Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/814

 EYOK

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EYCK

In Italy the work of Jacopo della Querela, of Ghi- berti, the frescoes of Masolino and of Masaccio (142S), are contemporary with the labours of the Van Eycks, and bear traces of similar tendencies. But the birth- place of the movement was not on Italian soil. It is in France we find the earliest evidences of it, about the beginning of the fourteenth century. A few statues, like the Visitation group in the great doorway at Reims (1310), the tombs of St. Denis, the portraits of King Charles V and his wife Eleanor (in the Louvre), mark the last stages in the victorious progress. The same school which a century earlier had developed the Gothic ideal, was about to produce by a natural evolu- tion the new principles and the new methods. An important factor in this evolution was the creation of the Duchies of Berry and of Burgundy, and the alli- ance of Flanders and Burgundy by marriage (1384). At the Court of the Valois, the most brilliant in the world, famous for its voluptuousness, its elegance, and its worship of all the arts of lite, and under the patron- age of its princes, no less famous for their dissolute lives than for their artistic taste and love of luxury, there rapidly grew up a school of painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, and miniaturists, cosmopolitans by birth, but Parisian by education, who were the nucleus of the Renaissance.

The larger part of the paintings, frescoes, and stained glass of this epoch have perished; but the miniatures supply all the proof we need. Especially in the manu- scripts made at the time for the Due de Berry do we find the links of this glorious history. Many of the books collected by this incomparable Ma!cenas have come down to us; some of them illustrated by Andr6 Beauneveu, Jacquemart of Hesdin, or Jacques Cohn of Antwerp. But the most important of all is the seignorial MS. — one of the treasures of Chantilly — known as the " Book of Hours of the Due de Berry". This wonderful book was adorned from 1413 to 1416 by three artists; "the three illuminator-brothers" spoken of by Guillebert of Metz, the brothers de Lim- bourg or simply the Limbourgs. Nearly all the poetic fancy of the Van Eycks is already outlined in this "Book of Hours", especially on their landscape side; and whereas the Limbourgs kept to the country around Liege, the Van Eycks followed the same route, and doubtless experienced the same influences. But there is something more. Another MS., "The Hours of Turin", which was unfortunately destroyed in the fire at the library of that town, 20 January, 1904, be- longed successively to the Due de Berry (d. 1416) and to Duke William IV of Bavaria-Hainault. And it has been proved that Hubert van Eyck spent some time in the latter's service. Paul Durrieu has given very weighty reasons for attributing the MS. to him, and for believing that he began it for the Due de Berry. Thus the art of the Van Eycks would be but the cul- minating point of the great Renaissance movement in- augurated at the Court of the Valois in France, and which reached its apogee in 1400. Perhaps this was what the Italian Bishop Facius meant to imply when in 1456 he spoke of Jan van Eyck as Johannes Gal- licus.

This is a partial solution of the enigma of the altar- piece. Hubert and Jan van Eyck are butcontinuators, masters indeed, of an art that began before them and without them. But what was it they added that caused the new style in art to date only from their work? If we are to credit Vasari, Van Mander, and all the historical writers, their great discovery was the art of painting with oUs. Pamting with oil had been dis- covered long before; the monk Theophilus gives a recipe for it in the eleventh century. And as we have seen, the new sstheticism had been already formu- lated in the miniatures of the Limbourgs and of the Van Eycks themselves. Whatever importance in art its material and mechanical methods may have, it would be too humiliating to make it depend entirely on the

particular fluid, water, gum, or albumen used in mix- ing the colours. Moreover, on canvases 500 years old from which all moisture has long since dried up he would be a daring critic who would venture to assert the proportion of oil or distemper used by the artist. To buUd one's criticism on such a doubtful principle is like seeking the scent of the "Roses of Sadi". The real merit of the Van Eycks is elsewhere. By a chain of circumstances (The Battle of Agincourt, the madness of Charles VI, and the minority of Charles VII), France was brought to the edge of ruin, and suddenly lost control of the movement that it had begun.

Comfort, art, luxury began to cluster around the new fortunes of the Duchy of Burgundy, as the home of wealth in the North. Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, Antwerp became the centres of the new school. In these new towns of little culture and traditional re- finement, and lacking in reserve (Taine, " Philosophie de I'Art aux Pays-Bas" — description of the festivals known as the Vaeu du faisan), Naturalism, freed from the restraints French taste would have imposed on it, was enabled to grow at its ease and spread without restriction. The Germanic element which had already shown itself in such men as Beauneveu, Malouel, the Limbourgs, burst out, and carried everything before it in the work of the Van Eycks. For the first time the genius of the North shook off all those cosmopoli- tan influences which had hitherto refined it, and gave itself free scope.

It paused not to think of what had gone before, and it was not concerned with such things as taste, nobility, or beauty. Such preoccupations as these, as the antique began to have an influence, became more and more the distinguishing characteristics and limitation of Italian naturalism. It is enough to compare the ugly yet touching figures of Adam and Eve by Jan van Eyck, with those by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel to be convinced of this. On the one side there is real- ism, but the painter has scruples, reserves, a sense of modesty; on the other there is absolute crudity, what we might call naturalism pure and simple. What does this mean, but that painting, which had hitherto been a universal, international art, is beginning to localize itself; and that what had hitherto been a European, or better still. Western, colour-language is about to split up into many dialects and national modes of speech? It is the real glory of the Van Eycks, that they emancipated the genius of the races of the North and gave it its first full expression. During a whole century (1430-1530) the school they founded at Bruges was always producing new works and renew- ing its own strength. During a century, painters from Flanders, from Holland, and Germany — Petrus Cristus, Gerard de St-Jean, Ouwater, Hugo van der Goes, Roger van der Weyden, Memlinck, Gerard David, Martin Schongauer, Durer, Lucas of Leyden — never ceased to draw their inspiration more or less directly from their work. In 1445 the Catalonian Luis Dalmau made a copy of the altar-piece of Ghent. In France, Jean Fouquet, Nicolas Froment, on the banks of the Loire and of the Rhone, were disciples of Jan van Eyck. Even Italy did not escape their sovereign influence. As early as the middle of the fifteenth century paintings by Jan van Eyck were being treasured at Naples and at Urbino. _

Antonello of Messina went to study art in Flanders. Ghirlandajo imitated the famous Portinari altar- piece by H. van der Goes, and whenever an Italian painter relaxed a moment his straining after art to snatch a breath of gayety or a lesson in realism, it was always to the Flemish school he turned ; always, until the triumph of the antique was assured, and Raphael and Michelangelo, by the constraining revelation of its beauty, had restored for a time the reign of the ideal. Their triumph was, however, short-lived; the pagan and aristocratic ideal of art and life, with all its loftiness and rigidity, began to give way from the