Van Eyck, Jan

Jan Van Eyck: Renaissance Realist (Basic Art)

Van Eyck left an indelible impression on Renaissance art and paved the way for future realist painters. This title in the Basic Art series features a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, cultural and historical importance, illustrations from the artist, and more.

Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens and Their Contemporaries

Painting and Politics in Northern Europe offers a chronologicalaccount of political engagement in works by early modern NorthernEuropean painters Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, PeterPaul Rubens, and Frans Snyders. Offering fresh interpretations ofcanonical paintings, Margaret Carroll illustrates how these artistsregistered their pictorial responses to the political events anddebates of their day. In those debates, the imagery of gender andpower was often intertwined. Considering a range of works, includingvan Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Bruegel’s NetherlandishProverbs, and Rubens’s Life of Marie de Médicis series,Carroll examines the ways in which these Netherlandish paintersseized on that imagery and creatively transformed it into the materialsof art.

The narrative follows the way painters responded to the emergence of “modern” theories of politics and natural law from the classical and medieval tradition. Carroll begins by addressing paintings that identify the natural order with consensual social relations in a stable political hierarchy, then turns to paintings that stress the struggle for mastery in a perilous and unstable world. These paintings may be valued not merely as historical artifacts of a bygone era but as interventions in a cultural discourse that continues to this day.

Aldo van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity

Aldo van Eyck: the Shape of Relativity is the first monograph on an architect whose poetic vision has exerted a far-reaching influence on architectural thinking since the Second World War. It is the story of an eventful career and an intensive study of an oeuvre. Far from limiting itself to architecture, this book deals primarily with the architect's ideas. It traces the roots of his thinking to early childhood, throwing light on his early passion for poetry, in turn related to the classical thinking of his father the poet P.N.van Eyck. It recounts his discovery of the twentieth-century avant-garde and of archaic cultures while in Zurich and Paris. It develops his role in Cobra movement and in 'de 8 en Opbouw', in international CIAM, and the dissident Team 10, and further in architectural education in Amsterdam and Delft. The book pays considerable attention to the concept of relativity, which Van Eyck regards as the foundation of the culture of the twentieth century. And, of course, the book includes a detailed examination of his projects and buildings, ranging from the children's playgrounds of Amsterdam and the Municipal Orphanage, from the introverted Sonsbeek Pavilion to the exuberant Auditor's Office in The Hague. The English edition of this indispensable study of the most eminent postwar architect of the Netherlands will be published on the 80th birthday of Aldo van Eyck. The book contains more than 600 illustrations, of which 100 are in colour, a bibliography of writings by Aldo van Eyck, a selected bibliography of literature about Aldo van Eyck and a list of designs and completed works. Francis Strauven is professor at the Academy of Art and Science in Brussels. From 1971 to 1992, he was editor of the magazines Wonen TABK and Archis, in which he wrote articles on Art Nouveau, Functionalism and contemporary developments. His publications include Bouwen in België (1945-1970), L.H. de Koninck (1980), L' Architecture en Belgique 1970-1980 (1981), Renaat Braem (1983), Aldo van Eyck's Orphanage, a modern monument (1987) and Jos Bascourt, art nouveau in Antwerp (1993).

Inventing van Eyck: The Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age

The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting 1430-1530

The emergence of early Netherlandish painting and its dissemination throughout Europe took place during one of the most intriguing epochs in the history of Western Europe. This age of transition from the late Middle Ages to early modern times was characterized by fundamental changes in economics, politics, religion, society, and—in its broadest sense—culture.

It is no coincidence that the art of Jan van Eyck, the Master of Flémalle, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling, and Gerard David flowered in the period that saw the formation and expansion of a mighty Burgundian state in the prosperous provinces of the Netherlands and the neighboring regions. The ever-growing political significance of Burgundy was reflected by the success of Burgundian culture abroad. From the outset, members of the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese business communities residing in Flanders, such as the Arnolfini and Portinari, took pride in commissioning works by Netherlandish painters that were eagerly sought after by the princes and urban entrepreneurs of their homelands. The Sforza of Milan sent their court painter to Bugatto to train with Rogier van der Weyden; Alphonso V of Aragon ordered his painter Dalmau to travel to the Netherlands; and Isabella of Castile appointed Juan de Flandes alongside other Northerners as her court painter. The presence of Netherlandish works of art in the South inspired Iberian, French, and Italian artists such as Jean Fouquet, Filippino Lippi, Antonello da Messina, Bartolomé Bermejo, and Nuño Gonçalves.

This book explores the complex artistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political relationships between Burgundian Netherlands and the Mediterranean. It offers a lavishly illustrated panorama of the work of Jan van Eyck and his followers, and focuses on their share in the development of painting in southern France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, reproducing many of the finest works of European Renaissance painting. 380 illustrations, 220 in color.

Jan Van Eyck: Two Paintings of Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata

The Marian Paintings of Jan Van Eyck

Jan van Eyck: The Play of Realism

Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)

Spanning more than 2,500 years in the history of art, this book demonstrates how the rise and diffusion of the science of optics in ancient Greece and the Mediterranean world correlated to pictorial illusion in the development of Western painting from Hellenistic Greece to the present. The spread of understanding of how light is transmitted, reflected, and refracted is evident in the works of artists such as Brunelleschi, van Eyck, Alberti, and Leonardo. The interplay between optics and painting that influenced the course of Western art, Summers says, persisted as a framework for the realism of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Goya and continues today in modern photography and film. With 12 color and 79 b&w illus.

The Art of Arts: Rediscovering Painting

The lovingly crafted little tome The Art of Arts might become a cult classic if there are enough Jan van Eyck fans out there--or enough readers who can chew their way through 775 footnotes--to make this work of special genius even an underground bestseller. It is filled with delectable details (for example, that an image of a mill in a landscape connotes a wanton woman, complete with a page of explanations why) and myriad perspicacious observations. In discussing such masterworks as van Eyck's Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, author Anita Albus draws the reader into a vanished world of alternative perspectives, painterly depths of color and atmosphere, and the mesmerizing minutiae of late-medieval and Renaissance symbolism. The last chapter of the book, "Of Lost Colors," combines metallurgy, history, meticulous scholarship, and the author's passionate comprehension of colors in a discussion of antique pigments and their physical properties and pictorial uses.

The book's mostly paragraph-long sentences may put off some readers, and the warm, wry, even sly prose--its liveliness, in other words--may raise the hackles of the dowdy art-historical crowd (not the stylish, open-minded one). But this miniaturist's view of the northern Renaissance will copiously reward those who peruse it slowly, especially artists. Although it is possible to become lost in some chapters, as Albus tiptoes unhurriedly toward some arcane, elusive point, in the end it's hard to resist the sort of book that declares of the late 17th century: "Research into arthropods was in the air." This volume is a work of art, complete in itself, meticulously ordered according to the artist's unique vision, and handsomely "framed" by a sensitive designer. --Peggy Moorman

There was a time, five hundred years ago, when science was regarded as an art, and art as a science. And in the contest between the senses, the ear, through which we had previously received all knowledge and the word of God, was conquered by the eye, which would henceforth be king. A new breed of painters aimed to reconcile the world of the senses with that of the mind, and their goal was to conceal themselves in the details and vanish away, like God. A new way of perceiving was born.

Anita Albus describes the birth and evolution of trompe-l'oeil painting in oils in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, focusing her attention on works by northern European artists—both major and minor. As a scholar, she stands in the tradition of Panofsky; as a painter, she is able to see things others have not yet perceived; as a storyteller, she skillfully describes abstract notions in a vivid and exciting way. Like the multilayered technique of the Old Masters, her method assumes an ability to distinguish between the different levels, as well as a talent for synthesizing them.

The first part of the book is devoted to the visibility of the invisible in the art of Jan van Eyck—his visual effects, perspective, artistic technique, and philosophy. The second and third parts are taken up with descriptions of the genres of "forest landscape," "still life," and "forest floor." In the midst of butterflies, bumblebees, and dragonflies, Vladimir Nabokov emerges as final witness to the survival in literature of all that was condemned to vanish from the fine arts. After a glimpse into the continuing presence of the past and some conjectures as to the future, the book's final part throws fresh light on the colored grains of the hand-ground pigments that were lost when artists' materials began to be commercially manufactured in the nineteenth century.

The Art of Arts is thus both a dazzling cultural history and the story of two explosive inventions: the so-called third dimension of space through perspective, and the shockingly vivid colors of revolutionary oil paints. Albus makes abundantly clear how, taken together, these breakthroughs not only created a new art, but altered forever our perception of the world.