Jan was of another sort; equally great as a craftsman, he was a fine gentleman, a courtier, the friend of princes, and a diplomat. In those barbarous days before the culmination of the era of enlightenment, art was not a cult, isolated from life, nor were artists a sort of creature apart, made so by the possession of a then undiscovered and quite pathological affliction called the “artistic temperament.” They were good citizens and an integral part of a like-minded community, serving their kind after many fashions, amongst them being the honourable and admirable craft of art. Of this craft Jan was past master; he painted statues and illuminated missals and fashioned stained glass; he created great altar-pieces and produced living portraits of old ecclesiastics and worthy burghers and their wives; for all I know he was an architect as well—at all events he might have been, as is proved by the wonderful drawing of St. Barbara with its background of a great Gothic tower under construction. A thoroughly typical example of his painting is the St. Donatian altar-piece, a votive picture ordered by the excellent old Canon Van der Paele, who is shown in adoration before Our Lady and the Holy Child and attended by St. Donatian himself and St. George. Mr. Berenson could find no finer example than this of that “space composition” on which he rightly lays such stress; Holbein could paint no more exact and characteristic portraits; all the goldsmiths of Byzantium could not rival the jewel work of armour and orphreys, brocades and embroideries, and sculptures and inlays, while the colour, both in its individual parts and its composition, comes nearer the living light of the
A DRAWING OF ST. BARBARA, JAN VAN EYCK
windows of Chartres than any other painted colour in the world. One would like to hang this particular picture (for a time only, then replacing it over an altar where alone it belongs) in the midst of a “Rubens Gallery,” or a room in the Luxembourg or the Royal Academy, and call all the world to see.
There is little enough left of Jan’s work, and for the same humiliating reason that holds in the case of his brother. Of Hans Memling, another wonder child, there is fortunately much. When one catalogues the list of this earliest and greatest work in Flanders and recalls the wrecking with axe and torch of cathedrals, abbeys, convents, hospitals, châteaux by Calvinists and sans-culottes; the pyres of smouldering pictures, the ditches filled up with pulverised glass, shattered statues, illuminated missals and graduales and books of hours; the sacred vessels and gorgeous vestments, such as Hubert and Jan, Hans and Gerard showed in their pictures, despoiled of their splendid jewels (transferred for a consideration to Hebrew brokers) and melted down or used for chair covers, as the case may be; and when in this lurid light one weighs the thick hides and the muddled brains and the shrivelled souls of the wreckers against even the mere artistic value of their spoils, one marvels still more at the wonders of scientific evolution and the promises of evolutionary philosophy.
Memling is the third of the great trio of Flemings, and though there were innumerable others whose art was near perfection, these three stand for ever by themselves apart. There is more of human tenderness in his work and a certain spiritualisation informing everything that gives a different quality; the portraiture and differentiation of character are possibly beyond what any other ever attained, but his composition as it gains in complexity and facile ease loses something of that broad and powerful directness, that supreme quality of rhythm and serenity that marked the Van Eycks. The colour also is less invariably sonorous, less pure and splendid and luminous both in its single tones and its harmonies, while now and then the universal Flemish passion for sumptuous stuffs and gorgeous patterns and glittering accessories betrays him into a loss of unity and balance. Still, any criticism is impudent; his St. Ursula series, his St. John Baptist, his St. Bertin and Floreins and Moreel altar-pieces are amongst the greatest pictures that
