Minds and Schools under the Dukes
Thomas à Kempis looked on the world with reluctance and distrusted intellectual activity. Even so, the lands under Burgundian rule showed notable intellectual life. The dukes, and above all Philip the Good, collected books themselves and encouraged literature and art. Schools multiplied, and the University of Louvain, founded in 1426, soon became one of Europe's respected centers of learning.
Georges Chastellain wrote the Chronicle of the Dukes of Burgundy. It is long on rhetoric and short on philosophy, but its French is clear and handsome, a style that Froissart and Commynes also helped create. Private groups formed "chambers of rhetoric" to compete in oratory and poetry and to stage plays. Two languages were current in the ducal lands: French, the "Romance of the Walloons," in the south, and Flemish dialects of German and Dutch in the north. The two vied with each other in producing speakers and writers.
Building: Churches and Town Halls
The duchy showed itself best in the arts. The vast church of Antwerp, with its many aisles, was begun in 1352 and finished in 1518. At Louvain the graceful church of St. Peter was laid down; it was destroyed in the Second World War. Townspeople were rich enough to raise public buildings and halls as grand as the churches they built for God.
The prince-bishops of Liège built a palace for themselves and their administration that had no rival in the Low Countries for beauty and grandeur. The Ghent cloth hall dates from 1325, the Brussels town hall was built between 1410 and 1455, and the Louvain town hall between 1448 and 1463. At Bruges the Hôtel de Ville, built over the years 1377 to 1421, was joined in this period by the famous belfry tower (1393–1396), a landmark known worldwide and a sign of land for those at sea. These great Gothic buildings expressed the pride of the cities and their merchants, while the dukes and the Burgundian aristocracy filled their palaces and chapels with sculpture, paintings and illuminated manuscripts.
Flemish artists, who had fled the war with France, returned to their cities. Philip the Bold gathered seven real masters to decorate his summer retreat, the Carthusian monastery of Champmol near Dijon.
Claus Sluter and the Well of Moses
In 1386 Philip commissioned Jean de Marville to build him a magnificent tomb at Champmol. When Marville died (1389), the Dutch sculptor Claus Sluter carried on, and when Sluter died (1406), his pupil Claus de Werve continued, until the tomb was completed in 1411, some seven years after the duke's death. The Dijon revolutionary assembly ordered the tomb destroyed in 1793, and its fittings were scattered or lost. In 1827 the pieces that survived were gathered and placed in the Dijon museum.
The duke and his wife, Margaret of Flanders, lie beneath a great slab of white marble. Below it a procession of forty mourners, the only survivors of ninety figures, grieves in quiet, beautiful sorrow. For the chapel portal Sluter and his pupils carved five splendid statues (1391–1394): the Virgin receives the reverent devotion of Philip and Margaret, who are presented by John the Baptist and St. Catherine of Alexandria.
In the cloister Sluter raised his masterpiece, the Well of Moses, a stone base crowned with statues of Moses, David, Jeremiah, Zechariah, Isaiah and Daniel. Originally the Crucifixion scene stood above it. Of that group only the head of Christ survives, crowned with thorns, grave and sorrowful. Since the height of Romanesque art, Europe had seen no statuary of such manly force and daring.
The Painters and the Oil Technique
The painters formed a splendid line too. Miniaturists still had patrons. William, Count of Hainaut, paid a large sum for a very fine book of hours (about 1414). Its anonymous genius (perhaps Hubert van Eyck) painted a harbor with ships at anchor or under sail, passengers disembarking, sailors and porters at work, waves breaking on a curved shore and white clouds drifting across the sky. It served as a model for thousands of later Low Countries landscape painters. This work, which shows the minute care of its creator, is painted on a page the size of a postcard. In 1392 Melchior Broederlam of Ypres decorated Champmol with a handsome carved and painted altarpiece, the oldest painting on panel outside Italy.
But Broederlam and the artists who colored the walls and statues at Champmol used the traditional tempera, a pigment mixed with a gelatinous medium. With it, shading and tint were hard to render, translucency was impossible, and damp ruined the work. In the first quarter of the fifteenth century, after a hundred years of trial and error, Flemish painters perfected a new technique with oil colors, and it revolutionized the art of painting.
The Adoration of the Lamb
When Hubert van Eyck and his younger brother Jan painted the Adoration of the Lamb for the Cathedral of St. Bavo in Ghent, they proved the superiority of oil and also produced one of the extraordinary masterpieces of painting. From then on St. Bavo became a place of pilgrimage for art lovers. Goethe called it the "pivot of the history of art."
The work is a folding polyptych on wood, with twelve pictures on each side when open. (The book's dimensions for it are clearly a misprint, and I give none.) In the center of the lower row is an imagined landscape, with a city of soaring towers behind the hills standing for the Holy Jerusalem. In front stands the fountain of the water of life, and behind it an altar with the Lamb, symbol of Christ, who offers his life and blood for the redemption of sinners. Around it stand cardinals and prophets, apostles and martyrs, angels and saints, rapt in worship.
In the center of the upper row, a seated figure resembling a Semitic Charlemagne is shown as God the Father. It is an inadequate image of divinity, but a noble idea of a wise ruler and just judge. The painting's real greatness lies in one picture, the Virgin. She is shown as a woman of Teutonic type, with delicate features and fair hair, chaste and modest, though not beautiful in the sense of the Sistine Madonna. To her left stand angels, and at the far left Adam, nude, thin and sorrowful. To the right of the Father stands John the Baptist, dressed splendidly for a wandering preacher of the desert. At the far right is Eve, nude, sad and lovely, weeping for lost Paradise. These nudes disturbed the Flemings for some time, since they were familiar with nudity neither in life nor in art. Above Eve, Cain kills his brother Abel.
The panels on the outer face are less lofty than the inner ones. In the middle row the angel at left and Mary at right, separated by a room, represent the Annunciation. The faces are uniform, the hands delicate and lovely, and the garments, as in all Flemish painting, magnificent. A Latin poem of four lines is written below. Time has erased some words, but the sense is that Hubert van Eyck, "the painter than whom none was greater," began the work and Jan, "second in art," finished it at the request of Jodocus Vyd. The last line gives the year 1432 through the numerical value of certain letters. Vyd and his wife were the donors.
How much of the picture is Hubert's and how much Jan's will fortunately never be settled, and the inscription will stand until the painting is destroyed.
Fine Detail and Great Reach
One could say that the painting contains too many incidental figures and details. Every man, woman, angel, flower, blossom, branch, animal, stone and jewel is painted with admirable patience and faith. This is just what amused Michelangelo, who held that Flemish realism sacrifices the main theme to superfluous secondary details. Yet in Italy at that time no work equaled it in scope, understanding or effect. In later periods only Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, Raphael's Vatican frescoes, and perhaps Leonardo's Last Supper before it decayed surpass it. Alfonso the Magnanimous asked Jan van Eyck to come to Naples and paint him men and women with golden hair like the singers in the Adoration, whom southern Italy could not match.
Jan van Eyck's Portraits
After 1432 Hubert passes out of our sight. We know something of Jan's prosperous life. Philip the Good made him his "valet de chambre," then a post of honor and means, and sent him abroad as an outstanding envoy of Burgundy. About twenty-four surviving paintings are attributed to him, nearly all masterpieces. Dresden has a Madonna and Child second only to the Adoration of the Lamb. Berlin boasts the man with the carnation, a serious face wonderfully matched to the flower he holds. In Melbourne the small Ince Hall Madonna, only 23 by 15 centimeters, is brilliantly colored and said to be worth about $250,000 (the book's figure). Bruges has the Madonna with Canon van der Paele, in which the Virgin is shown in perfect beauty and splendor from head to foot, and the stout, bald, kindly canon is one of the great portraits of the fifteenth century.
Another painting by Jan in London shows Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife, newly married, in a room with a mirror and a chandelier. The Frick Collection in New York recently acquired, at a high price, a Madonna with Saints Barbara and Elizabeth, rich in color. Washington has an Annunciation, outstanding for the depth of its space and the splendor of Gabriel's robes. In the Louvre the Madonna of Chancellor Rolin captivates with its winding river, a bridge crowded with people, a walled city with towers, flowered gardens and a range of hills touching the sunlight.
In all these works, beyond their consistent coloring, there is a manly effort to show the donors as they were and seemed, and to capture their life, thoughts and feelings as time had shaped their faces. The idealism of the Middle Ages is set aside in these portraits, and the new naturalism, perhaps a reflection of the middle class's love of this world, is followed with full force.
Rogier van der Weyden
Many other painters won fame in this fertile and art-loving land, among them Petrus Christus, Jacques Daret and Robert Campin, the Master of Flémalle. We bow to all of them and turn to Campin's pupil Rogier de la Pasture. At twenty-seven he made such a name in his native Tournai that the townsmen twice presented him with wine, three times the amount they had given Jan van Eyck. Yet Rogier accepted an invitation to become official painter of Brussels. From then on he Flemished his name and called himself Rogier van der Weyden.
In 1450, a Jubilee year, he went to Rome at the age of fifty-one, met Italian painters and was recognized as a world-famous figure. It is thought that oil painting in Italy advanced through his influence. When he died in Brussels in 1464 he was regarded as the most famous painter in Europe.
He left many works. He painted Philip the Good, Rolin (for forty years Philip's chancellor), Charles the Bold and many notables. One painting of indescribable beauty is the Portrait of a Lady, now in the National Gallery in Washington, which combines combativeness, piety, modesty and pride. Rogier was too romantic a portraitist to rival Jan van Eyck. But in his religious paintings there is a tenderness and delicacy of feeling and an emotional pull that Jan's manly, realistic art lacks. In Rogier's pictures the spirit of French or Italian painting, and the mood of medieval painting, appear in Flemish form.
The Last Judgment at Beaune
Like the Italians, Rogier painted the moving episodes of the story of the Virgin and her child: Gabriel telling the frightened girl she will be the mother of the Son of God; the Nativity; the Adoration of the Magi; St. Luke painting the Virgin nursing her child; the Visitation; a mother lost in sweet thought of her child; Christ in the Temple; the Crucifixion; the Descent from the Cross; the Resurrection; and the Last Judgment.
In the last, probably made to rival the Adoration of the Lamb though it falls short of it, Rogier reached the summit of his art. It was painted for Rolin and now hangs in the beautiful hospital that this great man built at Beaune. In the central panel Christ sits in judgment, with a face more merciful and gentle than Michelangelo's Christ. On either side, angels in shining white robes carry the instruments of his Passion. Below them the archangel Michael weighs the deeds of the good and the wicked. At the left the Virgin kneels in prayer and intercession. On one side the saved give thanks, and on the other sinners tumble in terror into hell. Another equally famous work by Rogier is a triptych at Antwerp showing the Seven Sacraments in symbolic scenes.