Stealing the Mystic Lamb (3 page)

In religious paintings for public spaces, too, what one might describe as “mystery paintings” were favored. They would often include varying levels of complexity, depictions of biblical scenes that are easily recognizable for the simpler viewers, alongside erudite images, which often contained hybrids of various theological texts, references to mythology or pagan ideas, and time-and-place-specific references, what we might call “inside jokes” today, which were obvious to contemporary viewers but are like a foreign language to a twenty-first-century audience.

There was also a pleasure in deciphering. In a time before the printing press, one of the great pleasures of an educated life was to contemplate pictures over the span of hours, months, or years. Works such as
The Mystic Lamb
had a religious function, decorating and referencing the Mass that took place in the church at the altar beneath it. But they were also sources of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, something to be debated with friends. Viewers showed their erudition by noting references
in painting, by identifying the various philosophical concepts raised by the painting, and by discussing how various ideas and images might be woven together into a sum that reveals a greater truth. Renaissance art conveyed ideas in images, painted stories, and pictograms, artists toying with ways of presenting concepts through the inherently silent, mostly textless medium of painting. Faces, landscapes, still lifes, and bodies had to tell stories. The great artists could use this mute medium to plumb emotional and theological mysteries.

The images in
The Ghent Altarpiece
are varied and theoretically diverse. The painting incorporates more than one hundred figures, many inscribed textual phrases, references and cross-references to biblical passages, apocryphal theologies, and even pagan mythology. Complicated symbolic works such as this one began with an overall iconographic plan that was designed by a scholar, a great theologian—rarely by the artist himself. The artist would be told the scheme of the painting, which figures should be included, which phrases, and perhaps even their relation to one another in the composition. It was up to the artist to execute the concept of the scholar. The more accomplished the artist, the less the art would be dictated to him.

In this case, Jan van Eyck was a relatively young up-and-comer. This would be his first major work for public display. Therefore he would have received a considerable amount of guidance. Under most circumstances, the implementation of individual concepts and the arrangement of figures were at the discretion of the artist, while the theme, any text, portraits of donors, and especially the number of figures would be expressed in the written contract. Painters were often paid by the number of faces they were asked to paint, so this was an important factor. The contract for
The Ghent Altarpiece
is lost, and we can only guess what it contained and how much of a free hand the artist was given in its conception. Likewise, no record remains of the scholar who designed the theme, although a probable candidate has been suggested. The scholar must have been inordinately well-read—a knowledgeable Humanist. One can imagine how difficult it must have been to summon up by memory or painstaking research
the many phrases and cross-references employed in this work, without the benefit of a computer, a concordance, or even the access that the invention of printed type would provide twenty years later.

What may strike some viewers as a simple painting of a room is in fact a masterpiece of minute details, each with a specific liturgical or symbolic reference. Paintings of this period did not contain details without a reason. The enormous material expense of the purchase of smooth, flat panels, pricy pigments to make the paint, the wood-carved frames, and the cost and time of the artist’s work was so high that only the very wealthiest individuals and institutions—princes and kings and bishops and the wealthiest merchants—could commission art. Artists themselves could rarely afford the material to paint anything that had not been commissioned. It would be another two hundred years before the first artists began to paint “on spec,” in hopes of a sale through a gallery. Four hundred more years would pass before the first ready-mixed tubes of paint were available for purchase. In van Eyck’s day, artists created what they were paid for. Every detail was significant.

Art historians use iconography, the study of symbols in art, to determine the literary source that inspired paintings. Most religious works of the premodern period illustrate literary concepts or stories. Knowing the literary source reveals the theme of the painting, which might otherwise remain elusive. For religious works, the sources most often used are the Bible or
The Golden Legend
, the medieval biography of saints written circa 1260 by the monk Jacobus da Voragine, which was the second-most popular book (behind the Bible) through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A woman carrying her eyes on a silver platter might not have obvious meaning, until we know the literary source,
The Golden Legend
, and understand that the image comes from a biography of Saint Lucy, whose eyes were put out during her martyrdom.

A procession of the pantheon of saints, related to the All Saints sermon, moves slowly towards the Lamb on the altar at the center of a vast field. The theme of this central panel of
The Ghent Altarpiece
, called “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” is drawn from
The Golden Legend
as well
as the Revelation of Saint John. Therefore in the imagery of the altarpiece we find a series of interrelated theological themes, nested like Russian dolls, mutually referential while deepening the religious and iconographic mystery surrounding the painting. In the twenty-six individual scenes depicted across the twelve oak panels, we are presented with an A to Z of Christian mystical theology, from the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-28) to the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in the final book of the New Testament, Revelation.

To unlock the mysteries of
The Ghent Altarpiece
, then, we must first approach its component parts, examining their content and symbolism and asking what the individual panels portray. Among its many mysteries are saints disguised as statues, floating prophets, and text written upside down.

When the altarpiece is closed, the verso (back) of eight of the panels is visible, illustrating the Mystery of the Incarnation. The panels are divided into two registers, each four panels across. The upper register depicts an open room in which the Annunciation takes place, the moment that God sends the angel Gabriel to tell Mary that she will bear the Son of God (Luke 1:28-38). This scene is painted across all four panels, with Old Testament prophets and sibyls floating above the painted “ceiling” of the Annunciation room.

The panel on the left shows the angel Gabriel with a lily in hand, a flower that symbolizes Mary’s virginity and purity and that Gabriel means no harm. Gabriel speaks the words of the Annunciation, which have been painted in gold onto the panel, emanating from Gabriel’s mouth:
Ave Gratia Plena Dominus Tecum
(“Hail [Mary], full of Grace, the Lord salutes you”). Gabriel’s body fills the room, in which he seems to float rather than stand. The room itself is contemporary to the painting, not biblically accurate, with exposed wooden crossbeams on the ceiling and a naturalistic light source: sunlight flooding through the open windows, which casts Gabriel’s shadow against the back wall.

Mary kneels on the right-hand side of the upper register, receiving the annunciated words of Gabriel. Her response to Gabriel’s words,
Ecce ancilla domini
(“Behold the slave of the Lord”), is written upside down. This may seem odd, until we realize that this reply is not for us, but rather for God and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, above Mary’s head, and God, presumably high above in Heaven and gazing down at Mary on earth, would need the response to be inverted in order for the text to be clearly legible. This contrivance appeared with some frequency in northern Renaissance Annunciation paintings, most famously and first here. The Latin phrase uttered by Mary is often mistranslated as “Behold the hand-maiden of the Lord,” a politically correct alteration of the literal translation, in which Mary offers herself as a slave.

The Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descends upon her, signaling her impregnation with the future Christ. Her hands are crossed on her chest in a gesture of humility. She kneels on the floor as a further reference to her humility—
humilitas
in Latin, meaning “close to the earth.” A gorgeously rendered glass decanter, through which the window sunlight is cast, alludes to a medieval theological explanation for how Mary could become pregnant with Jesus yet still be a virgin. The rationale was that if a ray of light can pass through glass without breaking it, then Mary can be a pregnant virgin. This unusual validation worked to quiet the murmuring masses in the Middle Ages. Even back then, virgin pregnancy sounded a bit suspect.

The prophet Micah is in the crawl space above Mary. He indicates a passage in the Old Testament, inscribed in a waving painted banner, in
which he predicted the coming of the Jewish messiah, a prophecy that medieval Christian theology appropriated as a prediction of the coming of Christ: “Out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel.” Van Eyck, like many artists, enjoyed paying homage to past artworks by quoting visual references to them. He chose to pose Micah identically to the 1417 sculptural relief of God carved by Donatello for the niche above his revolutionary statue of Saint George, which was on the façade of the church of Orsanmichele in Florence. This statue was considered the most important sculpture of its time, and Florence became a point of pilgrimage for fellow artists, who traveled across Europe to admire Donatello’s work. The admiring artists often referenced his work in theirs. Such visual, formal references by one artist to another appear frequently, and they form an inside joke for art historians, who take perhaps inordinately great pleasure in recognizing such references. But in many cases, as in this instance, they also serve up a clue that would otherwise have eluded scholars.

There is no clear evidence that Jan van Eyck ever traveled to Italy. But he would have needed to see the Donatello relief in order to reference it in his own painting. Because Gutenberg had not yet invented moveable type, copies of an artwork, image, or text had to be made by hand, one at a time. In order to see an artwork, one had to travel to its location. Visual references such as this are strong indicators that the artist saw the referenced work in person.

The prophet Zechariah is also depicted in what appears to be the crawl space above the painted ceiling, beneath the rounded top of the panel. A
fragment of his messianic prophecy is inscribed in Latin, on a banner swirling over his head: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, shout out behold, thy King cometh unto thee” (Zechariah 9:9).