Stealing the Mystic Lamb by Noah Charney Read Free Book Online Page A

the frescoes of the time, which lacked the vibrancy of color
and the minute detail that oil painting boasts. The fact that the altarpiece could not be opened completely meant that the wings would thrust out towards the viewers at an angle, providing an extra dimensionality of which wall painting was wholly incapable. In this way, van Eyck emphasizes the fact that this is a work on panel, whose monumentality can only be compared with frescoes, but whose level of detail recalls tiny manuscript illuminations.
    Finally, the upper register of the inside of the altarpiece features three monumental figures—the first monumental figures (much larger than those around them) to appear in Northern European panel painting.
    In the center, God the Father is seated, face forward with a hand up-raised in blessing. This panel overflows in both text and symbol. The pelican and the vine on the brocade over God’s shoulder refer to the blood Christ spilt for humankind. Pelicans were erroneously thought to pierce their flesh in order to feed the young from their own blood in times of famine, while vines produce grapes that yield the sacral communion wine, representative of Christ’s blood. The inscription in the triple molding behind God’s papal tiara-clad head reads:
    THIS IS GOD, THE ALMIGHTY BY REASON OF HIS DIVINE
MAJESTY; THE HIGHEST, THE BEST, BY REASON OF HIS
SWEET GOODNESS; THE MOST LIBERAL REMUNERATOR
BY REASON OF HIS BOUNDLESS GENEROSITY.
    The inscription continues along the edge of the raised step on which God the Father is seated:
    ETERNAL LIFE SHINES FORTH FROM HIS HEAD. ETERNAL
YOUTH SITS ON HIS BROW. UNTROUBLED JOY AT HIS
RIGHT HAND. FEARLESS SECURITY AT HIS LEFT HAND.
    A description of Christ enthroned as the king of Heaven comes in Revelation, a direct quotation of which is embroidered into God’s garment,
Rex Regnum et Dominus Dominantium : “King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”
    This quotation indicates an origin source for the imagery of this central figure in majesty as Revelation 19:12-16:
    His eyes [were] as a flame of fire, and on his head [were] many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he [was] clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies [which were] in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goes a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on [his] vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.
    Though, for the sake of modesty, we are not privy to God’s thigh, “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” may be found embroidered onto the “vesture dipped in blood,” in this case a gilt-edged scarlet garment.
    Theologically, the Godhead consists of three parts: the Father (God), the Son (Christ), and the Holy Spirit (usually rendered as a white dove). The Holy Spirit as a dove is in the panel directly below the enthroned God the Father, creating an imaginary vertical line linking the two. The dove, a symbol of divine light, radiates sunlight over the New Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation, for New Jerusalem “had no need of the sun, nor of the moon, to shine above it; for the glory of God did illuminate it” (Revelation 21:23).
    The Lamb of God on the altar in The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb is a symbol of Christ, who, like the lambs sacrificed by pagans to appease the gods, sacrificed himself to save humankind and reverse the Original Sin of the Fall of Adam. The Lamb, from whose head light shines and who bleeds into a golden chalice, is an icon that represents Christ and has been used as such since the earliest Christian artworks were scrawled
or mosaicked in underground catacomb churches, hidden from the persecutions of the Romans on the earth above them.

    God the Father, enthroned. The