OUR LADY, FROM THE TRYPTICH AT GHENT HUBERT VAN EYCK
and the human appeal of the poignant beauty of the world, and the transcendent magic of the supernatural, sacramentally and visibly set forth.
This, which very well may be the greatest picture in the world (it does not matter), was ordered from Hubert Van Eyck when he was nearly fifty years old, he having been born about 1366 in the province of Limbourg and coming of a long line of painters. It was ordered by Jodocus Vydts, a worthy burgher of Ghent, as an altar-piece for a chapel he had built and endowed (according to the pious and admirable practice of those good Catholic times) in the Cathedral of St. Bavon. For ten years he worked at his masterpiece, and then death overtook him in the year 1426, when his work was only partly finished, when his brother, Jan, took it up and brought it to a triumphant conclusion in 1432. It is a great triptych of twenty-two painted panels and its preservation has been nothing short of miraculous. Philip II tried to carry it off in 1558, the Protestants to destroy it in 1566, and the Calvinists to give it away to Queen Elizabeth in 1578. It was nearly destroyed by fire in 1641, dismembered and packed away in 1781, carried off (parts of it) to Paris in 1794. In 1816 most of the wings were sold to a shrewd dealer for $20,000 and by him to the Berlin Museum for $80,000; finally the Adam and Eve panels were taken to the Brussels Museum, and a set of copies attached to the mutilated remainder in the Cathedral of St. Bavon.
The work is one vast, comprehensive, and sacramental manifestation of the central Catholic sacrament of the mass, searching and final in its symbolism, consummate in its mastery of all the elements that enter into the make-up of a great work of pictorial and decorative art, unapproached and unapproachable in its splendour of living and radiant colour. In its philosophical grasp, its technical perfection, its unearthly beauty, its communication of the very essence of a fundamental mystery, and in its evocative power it staggers the imagination and takes its place amongst the few great works of man, in any category, which are so far beyond what seems possible of achievement that they rank as definitely superhuman. So far as its spiritual content is concerned, it can no more be estimated than can the mass itself, or paraphrased in words than Chartres Cathedral or a Brahms symphony or the Venus of Melos. If the Van Eycks are responsible for this, they rank with St. Thomas Aquinas and Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci as the greatest creative forces amongst men. Of course they were not, nor the others, named. Somehow each was used by something greater than he: the concentrated consciousness of his fellows, the underlying and informing time-spirit of an era—or why not God Himself?—as a channel through which and by which absolute truth was communicated to man who, of his own motion, can do much, but not so much as this.
For the consummate artistry, for the perfect sense of decoration and composition, the keen and exquisite line, the perception and recording of diversified character, the poignant love of all natural beauty and corresponding rejection of all ugliness, for the technique which is that of a master in the fashioning of precious metals and the cutting of priceless gems, for the colour that is now resonant with all the deep splendour of great music, now thin and aerial with all the delicacy of far horizons and misty forests at some pale dawn in a land of dreams—for all these things we may remember Hubert Van Eyck and his brother Jan, for this is their work, but beyond this we go elsewhere, at least as far as the mass itself, for the inspiration that has made this Flemish triptych one of the great, revealing creations of the world.
The infinite variety of conception and rendition simply transcend experience. The three great, dominating figures—God the Father, Our Lady, and St. John Baptist—are of a Byzantine majesty transfused by a passionate humanism that is almost unique in any form. From them you pass to the central panel of the “Worship of the Lamb That Was Slain,” which is as tender and personal and human as the best of Fra Angelico, and, like his clear visions, irradiated by a kind of paradisal glory that sets it in a heaven of its own; from this you go to the panels of singing angels and splendid attendant knights and marching pilgrims that are pages out of the daily record of life in proud and beautiful Bruges, and finally you come to the Adam and Eve who are sheer, unadulterated realism unapproachable in its minute veracity. Surely, these two men were a type of the universal genius. They balked at nothing and found nothing too difficult of accomplishment, simply because they were perfectly trained and broadly accomplished craftsmen who knew that theirs was an exacting and a jealous craft for which “temperament”—artistic or otherwise—was not, and could not be made, a substitute.
It is with a feeling almost of relief that we come down nearer the earth and confront the masterpieces of Jan Van Eyck. With Hubert we are taken into a kind of seventh heaven of mystical revelation; with his brother and those that follow we come back to what is more human, more in scale with experience. Great art still, as great as one can find elsewhere, and with all the mastery of methods, all the confident certainty, all the triumphant colour and the exquisite design and the faultless craftsmanship of the painted “Beatific Vision” itself. There once were many other pictures by Hubert Van Eyck, but all now are gone, destroyed by the savage hands of Calvinists and Revolutionaries, and the “Adoration of the Lamb” remains alone as an isolated miracle.