Over the course of the thirty years that I taught art history to college undergraduates, introducing my students to the manuscript illuminations and panel paintings of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck always gave me an especial pleasure. I wanted my students to share in my wonderment at Jan’s seemingly effortless ability to present nature rather than represent it, right down to the most infinitesimal details, without compromising the integrity of the whole, his powers of observation complemented by an uncanny ability to capture light, texture, and atmosphere.
The earliest surviving works of Jan—who is thought to have been born around 1390 in Maaseyck, modern-day Belgium—date to the first lustrum of the 1420s. In 1425, he was appointed court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, whose empire then comprised almost the entirety of the Low Countries and a large wedge of northeastern France together with his home duchy of Burgundy and the contiguous Franche-Comté (Free County) to the east. Moving to Bruges in 1430, Jan produced paintings for the Burgundian court, nobility, and haute bourgeoisie right up until his death there in 1441.
Although the study of Jan’s extraordinary pictures began in earnest some two centuries ago, interest in the artist began to accelerate in the second half of the last century, when modern conservation techniques brought one surviving panel by the artist after another closer to the state of perfection they were in when Jan dispatched them from his Bruges atelier. The Annunciation (ca. 1434/1436) in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., for example, was cleaned and restored in 1998; work on the outer panels of his greatest surviving achievement, the Ghent Altarpiece (ca. 1432), was begun in 2012 and completed in 2020; and the cleaning of Jan’s Rolin Madonna (ca. 1435) in the Louvre commenced in 2021.
A major exhibition celebrating Jan and the restored outer panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, entitled “Jan van Eyck: An Optical Revolution,” opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent in February of 2020, but unfortunately had to be shuttered just one month later because of the COVID crisis. Given that disappointment, the exhibition under review here, “A New Look at Jan van Eyck,”1 is especially welcome. At its center is the fully restored Louvre panel, which was made in the early 1430s for Nicolas Rolin (1376–1462), a native of Autun in Burgundy who in 1422 became chancellor to Philip the Good. The panel is believed to have originally been installed in Nicolas’s parish church, Notre-Dame-du-Châtel in Autun, where it remained until the church burned down in 1793. After a short residence in Autun Cathedral, it was moved to the Louvre in 1800.
To provide the fullest possible context for the Louvre panel and Jan’s artistic and cultural milieu, the museum has brought together twenty-four paintings, twenty-one illuminated manuscripts and cuttings, twelve sculptures, and seven drawings made in France and the Low Countries from the twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries. In addition to the Rolin Madonna, the works by Jan on view include his additions to the celebrated Turin-Milan Book of Hours and three other panels entirely by his hand, the most exquisite of which is the Washington Annunciation mentioned above.
A spacious gallery on the first floor of the Louvre’s Sully wing accommodates the show. When visitors enter, the Rolin Madonna greets them on the far side of the room; all of the other objects are exhibited in three discrete spaces to either side of Jan’s masterpiece. Beyond a partition behind the Madonna panel is a large monitor that offers visitors a slow digital pan across the painting at high resolution that clearly reveals how the artist deployed tiny dots and strokes of paint barely visible to the naked eye to build his forms.
Jan’s powers of miniaturization are already evident in his earliest surviving works, his contributions shortly before 1425 to the Turin-Milan Hours. On the page that introduces the suffrage (petition) to John the Baptist, the saint’s birth, transposed to a late-medieval bourgeois Flemish interior, is illustrated above the incipit (opening) of the suffrage text; I would like to focus here on the representation of John’s baptism of Christ in the space just below those four lines of text.
In a tour de force a mere 4.4 inches wide, Jan captures the time (late afternoon) and the atmospheric conditions (warm and humid) at the moment of Jesus’s baptism; every detail of the waterfront castle on the left, right down to the handful of figures standing on the boat slip projecting from the structure, together with all of their reflections in the placid River Jordan beneath them; the wavelets breaking on the rocky near shore; the flock of birds in flight above the onlookers descending to the river at the far right; and the last rays of direct sunlight on the castle and promontory in the distance.
A like visual mastery characterizes the much larger Rolin Madonna itself. Measuring some twenty-six by twenty-five inches, the work shows the kneeling chancellor in prayer immediately before the enthroned Virgin and Child in a loggia that gives onto a sprawling landscape divided by a meandering river.
On Nicolas’s sinister side is a small town and beyond it a hillside with vineyards; the Rolin family drew much of its wealth from viticulture. On the holy figures’ dexter side rises a city composed almost entirely of churches, the two agglomerations linked by a single bridge across the river. Perhaps Jan is subtly warning the chancellor and all of us not to succumb to the blandishments of this mortal world, but rather to hew to the Christian faith and thereby cross the figurative River Jordan to the eternal City of God on the river’s other side.
The removal of centuries of grime and darkened varnish means that we can truly see Jan’s handiwork as he would have wished it. But what to marvel at first: Nicolas’ fur-edged brocade woven of chocolate-brown wool and silk and threads of gold? The gemstones that stud the hem of the Madonna’s red robe, the gold crown held by an angel over her head, and the cross of gold that surmounts the crystal orb in the baby Jesus’s left hand? The sprawling landscape beyond the three arches behind the chancellor and holy figures? Everywhere one looks there are details that astonish and enchant the eye but never compromise the unity of Jan’s vision.
Reproductions can only do partial justice to the paintings of Jan van Eyck; they beg to be seen face to face, and the Louvre exhibition offers the opportunity to see five of them together with fifty-nine objects that complement and widen our understanding of both his extraordinary art and his milieu.
- “A New Look at Van Eyck: The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin,” on view at the Louvre, Paris, through June 17, 2024. ↩︎
