Jan Van Eyck

http://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni/riviste/mdccc-1800/2018/1/disvelando-pale-effigi-e-panneggi/

Art-historical partners Joseph Archer Crowe (1851) and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1865) made individual surveys in Denmark.

This paper speculates on their interactions with Danish expert Niels Lautitz Andreas Høyen (1798-1870). It focuses on Cavalcaselle’s Danish sketches (Marciana, Venice). Moreover, it offers new perspectives on Gustav Friedrich Waagen’s stay in Copenhagen (1868).

Furthermore, it expounds on the fortuna and conservation history of the "Man of Sorrow" by Andrea Mantegna, the "Portrait of Lorenzo Cybo" by Parmigianino, an altarpiece by Filippino Lippi, the  alleged "Portrait of Antonio Galli" assigned to Titian or Federico Barocci and two male portraits assigend to Hans Memling and Andrea Del Sarto. Furthermore, it discusses the attribution of some other – mostly Valenti Gonzaga – paintings now in the Statens Museum for Kunst, as a copy from Raphael once assigned to the Sassoferrato or an altarpiece attributed to Marco Vecellio's circle.

In addition, this paper investigates the 19th-century criticism of draperies by Mantegna and Leonardo not only in relation to Giovanni Bellini's or Hubert and Jan van Eyck's oeuvre.

Finally, it hypothesyses the identification of a "Portrait of Thomas Gresham" assigned to the so-called 'Master of the 1540s'.

The steeply inclined ground planes of Early Netherlandish paintings are often covered with a drapery so stiff and heavy that it seems to break rather than fold. Known as the hard style — in opposition to the soft style common at 1400 — this drapery tends to push up toward the flatness and verticality of the picture plane, where its angular folds rhyme reflexively with the rectilinear corners of the painted panels in which it appears.

Despite its sweeping generality and seeming anachronism, Wilhelm Worringer’s account of this drapery as a form of abstraction gets a good deal right. If Worringer is right—that what he calls Gothic drapery is, in an important sense, non mimetic — that drapery, especially in its late hard form, may be more “thing” than picture — “thing,” that is, in the specifically medieval sense that Friedrich Ohly describes. Ohly’s account of medieval Dingbedeutung (thing-meaning) lends unexpected support to Worringer’s abstraction thesis by demonstrating the centrality of formal properties to certain modes of medieval exegesis.

At the same time, Ohly’s work suggests an important corrective to Worringer’s formalism: because the formal properties of a painting relate it to all those things beyond its frame that share its properties, a painting should not be thought of as an autonomous entity. Reading Worringer through Ohly helps us see that the reflexive abstraction of hard-style drapery—with its flatness and its rectilinear folds, which echo the framing edges of the picture, particularly where they meet to form corners — opens the picture, in fact, first, to its own material substrate and, then in turn, to a wider world of things.

The Analogical Turn

Our modern understanding of science and culture builds on two basic assumptions: the conviction that every human person is an ‘autonomous’ subject and the scientific promise that the world can be fully represented by a mathematically generated “picture of the world”. The history of theoretical attempts to justify these assumptions can be traced back to René Descartes’. However, the main features of this world view had already rapidly emerged 200 years earlier in Renaissance Italy. The modern concepts of science and culture were not invented by scientists, but were rather the outcome of an artistic vision of perspectivity and space. This explains why the accompanying vision of ‘scientific realism’ was successful despite its inferior grasp of reality.

This book sets out to recover Nicholas of Cusa’s critical response to this early modern paradigm shift, and in doing so, develops a fresh perspective on the challenges of our time. Globalised societies are characterized by their inability to reconcile the seemingly black and white univocity of scientific rationality with the ambiguous equivocity of post-modern pop-culture. This impasse originated in the Early Renaissance, but Cusa developed at the same time an alternative vision of the Age to Come. In contrast to his mainstream contemporaries, his appreciation of individuality, creativity, and scientific precision was deeply rooted in the analogical rationality of the Middle Ages. He revived and transformed this tradition in a manner which now, retrospectively, offers new insights both into the ‘completely ordinary chaos’ of post-modern everyday life, and the crisis of a scientific culture which has become blind to its constitutional limitations. Cusa’s mystagogy enables us to recover the analogical middle path between univocity and equivocity without losing sight of the emancipatory legacy of the modern age that emerged during his lifetime.

This is the first in-depth historical study of Jan Gossart (ca. 1478-1532), one of the most important painters of the Renaissance in northern Europe. Providing a richly illustrated narrative of the Netherlandish artist's life and art, Marisa Anne Bass shows how Gossart's paintings were part of a larger cultural effort in the Netherlands to assert the region's ancient heritage as distinct from the antiquity and presumed cultural hegemony of Rome.

Focusing on Gossart's vibrant, monumental mythological nudes, the book challenges previous interpretations by arguing that Gossart and his patrons did not slavishly imitate Italian Renaissance models but instead sought to contest the idea that the Roman past gave the Italians a monopoly on antiquity. Drawing on many previously unused primary sources in Latin, Dutch, and French, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity offers a fascinating new understanding of both the painter and the history of northern European art at large.

Wall-mounted memorials (or ‘epitaphs’) enjoyed great popularity across the Burgundian Netherlands. Usually installed in churches above graves, they combine images with inscriptions and take the form of sculpted reliefs, brass plaques, or panel paintings. They preserved the memory of the dead and reminded the living to pray for their souls. On occasions, renowned artists like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden were closely involved in memorials’ creation.

In Pious Memories Douglas Brine examines the wall-mounted memorial as a distinct category of funerary monument and shows it to be a significant, if overlooked, aspect of fifteenth-century Netherlandish art. The patronage, functions, and meanings of these objects are considered in the context of contemporary commemorative practices and the culture of memoria.

http://www.brill.com/products/book/pious-memories

This article demonstrates that the Revelations were essential for the creation of a new iconography of the Virgin for the Flemish art of the first decades of the 15th century. The aim is that to analyze the wide-range of Brigittine texts that explain the symbolic elements of the painting which are related to the iconography of the Virgin, to her physical and symbolic features and attributes, and to Marian dogmas, especially those of the Perpetual Virginity, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. The depiction of the Virgin in the Ghent Altarpiece is, in many respects, brand new and reveals how the symbolism of the last medieval centuries had given way to the new demands of devotional and mystical literature. The interest in female mysticism within the territories of Flanders and Brabant dates back to the beginning of the 13th century, when the development of a new female religious movement took place. In this environment particularly sensitive to the feminine word, the works of Bridget could find the right reception and her Mariology could inspire the representation of the Virgin of the Ghent Altarpiece.

The small figure reflected in St George’s shield in Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele (Bruges, Groeningemuseum) did not receive any scholarly attention until the mid-twentieth century. Taken to be the artist’s self-portrait, the reflection is usually seen as analogous to its counterpart in the Arnolfini Portrait despite significant differences between them. This essay investigates the particularity of Van Eyck’s self-representation in the Van der Paele Virgin in terms of its function and meaning. Through consideration of the surface on which the reflection is depicted, the saint with whom it is associated, and the setting in which the painting was located and experienced, it is argued that Van Eyck depicted himself in a highly self-conscious manner, closely linked both to his identity as a painter and to the desire, shared with his patron, for remembrance after death.

The fact that so many of the iconographical details of the Ghent Altarpiece are derived from the Apocalypse of John makes it easy to overlook the fact that others are not. Whoever was responsible for the iconographical program of the altarpiece clearly drew on several subsidiary sources besides the bible. In this paper it is suggested that one of these subsidiary sources was the Revelations of Bridget of Sweden. Reminiscences of
Bridget’s visions may be found not merely in the iconography of the altarpiece, but also in its inscriptions.

The use of reflection as a sign of the painters’ presence  seems to be characteristic of Jan van Eyck. We find this in "The Arnolfini Portrait" and also in "The Virgin and Child with Canon Van der Paele". In both cases the painter is outside the represented space but his reflection demonstrates his presence in the real physical space where he is making the picture. These two examples are relatively well-known. The aim of the present paper is to suggest a third example, which till now has never been an object of attention. It seems that one can observe a similar phenomenon in the Ghent Altarpiece, in the scene of the Adoration of the Mystical Lamb. Two figures are reflected on the spherical surface of the Fontaine of Life. Who are these figures? Obviously they do not belong to the depicted scene, they are outside the pictorial space. We can guess that they are a reflection of the master (Jan van Eyck) and his assistance, as in the "Arnolfini Portrait". It is not excluded, however, that the reflection refers to the brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck.

"In his De visione Dei, Nicholas of Cusa addresses two aspects of divine vision: my desire to see God and God’s capacity to see
me. The latter aspect is distinguished by absolute power: God’s gaze is all-seeing. To explain this peculiar power Cusa
introduces what he calls the figure of an ‘omnivoyant’. This is a portrait with its eyes turned towards the spectator so that the
gaze of the depicted person appears to follow the spectator. This paper shows how this optical effect determined the choice
of the full-face view as the characteristic way to represent the divine in Renaissance painting, and how inscriptions on the
frames of a series of portraits of Christ attributed to Jan van Eyck reveal that the use of this effect was deliberate and in
accordance with theological doctrine."

This article examines the monuments with which some of the most celebrated musicians and composers of the Burgundian Netherlands were commemorated. Perhaps best known is Guillaume Du Fay’s wall-mounted memorial; thanks to musicologists’ research, his sculpted tablet is also one of the best documented of its kind and thus can be situated within the context of the composer’s various provisions – musical and otherwise – to secure his posthumous commemoration. Du Fay’s memorial is considered in relation to selected artworks commemorating his contemporaries and successors, including Gilles Binchois, Jacob Obrecht, Josquin des Prez, and Marbrianus de Orto. These include not only tombs and memorial tablets but also panel paintings – like Hans Memling’s portrait of Gilles Joye – and, in one case, a brass reliquary coffer. Of particular concern are the ways in which these monuments reflect their patrons’ wealth, status, personal relationships and devotional priorities, as well as their identities as musicians and clerics.

The extant works of Hugo van der Goes frustrated attempts among early historians of Netherlandish painting to organize the artist's career according to a chronology. The survival of a biographical document attesting to his madness additionally troubled the expectation of artistic progression. Goes earned the reputation of the first modern artist whose genius was connected to his aberrant psychology. This essay critically examines the impulse in art history toward temporal sequencing, arguing that such a practice is most profitably applied in the case of Goes not to his oeuvre as a whole but to a study of his process within an individual work. The alterations over time to the surface of The Fall of Man, which has often (but not unanimously) been deemed the artist's “first work,” afford consideration of how Goes thought about revision and how historians of early Netherlandish painting might engage disciplinary change by rethinking the impulse toward prioritization.

What happens when we look at a canonical painting from the perspective of its non-human occupant? This article explores that question through the case of the dog in Jan van Eyck's "Arnolfini Portrait." Not only is the dog in The Arnolfini Portrait fundamental to the fellowship that Van Eyck invites us to feel both with himself and with his work; consideration of his presence also offers an opportunity to reconsider the limitations of traditional art-historical method.

A significant new interpretation of the emergence of Western pictorial realism

When Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441) completed the revolutionary Ghent Altarpiece in 1432, it was unprecedented in European visual culture. His novel visual strategies, including lifelike detail, not only helped make painting the defining medium of Western art, they also ushered in new ways of seeing the world. This highly original book explores Van Eyck’s pivotal work, as well as panels by Rogier van der Weyden and their followers, to understand how viewers came to appreciate a world depicted in two dimensions. Through careful examination of primary documents, Noa Turel reveals that paintings were consistently described as au vif: made not “from life” but “into life.” Animation, not representation, drove Van Eyck and his contemporaries. Turel’s interpretation reverses the commonly held belief that these artists were inspired by the era’s burgeoning empiricism, proposing instead that their “living pictures” helped create the conditions for empiricism. Illustrated with exquisite fifteenth-century paintings, this volume asserts these works’ key role in shaping, rather than simply mirroring, the early modern world.

The VERONA (Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access) research project gives open access to high resolution scientific image data from the oeuvre of the pioneer of Flemish painting, Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441). The project is carried out by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA, Brussels) in collaboration with museums that have paintings by Van Eyck in their collections. In each case, the artworks are examined and documented with the same scientific imaging techniques using the same protocol: macrophotography (normal light, raking light, infrared light and ultraviolet fluorescence), infrared reflectography and in some cases radiography. Comparable images are obtained through the use of standardized procedures and the same equipment. The resulting material is publicly released via the website 'Closer to Van Eyck' (closertovaneyck.be). The website user, via comparative windows and zoom features, can actively study for the first time differences and similarities in the artist's technique in various paintings on the basis of the same standardized material. This paper describes the scientific imaging techniques and methodologies used to produce and publish the image material, from the multimodal acquisition to the processing for stitching and multi-modal registration, culminating in web distribution.

El presente estudio analiza la presencia del espejo en las pinturas El matrimonio Arnolfini de Jan van Eyck y Las Meninas de Diego Velázquez. En estas obras se examina la representación del espacio y la posición del artista como partícipe y creador de la escena pictórica. La propuesta considera que el pintor temprano moderno utiliza el espejo como un recurso que resalta su individualidad y que le permite crear espacios ilusorios en los cuales los artistas poseen el poder de la 'verdad' en torno a la representación de la realidad pictórica.

L’Agneau Mystique.
Van Eyck.
Art, Histoire,
Science et Religion.
Danny Praet & Maximiliaan Martens (eds.),

© Flammarion, Paris, 2019
ISBN : 978 2081492868
No d’édition : L.01EBUN000761
Dépôt légal : octobre 2019

L’Agneau mystique des frères Van Eyck (1432) est unanimement reconnu
comme oeuvre picturale sublime, avec un rayonnement et une influence
exceptionnels. Ce fut la première peinture à l’huile de grande taille et
le mysticisme religieux s’en dégage avec force. Le retable se lit presque
comme un ABC du christianisme, allant de l’Annonciation au sacrifice
symbolique du Christ : « l’agneau mystique » représenté sur un autel dans
un paysage paradisiaque, versant son sang dans le Saint Graal.
Ce livre regroupe pour la première fois un grand nombre de savoirs lié à
l’Agneau mystique – soit le monumental polyptyque réalisé par les frères
Hubert et Jan Van Eyck en collaboration avec un atelier de renom et
un ensemble de conseillers sur le plan du contenu. Ce livre nourrit une
ambition similaire : réunir des experts des disciplines les plus diverses.
Ce n’est qu’en combinant les points de vue des spécialistes en histoire de
l’art, des historiens, des philosophes, des scientifiques du religieux, des
mathématiciens et des spécialistes de l’optique que l’on peut pleinement
saisir la richesse et la profondeur de ce chef-d’oeuvre.
Richement illustré de dizaines de détails d’une précision inouïe – parfois
invisibles à l’oeil nu – révélés durant la campagne de restauration en cours.

The exhibition presents three of the circa twenty extant works by Jan van Eyck, offering a glimpse of the art produced during the reign of Duke Philipp the Good, when the Burgundian Low Countries witnessed a unique flowering of courtly and urban civilisation.

Lustre in the dark: The perception of Early Netherlandish painting in renaissance Italy

Variations in the effects of light are the reason why Northern and Italian art of the fifteenth century mimics reality in different ways. Italian artists attempted to define our concept of three-dimensionality by means of geometrical perspective and lume (= spatial lighting). Northern artists especially used lustro (= lighting, lustre). Glossy objects in the foregrounds of Flemish paintings helped to draw the scene closer to the beholder. Lustro was therefore even used in open-air daylight scenes. In Leonardo’s mind the glossy effect of the related Italian concept of splendore in the dark bestowed the scene with a certain gracefulness (grazia). This is what must have attracted 15th-century Italian art lovers to Northern art. Splendore was achieved by tonal transitions in layers of oil paint. Lustro, however, did not allow for any natural depth of field (focus). As a consequence Flemish masterpieces were negatively judged in 16th-century Florentine art theory. The Florentines experienced the meticulous rendering of details as disturbing.

The aim of this article is to propose an interpretation of the musical elements of the painting The Fountain of Grace. Art-historical and musicological analysis allow us to conclude that the painter, acting in all likelihood between 1445 and 1450, used drawings from the workshop of Jan van Eyck and also turned to miniatures with musical motifs from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry by the Limbourg brothers. The author addresses the angel musician motif with regard to the Eucharistic aspects of the painting. The music performed by the spiritual beings is interpreted as an attempt to demonstrate the magnitude and splendour of the Church.
[En este artículo se propone una interpretación de los elementos musicales de la Fuente de la Gracia. El análisis históricoartístico y musicológico permite constatar que el autor de la pintura, ejecutada probablemente entre 1445 y 1450, utilizó dibujos del taller de Jan van Eyck y también recurrió a las miniaturas con motivos musicales de Las muy ricas horas del duque de Berry de los hermanos Limbourg. Se propone interpretar el motivo del ángel músico en el contexto del aspecto eucarístico de la pintura. La música ejecutada por los seres espirituales se interpreta como una demostración de la grandeza y el esplendor de la Iglesia.]

Presentation of the famous and impressive Book of Hours/Psalter/Missal originally realised and miniated for the Duke Jean de Berry, and the main questions around it: timeframe, patrons, miniature artists, the role of Jan Van Eyck and his followers.

This article offers the first analysis of the Rolin Madonna (ca. 1435) in relation to Jan van Eyck’s trip to Castile and Granada (1429). The space and the architectural typology in the painting reveal Hispanic influences which are only explicable through first-hand experience by the artist. These elements were not fully understood by his Flemish peers, who adapted them to local use. This study allows us to re-position Van Eyck and Chancellor Rolin’s interests in line with the plurality of artistic models and the tensions between the existing hegemonies and the multiculturalism of the major global powers during the Early Modern period. //
Este artículo analiza por primera vez la Madonna Rolin (ca. 1435) en relación con el viaje de Jan van Eyck a Castilla y Granada (1429). El espacio y la tipología arquitectónica del cuadro denotan influencias hispanas explicables únicamente a través de la experiencia in situ del artista, elementos que sus colegas flamencos no comprendieron y readaptaron a sus usos locales. Como consecuencia, esta investigación permite resituar los intereses de Van Eyck y del canciller Rolin en línea con la pluralidad de modelos y con las tensiones entre hegemonías y multiculturalidad de las grandes potencias europeas en la temprana Edad Moderna.

In this article I argue that Jan van Eyck visited Valencia as part of the ducal embassy to Aragon in the autumn/winter of 1426, which was the first of two embassies sent by Philip the Good to negotiate his marriage to Eleanor of Aragon, sister of Alfonso V of Aragon. This visit probably enabled a number of Valencian painters to contact the Burgundian court painter and gain direct access to his technical and pictorial innovations. Within a small network of Valencian artists, some even acquired a painting and a drawing attributed to him. Exceptionally, tracings after Eyckian works were imported and literally taken over, as is evidenced by the study of Dalmau’s Virgin of the Consellers. Dalmau made his tracings after the Ghent Altarpiece in Van Eyck’s workshop, before the work was installed in the Vijd Chapel. The duration of Dalmau’s stay in Van Eyck’s workshop should therefore be taken into account when studying the genesis of the Ghent Altarpiece.

In a seminal article from 1945 Millard Meiss discussed the use of light in the art of Flemish masters.
According to the author, the way light was used in representations of the Annunciation reflects a
well-known metaphor from the Medieval Nativity hymn, Dies est laetitiae, which compares Mary’s
hymen with the glass of a window.
The central issue of this article is this glass-symbolism. In previous studies the rays has usually
been seen as directed toward Mary’s ear, visualizing the so-called conceptio per aurem doctrine,
according to which Mary conceived and became pregnant through her ear, by listening to the
Word of God. In my view, however, the rays are usually directed toward Mary’s forehead, not her
ear.
Determining the direction of light is important because if it strikes the forehead it means that
Mary is seen at the moment when she receives one of the stars or crosses that can be found on
Mary’s maphorion in Eastern Orthodox art as well as in that of the Italo-Byzantine tradition. The
three stars are symbols of Mary’s perpetual virginity, which was defined at the Lateran Council of
AD 649 as consisting of the three phases before, during, and after the birth of Christ (ante partum,
in partum et post partum). In my view, it is no coincidence that the words that follow immediately
after the hymn’s description of Mary’s hymen as like glass (Ut vitrum non laeditur, sole penetrante)
follow the words Sic illaesa creditur, virgo post partum et ante.
This article examines the differences and similarities between Easter and Western representations
of the Annunciation. In addition it highlights one painting that may be considered as a synthesis
between the various iconographies with regard to this particular topic.