Jan van Eyck

• 1. Introduction

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  Jan van Eyck signed his paintings with a motto that doubles as a private joke. ALS ICH KAN, written in Greek characters across his frames and canvases, translates as "As I Can" or "As Best I Can." It sounds like a shrug. But the phrase is also a pun on his surname, and scholars have noted it sometimes mirrors the monogram of Christ. False modesty, perhaps, from a painter who knew exactly what he had done.

  Born somewhere in or around Maaseik, in what is now Belgium, probably in the decade around 1380-1390, van Eyck died in Bruges on the 9th of July 1441. In those six decades he produced roughly twenty paintings that survive with confidence, plus contributions to the illuminated manuscript known as the Turin-Milan Hours, and the Ghent Altarpiece, one of the most studied works in Western art. Giorgio Vasari and Ernst Gombrich both called him the inventor of oil painting. That claim is now considered an oversimplification, but it tells you something about the magnitude of his reputation.

  The questions this documentary will pursue are harder than "how good was he?" They are: what kind of man ran a court diplomat's life alongside a painter's life? What did it mean to be the only 15th-century Netherlandish painter who routinely signed his work? And what happens when realism and religious symbolism are so thoroughly braided together that a viewer needs multiple viewings to find even the most obvious layer of meaning?

• 2. A Painter at Court

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  By 1422, when records first place van Eyck in The Hague, he was already a master painter with workshop assistants in his employ. He had entered the service of John of Bavaria-Straubing, ruler of Holland, Hainault and Zeeland, with the rank of valet de chambre, a title that placed a craftsman inside the intimate orbit of a ruler. He was redecorating the Binnenhof palace.

  After John died in 1425, van Eyck came to the attention of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Philip's regard for van Eyck was not merely appreciative. He explicitly wanted the painter to have the financial security and artistic freedom to paint "whenever he pleased." A court salary freed van Eyck from having to chase commissions, and the following decade saw his technical reputation grow fastest.

  Philip also deployed him as a diplomat. Between 1426 and 1429 van Eyck undertook several journeys described in surviving records as "secret" commissions, for which he received multiples of his annual salary. In 1426 he departed for "certain distant lands", possibly the Holy Land. The topographical accuracy of Jerusalem in The Three Marys at the Tomb, completed by workshop members around 1440, has been cited as circumstantial evidence for that trip.

  On the 18th of October 1427, the Feast of St. Luke, van Eyck travelled to Tournai to attend a banquet held in his honour. Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden were both present. He was a senior member of the Tournai painters' guild, and this banquet places him at the centre of the emerging Netherlandish school at the precise moment it was forming.

• 3. The Portugal Journey

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  The most fully documented of van Eyck's diplomatic missions began in 1428, when Philip the Good sent him to Lisbon as part of a delegation to prepare a marriage agreement with Isabella, daughter of John I of Portugal. Van Eyck's specific task was to paint the bride so the Duke could form a picture of her before committing to the match.

  Portugal was in the grip of plague at the time. The Portuguese court was itinerant, and the Dutch delegation had to travel to the out-of-the-way castle of Avis to find them. Van Eyck spent nine months there. He then returned to the Netherlands with Isabella as a bride-to-be; she and Philip married on Christmas Day of 1429.

  The nature of the commission was delicate. Van Eyck had to render Isabella's appearance honestly enough to satisfy the Duke's practical need, while also pleasing a woman who knew she was being appraised. His solution was consistent with his wider practice: he showed his sitters as dignified, without hiding their imperfections. Surviving copies of the Portrait of Isabella of Portugal show a woman resting her hands on a faux stone parapet, her eyes gazing directly out at the viewer, her presence extended into the space beyond the frame.

  The portrait itself is lost, but from copies it is possible to deduce that the oak frame carried additional "painted-on" frames, one of them lettered with a gothic inscription. Philip paid van Eyck multiples of his annual salary for the Portugal journey, which gives some measure of how the court valued it.

• 4. The Ghent Altarpiece

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  The Ghent Altarpiece was commissioned by the merchant, financier and politician Jodocus Vijdt and his wife Elisabeth Borluut. Work began sometime before 1426. Hubert van Eyck, Jan's older brother, is believed to have started it. Hubert died in 1426. Jan completed it, and the polyptych was consecrated on the 6th of May 1432 at Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, during an official ceremony attended by Philip himself.

  Scholars have described it as representing "the final conquest of reality in the North." The phrase points to a deliberate turn away from the classical idealisation that characterised the great works of the Early Renaissance in Italy. What van Eyck offered instead was faithful observation of the natural world, rendered in oil with a luminosity that had not been achieved before at this scale.

  Ten of van Eyck's surviving signed works carry a variation of the ALS ICH KAN motto, and the Ghent Altarpiece is among them. The altarpiece's Mary wears a crown adorned with flowers and stars. She reads from a girdle book draped with green cloth, an element that may have been borrowed from Robert Campin's Virgin Annunciate. The lettering on the arched throne above her is drawn from the Book of Wisdom (7:29): "She is more beautiful than the sun and the army of the stars; compared to the light she is superior."

  After Jan's death in 1441, Lambert van Eyck oversaw the workshop. In early 1442, Lambert had his brother's body exhumed from the graveyard of the Church of St Donatian and placed inside St. Donatian's Cathedral.

• 5. Realism and the Portrait Sitters

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  Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon, dating to around 1430, is thought to be van Eyck's earliest surviving portrait. It already contains most of the devices he would refine across the following decade: the three-quarters view, directional lighting, an elaborate headdress, and a flat black background that gives the figure no spatial escape. The man has what scholar Lorne Campbell describes as the look of someone "rather inefficiently shaved," a light stubble of one or two days' growth.

  Campbell lists the other unshaven sitters van Eyck portrayed: Niccolò Albergati in 1431, Jodocus Vijdt in 1432, Jan van Eyck himself in 1433, Joris van der Paele around 1434-1436, Nicolas Rolin in 1435, and Jan de Leeuw in 1436. The consistency is striking. This was not accident or negligence but a deliberate observation of how men actually look.

  Van Eyck did not simply copy what he saw. He altered a model's proportions to emphasise features of interest. In the portrait of his wife Margaret, painted in 1439, he changed the angle of her nose and gave her the fashionably high forehead that would have flattered her in the eyes of contemporaries. The Portrait of Margaret van Eyck carries an inscription in Greek on the frame: "My husband Johannes completed me in the year 1439 on the 17th of June, at the age of 33. As I can."

  The inscription is set in the sitter's voice, a technique van Eyck used repeatedly. Portrait of Jan de Leeuw reads: "Jan de Leeuw, who first opened his eyes on the Feast of St Ursula the 21st of October, 1401. Now Jan van Eyck has painted me, you can see when he began it. 1436." The sitter appears to be narrating his own likeness.

• 6. Mary, the Church, and Hidden Meaning

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  With the exception of the Ghent Altarpiece, every religious work van Eyck produced places the Virgin Mary at the centre. She is typically seated, wearing a jewel-studded crown, cradling a playful Christ child who grips the hem of her dress. This posture recalls the 13th-century Byzantine Eleusa icon, the Virgin of Tenderness. She usually wears red. She is sometimes shown reading a Book of Hours.

  Art historian Otto Pächt described the interior of Madonna in the Church as a "throne room" that envelops Mary as if a "carrying case". Her head reaches nearly to the level of the gallery, approximately sixty feet high. This distortion of scale appears in several other Marian paintings, including Annunciation. Art historians in the 19th century read the scale as the error of an immature painter. Erwin Panofsky, in 1941, was the first to propose that her size represents her embodiment as the Church itself. Till-Holger Borchert put it more directly: van Eyck painted not "the Madonna in a church" but Mary as "the Church."

  Craig Harbison identifies the blending of realism and symbolism as "the most important aspect of early Flemish art." In van Eyck's work, according to Harbison, "descriptive data were rearranged so that they illustrated not earthly existence but what he considered supernatural truth." The symbols are so densely layered that, as Harbison notes, a work must be viewed multiple times before even the most obvious meaning of an element is apparent.

  The inscription on the Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele records a practice that was commercially and spiritually intertwined: "Joris van der Paele, canon of this church, had this work made by painter Jan van Eyck. And he founded two chaplaincies here in the choir of the Lord. 1434. He only completed it in 1436, however." Van der Paele actively sponsored requiem masses, and with that income endowed churches with embroidered cloths, chalices, plates and candlesticks.

• 7. Signature and Legacy

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  Van Eyck was the only 15th-century Netherlandish painter who routinely signed his panels. The practice was consequential. Because his name is attached to so many surviving works, attribution has been far less contested than it is for most of his contemporaries in the Early Netherlandish school.

  The Arnolfini Portrait of 1432 is signed "Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434", which translates as "Jan van Eyck was here 1434." The signature is written in the decorative script ordinarily reserved for legal documents, a choice visible also in Léal Souvenir. The claim of presence in the Arnolfini Portrait is both a verification of the record and, some scholars suggest, a mildly arrogant assertion of the work's quality.

  When van Eyck died on the 9th of July 1441, Philip made a one-off payment to his widow Margaret, equal in value to the artist's annual salary. In 1449 the Italian humanist Ciriaco de' Pizzicolli named him as a painter of note and ability. Bartolomeo Facio recorded him in 1456. In Facio's 1454 De viris illustribus, van Eyck is named "the leading painter" of his day, placed alongside Rogier van der Weyden, Gentile da Fabriano, and Pisanello.

  In 1998 Holland Cotter estimated that only about two dozen works could be attributed to van Eyck with varying degrees of confidence, including some drawings and pages from the Turin-Milan Hours. Of roughly forty works considered originals in the mid-1980s, around ten were by the late 1990s being vigorously contested by leading researchers as workshop pieces rather than by van Eyck's own hand. The square in Bruges where he lived and worked bears his name: Jan van Eyckplein.