THE history, the principles, the motives, the methods of that mode of art which expresses itself in pictorial form are involved in more error and misrepresentation than happens in the case of any of its allies. For this the nineteenth century, and particularly the Teutonic nineteenth century, with its inability to understand art in any form save that of music, is chiefly responsible. Every effort has been made to isolate it as an independent form of art, to confine it to “easel painting” on panel or canvas, or to wall decorations conceived after the same fashion and on the same lines, to reduce it to certain schools and individuals and localities; in a word, to make it a highly specialised form of personal expression, like lyric poetry or theological heresy. This is to miss its essential character and deny its primary function.

Painting is the use of colour and the composition of lines and forms for sheer joy in this{220} particular kind of beauty; for the honouring of the most honourable things; for the stimulating of high and fine human emotion; for the symbolical (and therefore sacramental) expression of spiritual adventures and experiences that so far transcend the limitations of the material that they are not susceptible of intellectual manifestation. Painting is primarily and in its highest estate an ally and an aid of architecture, as are also sculpture and (in a less intimate degree) music, poetry, and the drama, all working together for the building up, under the inspiration of religion, of a great stimulus and a great expression. As a thing by itself it fails of half its power, but, like all the arts, it can be used in this way, though indifferently and only within certain limitations. To say, therefore, that painting as an art began with Giotto or Cimabue or Duccio, is absurd; there was great painting long before them, and some of it reached heights even they could not attain. Of course most of it is gone, vanishing with the destroyed or remodelled buildings, where it worked intimately with architecture, scraped off by “restorers,” whitewashed by iconoclasts, done over by easel painters, so it is hard to judge it justly, but a few fragments remain in France and Italy{221} that give some idea of its original power and beauty.

Similarly, illumination is not a handicraft or an industrial art; it was frequently great art of a very distinguished quality, and so was the painting of carving and sculpture, an art not disdained by the Van Eycks themselves. From the earliest beginnings of the Middle Ages there was great painting, and the Duccios and Massaccios and Memlings only added to it certain different, and not always admirable, qualities, while devising novel methods that made possible novel modes of expression.

And here enters another misconception that has done much harm: the Van Eycks did not invent oil painting, if by the phrase is meant the oil painting of the nineteenth century. This, the use of mechanically ground pigments already mixed with an oil medium, is a trick hardly more than a century old, and is a time-saving device for the obtaining (which it does not succeed in doing), at the least expenditure of time and thought, of the effects originally produced by the old method that held from the time of Hubert Van Eyck down to that of Sir Joshua Reynolds. This old method consisted in dividing the work of a painter into{222} three stages—drawing, modelling, colouring—each of which had to be done laboriously and to perfection. After the picture had been drawn completely and in every detail it was modelled in a thick underpainting of impasto with its varied reliefs and textures, and then the colour was applied; successive coats of transparent pigment, one imposed on the other, each being allowed to dry before the next was put on. The result was, amongst other things, that depth, resonance, and transparency of colour that mark the great painting of the past and are absolutely unobtainable by the use of the opaque and muddy pigments squeezed out of collapsible tubes. In this earlier method there was no short road to success; a painter could not sweep in his broad masses of paint with a few masterly strokes, masking his lack of proficiency in drawing by daring and theatrical brush work, and making amends for his opaque and unbeautiful colour by a stunning exhibition of a delusive chiaro-oscuro. Everything was built up laboriously and conscientiously; it was consummate craftsmanship, with much in common with stained glass, orfèverie, and even with architecture. No wonder a painter’s training frequently began with a goldsmith; it demanded the most exquisite and conscientious craft{223} and there was no substitute that a public trained in eye and quick in appreciation could be induced to accept. Temperament was no excuse for incapacity; daring brush work made no amends for lack of competence; for once painting was on a par with the other arts, and a painter was as much a master of craft, and as rigidly held to its highest standards, as a musician or a master builder.

Of course there always had been fresco-painting, and here the method was quite different, for the colour had to be applied swiftly and once for all to the wet plaster. Here the technique was direct and instantaneous, quite unlike that of panel painting, and though it was no more adaptable to the vagaries of temperamental expression, it opened up new possibilities of which painters were always trying to take advantage. Giotto himself, being the greatest master of this particular mode, was always working along these lines, and later Velasquez combined them with the possibilities inherent in the development of underpainting as a thing final in itself, without the laborious and studied glazing of successive coats of pure colour.

The art of painting was never a rigid and immobile system; every painter was striving for{224} new methods and new developments, and frequently finding them; in the end, as the old artistic sense died away, virtuosity took its place, and this found its opportunity through the elimination of all the old elements of craftsmanship and a development of the qualities of breadth and swiftness inherent in fresco-painting, together with the dash and bravura that offered themselves through the clever manipulation of the thick and solid and suave material of the old underpainting. In a word, the tendency was toward combining drawing, modelling, and colour in one process, obtaining final effects in one operation; and while this meant a possible slouching of drawing, a substitution of surprise and bravado for consistent modelling, a loss of all depth and resonance of colour, and the putting of a premium on such quite unimportant (and sometimes vicious) matters as dashing brush work, it must be admitted it did permit “temperament” to express itself with a swiftness and mobility impossible before, granting always that this is desirable.

Now in the working of this revolution the Van Eycks had no part whatever. They did not invent “oil painting” or anything like it. They{225} were the greatest painter-craftsmen ever known, and they and the generations that followed them in Flanders and Italy held faithfully to the old threefold mode of operation until Tintoretto, Velasquez, and Rubens began to merge the three in one and to lay the foundations for the present lamentable subterfuges of the Salon and the Royal Academy. What they did do was this: until Hubert’s time every painter had been searching for some medium which would not mitigate the perfect transparency of their hand-ground colours and would dry quickly. All kinds of viscous things had been employed—white of egg, fig juice, and other less seemly media—but none was wholly satisfactory. Oil was the natural thing, but oil was an unconscionable time in drying. Hubert Van Eyck found some oil medium (or varnish) that dried quickly and this at once became the universal medium. It was a great discovery and a great boon, but it had nothing whatever to do with “oil painting,” which did not actually come into existence until the dark days of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, therefore the skirts of the Van Eycks are clear and we can absolve them of all responsibility.{226}

There never was a school of such consummate craftsmanship as this of Flanders. The Van Eycks, Memling, Van der Weyden were the most perfectly trained, the most comprehensively competent, and the most conscientiously laborious artists ever known; also they understood drawing, composition, and lighting as no others ever did, while their sense of beauty of colour, either in itself or in subtle and splendid combinations, was unique. They were not portents, sudden meteors shooting across a dark sky, they simply continued and developed a long and glorious tradition. Long before them the monasteries had been producing great art of every kind—frescos, illuminations, stained glass, embroidery, painted sculpture—and it was all art of the greatest. When Hubert painted the “Adoration of the Lamb,” he merely gathered together all these arts and manifested his enormous and astounding synthesis in concentrated form, and better than any one had ever done before. All the intricate delicacy of jewel work, all the vivacity of clean-cut sculpture, all the suavity of silken needlework, all the flaming splendour of stained glass are brought together here in one astonishing combination, and to this era-making synthesis is added the living light and the human appeal of the poignant beauty of the world, and the transcendent magic of the supernatural, sacramentally and visibly set forth.

This, which very well may be the greatest picture in the world (it does not matter), was ordered from Hubert Van Eyck when he was nearly fifty years old, he having been born about 1366 in the province of Limbourg and coming of a long line of painters. It was ordered by Jodocus Vydts, a worthy burgher of Ghent, as an altar-piece for a chapel he had built and endowed (according to the pious and admirable practice of those good Catholic times) in the Cathedral of St. Bavon. For ten years he worked at his masterpiece, and then death overtook him in the year 1426, when his work was only partly finished, when his brother, Jan, took it up and brought it to a triumphant conclusion in 1432. It is a great triptych of twenty-two painted panels and its preservation has been nothing short of miraculous. Philip II tried to carry it off in 1558, the Protestants to destroy it in 1566, and the Calvinists to give it away to Queen Elizabeth in 1578. It was nearly destroyed by fire in 1641, dismembered and packed away in 1781, carried off (parts of it) to Paris in 1794. In 1816 most of the wings were{228} sold to a shrewd dealer for $20,000 and by him to the Berlin Museum for $80,000; finally the Adam and Eve panels were taken to the Brussels Museum, and a set of copies attached to the mutilated remainder in the Cathedral of St. Bavon.

The work is one vast, comprehensive, and sacramental manifestation of the central Catholic sacrament of t............