The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jan van Eyck · with Hubert van Eyck (d. 1426), named first in the frame’s quatrain, his share not separable · a polyptych in oil on oak panel, closed and open · twelve panels, eight of them wings painted on both sides, twenty painted faces · about three and a half metres by four and a half open · St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent · completed 6 May 1432 · the Just Judges a modern replacement · as restored in campaigns completed 2016 and 2019
Mode
Winged altarpiece as eucharistic and apocalyptic programme; annunciation, the court of heaven and the gathering of the saints in one hinged object
Mythos
Promise and fulfilment; the Fall at the edges, the Lamb of Revelation at the centre, the elect converging from four directions
Phase
Two states, weekday and feast; completed 6 May 1432, six years after Hubert’s death
Presentation
Oil glazes on oak; twelve panels, four fixed and eight hinged wings painted on both sides, twenty faces, one of them a modern replacement
Register
From grey stone and a burgher’s room to colour, flesh and paradise; radiance throughout, terror only in the murder of Abel
Scale
The history of salvation, every estate, one chapel altar
Governing Proposition
A polyptych is made to be closed on the working days and opened on the feasts, and the opening is its argument: grey stone, a burgher’s room and two kneeling donors give way to colour, flesh and the end of time. The wager of the altarpiece is that the sacred is seen in the exact description of things — a brass basin, a plant, a face — and that every estate of the world, converging from four sides on one sacrifice, stands in the same light.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Joos Vijd and his wife Elisabeth Borluut commissioned the altarpiece for their chapel in the parish church of St John in Ghent, the church now called St Bavo’s Cathedral. It is a polyptych of twelve oak panels: four are fixed, and eight are hinged wings painted on both sides, so there are twenty painted faces. Shut, it is about half its open width. It was opened on the feasts and kept shut on the working days, so what the chapel saw on most days was the closed state, and the closed state is muted, nearly grey.
The upper register of the closed state is one room, drawn across four panels. Gabriel and the Virgin face each other from the two wide panels. Between them are two narrow panels of the same room, empty of figures: one opens through a window on a townscape, and the other holds a niche with a brass basin and a towel. The middle of the Annunciation is a room with nobody in it. In the arched tops above sit two prophets and two sibyls, the foreseers. The Virgin answers the angel, “Ecce ancilla Domini” (“Behold the handmaid of the Lord”, Luke 1:38), and the words are painted upside down, so that they read toward heaven and not toward the chapel. The light in the painted rooms falls from the right, consistent with the chapel’s window.
The lower register holds the donors and the two Johns. Vijd and Borluut kneel in niches at the outer edges, in the same light as the Virgin above them. Between them stand John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, painted as stone statues in grisaille. The donors kneel before stone. The painting imitates sculpture in the niches and space in the room on the one surface, and it gives the weekday world a promise and two burghers waiting under it. When the wings open, the Baptist will appear again, and not as a statue.
Movement II
On the feasts the wings were opened, and the grey gave way at once to colour. The open polyptych is commonly given as about three and a half metres high and four and a half wide; it shows twelve faces, seven above and five below. The upper register runs Adam; the singing angels; the Virgin; an enthroned figure in a papal tiara; John the Baptist; the angels making music at an organ; Eve. The Baptist who stood as stone on the weekday side is now flesh, beside the throne.
The enthroned figure sits at the centre, the crown at his feet and the hem of his robe jewelled. Whether he is God the Father, Christ, or the Trinity in one figure, the panel does not say, and the question has not been settled. On one side the angels sing, their faces strained with the effort of different notes; on the other they play, and the light gleams on the organ’s pipes. The music of heaven is shown as labour. The figures of the upper register stand at near life size, each panel on its own ground, a tiled floor, a brocade, a niche.
At the outer edges, beyond the angels, stand Adam and Eve, near life size and painted as observed bodies, flesh among the brocades of the court. Adam’s right foot projects over the ledge of his niche, seen from below, for a viewer standing on the chapel floor. Above them, in small grisaille fields, are the offering of Cain and Abel and the murder of Abel. The Fall stands at the two edges of the court of heaven, and the first death is the one moment of terror in the open view.
Movement III
Below the court the five lower panels make one landscape, and its centre is the Adoration of the Lamb, on the fixed panel. The Lamb stands on an altar, and blood runs from its breast into a chalice. Angels kneel around the altar, some holding the instruments of the Passion, some swinging censers. Above, the dove of the Holy Spirit sends its rays down across the field. The dove stands on the vertical below the enthroned figure, and the Lamb below the dove: one axis runs through both registers. The painted altar, with the Lamb’s blood falling into the chalice, stood above the real altar at which the Mass was said.
In the foreground is the fountain of the water of life (Revelation 22), its water running toward the viewer and out of the picture. To its left are prophets and patriarchs, with pagan figures among them, one in white with a laurel wreath, commonly read as Virgil; to its right the apostles kneel, and behind them stand popes, bishops and clergy. Further back, male confessors come on the left and virgin martyrs on the right, with palms and their attributes, Agnes with her lamb, Barbara with her tower. The figures number well over a hundred, and they are small, from a hand’s length to a forearm’s.
Where the gold ground of the older altarpiece would be, there is a meadow. Its plants are identifiable species, painted plant by plant, and it runs back to wooded hills and the towers of a city, a heavenly Jerusalem built from the churches of the Low Countries. The technique is oil glaze over a white chalk ground on oak, with underdrawing, and it lets each leaf be one leaf. Above the landscape, at a hard line, the upper register sets out its row of figures, each panel on its own ground and none with a horizon; below the line is one deep space under a high horizon, and nothing in the image passes from the one to the other.
Movement IV
The four wings converge on the meadow. From the left come the Just Judges and the Knights of Christ, riding; from the right the Holy Hermits and the Holy Pilgrims, the pilgrims led by the giant St Christopher. The ground runs on unbroken from panel to panel, so the riders and the walkers cross into the centre’s field. The active and the contemplative lives arrive from opposite sides at the one sacrifice, and every face among them is a particular face. Tradition read one of the riders on the outermost panel as Jan’s self-portrait.
That panel is gone. On the night of 10 to 11 April 1934 the Just Judges was stolen, together with its reverse, the grisaille John the Baptist of the closed state. The Baptist was returned. The Judges has never been recovered. The panel in the frame now is a modern replacement painted by Jef Van der Veken, the work of another hand. What the lost panel showed, its place in the procession and its subject, is known from older copies, not from the replacement’s surface.
So the procession of the just begins, at the far left of the open view, with a panel the Van Eycks did not paint. It is one of twelve open faces, one of twenty in all, and the scheme still requires it: without the judges one of the four groups converging on the Lamb is missing. The history of the work stands inside the work, in its frame, at the head of the procession.
Movement V
The altarpiece has been taken apart more than once. In the iconoclasm of 1566 it was hidden in the tower. In 1794 the central panels were taken to Paris, and they returned in 1815. The wings were sold and went to Berlin, where they were sawn through so that their two faces could be shown separately; they came back under Article 247 of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and were reunited with the centre in 1920, after more than a century away. In 1942 the German authorities seized it; it was held at Neuschwanstein and in the salt mine at Altaussee, and recovered in 1945. Paul Coremans’s team at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) treated it in 1950–1951.
The same institute has restored it again in phases: the exterior panels, completed in 2016, and the lower register of the interior, the Adoration among it, completed in 2019 and shown in January 2020; a third phase has taken up the upper register. Under centuries of overpaint the original surface had survived. On the Lamb, removing it uncovered the painter’s own head: frontal, with large forward-looking eyes, in place of a more conventional sheep’s head. The reception was divided, and some of it was ridicule. The Lamb on the altar now looks out at the chapel.
On the frame is a dedicatory quatrain. One of its lines holds the date in its capitals, which sum to 1432 — “VersU seXta MaI Vos CoLLoCat aCta tUerI” (“by this verse, on the sixth of May, it bids you look on what was done”) — and its opening names two painters: Hubert, “maior quo nemo repertus” (“than whom none greater was found”), and Jan, “arte secundus” (“second in art”). Its authenticity has been doubted. Hubert died in 1426, six years before the date in the verse, and Jan in 1441. What Hubert painted, if anything, cannot be separated on the panels, and some scholars have doubted that it can be found at all. The verse puts Hubert first and Jan second, and asks whoever stands before it to look on what was done.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure alone. Closed, it passes the subtractive test: the Annunciation is the promise, the seers foresee it, the two Johns name the Church, the donors kneel; no field could go. In the open lower register the four groups on the wings converge on the Lamb, and the fountain carries the sacrifice toward the viewer; the lost Judges are required by that scheme. What holds the axis lowest is the joint between the registers: a row of near life-size figures on separate grounds above, one landscape of small figures below. The Deësis does not need the meadow, and the meadow does not need Adam and Eve.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Two disclosures can be stated. The first is that the visible world, seen exactly, is where the sacred is: the plants of the meadow are identifiable species, the jewels are painted facet by facet, and the basin and towel of the Annunciation stand in a Flemish room, so that looking becomes devotion. The second is social. Salvation is a gathering of every estate, from judges and soldiers to hermits, virgins and pagan poets, converging on one sacrifice, and the donors kneel in the Virgin’s light. Held below the top because much of this is inherited doctrine, the communion of saints, All Saints and Revelation 7, and some of the force is calm radiance rather than meaning.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Elevation here is radiant rather than dreadful, and it recurs from panel to panel: the open view, a wall of colour after the grey; the enthroned figure of the Deësis, the crown at his feet and the jewelled hem; Adam and Eve at near life size, flesh among brocades; the singing angels, faces strained with different notes; the Lamb under the dove’s rays, the meadow running back to the city. The empty room of the Annunciation has its own quiet height. Terror enters only in the small grisaille of Abel’s murder. Held from the top by the scale of the lower figures: the Adoration elevates by clarity and plenty, not by mass.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built: the structure of the object carries the history of salvation. Closed, it shows the promise of the incarnation in a burgher’s room, with the foreseers above. Opened, it shows the end of time: the Lamb of Revelation 5 on an altar, the fountain of Revelation 22, the elect converging from four directions, the Fall at its edges. The opening of the wings is a revelation in the literal sense, an unveiling, and the painted altar stood above the real one. Every figure stays particular, down to the pilgrims’ faces. Held below the top because the apocalyptic and eucharistic patterns are inherited whole: what is built is the arrangement and its mechanism.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is the gold-ground tempera altarpiece and the International Gothic, with the Limbourg brothers’ landscapes at its furthest reach. The departure: a meadow, hills and a city in place of gold, at the scale of an altar; Adam and Eve at near life size as observed bodies; the two Johns as painted stone and an Annunciation in a real room; oil glazes carried through a polyptych. The stake was real, though no censure is on record: an untried naturalism across twenty faces of the largest panel commission of its region, one painter dead mid-work. Held off the top because the turn was not the Van Eycks’ alone: the Master of Flémalle was moving the same way.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The work knows what it knows through the hinged polyptych. Closed, it is grey stone, a domestic room and two kneeling burghers; opened, colour, flesh and paradise. The form performs the passage from promise to fulfilment and from image to presence: the two Johns of the closed state are statues, and in the Deësis the Baptist is alive. Substitute a single panel or a fresco and the two times, the act of opening and the rhythm of weekday and feast are lost. The glaze carries the argument about the particular. Held below the top by the joint between the registers, here the form’s own seam.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: nearly six centuries of re-examination, open on meaning as well as fact. Is the enthroned figure God the Father, Christ, or the Trinity in one figure? What, if anything, did Hubert paint? The quatrain names him first, and some scholars have doubted that his part can be found at all. Was the polyptych planned as one or put together from separate works, a question that turns on what it means? The plants, the towers and the riders’ portraits are still being identified, and the recent campaigns reopened the surface itself. Held a step below because more of the disputes concern authorship and fact than meaning.
Score: 9.4 / 10
On view since 1432, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what painting could be: the visible world rendered in oil glazes, at monumental scale and in a sacred programme, set the terms of Netherlandish painting and changed European painting’s idea of description. Much of the reach belongs to Jan’s other panels and to the Master of Flémalle, and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a site of pilgrimage for painters, copied and described within its first century, praised by Dürer in his diary in 1521, and followed by Rogier, Bouts, Hugo van der Goes and Memling, and by the Italian reception of Flemish oil in Antonello and the Portinari altarpiece.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over 594 years and through much: iconoclasm in 1566, survived by hiding in the tower; the central panels in Paris from 1794 to 1815; the wings sold, dispersed to Berlin and sawn through to part their faces; theft in 1934; seizure and a salt mine in 1942–1945; centuries of overpaint. The surface is little fixed to its moment: Burgundian dress reads as the furniture of paradise. What holds the axis is that the work did not survive whole. The Just Judges, a whole group of the procession, is lost, and another hand holds its place. Survival with a twentieth of the faces gone is still survival; the loss is permanent.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as command of oil glazes on oak panel at the scale of a polyptych. The making is load-bearing everywhere: reflections in jewels and armour; brocade, fur, the brass basin, and stone that reads as stone in the grisailles; the meadow of the Adoration, plant by plant; Adam and Eve, observed and foreshortened from below; a range from near life-size figures to faces a few millimetres high, in one technique. The making carries the meaning: the theology of the particular exists only because the hand can render it. The costs are small: the registers are at different scales, a fault of conception more than of craft. The replacement Judges are neither credited nor debited.
Score: 9.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the grisaille Baptist, a painted statue in a niche on the closed exterior, and the Lamb in the open meadow. They obey one law. Everything is a body or a thing under one natural light, and the sacred is made of the world’s matter: stone, flesh, wool and water obey one optics. The range runs from a domestic room to the end of time. What resists is a second law. Above, near life-size figures stand on separate grounds; below is one deep landscape of small figures under a high horizon. Two physics of size and space meet at a hard line, and nothing in the image reconciles them.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: the sacred, in the vertical from the enthroned figure through the dove to the Lamb; history, from the Fall and the first murder to the Annunciation; the social order, every estate converging; the city, in the donors’ civic world and a heavenly Jerusalem of real towers; the natural order, in the meadow, water and sky; the body, in Adam and Eve; music, in the singing and playing angels. The opening and the procession place each, so they are integrated. What is held weakly is consciousness, since the faces are calm, and labour beyond the pilgrims’ road; the family appears only as the donor couple.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.2 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, with The Swerve, The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 9.4. A command of oil on panel that is load-bearing in every face, a polyptych that set the terms of Netherlandish painting, and a form that performs its argument in the act of opening.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.7 and The Inner Law at 9.0, one fact seen twice: the hard joint between a row of near life-size figures above and a single landscape of small figures below. Between them, The Unconcealment at 8.8, where the disclosures are the painting’s but the doctrine is inherited, and some of the force is calm rather than meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.8, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, The Swerve at 9.4, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Unconcealment at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 8.7, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.1. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the polyptych as it stands — twelve panels and twenty painted faces, closed and open, completed in 1432 — as restored by KIK-IRPA in campaigns completed in 2016 (the exterior) and 2019 (the lower interior register), and of how it was made and what was done to it afterwards. No image or written source was consulted, and the present state of the upper interior register, under treatment in a third phase, could not be verified. Commissioned by Joos Vijd and Elisabeth Borluut for their chapel in the church of St John, Ghent, now St Bavo’s Cathedral. Hubert van Eyck, named first in the frame’s quatrain, died in 1426; his share cannot be separated, and nothing is credited to either painter alone. The Just Judges now in the frame is a modern replacement by Jef Van der Veken for the panel stolen in 1934: it is another hand’s work and is credited on no axis, and the loss counts only as a fact of how the work survived. The overpaint removed by the restorers, and any retouching that remains, are likewise neither credited nor charged. The quatrain is quoted in the standard transcription, its chronogram line checked to sum to 1432; the Virgin’s words are Luke 1:38 as painted. Figures that could not be verified, among them the exact dimensions and the number of figures in the Adoration, are not given.