Worldly van Eyck

Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (circa 1435) is both intimate and expansive. In the foreground of the painting a man kneels in prayer—eyes fixed, brow furrowed, lips tightly shut in silent devotion—before the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, who responds with a blessing and a slight twitch of his right foot. Behind them is a garden where birds mingle among flower beds; two men with their backs to us peer over its wall. Beyond them, mere centimeters of painted surface contain a landscape of impossible detail: tiny figures making discernible gestures stroll across a bridge; light and shadow play on the surface of a meandering river; snow-capped mountains blend hazily with the sky. On the right, church towers rise above busy city streets, while on the left the town gives way to quieter country roads weaving alongside tended fields. Although the distant view takes up far less space in the composition than the interior scene, no other element holds the eye for so long. It feels as though if you could only get closer you would see still more. The art historian Erwin Panofsky called the Rolin Madonna, for good reason, “the ne plus ultra in landscape painting.”

When I visited the exhibition “A New Look at Jan van Eyck: The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin,” which closed earlier this summer at the Louvre, I overheard a museumgoer directing half a dozen listeners to focus on the background. “Here,” the speaker said, pointing past the garden’s crenellated wall, “we cross from the realm of the terrestrial to the realm of the extraterrestrial.” What lay behind the desire to understand this Netherlandish masterpiece—among the treasures of the Louvre’s permanent collection—as a painting of visionary experience?

It is hardly a desire all the painting’s admirers have shared. In 1906 the archivist Anatole de Charmasse published the earliest known description of the Rolin Madonna, from an eighteenth-century manuscript in the municipal library of Rouen, France. The anonymous author, who saw the painting in 1705, identified the landscape not with heaven but with a specific place. “There are many little figures,” the author writes, “in addition to the city of Ghent and all the territories around it, which are represented so well and so delicately that one cannot imagine seeing anything painted better.” Never mind that Ghent, a city in present-day Belgium, is not bordered by mountains—to this observer van Eyck’s appeal lay in his ability to capture a recognizable world here on earth. Subsequent scholars have taken up this line of thought, proposing other referents for the town or its architectural elements.

In his influential Early Netherlandish Painting, first published in 1953, Panofsky put little stock in such efforts. He was a central figure in the rise of iconology—an art-historical method of interpreting a picture’s details by referring to textual sources rather than the observable world. In 1939 a scholar named Charles de Tolnay had proposed connecting the landscape in the Rolin Madonna to the celestial sphere; Panofsky elaborated on the idea and gave it popular currency. Van Eyck, he wrote, “wished to express the ultimate absorption of the whole present and the whole past in the fulfillment of the Last Days.”

In other words, van Eyck painted the earthly world so beautifully to direct our eye beyond it, to the time of the Last Judgment. The lilies in the garden of the Rolin Madonna could only be a reference to the Garden of Paradise, the river a reference to heavenly Jerusalem. Even the smallest detail in van Eyck was part of a “preconceived symbolical program.” Part of the appeal of Panofsky’s approach came from the lack of contemporary written sources on Netherlandish paintings, compared to those by fifteenth-century Italian writers. The possibility that Netherlandish paintings might themselves be read became a way to show that the art of the Northern Renaissance was as sophisticated as that of Renaissance Italy.

But it is hard to fix the meaning of every detail in a picture. Take the peacocks on the left side of the garden in the Rolin Madonna. Are they just rare, beautiful birds, or are they also moralizing symbols of pride? Can they be both? Is the waterway in the distant landscape the Meuse River that runs through the Netherlands, or does it represent the crystalline waters of salvation? At the root of such questions is another: What did van Eyck intend a painting like the Rolin Madonna to do?  

Sophie Caron, the curator of “A New Look,” took up that question with aplomb. The occasion for the exhibition was its recent restoration. Long obscured by layers of varnish that dampened its colors and the atmospheric effect of its landscape, now the Rolin Madonna has been returned to its full splendor. But the show not only explored the painting’s physical properties; it considered how the Rolin Madonna served its first owner and moved its early beholders. The exhibition let multiple interpretations of the painting’s function and significance coexist by bringing it into conversation with other work across media: illuminated manuscripts, sculptures, drawings, and paintings, including some of van Eyck’s. How, Caron encouraged viewers to ask, was this work seen and experienced, by whom, and at what proximity?

We cannot understand van Eyck’s landscape without understanding the person for whom it was painted: Nicolas Rolin, the man pictured before the Virgin and Child in the foreground. Rolin was the longtime chancellor to the most powerful ruler in fifteenth-century Europe: the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good. Over his almost half-century reign, Philip distinguished himself as a diplomat, a politician, and a patron of the arts. Rolin was at the duke’s side throughout, and he based much of his sensibility as a patron on the latter’s model.

Philip favored art that showcased his exceptional wealth and standing: costly embroideries, textiles, and goldsmiths’ work. These mobile media also suited the itinerancy of his court, which was continually on the move across a vast territory that stretched from the Netherlands to France. Van Eyck’s paintings could not compete in intrinsic value with Philip’s luxury commissions, but he had an unsurpassed ability to depict the precious fabrics and jewels that were the hallmark of Burgundian splendor. (Take, for example, the delicate gold threads shimmering throughout Rolin’s robe and the tiny gems dotting the gilded hem of the Virgin’s mantle in the Rolin Madonna.) This kind of skill brought him to the duke’s attention. In a 1435 document Philip affirmed that the artist would have a lifelong pension as a “very beloved” painter and a member of his court. According to Caron, van Eyck completed Rolin’s painting around that time.

Mobility was essential to the Rolin Madonna’s first life. At just over half a meter high and half a meter wide, the painting is not exactly small, but it is not hard to transport. It was designed as a portable object to be seen from two sides. As part of the Louvre’s efforts, the conservators restored the panel’s reverse, which van Eyck had also painted. The patterning corresponds to no known stone, but the back looks like some kind of green marble, speckled, streaked, and mottled so convincingly that it appears as though it would be granular and cool to the touch. At close proximity, it seems to transform, morphing into a murky pool, a vast galaxy, or a pure abstraction.

Caron argues that Rolin carried this painting with him for use in his private devotions but also showed it off when he had the chance. Other artists from the period—including manuscript illuminators in Paris, where Rolin often went on ducal business—evidently saw it, because they made work that responds to the composition. The relation between the Rolin Madonna and Rogier van der Weyden’s Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin (circa 1435–1440), which also progresses from devotional encounter to a walled garden and a river landscape, is trickier to untangle: the two artists were close contemporaries. Yet the other works in the exhibition make clear that there was nothing like the Rolin Madonna’s landscape before it, and that none of van Eyck’s followers equaled his achievement of depth or detail after. Bartolomeo Fazio, one of the artist’s admirers in fifteenth-century Italy, noted these remarkable qualities in a now-lost map of the world that van Eyck painted for Philip the Good. In the map, Fazio writes, you could distinguish “not only places and the lie of continents but also, by measurement, the distances between places.”

The world that van Eyck and Rolin moved through was full of pictures used like screens: wall-sized tapestries installed as sumptuous backdrops, which could be rolled up and taken from one setting to the next, illuminated prayer books that could be pocketed and consulted throughout the day. How different really, Caron asks, was the Rolin Madonna from a devotional manuscript? During his life the chancellor used this painting both as an aid to his prayers and as a marker of his social status. His patronage of van Eyck was too good to keep to himself.

Upon Rolin’s death, the Rolin Madonna began its second life as a commemorative object. The anonymous author who described the painting in 1705 encountered it in the Church of Notre-Dame-du-Châtel, a provincial site of worship in Autun, France, where Rolin’s family had a private chapel. It’s now impossible to say whether the painting was permanently installed within the chapel or brought out only on special occasions.

What seems evident is that from the start van Eyck designed the painting to accommodate its eventual function as a memorial for the man who commissioned it. The representational formula—Rolin in prayer before the Virgin and Child—was common to sculpted memorials from the period. These relief plaques, which show individuals piously preparing their souls for the afterlife, were not private. They were mounted in the walls of churches where visitors could offer prayers to help pave their subjects’ roads to salvation.

But van Eyck knew that Rolin needed more than faith to ensure a restful afterlife; he also had to endure the trials of the present. Here we return to the landscape. The argument for interpreting the background of the Rolin Madonna as extraterrestrial comes out of the writings of the early church fathers—out of the essential Catholic tenet that what we do in this life has everything to do with our fate in the next. As Rolin directed his prayers to the Virgin, he surely thought about that future. I would wager, however, that as he contemplated van Eyck’s painting his thoughts also circled back to more immediate concerns.

One detail that I had never observed, prior to the painting’s restoration, lies directly above the Christ Child’s blessing hand: an explosive fire that has engulfed at least one building in the distant town, with faint wisps of smoke suggesting that other homes and edifices will soon follow. It is a shock to discover. Rolin, who looked long and often at this painting, would surely have noticed it too. That distant fire is as definitive a sign as any that van Eyck painted Rolin into the real world, a world in which the chancellor himself was always putting out fires for a duke preoccupied with territorial expansion, campaigns abroad, or rebellions at home. There are no fires in heaven.