Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ado­ra­tion of the Mys­tic Lamb of 1432, bet­ter known as the Ghent Altar­piece, ranks among the most sig­nif­i­cant works of art in Europe. Housed at Saint Bavo’s Cathe­dral in Ghent, Bel­gium, this large and com­plex altar­piece has suf­fered a var­ied his­to­ry over the cen­turies, hav­ing been dis­man­tled, stolen, dam­aged, reassem­bled, recov­ered, cleaned, and restored sev­er­al times over. Thank good­ness that it is cur­rent­ly in good and safe con­di­tion, and open for view­ing by the pub­lic, at St Bavo’s.

I stum­bled across this great work of art on a TV pro­gramme just days before I was due to take a week­end break in Brus­sels. It seemed too serendip­i­tous not to arrange the short side-trip to Ghent, and thus I have been for­tu­nate to view this piece up close and per­son­al.

The van Eyck broth­ers, and Jan in par­tic­u­lar, were sig­nif­i­cant artists of the North­ern Renais­sance, oper­at­ing out of Bruges and leav­ing to pos­ter­i­ty such var­ied works as the Arnolfi­ni por­trait, the illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script known as the Turin-Milan Hours, and this great altar­piece in Ghent.

Jan van Eyck, the younger and more famous of the two broth­ers, was a mas­ter of nat­u­ral­is­tic detail. He pays as much atten­tion to earth­ly beau­ty as he does to the reli­gious themes in the altar­piece. The folds of the clothes, the jew­els, the foun­tain, the flow­ers and veg­e­ta­tion, the church­es and land­scape in the back­ground – all reveal a sys­tem­at­ic and dis­crim­i­nat­ing study of the nat­ur­al world.

Com­pare with the ear­li­er, “flat­ter” Inter­na­tion­al Goth­ic art of the 14^th cen­tu­ry. Although artists like Duc­cio and Simone Mar­ti­ni had begun to explore depth, per­spec­tive, and space, van Eyck takes it to a whole new lev­el and we recog­nise, for the first time, an unques­tion­able real­ism in the fin­ished art­work.

See here for the whole altar­piece and below that for a selec­tion of some of the won­der­ful details.