Jan van Eyck

Court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and the artist who raised the Netherlandish tradition of panel painting to a level of optical completeness that was not surpassed for centuries. Van Eyck did not invent oil paint — the medium had existed in various forms for a long time — but he mastered the technique of glazing, building images from dozens of thin, transparent layers of oil-bound pigment over a white chalk ground, to a degree no contemporary could approach. The result was a surface of extraordinary luminosity, each layer adding color and depth in a way that tempera could not match. His surviving works are few but overwhelming: the Ghent Altarpiece (1432), the Arnolfini Portrait (1434), a handful of Madonnas and male portraits that are among the most psychologically acute images in Western painting. Every surface in these works is a different material, and each is rendered differently: the nap of velvet, the individual hairs of a fur collar, the reflected distortions in a convex mirror, the gold leaf of an embroidered chasuble. The Arnolfini Portrait's mirror, barely an inch in diameter, contains a miniature scene of the whole room from behind, including two tiny figures in the doorway who may include Van Eyck himself. He signed it not with initials but with a legal formula — 'Johannes de Eyck fuit hic' (Jan van Eyck was here) — as a witness signs a document. He died in Bruges in 1441. His technique was immediately influential in Flanders and spread within decades to the Iberian Peninsula, Germany and Italy. Antonello da Messina, who supposedly brought the oil technique to Venice around 1475 after learning it from Flemish sources, was one of the transmission points through which the Northern method transformed Italian painting.