Jan Van Eyck

In recent decades, the historical significance of the panel paintings by Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and the Flémalle group has been subject to debate. This essay analyses the shifts in gilding practices that accompanied the introduction of the fifteenth-century ars nova, arguing that the new panel painting marked a self-conscious departure from the luxury arts by asserting its value through representation alone, rather than through material worth. From the 1420s-30s onwards, Netherlandish panel paintings rejected gold-leaf backgrounds, and they also increasingly either relegated gilding to small details such as halos and heavenly rays, or incorporated it into pictorial representation. In addition, these paintings display a particularly intensive visual dialogue with contemporary sculpture and brocaded textiles, as a means of exploring painting’s superior capacity to depict persuasive surfaces in spatial depth.

In establishing its independence from other contemporary art forms, and in promoting the intrinsic value of representation, early Netherlandish panel painting presaged the high status of painting in the ensuing centuries of the western canon, even though, in other respects, these works remained firmly rooted in earlier tradition. The rise of early Netherlandish painting thus sheds important light on the role of periodization within art-historical interpretation. Where a number of recent studies have perceived temporal instability within the content of medieval and Renaissance images, this essay proposes that historiographical assessment should take into account the specific material and conceptual qualities of different artistic media, and weigh the relative importance of their perceived references forwards and back in time.

The research for this project developed over many years and eventually coalesced into a size and shape in between a typical book and a typical journal article. Digital publication on the University of York’s History of Art Research Portal enables this essay to be presented at its full length, incorporating far more material—especially a greater number of detailed illustrations—than is possible in traditional printed journals. Publication at full length also enables it to combine typically disparate methodologies and sub-fields: historiography, methodological reflection, technical analysis, and close looking at artworks in different media, from luxury objects and sculpture to panel painting. Most critically, the visual apparatus of digital publication supports this essay’s emphasis on the importance of contingent looking within particular lighting circumstances, a feature rarely considered in art-historical studies.

Jan Dumolyn, Susan Frances Jones, Ward Leloup, Toon De Meester and Mathijs Speecke, ‘Margaret van Eyck, a House called ‘the Wild Sea’ and Jan van Eyck’s posthumous Workshop’, The Burlington Magazine, February 2022, pp. 120-29

Understanding of the transition in painting in Bruges between the death of Jan van Eyck in 1441 and the early career of Petrus Christus has been hampered by uncertainty about the size, location and fate of Van Eyck’s workshop, which some scholars argue was continued by his widow, Margaret. Reassessment of the evidence and new archival research suggests a new terminus ante quem for its closure.

The primary goal of the VERONA project is to accomplish and stimulate new research
on the Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) and the different hands involved in the
paintings of his workshop. The second is to examine and document all the paintings of Van Eyck
using the same scientific imaging techniques and the same protocol that the KIK-IRPA is currently
employing in its documentation of the Ghent Altarpiece, currently in restoration. The new imagery
includes macrophotography (normal light, raking light, infrared and ultraviolet fluorescence), infrared reflectography and in some cases radiography and MA-XRF scanning, the latter made in part-
Varios autores El Retrato de Margarita van Eyck de Jan van Eyck: nuevas imágenes…
75 La Ciencia y el Arte VII
Ciencias experimentales y conservación del patrimonio Págs. 74-95
nership with the University of Antwerp. The ultimate goal is to add all this documentation to the
website <http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be>. In this paper, the authors focus on Jan van Eyck’s
Portrait of Margaret van Eyck (Bruges, Groeninge Museum), considering what the new scientific
imagery reveals about the sitter’s original pose and Van Eyck’s working practices.

This paper helps to clarify the meaning and chronology of The Fountain of Grace through the study of the controversies surrounding the Eucharist, the Hussite heresy and the conversion of the Jews addressed in the councils of Basel and Ferrara-Florence.
Additionally, data are provided to outline the circumstances of the commission of the painting from the workshop of Jan van Eyck, to its reception in Castile, until arrival at its final destination in the monastery of Santa María del Parral in Segovia. The author upholds that the key personality that united all these factors was Alonso de Cartagena and his  network in politics, intellectuality, patronage and international trade during the second third of the 15th century.

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.

Exploring the rich variety of pictorial rhetoric in early modern northern European genre images, this volume deepens our understanding of genre’s place in early modern visual culture. From 1500 to 1700, artists in northern Europe pioneered the category of pictures now known as genre, portrayals of people in ostensibly quotidian situations. Critical approaches to genre images have moved past the antiquated notion that they portray uncomplicated “slices of life,” describing them instead as heavily encoded pictorial essays, laden with symbols that only the most erudite contemporary viewers and modern iconographers could fully comprehend. These essays challenge that limiting binary, revealing a more expansive array of accessible meanings in genre’s deft grafting of everyday scenarios with a rich complex of experiential, cultural, political, and religious references. Authors deploy a variety of approaches to detail genre’s multivalent relations to older, more established pictorial and literary categories, the interplay between the meaning of the everyday and its translation into images, and the multifaceted concerns genre addressed for its rapidly expanding, unprecedentedly diverse audience.