Van . Eyck Problems THE number of important books on Van
Eyck and his school is rapidly increasing. This last work, written by a former Director of the Vienna Gallery, comes after Professor Van Puyvelde's Holy Lamb (Collins, 1947) and two volumes of the great collection Les Primitifs Flamands, edited by P. Coremans and Janssens de Bisthoven (1948 and 1951). Thanks to the progress of photo- graphy a wealth of detail has now been made accessible. Although many of the plates in Dr. Baldass's book are already known, the author should be congratulated for devoting so much attention to early miniatures, to the works of Van Eyck's contemporaries, and to other pictures, beside the " Lamb," signed by the Master or attributed to him.
As for the text, there are two questions which will provoke discus- sion. The first concerns the origins, the link between Van Eyck paintings and the miniatures of the illustrators of the " Books of Hours " commissioned between 1400 and 1420 by such patrons of the arts as the Duke of Burgundy, the Duke of Berry and the King of France. At the beginning of this century, Belgian critics suggested that the sudden appearance of the altar-piece known as the "Adora- tion of the Lamb," inaugurated in 1432, may be explained by the extraordinary development noticeable in the works produced by this " Franco-Flemish " school of miniaturists, especially in the partly destroyed " Book of Turin."' Dr. Baldass goes a step further and tries to show, by a series of comparisons, that the author of the " Lamb " was directly influenced by the illustrations attributed to the brothers of Limburg and dating from the first years of the fifteenth century. Between two theories, it is wiser to choose the simplest, and since the Turin miniatures are much closer to the style of the Master than those of the Limburg brothers, there does not seem to be sufficient reason to doubt that either Jan Van Eyck or some artist closely connected with him painted some of them before 1417, that is several years before the inauguration of the " Lamb."
The second question is the burning question of authorship. Is Jan Van Eyck the author of the " Limb " and of the other pictures attributed to the school, or should we still maintain, in tile light of modern evidence, that Hubert and Jan share the honours of having produced the masterpiece ? The conflict is mainly between those who attach paramount importance to external evidence and those who try to find in the pictures themselves the solution of the problem. The fact is that until the middle of the sixteenth century no one doubted that the Ghent altir-piece was the work of Jan Van Eyck. The name of Hubert, with the suggestion that he was mainly responsi- ble for the work, was first mentioned in a quatrain published by a Flemish poet of the Renaissance, but the tradition was only accepted when the same lines were discovered on the frame of the altar-piece in 1824. This appeared a conclusive proof of the dual authorship, and, since then, critics have been at great pains to discriminate between the panels of the altar-piece and the unsigned pictures of the school, those which should be attributed to the " elder brother " from those which should be ascribed to the " younger."
When I was a university student, we talked of the " ruthless realism " of Jan and of the " lofty idealism " of Hubert. We never suspected that such words would have had no meaning in the fifteenth century, where the only distinction which could have been made was between belief and unbelief, or between the natural and the supernatural, and when it seemed obvious that a master able to paint God in His glory could also paint most accurately the lilies of the field. (Jan, by the way, signed a number of" realistic " portraits as well as the " mystic " Virgin at the Fountain, or the St. Barbara at the Antwerp museum.) The tradition of dual authorship was further weakened because the most learned experts did not agree about the ascriptions, and because these were rendered more difficult owing to the fact that critics could not refer for comparison to one single work signed and dated by the mysterious Hubert. In the absence df conclusive documents, art-historians got into the habit of drawing bold conclusions from hypothetical evidence. Dr. Baldass follows their example when he writes, for instance, that "- if we compare Jan's Queen of Heaven (the Virgin in the Church, Berlin) with Hubert's women standing by the Tomb, of Christ, the stylistic relationship becomes as clear as the individual differences." This means : " If we compare an unsigned work which I attribute to the well-known Jan to the unsigned work which is generally attributed to the hypothetical Hubert, the relationship between these two artists becomes evident."
When, twenty years ago, Mr. Renders propounded the theory that the inscription concerning the dual authorship had been added at a later date, and that the whole altar-piece and most of the paintings ascribed to the school are the work of Jan, he released a storm which is not yet dispelled. It still rumbles in one of Dr. Baldass's footnotes : "It would be unnecessary to mention this theory, had not Dr. Fried- lander welcomed this assumption with a sigh of relief." Dr. Friedlander is not, as Dr. Baldass assumes, the "only serious scholar" to.have been impressed by some of Mr. Render's arguments. As early as 1939 Professor Lavalleye of Louvain developed a similar view in the chapter devoted to the fifteenth century in " L'Art en Belgique " (Renaissance du Livre). As long as an authentic picture signed by Hubert is not discovered, a doubt will remain in the mind of most impartial critics. The discussion must go on. Let us hope that it will be conducted in the future with more tolerance and courtesy than it has been in the past. EMILE CAMMAERTS.
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