A THOUSAND WORDS by Mary Elizabeth Podles
Jan van Eyck's The Madonna in a Church
We are so accustomed to oil paintings that we seldom give the medium a second thought: it is essentially our default position for Old Master and fine art painting. But it was not always so. The sixteenth-century chronicler and art historian Giorgio Vasari credits Jan van Eyck with the invention of oil painting in the fifteenth century; while this is not strictly true, Van Eyck's mastery of the oil technique probably made Italian painters aware of its range of possibilities for the first time. It is worth a look.
In early Italian and Byzantine painting, the colored pigments were bound to their support with an admixture of egg yolk, which any washer of dishes can tell you is a tenacious substance, but one which by nature is rather opaque. When linseed or some other oil was substituted for the egg, pigments became transparent and could, once dry, be overlaid with other transparent colors for a nuanced richness and luminosity not before possible.
Look, for instance, at The Madonna in a Church, painted around 1425 on a small wood panel (now housed in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin). Notice the Madonna's head: successive layers of transparent flesh tones have been laid over a white underpainting. Light passes through the transparent paint and bounces off the underpaint, so that the Madonna's face is both subtly modeled in three dimensions and physically lit from within, like light passing through stained glass. Similarly, a combination of layered transparencies and brilliant touches of opaque yellow tin pigment make her crown both sparkle and glow.
The Supernatural in the Guise of the Natural
Oil paint gave artists unprecedented scope for the rendering of natural objects in a naturalistic way. But in Christian art, we know that the natural is often imbued with the supernatural. For all its innovation, Van Eyck's Madonna is also a very traditional one and owes much to her Byzantine forbears. For one thing, the anomaly of her size within the architectural frame reflects a Byzantine hierarchy of scale: more important equals bigger. Iconographically, too, she follows Byzantine types: the Mother of God as Queen of Heaven, and the Madonna of Tenderness who holds her baby gently by the foot as he reaches for her neckline.
The stylized architecture of the Byzantine icon is gone, though, replaced by a realistic (though not specific) Gothic church rendered in careful detail. Gone, too, is the gold background that stands for the divine and uncreated light; here, daylight falls through the upper windows and lights the floor at the Virgin's left.
But this is no ordinary daylight. If the Virgin's back is to the apse of the church—that is, to the east—then the light must be falling from due north, an impossibility, at least in northern Europe. This is the light of the divine, the supernatural rendered in the guise of the natural. Notice, too, how this supernatural light eclipses the candlelight in the niche just behind the Virgin's shoulder. Just as the candlelight is a dim reflection of the divine light, so, too, the image of the Virgin that the candles illuminate is but a dim intimation of the reality of the Mother of God.
Light has a further dimension here, too. In another painting, Jan van Eyck includes an excerpt from a Christmas hymn that includes the words,
As the sunbeam through the glass
Passeth but not breaketh,
So the Virgin as she was,
Virgin still remaineth.
Light passing through glass thus symbolizes Mary's perpetual virginity.
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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