Stealing the Mystic Lamb (10 page)

What is particularly astonishing in the case of
The Ghent Altarpiece
is that no evidence has been found to suggest that elaborate predesigned
schemes for religious artwork played a role in Flemish or Netherlandish art of this period. That is to say, in terms of theological complexity,
The Ghent Altarpiece
is without precedent. That does not necessarily mean a theologian did not design the concept of the work, but it does mean, if one did, it was a first in the art of the time. It is only one generation later that documents have been found that attest to another Flemish master, Dirk Bouts, having been advised on his iconography by a theologian.

One scholar, Dana Goodgal, not only believes that a theologian was responsible for the altarpiece’s iconographic scheme but has named an entirely plausible candidate for the role. Olivier de Langhe was the prior of the Church of Saint John (later renamed Saint Bavo) while the altarpiece was being painted. De Langhe’s most notable known accomplishment was a treatise on the Eucharist—a subject that resonates with the Christ-as-sacrificial-lamb theme of
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
. Van Eyck scholar Craig Harbison draws parallels between De Langhe’s text and
The Ghent Altarpiece
:

In this way,
The Ghent Altarpiece
could be seen as a collective affirmation of traditional Catholic values as the only way to access the Godhead. Although no documentary evidence confirms this, Olivier de Langhe was in the right place, at the right time, possessed the right knowledge, and wrote about relevant topics, all suggesting that he might well have been
the theologian who developed the iconographic scheme for
The Ghent Altarpiece
.

Van Eyck’s role as court painter required his participation in a wide variety of painting and design-related enterprises beyond wall and panel painting. In fact, panel paintings were very low on the priority list for court painters, whose primary tasks involved wall painting to decorate official residences, manuscript illumination, and the design of events. There are strikingly few references to panel paintings in Flemish court inventories, indicating the low importance given to them. In the main, only portraits, kept for historical record, would be assigned to court painters. These artists would more likely be tasked with painting temporary installations for a ducal festival or banquet. In the mid-1430s Duke Philip held a banquet at which a huge pie was rolled out of the kitchen: A man dressed as an eagle leapt out of it, followed by a flurry of doves, which then landed on the tables of the guests. It is almost certain that designing banquets such as that one, and the decoration of foodstuffs, occupied van Eyck’s time.

After the January 1430 wedding of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal, with his political and ambassadorial work well done, Jan finally settled in Bruges. He married a woman described in contemporary documents as “damoiselle Marguerite,” suggesting that she may have had aristocratic lineage. Their first child was born in 1434 and christened Philippot, named after his godfather, Duke Philip the Good. A portrait of Mrs. van Eyck, painted by her husband in 1439, shows her clothed in garments associated with the nobility. It is the only extant stand-alone portrait of a girl or woman by van Eyck. Jan painted a self-portrait, a pendant to accompany the portrait of his wife, both of which hung in the Bruges painters’ guild in the eighteenth century. The
Portrait of Marguerite
was lashed onto the guild wall with heavy iron chains, because the
Self-Portrait of Jan
had been stolen at an unknown date from the guildhall.
Some scholars have guessed that the
Man in a Red Turban,
which hangs in London’s National Gallery, is the stolen self-portrait, as its size is nearly identical to that of the
Portrait of Marguerite
, as would be the case for matching pendant portraits.

From 1432 until his death, Bruges town records indicate that van Eyck made annual mortgage payments on a house and workshop, which was owned by the church of Saint Donatian, in which he would ultimately be buried. That same year, records note that the councilors of the city of Bruges visited van Eyck’s studio in an official capacity, welcoming the great master to the city and lavishly handing out tips to Jan’s twelve studio assistants. His career as a secret agent appears to have ended when domestic duties called, although he would undertake two more missions to “foreign lands” in order to conduct “secret business” on behalf of the duke in 1436, to an undisclosed location, for which he received double his normal pay. He undertook a final mission, to pick up “certain panels and other secret items” and deliver them to the duke, in the winter of 1440. There is a record of Jan having been repaid for the expenses related to this last mission in January 1441, just six months before he passed away.

Van Eyck’s various travels certainly interrupted the painting of
The Ghent Altarpiece
. It was completed only after he had moved from Ghent to nearby Bruges. But Jan still kept in contact with the city of Ghent and its patrons—his
Saint Barbara
(1437) was commissioned by a man from Ghent.

Jan was close to Duke Philip, a confidante as well as an employee of the Burgundian leader and by some accounts his friend. The duke ultimately became godfather to one of Jan’s children, Philippot (the Duke presented the van Eycks with six silver goblets as a birthday present). Through the end of his life, Jan retained the position of painter to the duke, along with the accompanying salary of 720 livres per year (around $120,000 today). The duke took pains to continue to pay van Eyck’s widow even after the painter’s death, granting “
damoiselle Marguerite . . . 360 livres en 40 gros
,” the artist’s pension (half of his annual income while he was active), as a condolence and a sign of his affection for the great
painter and compassion for his family. As late as 1449, the duke paid for most of the entrance fee required for one of Jan’s children, “Lyevine van der Eecke,” to enter the convent of Saint Agnes in Maaseyck.

Once in Bruges, when he wasn’t creating wall paintings for the duke’s residence in Hesdin, Jan worked primarily for private patrons, whose portraits comprise the majority of his known paintings. The most renowned of these is
The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait
, also called
The Marriage Contract
(1434), now in the National Gallery in London. Only twenty-five extant paintings have been definitively attributed to Jan’s hand—a tiny number, making them all the more precious. Records indicate many others, all of them lost. Another twenty or so paintings are tentatively thought to be by van Eyck, or at least by his studio, though all of these have been disputed at some point, making the attribution uncertain.

After a long, illustrious career, Jan died and was buried in Bruges on 9 July 1441, in the graveyard of the cathedral of Saint Donatian. Nine months later, his brother Lambert arranged for Jan’s body to be exhumed and entombed in an honorable location inside the church. This same church would be looted and destroyed by French troops in 1799, a few years after they had stolen most of the panels of
The Ghent Altarpiece
and brought them to the Louvre. Lambert, a fine painter in his own right, took over Jan’s studio, supervising the apprentices and the incomplete commissions, while Jan’s widow, Marguerite, ran the business side of the workshop until 1450—the year in which van Eyck’s home in Bruges was finally sold to a new family.

Jan was one of the rare early Renaissance artists to achieve renown and wealth during his lifetime. He was paid a bonus of six hundred gold coins upon the completion of
The Ghent Altarpiece
in 1432 and was in constant demand thereafter. This bonus alone was the equivalent of the annual salary of twenty skilled workers.

Duke Philip the Good placed extraordinary value on the service of his court painter. In a 13 March 1435 document, Philip berated his treasurers in Lille for paying Jan’s wages late, stating that should Jan ever leave his court, Philip would never be able to find Jan’s equal in his “art and science.”
That same year Philip summoned van Eyck to Arras, where the artist accompanied his master during the delicate negotiations for a peace treaty between France, England, and Burgundy. It is tempting to wonder what might have been the “science” to which Philip referred. Painting was an art, and perhaps politics was the “science.” Or was Jan engaged in alchemy, as sources one generation later would suspect?

Giorgio Vasari thought as much. The sixteenth-century Mannerist painter and biographer of Renaissance artists wrote glowingly about Jan van Eyck in his canonical
Lives of the Artists
(1550). His discussion of van Eyck in a chapter on the earliest great Italian oil painter, Antonello da Messina, represents a rare inclusion of praise for a non-Italian in a work dedicated to the glorification of Tuscan art, Michelangelo’s in particular.

Vasari is responsible for a popular misconception that Jan van Eyck invented oil painting. It is the chemical concoction of oil paints that likely accounts for Vasari’s reference to van Eyck as an alchemist. Before the early fifteenth century, the preferred medium for painting had been tempera, which uses egg as the binding agent for hand-ground pigment. Pigment is ground into a fine powder with a mortar and pestle, then mixed with raw egg yolk to produce a paste. The result is an opaque paint, in which each layer essentially covers over the layer beneath it.

Oil paint, as the name implies, uses a combination of oils, usually linseed and nut oils, instead of egg, as the binder. The result is a translucent paint that is easier to control, permitting finer detail, and one in which each layer may be seen slightly through subsequent layers. As a result, one can paint in oils with a great deal more subtlety.

There is no indication, beyond Vasari’s comment, that Jan invented oil painting. But as the first art historian, and a friend (and sometimes rival) of many of the artists about whom he wrote, Vasari told stories that tended to stick. One might think that a contemporary, and a fellow painter, would be a highly reliable source as biographer. But much of Vasari’s work is skewed by rivalries, and there is a clear propagandistic edge to his praise, which presents Michelangelo, Vasari’s close friend and his own source of inspiration, as the greatest artist of all time. Many
would agree with this estimation, so that, in and of itself, is not grounds to dismiss Vasari. But in recent years art historians have noted the many inaccuracies in Vasari, and his
Lives of the Artists
has shifted from the number one source for research into Renaissance artists, the starting point for scholars, into one of many useful sources.

Vasari’s primacy carried into the twentieth century, and his manner of writing, accessible and full of quirky anecdotes and gossip about the lives of the artists, means that what Vasari wrote was not only taken seriously but was memorable. It is perhaps odd, though, that Vasari should attribute the invention of oil painting to van Eyck, when works in oil exist that predate Jan’s career. Vasari was likely unaware of
The Norfolk Triptych
, which was painted with a combination of tempera and oil, and of the oil paintings of Melchior Broederlam that came a generation before Jan, or at least unaware of their dates. For artists like van Eyck, whom Vasari did not or could not know, the biographer relied on hearsay, rumor, and legend to fill in the gaps. Yet there is no evidence that Jan’s fellow countrymen in Flanders believed that he had invented oil painting, until after the publication of Vasari’s book, at which point they began to tout their hometown hero as the inventor of the medium. One fact from Vasari is almost certainly true: Oil painting did not arrive in Italy until the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina traveled to Flanders to learn the secret of painting in oils from van Eyck.

We may state with confidence that, among northern European artists, Jan van Eyck perfected the use of oil paints in a way that no one had before, and that would influence all artists thereafter. The Flemish painter and art historian Karel van Mander, a generation younger than Vasari, wrote a history of northern European artists in which he called Jan and his brother Hubert van Eyck the “founders of Netherlandish art,” artists who began painting in egg tempera and first invented an oil-based varnish as a sealant to their works in tempera. Van Mander tells a story that Jan van Eyck was drying a varnished panel in the sun one day, when the wooden joins between the strips of wood that comprised the panel painting pulled apart, and the painting was ruined. He decided that he needed
to find a way to speed up the varnishing process, and tried to do so by mixing in quick-drying walnut and linseed oils. Success with varnishes led van Eyck to experiment with linseed oil as a binder for pigment—the resulting oil paints were easier to control, to layer, and to blend to a mirror-sheen surface.