So let's open it up and take a look inside.
We're struck immediately by an explosion of rich colors.
And this is a color that's really possible because of the luminousness of oil paint,
especially in the way that the Northerners handled it.
And so there's an incredible sort of material beauty
that is very palpable as soon as one opens it up.
And we're struck immediately by this very large figure
in the center of God the Father, dressed like a king
with a papal crown on his head, a crown at his feet
to show that he's king of kings, holding
a scepter, a symbol of power.
That scepter is exquisite.
It's so clearly rendered out of rock crystal.
And the crown at his feet is an amazing display
of jewelry design, of jewelry making.
And if we look past the exterior of the crown
to the inside of it, we can actually
see how it was hammered from the inside out.
We have a theme running through here of God's saving grace,
God's saving power, his plan to forgive and redeem mankind.
That issue is so critical here, and this is one of the early great examples of God being remade in what we will come to know as the Renaissance,
as opposed to the earlier medieval God that was wrathful, was terrifying.
Here we have a God that is a God of forgiveness, and it is an expression of the humanist tradition that is developing in Europe at this time.
And on either side of God we have, on the left, Mary also wearing a crown, looking like a queen.
The crown has roses and lilies in it, and on the right, Saint John the Baptist.
And to go back to that theme of God's redemption and forgiveness,
in that gold embroidery which we have in that tapestry behind God the Father,
an image of a pelican.
In the medieval tradition, the pelican, if it's young or starving,
it was believed to pick at its own flesh to feed its young.
This notion of God making this extraordinary sacrifice is explicitly rendered here.
On the left we have the angels singing in heaven and on the right the angels playing music in heaven, so we have this
Not only incredibly rich environment visually of gold and jewels, but also the sounds of heaven.
you look at the choir on the left,
and look at the richly carved furniture of music stand,
and on the right of the organ,
I imagine that this is some indication
of what the original frame of this painting
might have looked like.
One of the things I really love is that each of the angels wears a different crown on the left as they sing and they make slightly different faces as though you can tell the different notes that they're each singing.
even though their faces are actually quite similar,
it because they become a kind of, I imagine, a kind of ideal of
beauty in Van Eyck's imagination.
And then when we go a little bit further out,
we see the panels of Adam and Eve
are represented very realistically, very...
sort of deeply human in their bodies,
not at all idealized the way that we would see
with Masaccio or the artists of the Italian Renaissance.
Of course, the artists of the Northern Renaissance
don't have ancient Greek and Roman sculpture
everywhere to look at, which would suggest
the tradition of idealizing or making perfect
of the human body.
And so here Adam and Eve look like two real people
that Van Eyck had modeled for him in his studio.
you have throughout this painting, a kind of grandeur,
and then you have these two figures naked,
seem so vulnerable, they seem so out of place,
they seem so mismatched.
This painting is really about God's willingness
to reach out to man in all of his imperfection.
And their jarring presence, the sense of discord, I think is a potent expression of the painter's
interest in representing God's willingness to reach down to our imperfect world.
One of the other things that I'm really struck by is the gold embroidery in the figure on
the right who's playing the organ in the ermine on her gown and even
You know, the attention that's being paid to the tiles on the floor, the pipes of the
Oregon.
We have that thing that happens in the Northern Renaissance where artists pay an enormous
amount of attention to things that are seemingly unimportant, but we know that the artists
of the Northern Renaissance lavish so much attention and care and detail and clarity
on objects because they represent the heavenly and the spiritual.
They link us to the heavenly and the spiritual.
does something else as well, which is it makes concrete the heavenly world and it
makes it so understandable. It also makes it very believable and, in a sense, very
tangible.
And in the scene below, we see an image with four groups of people coming toward a scene at the center, which is an altar with a lamb.
And the lamb has a wound in its side and is bleeding into a chalice.
because the lamb, of course, is a symbol of Christ,
of Christ's sacrifice, and yet here we have this lamb
that has overcome any earthly pain,
any earthly suffering, and is here functioning
in the purely symbolic realm.
And surrounding that altar, we have angels who carry the instruments of Christ's suffering,
the cross, the crown of thorns, the column that he was bound to and he was flagellated.
And so we have this sense of sacrifice for man's redemption.
and man in these four large groups come to pay homage.
and we have prophets and saints and popes and figures from the Old Testament who all make their
way toward Christ and below that the fountain of life which has a stream that leads out and down
toward us and toward the altar in the chapel.
all played out in this glorious and divine landscape, this gem-like landscape where there's
a kind of specificity that is overwhelming visually.
Every leaf is rendered, every window pane in the city beyond is rendered.
You have not only a sense of the magnificence of God's realm, but you have the sense of
overwhelming
awe because our eyes are incapable of taking in this much visual information simultaneously.
This is a painting that's almost cinemagraphic in that you have to look through it over time
in order to be able to take it all in. It is simply too much.
And so in a way it suggests a kind of vision that transcends human vision, a divine vision,
and in fact one of the things that's said about van Eyck as an artist is that he had an eye like
a microscope and a telescope.
showing us things very far away as though they were under a microscope, a kind of vision
that only is possible for God.
So this disjuncture between man's limited vision, which we feel as we look at this painting,
and this notion of God's complete vision.
through this painting transcending our earthly realm and coming face to face with God.