EARLY FLEMISH ART--THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--MABUSE, MATSYS, 1460-1530
OR 31.
In the Low Countries painting had very much the same history that it had
in Italy, but the dates are later, and there may be a longer interval
given to each stage of development. Religious painting, profuse in
symbolism, with masses of details elaborately worked in, meets us in the
first place. This style of painting reached its culmination, in which it
included (as it did not include in its representation in the Italian
pictures) many and varied excellencies, among them the establishment of
painting in oil in the pictures of the Flemish family of painters--the
Van Eycks.
Before going into the little that is known of the family history of the
Van Eycks, I should like to call attention to the numerous painter
families in the middle ages. What a union, and repose, and happy
sympathy of art-life it indicates, which we appear to restlessness and
separate interests of modern life. The Van Eycks consisted of no less
than four members of a family, three brothers, Hubert, John, and
Lambert, and one sister, Margaret, devoted, like her brothers, to her
art. There is a suggestion that they belonged to a small village of
Limburg called Eyck, and repaired to Bruges in order to pursue their
art. Hubert was thirty years older than John, and it is said that he was
a serious-minded man as well as an ardent painter, and belonged to the
religious fraternity of our Lady of Ghent. He died in 1426. John, though
of so much consideration in his profession as to be believed to be 'the
Flemish Painter' sent by Duke Philip the Good of Flanders and Burgundy
with a mission to Portugal to solicit the hand of a princess in
marriage, is reported to have died very poor in 1449, and has the
suspicion attached to him of having been a lover of pleasure and a
spendthrift. Of Lambert, the third brother, almost nothing is known;
indeed, the fact of his existence has only lately come to light.
Margaret lived and died unmarried, and belonged, like her brother
Hubert, to the religious society of our Lady of Ghent. She died about
1432.
The invention of painting in oil, for which the Van Eycks are commonly
known, was not literally that of mixing colours with oil, which was
occasionally done before their day. It was the combining oil with resin,
so as to produce at once a good varnish, and avoid the necessity of
drying pictures in the sun, a bright thought, which may stand in the
same rank with the construction, by James Watt, of that valve which
rendered practicable the application of steam to machinery. The thought,
occasioned by the cracking of a picture in tempera exposed to the sun,
is due to Hubert Van Eyck.
The great picture of the Van Eycks, which was worked at for a number of
years by both Hubert and John, and, as some reckon, touched by the whole
family, is the 'Adoration of the Lamb,' at St Bavon's, Ghent. I should
like to give a faint idea of this extraordinary picture, which was
painted for a burgomaster of Ghent and his wife in order to adorn their
mortuary chapel in the cathedral. It was an altar piece on separate
panels, now broken up and dispersed, only a portion of it being retained
in Ghent.
It may strike some as strange that a picture should be on panels, but
those of the old pictures which were not on plastered walls were
commonly on panels, many of them on the lids and sides of chests and
presses which were used to hold sacred vessels and priestly raiment.
When the wings of the Van Eycks' altar-piece of the 'Adoration of the
Lamb' were opened on festivals, the subjects of the upper central
picture were seen, consisting of the Triune God, a majestic figure, and
at his side in stately calm the Virgin and the Baptist. On the inside of
the wings were angels, at the two extremities Adam and Eve. The lower
central picture shows the Lamb of the Revelation, whose blood flows into
a cup; over it is the dove of the Holy Spirit. Angels, who hold the
instruments of the Passion, worship the Lamb. Four groups of many
persons advance from the sides, these are the holy martyrs, men and
women, priests and laymen. In the foreground is the fountain of life; in
the distance are the towers of the heavenly Jerusalem. On the wings
other groups are coming up to adore the Lamb; on the left those who have
laboured for the Kingdom of the Lord by worldly deeds--the soldiers of
Christ led by St George, St Sebastian, and St Michael, the patron saints
of the old Flemish guilds, followed by emperors and kings--a goodly
company. Beyond the soldiers and princes, on the left, are the righteous
judges, also on horseback. In front of them, on a splendidly caparisoned
gray, rides a mild, benevolent old man in blue velvet trimmed with fur.
This is the likeness of Hubert Van Eyck, painted after his death by his
brother John, and John himself is in the group, clothed in black, with a
shrewd, sharp countenance. On the self-renunciation have served the Lamb
in the spirit, hermits and pilgrims, among them St Christopher, St
Anthony, St Paul the hermit, Mary Magdalene, and St Mary of Egypt. A
compartment underneath, which represented hell, finished the whole--yet
only the whole on one side, for the wings when closed presented another
series of finely thought-out and finished pictures--the Annunciation;
figures of Micah and Zechariah; statues of the two St Johns, with the
likenesses of the donors who gave to the world so great a work of art,
kneeling humbly side by side, the burgomaster somewhat mean-looking in
such company in spite of the proof of his liberality, but his wife noble
enough in feature and expression to have been the originator of this
glory of early Flemish painting. The upper part of the picture is
painted on a gold ground, round the central figure of the Lamb is vivid
green grass with masses of trees and flowers--indeed there is much
lovely landscape no longer indicated by a rock or a bush, but betokening
close observation of nature, whether in a fruitful valley, or a rocky
defile, or mountain ridges with fleecy clouds overhead. The expression
of the immense number of figures is as varied and characteristic as
their grouping.[2]
Hubert Van Eyck died while this work was in progress, and it was
finished by his brother John six years after Hubert's death. When one
thinks of the intense application and devotion which such a work costs,
and recalls the bronze gates of St John that occupied Lorenzo Ghiberti
49 years, and when we read, as we shall read a few chapters farther on,
of large paintings which were begun and ended in so many days--even so
many hours, one can better understand what is the essential difference
between the works of the early and the later painters, a difference
which no skill, no power even can bridge over. John Van Eyck, who had
lived late enough to have departed from the painting of sacred pictures
alone, so that he left portraits and an otter hunt among his works, is
three times represented in our National Gallery, in three greatly
esteemed portraits, one a double portrait, believed to be the likenesses
of the painter and his wife, standing hand in hand with a terrier dog
at their feet.
Gossaert, called de Mabuse from his native town of Mabeuze, sometimes
signing his name Joannes Malbodius, followed in the steps of the Van
Eycks, particularly in his great picture of the 'Adoration of the
Kings,' which is at Castle Howard, the seat of the Earl of Carlisle.
Mabuse was in England and painted the children of Henry VII, in a
picture, which is at Hampton Court. There is a picture in the palace of
Holyrood, Edinburgh, which has been attributed to Mabuse. It represents
on the sides of a triptych or diptych (somewhat like a folding screen)
James III. and his queen with attendants. The fur on the queen's dress
displays already that marvellous technical skill for which Flemish
painting is so celebrated.
Hans Memling belonged to Bruges. There is a tradition of him, which is
to a certain extent disproven, that he was a poor soldier relieved by
the hospital of St John, Bruges, and that in gratitude he executed for
the hospital the well-known reliquary of St Ursula. However it might
have originated, this is the most noted work of a painter, who was
distinguished frequently by his minute missal-like painting (he was also
an illuminator of missals), in which he would introduce fifteen hundred
small figures in a picture two feet eight inches, by six feet five
inches in size, and work out every detail with the utmost niceness and
care. The reliquary, or 'chasse,' is a wooden coffer or shrine about
four feet in length, its style and form those of a rich Gothic church,
its purpose to hold an arm of the saint. The whole exterior is covered
with miniatures by Memling, nearly the whole of them giving incidents in
the legendary history of St Ursula, a 'virgin princess of Brittany,' or
of England, who, setting out with eleven thousand companions, her lover,
and an escort of knights on a pilgrimage to Rome, was, with her whole
company, met and murdered, by a horde of heathen Huns, when they had
reached Cologne, on their return. My readers may be aware that the
supposed bones of the virgins and St Ursula form the ghastly adornment
of the church founded in her honour at Cologne. It is absolutely filled
with bones, built into the walls, stowed under the pavement, ranged in
glass cases about the choir. Hans Memling's is a pleasanter
commemoration of St Ursula.
Quintin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, was born at Louvain about
1460. Though he worked first as a smith he is said by Kugler to have
belonged to a family of painters, which somewhat takes from the romance,
though it adds to the probability of his story. Another painter in
Antwerp having offered the hand and dowry of his daughter--beloved by
Quintin Matsys--as a prize to the painter who should paint the best
picture in a competition for her hand, the doughty smith took up the
art, entered the lists, and carried off the maiden and her portion from
all his more experienced rivals. The vitality of the legend is indicated
by the inscription on a tablet to the memory of Quintin Matsys in the
Cathedral, Antwerp. The Latin inscription reads thus in English:
'Twas love connubial taught the smith to paint,'
Quintin Matsys lived and died a respected burgher of Antwerp, a member
of the great Antwerp painters' guild of St Luke. He was twice married,
and had thirteen children.
Whatever might have been his source of inspiration, Quintin Matsys was
an apt scholar. His 'Descent from the Cross,' now in the Museum,
Antwerp, was _the_ 'Descent from the Cross,' and _the_ picture in the
Cathedral, until superseded by Rubens' masterpiece on the same subject.
Still Quintin Matsys version remains, and is in some respects an
unsurpassed picture. There is a traditional grouping of this Divine
tragedy, and Quintin Matsys has followed the tradition. The body of the
Lord is supported by two venerable old men--Joseph of Arimathea and
Nicodemus--while the holy women anoint the wounds of the Saviour; the
Virgin swooning with grief is supported by St John. The figures are full
of individuality, and their action is instinct with pathos. For this
picture Quintin Matsys--popular painter as he was--got only three
hundred florins, equivalent to twenty-five pounds (although, of course,
the value of money was much greater in those days). The Joiners'
Company, for whom he painted the 'Descent from the Cross,' sold the
picture to the City of Antwerp for five times the original amount, and
it is said Queen Elizabeth offered the City nearly twenty times the
first sum for it, in vain.
Quintin Matsys painted frequently half-length figures of the Virgin and
Child, an example of which is in the National Gallery. He excelled in
the 'figure painting' of familiar subjects, then just beginning to be
established, affording a token of the direction which the future
eminence of the Flemish painters would take. One of his famous pictures
of this kind is 'The Misers,' in the Queen's collection at Windsor. Two
figures in the Flemish costume of the time, are seated at a table;
before them are a heap of money and a book, in which one is writing with
his right hand, while he tells down the money with his left. The faces
express craft and cupidity. The details of the ink-horn on the table,
and the bird on its perch behind, have the Flemish graphic exactness.