Van Eyck: a revelation in Ghent
Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Ghent, Belgium (+32 9 323 67 00, mskgent.be). Until 30 April
For centuries, the Flemish master Jan van Eyck (c.1390-1441) was believed to have invented oil painting, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. This was, in fact, one of the many “tall tales” spun by the 16th century Florentine art historian Vasari; the technique has probably existed since classical times. Yet while van Eyck may not have invented oil paint, the uses he put it to were “revolutionary”. Put simply, he was the first artist to create “an utterly tangible record of his world”, picturing the faces, surfaces and phenomena he saw around him in an “intensely realistic” style that made his contemporaries look “primitive”. This new exhibition in Ghent, which accompanies the restoration of his famous altarpiece at nearby St Bavo’s Cathedral, explores his achievements in unprecedented detail – showing how his innovations dragged art out of the Middle Ages and paved the way for the Renaissance. Bringing together 13 of van Eyck’s 22 surviving works, alongside a wealth of documentary material, the show is a riveting testament to one of history’s greatest painters.
Van Eyck is an alchemist, said
Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. In his Annunciation Diptych, a painting depicting sculptures of Mary and the Archangel Gabriel, he effortlessly “simulates light hitting the surface of pure white marble and convincingly makes the statues seem three-dimensional”. This sort of magic occurs repeatedly: a 1436 portrait of a goldsmith has its subject brandishing a gold ring that “glints in dazzles of yellow, catching a beam of light”, while another painting of the annunciation sees Mary framed by “bottle-glass windows” that beg you to squint through them. Indeed, it is almost impossible to believe the work is merely “a flat piece of wood with paint on it”.
Van Eyck’s true breakthrough was to move beyond the conventions of medieval religious painting, said Jackie Wullschläger in the FT. The works gathered here show art moving from the dogmatic “Christian outlook” of van Eyck’s predecessors to an “empirical, questioning gaze”. Nowhere is this more evident than in his monumental, 26-panel altarpiece The Adoration of the Mystic
Lamb in Ghent’s cathedral; unprecedentedly, eight exterior sections have been loaned to the city’s museum of art, and are “the stars of its show”. In this extraordinary series of images, we see a “sensuous, red-winged” Gabriel hovering over an arched window looking out onto Ghent, presenting the city as it “had never been depicted before”. This scene is just one highlight of a “dazzling” show full of art “so lifelike and sharp that it disturbs”.