Jan van Eyck (Maaseik, principality of Liege, ca. 1390 – Bruges, county of Flanders, July 9, 1441) was a flamenco painter of late Gothic who worked in Bruges. He is considered one of the best artists of the group of early Flamenco for his innovations in the art of portrait and landscape. Together with Robert Campin, who operated in Tournai, the key figures of the appearance of the Flemish school with emphasis on the observation of the natural world are considered.
Contemporary writer Bartolomeo Fazio described Van Eyck as an expert in geometry and “master of all the arts that adds distinction to painting”, recognizing the meticulous dedication that he put in the creation of His works. For a long time he was considered the “father of oil painting”, as historian and critic Giorgio Vasari attributed the invention of this technique, an aspect that was denied during the nineteenth century.
Jan van Eyck was an Early Netherlandish painter active in Bruges and one of the most significant Northern Renaissance artists of the 15th century. Outside of the Ghent Altarpiece completed with his brother Hubert van Eyck, and the illuminated miniatures ascribed to Hand G—believed to be Jan—of the Turin-Milan Hours, only about 25 surviving works are confidently attributed to him, all dated between 1432 and 1439. Ten, including the Ghent altarpiece, are dated and signed with a variation of his motto, ALS IK KAN, always written in Greek characters, and transliterate as a pun on his name.
Van Eyck painted both secular and religious subject matter, including altarpieces, single panel religious figures and commissioned portraits. His work includes single panels, diptychs, triptychs, and polyptych panels. He was well paid by Philip, who sought that the painter was secure financially and had artistic freedom and could paint “whenever he pleased”. Van Eyck’s work comes from the International Gothic style, but he soon eclipsed it, in part through a greater emphasis on naturalism and realism. Through his developments in the use of oil paint he achieved a new level of virtuosity. Van Eyck was highly influential and his techniques and style were adopted and refined by the Early Netherlandish painters.
He is the author of numerous portraits and pieces of religious type, including the adoration of the Mystic Lamb, an encyclopaedic compendium of Christian theology displayed on twelve panels that combine the concept of “salvation” that begins with The Annunciation, until the end of the world with the Apocalypse. Considered by Albrecht Dürer as “the most precious painting and of greater understanding”, it contains innovative elements such as the presence for the first time of donors, as well as large knot characters.
Little is known of his early life. The few surviving records indicate that he was born c. 1380–90, most likely in Maaseik. He took employment as painter and Valet de chambre with John of Bavaria-Straubing, ruler of Holland, in the Hague around 1422, when he was already a master painter with workshop assistants. After John’s death in 1425 he was employed as court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, in Lille, where he remained until 1429 after which he moved to Bruges, working for Philip until his death there in 1441.
The birthplace of the Van Eyck brothers was located in Maaseik (Eik al Mosa, formerly Eyck was written). The date of birth was estimated around 1390 from payments made to Jan van Eyck between 1422 and 1424 as painter of the court of John III of Bavaria in The Hague, where he had the rank of chamberlain ; This suggests an age of more than 30 years. For the majority of specialists, the apparent age observed in the probable self-portrait that has come to us suggests a date before 1395.
Jan belonged to a family in which there were two brother painters, Hubert and Lambert, and a sister called Margareta, who won fame as a miniaturist. Regarding the controversial existence of his brother Hubert, there is evidence that he was born in Maaseyck in 1366, there is evidence of a 1413 painting by “Hubert Master”, and he died in Ghent on September 18, 1426. Hubert is the one who would have begun the work of The Adoration of the Lamb. In 1823 he was able to confirm this responsibility when discovering an inscription to the framework of the work, where Jan van Eyck indicated that he was the one who finished the work begun by his brother.
Jan van Eyck married a woman sixteen younger, called Margareta, as her sister, with whom she had at least two children.
After a life between Lilla and Bruges, he died in this last city on July 9, 1441, and as recorded in the records of the chapter, he was buried in the cemetery of the church of San Donacián. His funeral cost 12 pounds Parisian, and the touch of bells in his honor, 24 sols. Later his body was transferred from the cemetery to the interior of the church, at the request of his brother Lambert and was placed in a grave near the baptismal font. The church of San Donacià was destroyed during the French Revolution in 1799.
His first documented work was as a painter and a chaplain of the prince-bishop of the principality of Liège, John III of Bavaria, who had occupied the county of Holland when his brother William VI of Bavaria died; Jan decorated his castle in The Hague between October 24, 1422 and September 11, 1424. Count John III died, and on May 19, 1425 Jan moved to Bruges also as a Painter of the court and chamberlain of Philip III the good, Duke of Burgundy and Count of Flanders. That same year he marched to Lilla, where the count had his preferred residence and where he continued until 1429. In 1430, despite continuing to work for the Duke, he had permanently established Bruges and his entire pictorial production It is from this period.
Van Eyck had the artistic admiration of Duke Philip and his maximum personal confidence and for this reason in 1426 he participated in several diplomatic missions in his name. A year later, he traveled to Valencia and Portugal as part of a delegation to negotiate the third marriage of Duke Felip. In Valencia, he attempted to make Felip’s marriage link with Elisabet d’Urgell, daughter of Count Jaume II d’Urgell, an operation that failed because Alfons el Magnànim, king of Aragon and Elisabet’s uncle, had agreed to His union with Prince Pere de Portugal in order to reinforce his positions before the kingdom of Castile.
When the proposal failed, on October 19, 1428, he marched to Portugal to request the hand of Isabel of Portugal and Lancaster to his father, King John I of Portugal. The delegation returned a year later and the wedding was celebrated on January 10, 1430. On this trip, Eyck painted a portrait of Princess Isabella of Portugal who had to serve so that the count could know her and give her Your final acceptance. In Portugal, Van Eyck coincided with the Valencian painter Lluís Dalmau who, curiously, was part of the wedding party between Elisabet d’Urgell and Pere de Portugal. As a result of this knowledge, Dalmau would eventually travel to Flanders between 1431 and 1436 to learn the technique of the Van Eyck workshop and learn about the new flamenco trends. Later, Lluís Dalmau performed the Virgen de los Consejeros, a work with a clear Flemish influence.
It was in this period of strong international exchange that Van Eyck made a map of the world made for the count, a piece lost today, like the portrait of Isabel of Portugal. In 1436, he made his last diplomatic trip to Prague.
Jan van Eyck continued, until his death, to the service of the Duke Felip, which always was recognized to him, providing him a treatment of favor in the court; In 1434 the Duke sponsored a son his. When the artist died, Philip granted his widow a financial compensation and a dowry to his daughter, Lyevine, to be able to enter the convent of Saint Agnès de Maaseyck.
After his death, his brother Lambert was in charge of his affairs and probably supervised the closure of his studio in Bruges.
In order to contextualise the work of Van Eyck it is necessary to understand that he was a painter from court to salary, disconnected from the union that grouped the free painters, where he probably had vetoed access for this reason. However, having a salary allowed him to devote much time to the study and perfectionist realization of his work. For the same reason, their clients were characters related to the Burgundy court, such as Cardinal Niccolò Albergati or rich Italian merchants such as the banker of Lucca, Giovanni Arnolfini.
The description that contemporary writer Bartolomeo Fazio makes of Van Eyck as litterarum nonnihil doctus and “master of all the arts that add a distinction to painting,” explains his intellectual curiosity for theological texts, astronomical details, chronograms Or paleography. Van Eyck expressed an instinct of historian, a systematic scholar who allowed him to create a “symbolism disguised” where “every sign of objectivity had meaning and all meaning was disguised.”
In order to develop this symbolism he became a scholar, almost an archeologist according to Panofsky, recreating churches and palaces or recovering Romanesque inscriptions. He imagined in a kind of free transformation of the scenarios or locations the architectural details, so that, being absolutely credible, it is impossible to identify them with a specific place. As Durer affirmed, Van Eyck had collected “all the details of the multiple images he had seen, without needing to resort to individual models.” Painting from the “secret treasure of his heart” was plausible what was imaginary, an imagination controlled in all the details for a preconceptional symbolic program.
Its innovative style combines naturalism with vivid colors with a decorative style typical of the miniatures of the Middle Ages with regard to the meticulousness of the details, the precision of the textures and the search for new systems of representation of the three-dimensional space . Human figures are framed in a naturalistic space.
With regard to the search for three-dimensional effects, Van Eyck does not resort only to perspective with a leakage point, but also deployed his refined mastery of the oil painting technique. At the beginning of his artistic career, van Eyck developed a clear concept of reality and how his paintings had to represent it. But no concept is effective without means available for exploration and expression. The success of the artist using his technique as a tool to increase his pictorial vision, was crucial in the successful manifestation of his artistic concept on canvas. Van Eyck used his oil technique as an optical device and as a conceptual tool. In pure practice, van Eyck’s “infinitesimal calculus” was possible because the new medium he used allowed him to combine a large number of brushstrokes, merging them literally with each other. As a result, he was able to investigate the relationship between small and large brushstrokes in works such as the Virgin of Chancellor Rolin, the Virgin of Van der Paele and the altarpiece of Ghent. It is remarkable that they go Eyck, using only rudimentary instruments in combination with the knowledge that his technique allowed him, he was able to create works of art that reflect the multiplicity and unity of nature. To the Virgin of Rolin, Van Eyck used his technique to the maximum to present a microscopic differentiation of detail and, at the same time, see near and far. In this work, it is not a matter of unifying discrete elements in a whole, but rather extending its “improved vision” method to include a distant perspective. It is as if this great observer uses his highly developed “tecno-crafts” to sweep the entire territory with the eye by recapping the revealing light.
The religious symbolism of his compositions denotes a knowledge that mixes his interest for people and nature within a humanistic mentality. Jan van Eyck was a fundamental influence in the primitive flamenco of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
The semi-magical domain of Van Eyck’s oil technique, which Vasari will take to consider him an alchemist, conjured up a new and almost palpable world, where painting itself – above all in the provision of light, Material textures – acted almost as a constituent element of what he represents.
It can be said that his style symbolizes a structure of the universe with an infinitesimal view of objects; Build your world with its pigments just as nature builds the real world with its own raw material. It reproduces human skin or a poorly shaved face assuming the very nature of what is being reproduced and maintains the solidity and fullness of objects that are far removed from those that are in the foreground of their landscapes. His eyes behaved like a microscope and a telescope at the same time.
He is an artist who was aware of his own importance, and was one of the first flamenco artists to sign and date his paintings in the frames, then considered an integral part of the work (often both were painted together ).
One of the most admired qualities by the Italians of the time was the splendor of the Flemish technique of oil painting that Vasari considered invented by Van Eyck. Vasari, in his biography of Antonello da Messina, fantasized about the discovery of the technique by Van Eyck, kept as a secret that gave the flamenco painters an advantage over the Italians. Although it was an earlier invention documented by Theophilus in 1125 and by Cennino Cennini in his Il libro dell’arte of 1390, the manipulation of Van Eyck certainly created apparently miraculous illusions of reality. The oil allowed for a smooth transition between the limits of volumes and spaces and guaranteeing a surprising accuracy of the details. It created the subtle effect of diffused light in the aerial perspectives and shadows, illuminating even the darkest passages with its rich but transparent brightness of color. In addition, it was used with a purified technique with lead white to accentuate the surface light more than as a color of specific objects.
Van Eyck had begun working on the egg tempera, experimenting with a faster drying varnish combining flax and nuts oils. In this process, which Karel van Mander placed in 1410, he began using a new binder of pigments that dried faster and produced brighter colors even without varnish, achieving an easier combination of colors. The “new” technique was spreading among the painters through the dissemination of the German writer Joachim von Sandrart and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Descamps, making the legend of Vasari more true, until in the mid-nineteenth century was discovered in England A copy of the work of the Benedictine monk Teòfil Diversarum Artium schedule sive of divers Artibus (1125), a treaty where he gave clear instructions on oil painting.
But it is true that the Van Eyck brothers were among the first flamenco painters who used it for paintings on the table with very precise details. It was they who achieved new and outstanding effects through the use of velours, the technique of painting with layers of paint on previous layers of still wet paint and other techniques. Jan van Eyck combined the egg tempera and the oil in the different layers achieving a special effect due to the different index of refraction of the light of both substances.
He brought the technique of oil painting and the realism of the details (especially the representation of materials) with a level never reached before. These layers of oil were applied on a support that consists of a wooden table (usually beech, Fagus sylvatica) polished and painted white, so that a reflection of the light is achieved with the consequent brightness of the Painting and a suggestion of depth. Van Eyck dared to use these methods to try what would later be called the trompe l’oeil.
This ability with oil allowed him to reflect in a naturalistic way the reality. In addition, he was careful and his works, usually small, have an extraordinary detail of the world of the miniature. Immediate background influences on Van Eyck were the excellent German miniaturists of Limburg, as well as the sculptor Claus Sluter: how to represent the folds of the cloths that Sluter made in stone is practically the same way that Eyck goes Paint the folds in his works. Also mentioned as the predecessor of the Van Eyck the least known, but valuable painter, Melchior Broederlam.
The work prior to 1420 is only known for references, among others, the biography of Fazio describing the lost production of van Eyck, citing the Lady in the bathroom, a work of profane themes, as well as a map of the world that goes Eyck painted for Duke Philip. The description of the lost map made by Fazio makes it clear that not only was it a functional map but rather a splendid work. Therefore, although it could have located the sites very accurately in order to be useful for estimating distances, it would also have been considered, basically, as a world map symbolic piece.
As a portraitist, he is considered an exhaustive author, with portraits intensely close and at the same time remote. He knows how to combine the individuality of the character, what is different from the rest of mankind, which is more characteristic of gender painting, with its universality, that is, what has in common with the rest of mankind, in a way Timeless; They are portraits that can reflect key data of a society or ethnicity, but they can be absolutely impersonal. In the fifteenth century in Flanders an emphasis was placed on the uniqueness that leads to a descriptive and static approach. This is the case of Van Eyck with portraits more descriptive than interpretative. The characters are almost static, giving them an attractive and enigmatic depth.
New works signed and dated between 1432 and 1439 are conserved, four of them are religious, such as the Virgin of the canon Van der Paele (1436, Groeninge Museum, Bruges) or the Virgin of Chancellor Rolin (Museum of the Louvre, Paris) and the other five are portraits, such as Arnolfini’s marriage (1434, National Gallery, London). As in almost all the works of Van Eyck, this excels in allegories and symbols: there is a convex circular mirror in which the same author appears vaguely reflected, and under this mirror the phrase “I have been here”. Although it is not exactly the speculative game system that Diego Velázquez later uses in Las Meninas, there is an interesting precedent in Van Eyck’s painting, which is, among other things, a search for the super vision that the two-dimensionality of the painting imposes on The representation of the spaces. Van Eyck reinforces the “integration” of the spectator within the virtual space represented in his work.
The collection of miniatures known as the Book of Hours of Turin is a work of the brothers of Limburg. The documentary ignorance of the activity of Jan van Eyck in The Hague court with William VI of Bavaria has speculated on the authorship of Van Eyck at the end of the work of Limburg that was unfinished at the death of these plague .
It is a work of a French late Gothic tradition, probably commissioned by Duke William of Bavaria before 1417 and executed in The Hague for the Count of Holland, John of Bavaria between 1422 and 1424. Most of the miniatures were destroyed By the fire in 1904, although there are photographs; The existing part of the manuscript is preserved in the Civico d’Arte Antica Museum in Turin. Among the historians who attribute the participation of the Van Eyck, stands out Georges Hulin de Loo who identified up to eleven collaborators in the miniatures of the Book of Hours, calling them with the first letters of the alphabet. In the best pages of the mined book, attributed to “master G” (Jan van Eyck, according to Loo) the figures are already fully integrated into a realistic space, with a light that unifies the representation and draws with great precision and tiny details the ” Space and the characters’ roles. It is clear that Van Eyck posed, like Masaccio, the problem of reality: but while the Italian did a synthesis that welcomed the sole essence of things, worrying about placing them in a space of unitary perspective and Rational, flamenco analyzed with singularity and attention singular objects as they appear before our senses. It is not known exactly whether these miniatures were made by Jan or his brother Hubert, as with other works prior to 1426, when his brother Hubert died. At least seven of the miniatures were the work of van Eyck (“master G”), of which only two are preserved: The birth of Saint John the Baptist and the Mass of deceaseds.
In the work of the genovese humanist Bartolomeo Fazio De viris illustribus written in 1454, he presented him as “the principal painter” of his time, within the group of the best in which he placed Roger van der Weyden, Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello. It is particularly interesting that Fazio showed such enthusiasm for the Flemish painters as he did for the Italians. Fazio describes van Eyck as a cult man, versed in the classics, especially in the writings on painting by Pliny the Elder. This may explain the inscription of the Ars Amatoria de Ovidi, which was in the original framework, currently lost, of the portrait of the Arnolfini Marriage, and by the Latin inscriptions in his paintings, using the Roman spelling, which was then reserved for Cults men
Van Eyck’s work has been abundantly copied by painters and illuminators. His compatriots were still considered the king of painters in the sixteenth century, exerting an enormous influence on the flamenco and European art in general. Petrus Christus is considered his principal disciple, although he does not know if he was part of his workshop. Among his direct heirs we can mention Gerard David, Hugo van der Goes and Konrad Witz, and even Hans Memling, Martin Schongauer, or (albeit whether he is purely Renaissance) the Mabuse. They were also influenced by Italians such as Antonello da Messina and Colantonio. Van der Weyden follows his realistic style, although adding more dramatism.
Valencian contemporary artist Lluís Dalmau traveled in Flanders in 1431 by order of Alfons V de Aragón, where he met Van Eyck’s work and could have been a season in his studio. Its clearest influence is the Mother of God of the Council members commissioned by the Consell de Cent. King Alfons was a great fan of flamenco art and he got two works by Van Eyck, now disappeared: the Lomellini Triptych and a Saint George.
Its international reputation, on the other hand, is certified in the Italian historiography of the fifteenth century, where there is information about Van Eyck, related, among others, by Ciriaco de Pizzicolli, Bartolomeo Fazio, Filarete and Giovanni Santi.