Stealing the Mystic Lamb (11 page)

The theory that Jan van Eyck invented oil painting was officially disproved in 1774, when the great philosopher and art historian Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, author of
Laocoön
, published his discovery of a twelfth-century monastic manuscript that described how one could use oil to bind pigments, in his translation of
De diversis artibus
(“On the Various Arts”), a book written by the Benedictine monk, artist, metallurgist, and armorer Theophilus Presbyter (the pseudonym for Roger of Helmarshausen) sometime between 1110 and 1125. Lessing’s translation was published in 1774 as
Vom Alter der Ölmalerey aus dem Theophilus Presbyter
and was the first printed edition of Theophilus’s treatise. Even after the book was published, the legend of Jan’s invention persisted, as resonant myth will so often do when its primacy and beauty outshine the discovery of fact.

While oil paint was surely invented long before van Eyck, Jan was the man who transformed the mere binding of pigments with oil into Oil Painting, imbuing power, beauty, and delicacy into what would become the preferred painting medium from that point forth to this day. That van Eyck should not have invented oils did nothing to dull Lessing’s admiration for the Flemish master. The great philosopher wrote: “If Jan van Eyck did not invent oil painting, did he not at least render it so very great a service, that this service may be prized as highly as its first invention and ultimately even be confused with it?”

But Lessing’s publication did little to defuse the popular myths around van Eyck. Through the fog stirred up by legend, it is often difficult to distinguish historical fact from elegant fiction. In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, a popular Romantic myth described van Eyck as a folkloric painter-cum-magician, an artistic genius who locked himself by night in a mad scientist’s alchemical laboratory, trying to perfect his secret recipe for oil paint.

An illustrated serial printed in the French journal
L’Artiste
in 1839 told the story of two Italian painters famous in their own right, Domenico Veneziano and Andrea del Castagno, who were sent to spy on van Eyck and steal his recipe for oil paint to return artistic glory to Italy. Jan fled the nosy Italians by night along with his brother Hubert and his sister Margaret, returning to his family home in Maaseyck with the secret recipe. But before he left, he set an incendiary trap in his studio. The Italian painters tried to break in, and the studio went up in flames. Unharmed, the Italians hunted down van Eyck, catching up with him in Bruges. Andrea del Castagno, with his suave Mediterranean charms, seduced Margaret into providing him with the recipe for oil paints, which is how the medium first came to Italy.

A lovely story, but none of it true.

From his own day onwards, Jan was mythologized by many who came into contact with his work. A substantial biography of him predates Vasari by a century. In 1455 a humanist scholar from Genoa, Bartolomeo Facio, wrote
De viris illustribus
, “On Illustrious Men,” in which he named Jan van Eyck “the leading painter of his day.” This was strong praise indeed coming from a nationalistic Italian, particularly when artists such as Rogier van der Weyden, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Masaccio, Robert Campin, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio were van Eyck’s contemporaries. We also learn from Facio that Jan was unusually well-read, with a particular passion for the Latin authors Pliny the Elder and Ovid. In an era with a sliver of a literacy rate, it was highly unusual that a painter who was not also a monk would be versed in Latin.

How would it have felt to stand inside a real painter’s studio in mid-fifteenth-century Flanders? One might imagine the thick scent of oils in a poorly ventilated room. The sun slants in from windows along the southern wall. Dusty costumes and props are piled in a corner. On an oak table, pigments are churned to paste by pestles in marble mortars. Smooth oak panels, finely joined and destined to be the support of future paintings, were made at great cost by a specialist carpenter and now stand stacked carefully in a corner, separated by rags to prevent scratches. Clay pots line a shelf, covered in archaic labels and filled with powders and raw
materials to grind for paint: charcoal for black, orpiment for yellow, cinnabar for red, lapis lazuli for blue. The precious blue is reserved primarily for the garments of the Virgin Mary. Lapis lazuli was the single most expensive item by weight throughout the Middle Ages. One could judge the expense of a painting of this period not by the gilding but by the amount of lapis lazuli blue it contained. The cobalt blue ore was mined in what is now Afghanistan. It had to make its way by caravan along the bandit-infested Silk Road, through Constantinople to Venice, where it would be loaded onto a merchant ship and sail through the Mediterranean, past the Strait of Gibraltar, and up the coast of France to reach Flanders.

Adolescent apprentices are hard at work, preparing one of the oak panels with a layer of white gesso, a mixture of plaster and animal glue onto which the painter will add color. In 1432 van Eyck employed twelve such assistants, some of whom would go on to become famous painters in their own right (although unproven, it is thought that a young Rogier van der Weyden and Petrus Christus may have assisted van Eyck for a time). A human skull sits beside an easel, and a convex mirror hangs on the wall—staple props of an artist’s studio. Portraitists often looked at their subjects through a mirror, rather than face them directly as they painted. The edges of the mirror provided a frame for the subject’s image within it. The mirror served to transfer the three-dimensional reality of the subject onto a two-dimensional surface, mimicking the efforts of the artist to paint the sitter onto a flat canvas or panel, while giving the painted image the illusion of depth. Convex mirrors feature prominently in van Eyck’s work, most famously in
The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait
.

And in 1432, propped against the studio walls, carefully brushed with its final layers of varnish by leather-smocked assistants, under the watchful eye of Jan van Eyck, lay the panels of
The Ghent Altarpiece
.

Among the many mysteries surrounding
The Ghent Altarpiece
is an enduring enigma about its creation. Indeed, one of art history’s greatest
unanswered questions is whether Jan van Eyck painted
The Ghent Altarpiece
alone. Jan’s story is inseparable from the history of the most famous painter who may have never existed.

In 1823 a hidden inscription was discovered on two of the twelve painted panels that comprise
The Ghent Altarpiece
. The inscription, a quatrain painted onto a strip of silver mounted on the back of the panels that depict the patrons who paid for the altarpiece, reads as follows:

This inscription had been painted over at some unknown time and was only discovered when, after an unbelievable series of thefts and smugglings, the wing panels of the altarpiece ended up on display at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, where the frames were cleaned.

The word “
frater
” and the date “1432” were no longer legible even in 1823, and so may only be inferred. The precise date of the completion, or more likely the official presentation of the altarpiece, was presented in an ingenious fashion—in secret code. The letters in bold in the text above were painted in a color distinct from the rest of the text, in the inscription itself. If we read these colored letters as Roman numerals (reading U as V), then the sum of these numerals gives us the year of completion: 1432. The date of the inscription, the sixth of May, is of particular resonance, as this was a holy date for the Bishopric of Tournai, which presided over
the city of Ghent until it became a bishopric itself in 1559. The holy day was called Saint John at the Latin Gate, in honor of Saint John the Evangelist, who was portrayed in one of the panels of
The Ghent Altarpiece
. Recall that 6 May 1432 was also the day of the baptism of Prince Joos of Burgundy, the son of Duke Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal, in the Vijd Chapel of the Church of Saint John. Therefore we might consider that Duke Philip’s son and van Eyck’s greatest creation share the same day of presentation to God and to the world.

The 1823 discovery of the inscription caused a huge stir within the art world.
The Ghent Altarpiece
had heretofore been regarded as the first masterpiece by the budding genius Jan van Eyck. All of a sudden there was a new name associated with it: that of Jan’s brother, Hubert.

It was as though an inscription had been uncovered on Leonardo’s
Last Supper
stating that the painting was begun by Larry da Vinci, or that Michelangelo’s
Sistine Chapel
was also painted by Frank Buonarotti. Art historians were up in arms. Either a new genius had been uncovered, or this was a ridiculous forgery. Perhaps it was both?

At that point, and indeed to this day, there has not been a single painting convincingly attributed to Hubert van Eyck. Nevertheless, the Hubert van Eyck mystery has divided scholars for the better part of two centuries. Hundreds of pages of criticism have been published devoted to Hubert’s artistic style.

So who was he?

Clues have risen from murky archives only in recent years. A Ghent city register for 1412 lists a “Meester Hubrech van Hyke,” and “Hubrecht van Eyke” is noted in the register of 1422. A document dated 9 March 1426 relates that an altarpiece for a chapel in the church of Saint Saviour, also in Ghent, was still in the workshop of “Master Hubrechte the painter.” A document from the Ghent accounts of the year 1424 tells of payment made to a “Master Luberecht” for two designs for an altarpiece commissioned by the city aldermen. In the city accounts for the year 1425, another document tells of a gratuity given by the aldermen out of the municipal funds to the pupils of a “Master Ubrecht.” Only one other reference
has been found: a record of inheritance tax paid to the city of Ghent by the heirs of a one “Lubrecht van Heyke” in 1426.

Variant spellings of names were entirely common in this period, before vernacular spelling of even nouns and verbs had been codified. So Masters Hubrechte, Luberecht, Ubrecht, and Lubrecht probably refer to the same person. Therefore though no works can be definitively attributed to Hubert van Eyck, authentic documents confirm that there was a painter of that name living and working in Ghent at the time of the creation of
The Ghent Altarpiece
.

What happened to his paintings?

Artistic attribution is often a tar pit for art historians. Before the nineteenth century, artists did not regularly sign their works, making it difficult to determine who painted what. Attributions are best made through linking primary source documents (contracts, letters, wills, legal documents, contemporary biographies) that mention the subject and sometimes size of works by certain painters and the destination or commissioner of the work. For most artists of the premodern period, we know
of
more works than we have access to. Art historians use the terms
lost
and
extant
to designate which artworks historians know of, through their mention in primary source documents, as opposed to which artworks are in an identified location. The term
lost
implies that a work might be found again. Once or twice a year there will be a major discovery of a masterpiece that was once lost. A prominent example was the 1990 rediscovery of Caravaggio’s
Taking of Christ
, now at the National Gallery of Ireland, which had been misattributed as a copy after Caravaggio and had hung, dirty and ignored, in a shadowy corner of an Irish seminary.

Over time, even works that are in prominent collections may have their authorship altered, as new evidence arises suggesting that a reattribution is in order. When the Albert Barnes Collection was moved from a Philadelphia suburb to its new center-city location, its inventory was reevaluated. Many of its Old Master paintings were found to have been misattributed, assigned to more famous painters than modern scholarship
suggests. Famous paintings are just as susceptible to reattribution. The renowned
Polish Rider
in the Frick Collection has been alternately considered one of Rembrandt’s greatest works and a work Rembrandt never touched. Attributions are made based on the evidence of historical documents and, less reliably, on a comparison of artistic style between known works by one artist and the unattributed work in question. If documentary evidence is insufficient, then connoisseurship may be called on to provide answers. Connoisseurship is an intrinsic, almost preternatural sense for authenticity and stylistic knowledge. As you might recognize your spouse from across the room, some art historians are considered to have an exquisite expertise in recognizing the work of certain artists. This talent, which was the predominant manner of attribution before the Second World War, has since become something of a parlor trick. Now, with technological advances and computers, scientists can analyze brush stroke and chemical composition (such as the percentage of various pigments mixed by artists to create their paints) to determine the presence of a particular painter’s hand.