Jan van Eyck: to be a pilgrim.

While the significance of our Catholic artistic heritage can often escape us in the modern world, beauty and art is integral to our humanity, as pointed out by Jean Cardinal Danielou in his book, Prayer as a Political Problem. He writes: "The world of beauty is the world of intermediary hierarchies which are irradiated with the glory that cascades down from the Trinity even into the formless opacity of matter. The beautiful is the world of forms between that which is above form, being the sphere of God, and that which has no form at all, being mere matter. The modern world shuts out that intermediate order. It recognizes nothing between scientific thinking and mystical possession, and in so doing denies completely the sphere which it is the function of art to reconstitute by giving back to the universe its depths."

In our March article "Vatican treasures in the United States" (pp. 17-20), we recalled the Holy Father's exhortation that our rich Catholic cultural heritage can serve as a means of catechises and evangelization. The following pages focus on Jan van Eyck, the Flemish master who, along with his brother Hubert, was once popularly credited with inventing oil painting. There are only 22 known works of van Eyck in the world today, many of them vibrant visual articulations of the Catholic faith which imbued the culture of the time. Here, Toronto author and art lover Mary Willan Mason tells of her efforts to view the exhibition and gives details on the life and work of van Eyck.

For a baptized European of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to make a pilgrimage to a specially sanctified place was so much expected of one, it could be thought of as a requirement to demonstrate one's faith. Our forebears felt compelled to leave the comparative safety of their own hearths and go on pilgrimage, a wearying, sometimes terrifying, life- threatening trudge along muddy rutted roadways that bore no resemblance whatsoever to a super-highway.

It seemed as though a twentieth-century pilgrimage might be in order when I learned of a special exhibition in the National Gallery in London this past winter of the paintings of Jan van Eyck. This Flemish painter (born c. 1385) was active from 1421, and died in 1441. The paintings were gathered from Washington, Turin, and Philadelphia and added to the National Gallery's own holdings.

I had planned to be in London while the exhibit Recognising van Eyck was on view. I added a one-day-hop on the Chunnel to Brussels, with a quick train ride to Ghent where van Eyck's masterpiece The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb is in the Cathedral of St. Bavo; back on the train to Bruges for his Virgin and Child with George van der Paele in the Groeningen museum; and back by train to Brussel's Midi station. It was an ambitious day, but it could be done.

From London's Waterloo Station to Brussel's Midi takes two hours and forty minutes by Eurostar, a smooth, easy restful way to begin an eight-hour concentrated journey. Thus, thanks to contemporary technology of Eurostar and Eurail, it was a pilgrimage to absorb the glorious works of adoration created by what must have been a spiritual man of singular gifts.

Jan and Hubert

Jan, and his brother Hubert van Eyck, might have approved of so unusual a plan. They were innovators, too, who experimented with oil bases for their pigments which gave painting, for the first time, the depth of colour and brilliance that has not faded in over five hundred years. The influence of the Flemish brothers on the artists of the Italian Renaissance was profound. Nothing is known about Hubert other than that he began The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, which Jan completed in 1432.

So having arrived in Brussels mid-morning, the quest started off, most appropriately, when a friendly Brusseler, in giving me directions to the first stop. The Royal Museum, pointed out the heroic sized statue of a man on a horse in front of the Royal Palace, Geoffrey of Bouillon, the leader of the First Crusade who set off in 1095 on his charger, a Belgian Heavy. He travelled east to Jerusalem and I was going west to Bruges, but I saluted him nevertheless.

Life of van Eyck

Jan van Eyck lived in Bruges (Brugge in Flemish) and painted very few works that we know of in his twenty years of activity. He was active at a time when there seemed to be a craze for cult statues and painted figures to appear to come to life. Whether Canon van der Paele had ever had such a specific miraculous vision does not matter now, but he engaged van Eyck to paint him as though this were his experience with St. George in armour pressing him forward to gaze upon the Holy Mother and her Child flanked by Saint Donatian, whose church the Canon had liberally endowed.

Although the Canon held several benefices in the Low Countries, he lived in Bruges, one of the most important ports of the Hanseatic League, a rich and thriving business centre. An adroit and crafty entrepreneur, a scribe, `albreviator litterarum aposticlarum' in the papal curia from 1387 until 1417, the Canon survived political upheaval (during the Great Schism) serving Popes and pseudopopes Urban IV, Boniface IX, Alexander V, John XXIII and Martin V, always coming out on top.

Even with memories of the Arnolfini double portrait and the Annunciation from Washington, and the others in London, it is here, in this Flemish city, that van Eyck's genius becomes clear. The Madonna embodies what he imagined as perfection, beautiful with more than human beauty; her eyes have an expression of utmost compassion and understanding. The baby looks on in some alarm and it has been suggested that he was disturbed by the clank of St. George's armour.

But it is the Canon we look at most closely, that wily fellow, with all the human frailties we recognize in ourselves. No wonder the faithful of the fifteenth century were so struck by van Eyck's portraiture. Even now to find a fellow human being in the presence of such perfection is sobering.

Adoration of the Mystic Lamb

Now it was back on the train to Ghent. Trains in Belgium are fast and frequent and easy to figure out. St. Baaf or Bavo Cathedral with its towers dominates the skyline, with the west doors overlooking St. Baaf Square. The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb is Jan's extraordinary masterpiece, in a polyptych in twenty four separated paintings, a glorification of the heavenly apotheosis of salvation by the sacrifice of Christ.

From Adam, surmounted by the sacrifices of Cain and Abel, to Saint Christopher leading pilgrims, the opened polyptych portrays the principals of our salvation. There is God the Father in majesty in the centre, overlooking the Divine Lamb who, in turn, is surrounded by prophets of the Old Testament, the writers of the New Testament, confessors, virgins, the Holy Ghost, the Jerusalem of Heaven, and the Fountain of Life.

When the doors are closed, twelve separate sections show the prediction of salvation, prophets, sibyls, Gabriel and the virgin Mary, St. John the Baptist who was the patron of the church in van Eyck's lifetime, and St. John the Evangelist, flanked by the donor and his wife. Together the paintings make one of the most powerful and ambitious holy works ever attempted.

There is a sign that pleads for silence in the small baptistry chapel where the altarpiece has been moved for greater security, but the profound effect of the work on the viewers is such that the sign is hardly necessary. It took Hubert and Jan eight years to complete, and for well over half a millennium admirers have come to marvel, to ponde,r and to contemplate.

There are many other wonders in Bruges and Ghent, and indeed throughout Belgium, but they will have to wait till another visit. It is time now to take the train back to Brussels and board the Eurostar for the two hour and forty minute return ride through the Chunnel to London, a short interlude of solitude and introspection, a reaffirmation of faith, solace, and spiritual growth before returning to the busy world again.

Sidebars

Chunnel tickets to Belgium, or to France, may be secured by contacting Rail Pass Express, Inc., 2737 Sawberry Blvd., Columbus Ohio 43245. Tel: [phone], Fax: [phone]; internet www.eurail.com They can also organize train passes and time tables. There is a toll-free order line at 800-772-7151 for groups or independent travellers. The London exhibit ended on May 31, 1998.