Was Jan Van Eyck een genie?

0:13 In the first half of the fifteenth century, Jan van Eyck created an entirely new vision of reality that would influence Western art history to this day. This new vision was based on three aspects. First, his technique. Second, his powers of observation. And thirdly, his knowledge. As for that technique... People used to think he was the inventor of oil painting, but we now know that wasn't actually the case. He has improved that technique tremendously. Among other things, by adding agents to the oil that made it dry faster and more manageable. By

0:59 that I mean he could work both transparently and glossy and all the transitions in between. We can see this very clearly in a comparison with a work from the previous generation, made around 1400. Melchior Broederlam also works in oil, but with an outdated technique, in which he depicts the reflection of light with opaque strokes. In Van Eyck’s work, on the other hand, we see the light sliding away. And that is precisely because of that new oil that he uses as a medium. This technical innovation is so radical

1:44 that it can truly be called genius. Secondly, he had an unparalleled power of observation. That could also be called genius. He studied how light behaves in reality. And that with a pre-scientific attitude, with the aim of gaining insight into nature and acquiring knowledge. And he also had a special eye-hand coordination, which allowed him to realize what he observed with great precision with that oil paint on panel.

2:29 And with that he could render all kinds of textures of all kinds of different materials . We think of wood carving, different metal alloys. Flora which he views with a botanical interest. And even one of the hardest things to paint, water. Water is represented here by means of reflections. And a detail in the Ghent Altarpiece, the water flowing in the fountain, shows his powers of observation. If we

3:15 we see that as the water falls, it forms concentric circles, splashes up, forms a ball and then falls back down. We need modern technology for that, Van Eyck could observe and depict that with the naked eye . A third aspect of his genius is his knowledge. We can actually compare him with that other famous artist, about a century later, Leonardo da Vinci. Van Eyck was the first learned artist in the North, a pictor doctus. He was aware of natural sciences. Alchemy, his experiments with that oil testify to that. On the other hand, optics. And then he must also have been clearly aware

4:03 of theological discussions of his time. There are sources that point to the erudition of Jan van Eyck. Since 1425 he was in the service of the Burgundian Duke Philip the Good. And the Duke writes in one of his letters that he admired his excellence in knowledge and art. The oldest literary source, from shortly after Jan van Eyck's death, is from a Neapolitan humanist, Bartolomeo Fazio. And he writes that Jan van Eyck is the best artist of his time, but is also familiar with the ancient authors

4:49 and that he is very well versed in the seven liberal arts, the artes liberales, the basis of medieval university education. And Fazio says he was particularly skilled in geometry. Late medieval geometry was primarily based in the artes training on the optics of visual perception. And this was based on a text by an Arab scholar from the early eleventh century that was translated into Latin around 1200 and thus found its way into the West.

5:36 It is remarkable that knowledge in the late Middle Ages was enormously enriched in the fields of mathematics and physics by the integration of Arabic knowledge. The author is called Alhazen in the West and his work De Aspectibus or Perspectiva. And in it he talks about three ways of perceiving. First, optics, direct observation. Second, the reflection of light in plane mirrors and in concave and convex mirrors, that is, concave and convex mirrors.

6:22 And third, the refraction of light: how light breaks in transparent materials such as glass and water. This knowledge was picked up by theologians in the thirteenth century and systematized, reformulated into clear propositions, making it very accessible for teaching at the university. The theologians interpreted the texts in a Christian way and gave them, as it were, a spiritual dimension, a metaphysical dimension. Because of course, for Christian theologians,

7:08 God was central to everything, to their worldview. At the end of the thirteenth century, for example, we see a theologian, Pierre de Limoges, making a connection between spiritual vision and optical perception. And he actually still uses those insights from Alhazen. He argues that during life we see reflections of reality, thus vague and distorted. After death we see according to the laws of refraction of light, thus indirectly. And only after the resurrection will we come face to face with God,

7:57 thus direct perception. And with that, one provides an answer to an age-old question already posed by the Church Father Augustine in the fifth century, namely: How can we as mortals ever perceive God? During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this knowledge developed further and was disseminated among the population, in popular literature, in sermons, and also in art theory. As a result, she becomes quite widely known. We can say that the Italian Renaissance, with the invention of linear perspective, is actually a simplification of the optics of visual perception,

8:46 namely a reduction to direct seeing. While Jan van Eyck integrates that optics, that perception, in all its complexity into painting, including that metaphysical, that spiritual layering. The goal was, of course, to gain knowledge about the nature of God through observation, to gain insight into creation. For example, let's look at the famous mirror in the Arnolfini double portrait in the National Gallery in London. That mirror is a convex mirror

9:33 in which we see reflected the scene we see in the painting. But we see more. We also see the world outside the painting, the world of the viewer. We also see a window that we cannot see in the actual painting, but which is reflected. And we see people entering who are in the viewer's space. And everything is deformed according to the laws of reflection in convex mirrors, namely according to the curvature of that mirror. A much more complicated example is the Knights of Christ. They wear gleaming armour, made of metal of course,

10:21 in which we see the flagpole carried by the leading knight reflected, broken, in the breastplate of the armour. Again, according to the laws of reflection in convex materials. And on his shoulder plate we also see a reflection of reality, again the world of the viewer integrated into the painting . On the other hand he carries a concave shield, a tournament shield. And there we see a reflection of the windows of the original chapel where the Ghent Altarpiece was located, the Vijd Chapel. But since those windows were further

11:07 from the surface of that mirrored shield than the focal point, according to the law of reflection the image is inverted, flipped. Van Eyck therefore knew the basic principles of optics very well. He was also aware of refraction of light. And we see this, for example, in the scepter that the figure of God carries in the Ghent Altarpiece. A scepter of rock crystal, a very clear, transparent material through which light falls and penetrates almost completely, experiencing internal reflection and a second refraction on the reverse side of the scepter.

11:53 And there's a lot of light coming outside. In addition, a focal point is also formed on the hand of the figure of God. Refractions in glass and water are also seen in carafes. And those are associated with that spiritual interpretation of refraction of light. Namely: light is refracted by water without tainting it, just as the virgin also remained pure. So we can indeed say that Van Eyck was a genius. He possessed knowledge. He had an enormous power of observation.

12:40 He radically renewed the technology . And we can study this much better today using the very high resolution digital recording that we have. And in recent years we have been through the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece, which will take several more years.