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Jan van Eyck was a Flemish style painter and is considered to be a founder of the Early Renaissance style during the Northern Renaissance period. The exact date and place of his birth are unknown by historians, but it is believed that he was born in the early 1390s in the eastern province of the Netherlands Limburg. During his life van Eyck served at the court of Duke Johann of Bavaria in Hague, painting and restoring pictures. Later he would serve at the court of Philip the Good of Burgundy. Where he was greatly valued not only as an artist, but he also as a diplomat entrusted by Duke with various diplomatic missions throughout Europe. The last years of his life van Eyck lived and worked in Bruges as painter to the court and city until his death in 1441.
“Jan Van Eyck was here,” is what historians have been saying for over 500 years. His style and use of innovations of the time, oil paints to bring out brilliant color combinations that seemed to bring his works to life, gives insight to the brilliant career of this Flemish Painter. Layering the colors to achieve what he called “atmospheric perspective” (Encyclopedia Britannica 1994) gives one the illusion that the air is never quite transparent; the sense of dust in the air is a sign of the scientific insight so prevalent at this time period. His use of symbolism in his painting especially the “Wedding Portrait”, gives us a perspective to his keen awareness of the Myth and Ritual that symbolized the Catholic Church of this period. The social and political intrigue of the changing way people viewed institutions due to the scientific advancements “Aristotle’s Scientific Method” of the times were brought to attention with van Eyck’s revolutionary use of oil paints with a finish of varnish stable enough to dry at a consistent rate.
One of the achievements of Van Eyck was to use oil paints to achieve what seemed to be an illumination emitting from his painting. This technique of illumination, one that Van Eyck would use often, that is still not fully understood nor appreciated to this very day remains one of the many mysteries surrounding this painter. He used this technique in his “Wedding Portrait”, (Encyclopedia Britannica 1994) and “Ghent Altarpiece”, (Hodge and Anson) a work he is believed to have worked on with his brother Hubert. The striking realism in microscopic detail was a trade make of Van Eyck, techniques, and he used these techniques in a variety of portraits. All of which contributed to a deeper symbolic meaning of a “picture within a picture”, a method called disguised symbolism by some art critics (Hodge and Anson), wrongly credited with the invention of painting with oils; he no doughtily advanced the art form to perfection. With his often used attention to miniature details, you can’t help but notice the eyes of the subject and the exquisite rendering found in van Eyck painting and its stable varnish covering, van Eyck’s real achievement, which bring out the brilliance of the oil paints. The intensity of the Turban is symbolic of the emergence of the use of the “Scientific Method” made so popular by Aristotle during the Greek period of Enlightenment and was to become such a big part of the Renaissance Movement.
Van Eyck used the oil medium to represent a variety of subjects with striking realism in microscopic detail, and even more he brought a scientific mind coupled with an ability to use symbolic meaning in his impressions. His meticulous attention to detail of both the physical and the symbolic positioned with an extreme awareness of his surroundings blended to produce an artist with unrelenting, dispassionate accuracy. There is no question that van Eyck’s early career as a manuscript illuminator had a profound effect on his future career as an artist. His attention to detail and miniature expressionism, a picture with-in a picture concept, produces real advancement in art expansion. Coupled with the use of oil paint color, tempered with varnishes composed of mixed linseed and nut oils produced a brilliance of color, translucent with extreme intensity of color as the pigment was suspended in a layer of oil that also trapped light. This was the brilliance of Jan van Eyck, a statesman, Royal Representative, God Fearing, enlightened, a solitary visionary, man with a purpose and meaning in life, an artist of Flemish heritage, warmly conscious of his impact on the lives of others
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