Julian Bell and Peter Schjeldahl on the Ghent Altarpiece

Hubert van Eyck and Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece (1432)

Julian Bell, in his brilliant “Kestrel, Burgher, Spout” (London Review of Books, April 16, 2020), says of the Ghent Altarpiece,

When Van Eyck delivered the work, it was recognised that its quality was also without equal, a judgment that remains irrefutable. It’s the superabundance that staggers. You zoom out from the townscape to the four-panel wide Annunciation that encapsulates it, but that scene is merely a prelude, painted on the exterior panels of the doors, to the two-level panoply within: theological VIPs above, and below, an early morning mass meeting of the blessed in some verdant parkland. The lush heaviness into which your eyes sink suggests that whatever breathes or glistens or crinkles – clouds, foliage, faces, cloaks, jewels, metalware and stone – has been stroked and befriended by brushwork of infinite patience: all is celebrated but decelerated, as if you are witnessing the creation of the world replayed in slow motion.

Wow! That last sentence is inspired. The whole piece is inspired – one of the most absorbing art reviews I’ve read this year. Reading it, I was reminded of Peter Schjeldahl’s wonderful “Ghent Altarpiece” essay – “The Flip Side” (The New Yorker, November 29, 2010), in which he says,

There is no more astounding work of art than the Ghent Altarpiece. Historically, it is a clutch of firsts: it represents the first really ambitious and consummate use of oil paint, though with some admixtures of tempera, and it marks the birth of realism as a guiding principle in European painting. Oils—of linseed, walnut, and other plant extracts—were employed as binders for pigments in Afghanistan in the seventh century and in Europe a century later. Some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Norwegian altar fronts are all in oils. But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color.

Again, wow! Two great art critics responding to one of the world’s great artworks – it doesn’t get any better than that.