Stealing the Mystic Lamb (9 page)

Beginning in the fourteenth century, the position was regularly given to artists and writers, whose advice and companionship were valued by the political elite in northern Europe long before artists would find acceptance in the aristocratic courts of the south. The desirable position came not only with a substantial salary of 1,200 livres per year (about $200,000 today), but also with benefits, including food, lodging, travel expenses, and even opulent clothing.

As
valet de chambre,
van Eyck had a strong political role by association, if not actively: with the ear of the duke, van Eyck was influential behind the scenes. His power and income also permitted him a financial independence that none of his fellow artists could boast. Free of the often Draconian restrictions of the local painters’ guild (in fact the court painter was not permitted to work on the open market and could only accept a commission with the duke’s blessing), van Eyck was as powerful an artist, politically, personally, and creatively, as any had ever been. Other painters held the coveted title of
valet de chambre
in France and Burgundy, including Melchior Broederlam, Francois Clouet, Paul Limbourg, Claus Sluter, and even a probable relative of Jan’s, by the name of Barthelemy d’Eyck. In Italy, Raphael would play a similar role, the first prominent Italian painter to act as courtier and political advisor, as well as an artist. Of the French and Burgundian
valets de chambre
, Jan van Eyck was the most famous, the best paid, the dearest to his master, and the most active politically.

Van Eyck worked for Philip the Good as an ambassador and as a secret agent. Though little concrete documentary evidence has come to light, it is known from contemporary sources that Jan traveled on secret missions on behalf of the duke. Such is the nature of secret activities—the more successful they are, the less trace they leave. Most likely these missions involved confidential dealings of a political or economic nature. References to these activities in contemporary documents describe them as “secret” and “special,” and note his significant remuneration for them, yet say little more. For example, a document from the winter of 1440 states that van Eyck delivered “certain panels and other secret items” to the duke, and he was reimbursed for expenses incurred in the acquisition of these “secret items” in January 1441. As an artist who might be sent to paint at various rival courts, van Eyck was almost certainly also a spy.

There are a number of Renaissance artists for whom we have fleeting archival evidence of their employment as secret agents on behalf of the court for which they worked. Famous artists or writers tipped as spies include poet Geoffrey Chaucer, Raphael, Benvenuto Cellini, Gentile Bellini, Rosso Fiorentino, playwright Christopher Marlowe, Albrecht
Dürer (who in 1521 made pilgrimage to see
The Ghent Altarpiece
and described it as a “very splendid, deeply reasoned painting”), the magician John Dee, and the philosopher Giordano Bruno. The fact that dukes and princes would loan artists to rival courts to pursue artistic commissions, an engagement portrait for instance, could be used as an excuse to place a trusted courtier deep inside an enemy’s headquarters. We know that the playwright Marlowe was sent to spy for England in Venice because of a document signed by Queen Elizabeth I preserved in Cambridge. The letter asks Marlowe’s Cambridge tutors to excuse his absence from classes, as he was abroad engaged in secret work for the queen. Gentile Bellini was sent by the Venetian Republic as a sort of diplomatic loan to the Turkish sultan Mehmet II. Bellini befriended the sultan, painting his portrait (which still exists) and a number of other works while in Istanbul. But Bellini was certainly acting as a spy as well, sent during the brief hiatus in the wars between Venice and the Ottomans.

So what was Jan van Eyck up to? We know that in 1425 he was sent to nearby Bruges and Lille on the first of his recorded secret missions. In July 1426 and again from August until 27 October of that same year, he was abroad engaged in secret activity, at an unknown location referred to in contemporary documents as “certain distant lands.” Court treasury records indicate that he was reimbursed for expenses incurred on a “secret and distant journey.” Some scholars believe that he was sent to the Holy Land, because of the uncanny accuracy of the landscape view of Jerusalem in
Three Marys at the Tomb
, attributed to van Eyck and his workshop. He was sent to Tournai on 18 October 1427 to attend a banquet in his honor, held by the local painter’s guild on the Feast of Saint Luke, patron saint of painters. The event was probably attended by famous contemporary Flemish artists, Rogier van der Weyden and Robert Campin. He returned from another unknown location in February 1428, for which he was reimbursed and received a bonus on top of his annual salary for “certain secret journeys.” He began his longest trip on 19 October 1428, when he was sent to Spain and Portugal as part of a Burgundian delegation, returning on Christmas day, 1429. This mission was undertaken
to secure Princess Isabella of Portugal’s hand in marriage for his patron, ensuring an alliance between Burgundy and Portugal. It also involved a detour to visit the famed pilgrimage shrine of Santiago de Compostela. Although Jan’s official assignment in Portugal was to paint two portraits of Isabella (one sent by sea and one by land, to ensure that at least one would reach Burgundy), he was also active in the political arena, helping to negotiate the terms of the marital alliance.

It is estimated that Elisabeth Borluut and Joos Vijd commissioned
The Ghent Altarpiece
in 1426, although no document confirming its date of commission survives. Elisabeth came from a wealthy Ghent family; her relatives had been abbots of the nearby Saint Bavo’s Abbey. Joos was the son of Nikolaas Vijd, a knight whose family was raised in rank through military service. Nikolaas served honorably for decades under the last Count of Flanders, Louis de Male. When Louis de Male died in 1390, his daughter Margaret of Dampierre inherited the county of Flanders, including Ghent. She married Philip II (Philip the Bold), Duke of Burgundy. The territory would pass on to their son, John the Fearless, the father of van Eyck’s patron, Philip III (the Good).

When the county of Flanders passed into the hands of the Dukes of Burgundy, a scandal unfolded. Account books from the city of Ghent were newly examined by Burgundian ministers, and Nikolaas Vijd was found guilty of embezzlement. This charge may or may not have been legitimate—perhaps it was an excuse to humble the right-hand man of the last, vanquished Count of Flanders. But Nikolaas was impelled to pay a large fine, and was stripped of his offices.

There is no record of how the Vijd children, Joos and Christoffel, took their father’s disgrace. But in Joos’s grandiose donation and patronage of an artistic masterpiece, there may have been a desire to erase the humiliation of his father’s guilt.

Joos Vijd was a politician and a philanthropist. He served on the Ghent city council on four different occasions and was the city’s principal alderman,
the equivalent of its mayor, in 1433-1434. He traveled with Duke Philip the Good through Holland and Zeeland. He also worked as special emissary for Duke Philip in Utrecht. It was in these capacities, involved with the Burgundian court, that he met Jan van Eyck.

Joos founded a charitable hospice run by Trinitarian monks, with the twofold agenda of lodging poor pilgrims and arranging to pay ransom for Christian slaves taken during the Crusades and on pilgrimage. This charity may have been inspired by some of Joos’s relations, who in 1395 had participated in a failed rescue mission under Duke John the Fearless to aid King Sigismond of Hungary and free Christian slaves held by Sultan Bayezid I. While Duke John’s fighting prowess earned him the nickname “the Fearless,” the mission was a disaster; it led to the imprisonment of the duke and his knights by the sultan until 1397, when, ironically enough, their own freedom had to be ransomed.

Joos Vijd’s coat of arms may still be seen in the keystone of the vaulting of the chapel ceiling. The chapel was established for the celebration of a daily Mass in honor of the donors, in a deed dated 13 May 1435. There was a widespread Catholic belief at the time that once someone died, the deceased would ascend out of Limbo into Heaven more quickly if the living prayed for their souls. The more people who prayed, particularly monks (and the more frequently the better), the faster their souls would rise to Heaven. As a result, aside from the charitable support of a beloved religious institution, and the creation of a memorial, donors were essentially paying their way into the fast lane to Heaven.

To this end, part of the contract that Joos Vijd and Elisabeth Borluut drew up, when they paid for the chapel and the altarpiece, included provisions for the celebration of Mass on specific feast days and the prayer for their souls by a specific number of monks, a certain number of times per year. Joos and Elisabeth had no children, another potential reason to endow a chapel and the celebration of Masses. Without children to pray for their souls, they needed the monks to pray for them.

How do we explain the grandiosity of Vijd’s commission? Why did he choose to work with the most prominent artist of the age on such a colossal scale? To underscore one’s piety, to speed one’s soul out of Purgatory,
to demonstrate one’s wealth—these are all legitimate rationales for commissioning
an
altarpiece. But there is no precedent for any painting of this scale, with this number of figures, this degree of realism, this combination of microscopic detail with a macroscopic vantage, in any previous work of northern European panel painting. In order to secure Jan van Eyck as an artist, services that were first and foremost promised to the duke, Vijd would have had to have serious connections—or the duke a rationale for permitting a local aristocrat, rather than himself, to bask in the glory of having commissioned the greatest painting of the age. Such questions have not been definitively answered, and the lack of closure has prompted a variety of theories, several rather more conspiratorial than sober, about why this masterpiece should rise like a leviathan out of the sea: miraculous, without precedent, and provoking more questions than answers.

A possible answer to the question of why
such
a work was created may present itself if we recall that 6 May 1432 was the date of both the first presentation of the altarpiece to the public and the baptism of Duke Philip’s son, also named Joos, who had been born April 24. The two events took place in the same church, in the same chapel. Therefore the altarpiece may represent not only the commission of the Vijd family but also a literal backdrop for the baptism of the son of Duke Philip the Good, a son on whom rested the hopes of the Burgundian dynasty. Of course Philip could not know that the timing of the completion of the altarpiece would coincide with the birth of his son, so this rationale would only explain the date of the presentation of the altarpiece, not why its commission was approved in the first place, years before. Alas, young Joos of Burgundy was not to be the future duke, as he died just weeks after the ceremony in which he was formally named.

It is noteworthy too that the duke’s infant son and the patriarch of the Vijd family shared the same first name. While there is no reason to think that the infant was named after him, the coincidence would likely have been seen as fortuitous to the local aristocrat Joos Vijd, who would have been both honored and proud. The fact of the baptism coinciding with
the completion of the altarpiece would explain why Duke Philip permitted his personal courtier to paint such a monumental work on behalf of a local aristocrat. Philip might have imagined that the altarpiece would serve as a backdrop for some major event, the birth of
a
son, or perhaps even his third marriage (to Isabella of Portugal), as he could not have predicted, in the late 1420s, which events in his personal life would coincide with the completion of the altarpiece. Van Eyck, like so many great Renaissance artists, was engaged frequently in the mounting of temporary decorations to celebrate one-time events, from weddings to royal visits—decorations that would be dismantled soon after the event took place. As a result, a large chunk of the time and effort of Renaissance court artists was focused on temporary artistic installations never intended to outlive the events themselves—precious time that might otherwise have been directed towards the creation of more masterpieces for the ages. This is a frustrating fact for art lovers, who would welcome a few more extant van Eycks in today’s museums, and was perhaps likewise so for the Renaissance artists themselves. With this in mind, we might consider that, while for van Eyck and for Joos Vijd,
The Ghent Altarpiece
was a monument for the ages, for Duke Philip the Good, the altarpiece served merely as a most elaborate and intricate stage set, a backdrop that would be used for the baptism of his son, born just as the altarpiece was completed.

It has generally been assumed that a learned theologian advised van Eyck on the iconography of
The Ghent Altarpiece
, designing an elaborate symbolic scheme, one that would require extensive knowledge of theological sources in a variety of languages. Most Renaissance artist contracts specified what the painter was to paint, which allegories might be represented, for example, and the biblical or literary scenes therein. The interpretation, or
invenzione
, as the Italians called it—what to do with the specifications—was up to the artist. But the scenes were, in the main, dictated ahead of time by the commissioners and their advisors.