(music) ("In The Sky With Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy"
Beth: We're going to have a look at
the Ghent Altarpiece.
Steven: It is absolutely breathtaking
and it's really complicated.
Beth: It is. It's made up of many, many panels.
It's a polyptych and those panels are
connected by hinges so they open and close.
Steven: Which means that we see this
set of paintings in two distinct ways.
We either see it opened or closed.
This is important because I think it would be
closed much of the year and opened on
feast days as a kind of revelation.
Beth: This would have had an elaborate frame.
Steven: There's some controversy about
actually who painted it.
This is generally ascribed to Jan Van Eyck.
Some suggest that his brother Hubert may have [done] it.
The frame was lost presumably during
the iconoclasm, that is the attacks on
Catholic art during the Reformation.
Beth: And we also know that this
painting is much coveted by the Nazis
and was actually stored in a salt mine.
We're lucky we still have it today.
We have at the top some figures with
scrolls and books.
Those are prophets and sybils who
predicted the coming of Christ,
the coming of the Messiah.
The moment that they predicted is
actually unfolding right below them,
and that is the scene of the Annunciation
where the angel Gabriel is announcing to
Mary that she is about to conceive Christ.
Steven: Gabriel over on the left panel,
Mary, three panels to the right,
and then wonderfully empty space,
not empty, in fact, this fabulous cityscape
and then a kind of still life on the
right middle panel, but nevertheless
an unoccupied set of spaces that suggest
the opportunity for Christ's arrival.
Beth: And we have the usual trappings
of the Annunciation.
The angel Gabriel holds lilies,
which are a symbol of Mary's purity,
her sinlessness, her virginity.
The angel Gabriel announces,
and you can actually see words
coming out of the angel's mouth in Latin;
"Hail Mary, full of grace,
blessed art thou among women."
Mary on the other side with the dove above her head
which represents the Holy Spirit,
and words coming out of her mouth.
Her reply to the angel Gabriel coming out
backwards, right to left instead of left to right,
and upside down,
"Behold the handmaiden of the Lord."
Backwards makes sense, right, because
she's speaking back to the angel.
It's very interesting that the words
are also upside down.
Steven: It makes us question who she's
speaking to, doesn't it?
Beth: Perhaps to God who's looking from above.
Steven: Everything in this set of panels
is very concrete and absolutely physical,
and yet those words, because they're gold,
but also because they're not attached
to anything physically represented,
are wonderfully ethereal and speak to God.
Beth: There is that tension between the writing which
is a very medieval thing to do.
It reinforces the flatness of the image,
and yet there's a tension between that
and as you said, the physicality of everything else;
a sense of space,
the objects that are depicted are
incredibly real as the light reflects on them,
that cityscape that goes out into
a distance where we can see figures,
shadows, buildings, birds or
that still life on the right where we see
the sunlight from the windows beautifully reflected,
attention to detail that is
very unique to the northern Renaissance.
Steven: These artists were miniaturists
and that attention to detail comes through
even on this large scale,
but we don't want to say that this is
the kind of naturalism or realism that
we would have seen develop
at this very time in Italy because it's not.
We're seeing a kind of awkward
linear perspective and
the figures themselves look as if
they might bump their heads if they
actually stood up in this room.
Beth: This space seems to rush back
and also, we're not seeing an attention to
the reality of the human body that
we would have seen in the Italian Renaissance.
We have a kind of drapery that seems to
have a life of its own with lots of angular folds.
It almost seems to hide the body underneath.
We should say that the altar piece is
11 and a half feet high.
It's really large.
It's made for a private chapel in
Saint Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent
that belonged to the patrons who we see below.
Steven: So we have four figures or two figures
and then two sculptures,
but that in and of itself raises a
really interesting visual trickery.
We take the figures who are dressed in red as real people,
and then the sculptures in the middle carved of stone,
but of course, this is all paint.
Beth: The figures who are represented as
sculptures are the two Saint Johns.
I think they had particular relevance for
the chapel and for the family.
It's also interesting to look at the patrons
because there's that thing that you always
see in the northern Renaissance which is
this amazing ability to represent different textures
because of course, the artist are using oil paint.
So that fur on his collar really seems like fur
and his skin really seems like skin of an old man.
Steven: And of course, oil paint will have
a profound impact on the sense of this painting,
but especially when we open it up.
(music) ("In The Sky With Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy"