The Altarpiece

A lot of our trips involve a necessary pilgrimage on my part. In Japan, the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima; in Belgium, Jan van Eyck’s altarpiece in Ghent at St. Bavo’s Cathedral.

Prior to coming to Belgium I considered Van der Weyden’s “The Lamentation” at the Prado in Madrid to be the altarpiece to end all altarpieces. Henry told me, wait, I have to get a load of the Van Eyck. 

Taking up five panels, it was finished in 1432 with a little help from Jan’s brother, Hubert. Our tickets to St. Bavo’s Cathedral got us in when it opened and included a virtual reality tour in the basement of the cathedral that took us through Van Eyck’s life, the creation of the painting, and it’s subsequent tumultuous history. We took the virtual reality trek first while a group of tourists clustered their way to the altarpiece. So we lucked out. Not only did we avoid jostling with a crowd to view the altarpiece, but the VR presentation was top notch.

The altarpiece is overpowering not with it’s neck-craning size, or the usual Biblical events (Adam and Eve are represented purposely set apart in side panels to emphasize their separation), but with a religiosity balanced by a realism which at the time was not only striking but a harbinger of what was to come. So the feeling is that the people in the painting aren’t symbolic, but contemporaries of Van Eyck.

Part of that is because of his attention to detail. He was experimenting with the luster oil paint could bring to the canvas, so minute reflections and refractions of light added depth not seen in the tempera plaster coloring of 15th century masters like Giotto. These are well known hallmarks in the history of painting, but what really struck me looking at the center panel, the focus of the entire altarpiece, was the surreal placement of the lamb standing on a stone altar bleeding into a chalice. 

It was like Van Eyck, exhausted after finishing the painstaking detail on the jewels in the papal-style crown, slumped in his chair and fell asleep channeling Magritte in a dream. “What’s missing,” Magritte whispers to him, “is in-your-face symbolism, something obvious but out-of-place, something, because of the absurdity of it, that you can’t miss.” 

Like other moments in relishing an art piece that has me marvel, time seems to fold so that an earlier masterwork seems inspired by modern genius.  Sort of like reverse engineering but more transcendent.