Jan van Eyck

The Play of Realism, Second Updated and Expanded Edition

Craig Harbison

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781861899934
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The surviving work of Flemish painter Jan van Eyck (c. 1395–1441) consists of a series of painstakingly detailed oil paintings of astonishing verisimilitude. Most explanations of the meanings behind these paintings have been grounded in a disguised religious symbolism that critics have insisted is foremost. But in Jan van Eyck, Craig Harbison sets aside these explanations and turns instead to the neglected human dimension he finds clearly present in these works. Harbison investigates the personal histories of the true models and participants who sat for such masterpieces as the Virgin and Child and the Arnolfini Double Portrait.

This revised and expanded edition includes many illustrations and reveals how van Eyck presented his contemporaries with a more subtle and complex view of the value of appearances as a route to understanding the meaning of life.

1

Introduction

One purpose of this book can be stated simply: to evoke the human dimension of Jan van Eyck’s paintings. His incisive realism invariably suggests something personal or actual, and the more one looks at his paintings the more significant the individual people represented in them appear to be. There is George van de Paele (illus. 23 ), for example, the powerful psychological centre of this work, or Nicolas Rolin (illus. 57), kneeling without patron saint before the Virgin and Child, or the Arnolfini couple (illus. 7), posed full-length, who are engaged in some sort of inter-change in a contemporary interior. Who were these people? And what might they have made of the images painted for them by van Eyck?

My concern with various details of van Eyck’s own life, and with those of his patrons, is not novel. Almost every recent study of his works includes interesting details drawn from the lives of these individuals. In addressing the issue of biography, my purpose is neither sensational nor journalistic, however; I am not bent on presenting new or startling information about the men and women represented in van Eyck’s paintings. Where biographical details have been introduced in the recent past, the tendency has been to deploy them in a very literal or restrictive fashion – a detail of this or that person’s life was said to be illustrated by a detail of this or that painting. In response to this, some writers seem to have become wary of contaminating the art with minute biographical data, which, in their view, trivializes it. Because of this, much information, readily available, has been set aside. I have tried to avoid these two pitfalls, one of which is to ignore information, the other to use it in too simple and causal a fashion. What I have looked for is not so much the influence of life on art, as the resonances between them, the ways in which they can be said to interact more freely and creatively. I am concerned not just with biographical data, but also with the information we can derive from it about the habits and attitudes of individuals, and of society at large. There is an element here that could be described either as popular culture or as mass psychology. Certainly, there were patterns of behaviour current at various levels of society in the Netherlands in the fifteenth century that van Eyck’s patrons must either have participated in or resisted. That, too, is part of the human interest of the paintings.

By taking such an approach, I found myself in disagreement with some currently popular views of early Netherlandish art. These paintings have not often been treated anecdotally, as ‘stories’ woven around the lives of those individuals portrayed in them. For some observers, the paintings are not stories about individuals; they are about religious ideology, about precise and repetitive definition of orthodox Christian doctrine and legend. They have been subjected to systematic iconographic analysis in order to find out the literary sources (invariably religious) of their subject-matter. A consciously applied system of religious meaning (initially called ‘disguised symbolism’) was thought to operate through the realism of these works, conveying traditional Christian doctrine in a programmatic fashion. Christian doctrine was laboriously elaborated and commented upon throughout the Middle Ages. It is thought that in northern Europe in the early fifteenth century, artists such as van Eyck had begun to set about providing a clever and complex visual equivalent for the accumulated theological wisdom.

This may, in part, have been the case in some commissions, especially those executed for a conservative ecclesiastical establishment. Van Eyck’s own, and exceptional, Ghent Altarpiece could fit this category, acting as theological treatise (illus. 126, 127). But the general implications of this view of the art of the time for the vast majority of smaller, private lay commissions are more troubling, if not untenable. There is no extant documentary evidence for extremely complex, preconceived programmes of theological discourse in Netherlandish art. Is it not more likely that lay people would have been drawn more to the readily accessible meaning an image held, and to its aesthetic aspects? Would they not have felt a very personal involvement in paintings they themselves commissioned? It also seems probable, as some scholars have suggested, that the religious associations provoked by these images would have been developed in free and individual ways.

Traditional iconographic analysis of early Netherlandish art often attempts to interpret all the details of a work in a way that intensifies a primary religious meaning. An interpretation seems best if even small elements in the design can be said to reinforce its central religious message. Ideally, then, everything in the image – and the world – becomes subject to a hierarchy of religious belief. The Church may have wished to exercise this kind of control – it may have been the goal of many a theologian – but the history of the time does not bear this out; nor do the works of art themselves. Early Netherlandish art, van Eyck’s in particular, did not uniformly support the views of the Catholic leadership. Even the most sincere apologist of the period would have found that a difficult task, if only because of the Church’s own internal conflicts – the reverberations of the Great Schism. Neither can van Eyck or his lay patrons be considered as merely extensions of Scholastic theology and symbolic thought. The Netherlandish world was far too diverse and complex for that. Van Eyck’s own astonishing profusion of realist imagery leads me to believe that the simplistic notion of an orderly renunciation of the world does not hold for many fifteenth-century lay people.

I do not want to exaggerate the rebelliousness of northern Europe’s fifteenth-century artists and patrons. These people did not turn away completely from medieval ecclesiastical convention, but they did invariably manipulate these conventions for personal ends. While we cannot say that social or religious tension and conflict was positively relished, it was present none the lass. The Arnolfinis might have wished to appear conventionally pious while still insinuating themselves into the world of courtly romance. George van de Paele wanted to use the Church for his own financial ends, while at the same time he espoused the power of personal prayer. The donor in the Dresden Triptych with the Virgin and Child (illus. 73) clearly delights in juxtaposing a text stressing renunciation with a saint whose costume presupposes aristocratic indulgence. The donor of Virgin and Child in a Church (illus. 93) wishes to participate in the pilgrimage craze of cult statues seemingly come to life, although he cannot claim to have had a specific miraculous vision. Over and again van Eyck’s apparent realism contains within itself a playful or ironic attitude towards the relations between the individual, society, religion and artistic representation. Clearly, social and religious ideals were changing at this time, and artists and patrons were interested in more than just the status quo. A part of van Eyck’s inventiveness lies in the ways he imagined that traditional religious mores could be manipulated or altered to fit changing historical circumstances.

My disagreement with those critics who imagine van Eyck to have been primarily a traditional, if sophisticated, theologian does not lead me to adopt the opposite point of view – to claim him and his patrons as no more than worldly, manipulative entrepreneurs. I have tried hard to avoid replacing a restrictive religious model of interpretation with one that is overly secular. In a work such as the Virgin and Child with George van de Paele, I do not see van Eyck and his patron as having thrown aside all traditional Christian notions about salvation – the importance of good works, renunciation of excessive worldly desires, devout prayer and so on – and substituting a new mercantile ideal, in which everything becomes a case of economic bargain-hunting. Certainly, van de Paele was a financially successful member of the papal curia. Certainly, we should be alert to the fact that attitudes toward money were changing. No longer was it thought of as a set amount, which simply needed to be divided up between worthy parties: even the Church increasingly recognized that the money supply could grow, and thus dramatically alter the circumstances (and status) of individuals or institutions. Money became increasingly significant in the process of salvation: it was used to buy indulgences and clerical positions, to pay for masses for the dead, for people to go on pilgrimages and for paintings that displayed one’s piety. But I believe such paintings reveal that money, like prayer itself, was only one element in a complex play.

The notion of an absolute and knowable hierarchy was crumbling. This might have led conservatives or radicals to fear the advent of a sinful and permissive era, or even the possible overthrow of the existing social order – the world turned upside down. In my opinion, van Eyck’s view of the world was not this alarmist; rather, both he and his patrons navigated between these extremes, at times playing them off, one against the other. It is this complexity, a fertile interaction of forces, that gives the life and art of this time its flavour.

In the fifteenth-century Netherlands, people toyed with their new-found wealth while continuing to acknowledge traditional forms of piety. Both were transformed in the process. Van Eyck suggests how the worldly ideals of his time were changing, largely by a kind of ironic detachment or playfulness. Meaning in his works is a result of his patrons’ own changing notions, notions about the expected results of earthly striving. Self-conscious, amused at their own pretence and daring, van Eyck and his patrons were also wary of encyclopaedic claims to knowledge, piety or salvation. One view, recently put forward, sees this era as a time of increased scepticism with regard to sense perception. During the Middle Ages many people maintained that the appearance of things themselves was a key to understanding their inner truth and meaning. This is the view from the outside in. The Scientific Revolution of the later sixteenth century and seventeenth changed that to one in which prior knowledge of inner structure and logic was first sought; this led in turn to an informed interpretation of outer appearances: things were viewed from the inside out. In between the medieval attitude and this later position was a time of doubt, provisional opinion and the search for new truths. In an analogous way, van Eyck presented his contemporaries with a complex, at times ambig uous, view of the value of appearances for understanding the meaning of life.

In recent years art-historical analysis has become increasingly demanding in terms of its complexity, specificity and precision, whether works are studied in terms of their subject-matter or their historical context. In many ways this is a positive development. Rather than vague impressions and free associations, we now expect closely reasoned connections to be drawn between art and history. Who would oppose the argument that we should be as detailed and as specific as possible in our elucidation of the relation between art and the conditions of its production? Certainly, in this book I try to bring out what I feel are some of the historical complexities – still unexplored – connected with van Eyck’s paintings. Part of my aim was realized by pursuit of the established belief that we should question the purpose of any and every detail in each Eyckian creation. Still, I feel there are dangers inherent in pursuing ever more demanding and complicated forms of contextual analysis.

Carefully structured rational analyses of an art-historical context can focus on religious issues or on more materialist, technical concerns. Either way, the results can be disappointingly similar: a feeling that the innate power of the image has somehow been compromised. Complete and detailed historical analysis often effectively denies that the way art works is, at least in some measure, surprising, as well as incapable of being defined with absolute precision. While I would not advocate an approach determined by personal whimsy or self-projection, the analysis of an art as personal as is van Eyck’s must make some allowance, within the appropriate historical framework, for the personal – in the sense of the intangible and the imaginative.

2

Van Eyck’s Realism

When looking at a painting by van Eyck, we are invariably struck by the depth and detail of its illusion. We know that his contemporaries stood and gawked – as we do today – at the convincing, seemingly limitless, variety of his visual effects. There are the fuzzy curling locks of hair of childhood (illus. 31), the heavy woollen weave of oriental carpets, the crisp folds of satin brocades, the rich translucence of hand-blown glass (illus. 28), and the misty mountains of an expansive panorama (illus. 61). We are simply enthralled by his visual cunning on both a large and a small scale. What is this detail – and our consequent fascination – all about? For one thing, in his art van Eyck seems to have behaved like a child with a new toy: he could not have enough of it, if only because it was new. His instinct for discovering fresh way of representing the world must have overwhelmed him. It was so for his contemporaries, and remains so for us today.

It is also true that the myriad objects and details in van Eyck’s works seem to have been painted with remarkable skill and accuracy. We believe he must have carefully studied these things, so vivid is their portrayal. In turn, it seems logical to assume that his depiction of the larger world was rendered with equal care, and that he based his settings on actual locations. But although it is clear he must have studied specific interiors, as well as landscapes, it is not at all certain that he ever portrayed a real scene or interior in its entirety. Scholars have combed Europe looking for the church interiors and landscapes that appear in some of his paintings. All to no avail. Van Eyck’s paintings do not present precise locales, nor specific historical events. However much he may have based them on visual observation, they are not documentary records of his world.

I will not push this matter further at this point; that is what I attempt to do throughout the rest of this book. Nevertheless, it may be useful to set out a few related suppositions, both those I myself employ and those to which I run counter.

However innocent it may sometimes appear to us, the realism of early Netherlandish painting is a highly charged affair, in its detail as well as in general structure. The painted world is always carefully constructed along certain artistic and psychological fault lines. There may, for example, be superficial similarity between van Eyck’s four images of the seated Virgin and Child (illus. 23, 40, 57, 73); but this should not blind us to the fact that each one is carefully arranged spatially and compositionally, both on the surface and in its imagined depth. The architecture in particular, as we will see, is always adjusted to fulfil distinct demands. There is, finally, an air of unreality about these images, overall and in detail. In van Eyck’s art the perceptual and the conceptual are constantly and deliberately intermingled; and no single-minded or systematic increase over the years in the lifelikeness of his images can be discerned.

If true, the above comments shed light on the reason why observers are so struck by the careful differentiation of detail in van Eyck’s works. What we sense, in effect, is that the most minute detail, as with the overall image, is itself ideal, or hyperreal. Looking into van Eyck’s world is somewhat akin to perpetually living through the crystal-clear days that follow a spell of rain or humidity. Similarly, van Eyck’s realism is unnatural in its dazzling clarity and profusion. He allows us a view of an ideal condition, ideal in its particulars as well as in its overall composition. This is van Eyck’s truth – the incredible depth and detail of colour, light and texture that only his paintings give. The truth does not pretend to be some simple or objective reality that we can routinely verify in the world ‘out there’; it is the artist’s own elevated and idealized vision of things.

For the present I wish to stress the technical achievements embodied here. With his remarkable technical facility, van Eyck clearly took the medium of oil glaze into new areas. He gave technique a new prominence. (He was a technical wizard, perhaps even versed in alchemy, as some contemporaries evidently thought.) Certainly his is an unusual artistic pretension – to manage all that he did simply by applying thin glazes of pigment to a piece of wood. It is no accident that this amazing painterly pretence tallies so nicely with the social, political, economic and religious pretensions of his client.

Today, for the purposes of rational historical analysis, we try to objectify and carefully distinguish such concepts in art as realism and symbolism. Over the last fifty years, especially, these concepts have been thought to be at work, jockeying for position, in early Netherlandish painting. We consider Netherlandish art to be realistic because, we claim, its artists strove to produce a visually accurate image of the world in which they lived. In some way this may indeed be true. It would be difficult not to believe that some early Netherlandish artists, van Eyck among them, discovered a new, interesting and convincing way to portray the visible world. But there are many ways in which such a belief in greater visual accuracy would be a self-deception, even wrong. One problem with accepting such a belief is that we would be led to view the ‘new’ situation in too dramatic and simplistic a fashion. From another point of view it is argued that the fifteenth century witnessed growing demands for realism, but without it being made clear what this might mean. It is even claimed that van Eyck was responsible for ‘the final conquest of reality in the North’.

To some extent it is understandable how such views have come about. We are quick to use the hindsight granted to us by our having acknowledged that there was a nineteenth-century Realist tradition in European art. As a consequence of this, fifteenth-century art can be understood to have been heading in the direction of realist description, which we believe was carried on through into the nineteenth century. And, if we compare medieval imagery with fifteenth-century art, we perceive the latter to be quite different: more involved with the visible world, and less tied to conventional or formulaic representations of things. Such an analysis is, however, both simplistic and anachronistic, confounding a complex period by judgements about it which are based on former styles and subsequent ‘results’. Van Eyck’s work shows us that the formulas that often controlled medieval representation continued to hold sway in fifteenth-century imagery. This is especially true in the case of his Virgin and Child by a Fountain (illus. 92), for example, which derives from an iconic model quite similar to that used by Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century English artist (illus. 2).

Analysis of realist image-making has often proved to be inadequate, for several other reasons. A building-block theory of realism – the notion that artists systematically added realist vocabulary to their repertory – is an ideal situation remote from artistic daily life. The history of Western art shows us that there was never a single pre-ordained goal for representational art to achieve. Unfortunately, we tend to gloss over this situation by promoting the notion of off-beat artists pursuing expressive byways, which can then be played off against a more literal or straightforward idea of realist image-making. From the pool of fifteenth-century Netherlandish artists we single out certain i...