![]() ![]() ![]() In addition, there was centuries of grime, and minute flecks of paint were peeling off. Deep layers of varnish had yellowed over time, covering the subtleties of Van Eyck’s exquisite handiwork. In terms of achieving depth, atmospheric perspective, flesh tones and sophisticated modelling, the new medium was unsurpassed, and so was Van Eyck’s handling of it.īefore the current project, carried out by Belgium’s Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, 70% of the Ghent Altarpiece had been overpainted and varnished. What’s more, nothing like this could have been achieved with egg tempera, which was the medium of choice among artists before the Renaissance. Before Leonardo da Vinci, Van Eyck really could claim to be the master of light he was certainly known to have studied optics. But Van Eyck used pigments to depict gold and fine metal objects, with light glinting off their surfaces, just as they would appear to the observant eye. He tirelessly experimented with the medium, altering its chemical balance to achieve faster drying times, and this allowed him to build up layers of translucent paint in order to achieve all those delicate and nuanced effects.īefore Van Eyck, artists depicting areas of gold would typically use gold leaf, which appeared flat and decorative on the surface of the painting. What he achieved with the medium – the extreme verisimilitude and exactitude of his execution, the fine, three-dimensional modelling, the subtle depiction of light and shadow, and the extreme realism of textures – set him apart from all predecessors. However, in an important sense, Van Eyck really is the father of oil painting. This was in fact a myth that continued well into the 19th Century. A century after the artist’s death, at the exact time the 16th-Century overpainters, the artists Lancelot Blondeel and Jan van Scorel, were busy ‘improving’ the details of his famous altarpiece, the Florentine painter and author of The Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari wrote in swooning terms that Van Eyck was the inventor of oil painting. ![]() Later this year, the altarpiece will find its way back to its new purpose-built visitor centre at St Bavo’s Cathedral amid other celebrations marking this important conservation and restoration work.Įven during his lifetime Van Eyck was venerated for his astonishing innovations, so much so that the altarpiece itself can be seen in terms of a series of firsts. ![]() It will also bring together half of Van Eyck’s extant paintings, which total around 20, alongside paintings by Northern European contemporaries and later artists responding to the altarpiece. Temporarily separated, these newly restored outer panels will form the dramatic focus of an exhibition examining the genius of Van Eyck, opening this month at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent. Having undergone years of painstaking restoration, ‘before and after’ images of the artist’s sacrificial lamb trended on social media, drawing the response that the big reveal was simply too freakishly weird-looking and might we please have the earlier one back. This is why the unveiling of a part of Van Eyck’s masterpiece, The Ghent Altarpiece, or as it’s also known, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, came as a shock to many. The tragedy of art’s greatest supermodel Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros of 1515, depicting the creature as if its thick hide were a suit of armour, comes to mind – though the intricate woodcut Dürer made from this second-hand encounter also happens to be an incredible artistic achievement, and one which helped spread the German artist’s reputation far and wide.īut a lamb, surely, of which plenty could be found gambolling through the fields of medieval Europe, can’t have presented any such mysteries, especially for an artist as observant, as none had been before him, of the tiniest material detail as the 15th-Century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck. Since most would not have had the benefit of direct observation but were usually reliant only on a written description, accompanied by a sketchy illustration that may itself have been anatomically wide of the mark, this is far from surprising. European artists of the past often depicted exotic animals in a way we now know to be wildly inaccurate. ![]()
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