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

crown at his feet has been considered a wonder of naturalistic detail since the fifteenth century.
    The image originates from the Gospel of Saint John: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world.” This quotation is inscribed in gold on the red velvet antependium of the painted altar on which stands the Lamb: Ecce Agnus Dei Qui Tollit Peccata Mundi . One must approach the altarpiece in order to read this inscription. In doing so, the viewer is physically drawn in to examine the naturalistic wonders of the painting. Van Eyck tricks the viewer into seeing the whole picture, an astounding wash of color and form and figures, as well as the loving minutiae that leap out.
    In 1887 art historian William Martin Conway wrote: “Such a [poetic] symbol was the Lamb of God. Medieval sculptors and painters never represented the lamb as a mere animal. They always made it carry a banner, emblematic of the resurrection. . . . In the Ghent Altarpiece, on the contrary, the symbolic creature is painted with perfect realistic veracity. It does not look like a symbol, it looks like a sheep.” Erwin Panofsky later showed how van Eyck used striking realism to convey the symbols of Christianity: “A way had to be found to reconcile the new naturalism with a thousand years of Christian tradition; and this attempt resulted in what may be termed concealed or disguised symbolism, as opposed to open or obvious symbolism. . . . As van Eyck rejoiced in the discovery and reproduction of the visible world, the more intensely could he saturate all of its elements with meaning.”
    In van Eyck’s union of realism with Christian symbolism, art historians saw the union of two periods of art—the symbolic and often awkwardly
realized medieval paintings and the increasing naturalism, vibrancy, beauty, and detail of the Renaissance and periods thereafter. In 1860, German art historian and director of the Berlin Museum Gustav Waagen would describe The Ghent Altarpiece as “a perfect riddle” of the union of two artistic periods, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
    The three figures of the upper center picture are designed with all the dignity of statue-like repose belonging to the early style; they are painted too on a ground of gold and tapestry, as was constantly the practice in earlier times: but united with the traditional type we already find a successful representation of life and nature in all their truth. They stand on the frontier of two different styles and, from the excellences of both, form a wonderful and most impressive whole. [Van Eyck became the first to] express spiritual meaning through the medium of the forms of real life . . . rendering these forms with the utmost distinctness and truth of drawing, coloring, perspective, and light and shadow, and filling up the space with scenes from nature, or objects created by the hand of man, in which the smallest detail was carefully given.
    Perhaps the most dazzling example of this naturalism in the entire painting is the crown, placed on the floor at God’s feet, sparkling as if spotlit, crusted in pearls, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds. That the crown, a symbol of secular, earthly might (as opposed to eternal, heavenly sovereignty), is placed on the floor at God’s feet shows its subordination to the rule of Heaven.
    A close examination of the pearls on this crown reveals that most were painted in exactly three brush strokes. A dark sweep for the body of the pearl, a white lower edge to indicate the reflective curvature of the pearl’s underside, and one dollop of bright white for the light caught in the pearlescent surface. Vermeer would study van Eyck’s technique two hundred years later and go one better, painting the single pearl in his Girl with a Pearl Earring with exactly one brushstroke.

    Mary, enthroned in Heaven, sits to the right of God, while Saint John the Baptist sits on God’s left

    Saint John the Baptist, enthroned
    In its depiction of the