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Netherlandish painters gave a new dimension to religious experience. In their art the picture frame becomes a threshold into a world that had been described in writing but never before embodied in paint. The new vision of painting was given its fullest, most complex statement in Jan van Eyck’s astonishing Ghent Altarpiece (Sint-Baafs, Ghent), completed in 1432. It might, indeed, be argued that the Ghent Altarpiece defined realism as a vehicle of expression for the next five hundred years. Large altarpieces
were the focus of public religious practice, but equal in importance
were small paintings for private devotion: pictures that gave their
owners privileged access to the realm of the sacred. Patrons of these
works ranged from individuals in the court circle of the dukes of
Burgundy to merchants, confraternities, and members of religious orders.
Each category of patron had its own concerns, to which Netherlandish
painters—whether renowned artists such as Jan van Eyck or now-anonymous
practioners on the level of the Master of Saint Augustine—responded
with imagination and an unsurpassed representational technique. (Click on details for more information.)
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Van Eyck to Bruegel Home
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