Before passing to Hubert van Eyck, the painter of the original of our next picture, please compare carefully the picture of Richard II. and this of the Three Maries, looking first at one and then at the other. The subject of the visit of the Maries to the Sepulchre is, of course, well known to you, but let us read the beautiful passage from St. Matthew telling of it, that we may see how faithfully in every detail it was followed by Hubert van Eyck.
In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, to see the Sepulchre. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the Angel of the Lord descended from Heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men.
Surely this would be thought a beautiful picture had it been painted at any time, but when you compare it with the Richard II. diptych does it not seem to you as though a long era divided the two? Yet one was painted less than fifty years after the other. It is the attitude of mind of the painter that makes the difference.
In the diptych, although the portrait of Richard himself was a likeness, the setting was imaginary and symbolic. The artist wished to tell in his picture how all the Kings who succeed one another upon the throne of England alike depend upon the protection of Heaven, and how Richard in his turn acknowledged that dependence, and pledged his loyalty to the Blessed Virgin and her Holy Child. That picture was intended to take the mind of the spectator away from the everyday world and suggest grave thought, and such was likewise in the main the purpose of all paintings in the Middle Ages. But we are now leaving the Middle Ages behind and approaching a new world nearer to our own.
Hubert van Eyck, in attempting to depict the event at the Sepulchre as it might actually have occurred outside the walls of the City of Jerusalem, was doing something quite novel in his day. His picture might almost be called a Bible illustration. It is at least painted in the same practical spirit as that of a man painting an illustration for any other book. It is not a picture meant to help one to pray, or meditate. It does not express any religious idea. It was intended to be the veracious representation of an actual event, shown as, and when, and how it happened, true to the facts so far as Hubert knew them.
THE THREE MARIES
From the picture by Hubert van Eyck, in Sir Frederick Cook's Collection, Richmond
He has dressed the Maries in robes with wrought borders of Hebrew characters, imitated from embroidered stuffs, such as at that time were imported into Europe from the East. The dresses are not accurate copies of eastern dresses; Hubert would scarcely have known what those were like, but was doing his best to paint costumes that should look oriental. Mary Magdalen wears a turban, and the keeper on the right has a strange peaked cap with Hebrew letters on it. Hebrew scholars have done their best to read the inscriptions on these clothes, but we must infer that Hubert only copied the letters without knowing what they meant, since it has not been possible to make any sense of them. In the foreground are masses of flowers most carefully painted, and so accurately drawn that botanists have been able to identify them all; several do not grow in the north of Europe. The town at the back is something like Jerusalem as it looked in Hubert van Eyck's own day. A few of the buildings can be identified still, and a general view of Jerusalem taken in 1486, sixty years after the death of Hubert, bears some resemblance to the town in this picture. The city is painted in miniature, much as it would look if you saw it from near at hand. Every tower, house, and window is there. You can even count the battlements. The great building with the dome in the middle of the picture, is the Mosque of Omar, which occupies the supposed site of Solomon's Temple.
Some people have thought that perhaps Hubert van Eyck, and his brother John, actually went to the East. Many men made pilgrimages in those days, and almost every year parties of Christian pilgrims went to Jerusalem. It was a rough and even a dangerous journey, but not at all impossible for a patient traveller. Dr. Hulin, who has made wonderful discoveries about the early Flemish painters, found a mention, in an old sixteenth-century list, of a 'Portrait of a Moorish King or Prince' by Van Eyck, painted in 1414 or perhaps 1418. If he painted a portrait of an oriental prince, he may have visited one oriental country at least, or at any rate the south of Spain. Probably enough during that journey he made studies of the cypress, stone-pine, date-palm, olive, orange, and palmetto, which occur in his pictures. They grow in the south of Spain and other Mediterranean regions, but not in the cold north where Hubert spent most of his days.