If you visit Ghent, why would you not visit Jan Van Eyck’s masterpiece? My guess is that for some it would just be a stuffy old altarpiece in a cold, dark church. Yet Ghent works hard to make the visit to St Bavo’s Cathedral an enlightening and worthwhile experience for all. First, a fun walk around the crypt immersed in a virtual world, using augmented reality headsets, gets even the most naive audience interested in the complexities and worthiness of this painting. By the time you get up into the church and stand in front of the magnificent Altarpiece, you know what to look for and can feel the X-factor. You and apparently over 90% of visitors to Ghent (though thankfully not all at once).
Mind you, the good people of Ghent have spent €2.2 million of their taxes restoring the Altarpiece, wiping away layers of 16th Century overpainting, and protecting it with a six-metre, climate-controlled, glass case (which magically opens the wings each morning and closes them again in the evening).Fortunately for the taxpayers, the restorers have found surprising discoveries that have hit world headlines and drawn the crowds.The restorers, employed by Belgium’s Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, are focusing on a few of the twelve panels at a time, and are working in a glass-fronted room inside Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts (which rather makes them into exhibits themselves).Of particular interest (and fuel for much hilarity on social media) has been the restoration of the central panel (known as the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb).In 2020, three years of scraping revealed that the central sacrificial lamb (ie Jesus) was no longer a vague, woolly creature, but who now gives us an unnervingly human stare, flaring his nostrils and pouting his lips, as Jan van Eyck had presumably always intended.
Much of the hyper-realistic detail in the heavenly gardens of the Ghent Altarpiece makes looking at the painting a delight if you know what to look for and was, in part, thanks to Philip the Good. Jan Van Eyck had proven himself an impressive painter and his pioneering method of applying thin layers of oil paint to create astonishing illusions of depth and light made him the choice for the Duke of Burgundy to appoint as Court Painter.Otherwise known as Philip the Good, the Duke was a great Patron of the arts (although incidentally he captured Joan of Arc and sold her to the English to be burned at the stake, so not-that-good).In 1428 Philip decided to send Jan to Portugal to paint two portraits of his (Philip’s) future wife, Isabella.Whilst he was there for ten months, Jan became inspired by the landscape and nature of the Iberian peninsula, which appeared in gorgeous detail in the Ghent Altarpiece just a few years later. Even the Mediterranean citron, which used to be known as the forbidden fruit and therefore was of great symbolic meaning, is placed in Eve’s hand as though it will drop out of the painting at any moment.
Other juicy facts add to our adulation of this, no longer stuffy, old masterpiece.Older brother Hubert van Eyck actually did much of the underpainting and composition whilst Jan (the better painter) filled it with the amazing detail a few years after Hubert’s death, including writing on the frames. Worthy of a Dan Brown novel, a quatrain (a poem consisting of four lines) is scribed on the side. In the last line a number of letters have been marked which, when added up, the Roman numerical value of these letters totals 1432, the year in which the Ghent Altarpiece was revealed.In more recent history, the Ghent Altarpiece was taken to Paris by Napoleon, to Germany by the Nazis, stolen six times, held for ransom and sold illegally.One section turned up in the checked-luggage department at the Ghent train station and one section (the Just Judges) is still missing, though rumoured to be hidden in a public place in Ghent.It is a wonder then, that today we are able to see it at all, in its intended place, in (almost) its complete form, and finally as Jan Van Eyck would have wished it to be appreciated by everyone, pout and all.