Flemish Masters: The Sacred Image and the World Made Holy
In the early 15th century, in the cities of Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels, a group of painters made a discovery that changed the history of Western art: that oil, used as a medium for pigment, produced a depth, luminosity, and precision impossible in tempera. The invention of oil painting — associated above all with Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441), though the technique had precedents — enabled the Early Netherlandish masters to achieve something unprecedented: the complete visual equation of the sacred and the material. In their altarpieces, the Virgin sits in a room with tiled floors and Persian carpets and Flemish windows opening onto Flemish landscapes. The angel of the Annunciation casts a shadow. The Lamb of God bleeds into a golden chalice in a landscape that could be the Flemish countryside on a clear summer morning. The theology was precise: if God had become incarnate in the material world, then the material world — painted with total fidelity, every detail rendered with reverence —...