Staying Home with Jan van Eyck - Coronavirus Blues (VIII)

Museums and art galleries are among the first things that I will seek out when we are eventually released from lockdown. Curiously though, I am not feeling culturally starved of art and, despite initial scepticism, have been pursuing aesthetic nourishment online. Whilst at home, I have had a wonderful introduction to the Belgian Symbolist Léon Spilliaert through a film that drifts leisurely through a temporarily closed show at The Royal Academy. And whilst I felt that the resolution and sharpness of the film could have been stronger, I cannot wait to see these moody and melancholic watercolours in real life. Confinement has also allowed me, paradoxically, to travel to Saint Petersburg and take in some Soviet era Social Realist art in an exhibition that features the Modernist Aleksandr Deyneka. Paintings that would ordinarily have been immediately dismissed as clumsy and soulless exercises in propaganda, have revealed hitherto hidden nuance. This exhibition is available on the website of the Manege Central Exhibition Hall, and although a first run-through of the virtual tour resulted in my computer crashing, the second attempt, for reasons that I can't fathom, was glitch-free and provocative.     

Still, what was missing from these two online exhibitions was the sense of presence and closeness that you get from standing immediately in front of a painting. Getting up close, without tripping security wires; lingering, letting your gaze drift to the left and right, changing the angle of vision: the absence of these things left me itching to see these images in the flesh. However, not so with my favourite lockdown discovery so far, a website dedicated to that great master of the Northern Renaissance Jan van Eyck.

The 'Closer to Van Eyck' project is a forensic joy. It's not just that you can get close to Van Eyck's paintings; you can get impossibly close, encountering a level of detail way beyond what could be achieved in situ. Indeed, the access that the website's magnifying facility gives you to The Ghent Altarpiece is simply astonishing. Julian Bell's wonderful essay in The London Review of Books drew my attention to the project, pointing out how individual species of bird could be recognised in one tiny section of the work: rooks, blackbirds, geese, a stork and a kestrel. Below is an ordinary online reproduction of the whole of one of the altarpiece panels.

Jan van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece (1432)

The area that Bell is focusing on is the section to the right of the angel with watermelon wings. Using the 'Closer to Van Eyck' website, let's zoom in on that area, to the left of the mullion. Explore just how close you can get. Indeed, even standing in front of this majestic work in St. Bavo's Cathedral, would leave you hard-pressed to turn ornithologist.

The site is an art-lover's worm-hole, no doubt about it. After it's discovery, I spent the next few hours crawling, snail-like over its surface: taking a jeweller's loupe to the gems on the Deity's mitre; tut-tutting at the grubby state of Eve's fingernails wrapped around the fateful apple; the rough, greying stubble on the lugubrious face of Joos Vijd; the gold pin, less than three-millimetres in length, in the head-scarf of Elizabeth Borluut; the violent wound on the Lamb of God, blood the colour of claret gushing steadily into the chalice.

Jan van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece (1432)

What joy, too, for any budding botanists with the time to list the huge array of flora in the fields around The Adoration of the Lamb. And that's all before you begin to pick out the moss and lichen spreading over damp stone. As I write, I'm once again lost in the wealth of detail that Van Eyck has included.

It wasn't just about the altarpiece, though. To my surprise, almost all of Van Eyck's works were accessible in this way. Without further ado, I sought out a favourite painting, The Arnolfini Portrait. As it's situated at London's National Gallery, I have easy access to this masterpiece, but never have I encountered it in this way.

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait (1434)

I knew exactly what I wanted to zoom in on. Thrusting the cursor between the two betrothed figures (yes, the man does look uncannily like Vladimir Putin), I magnified towards the back of the room, almost passing into the looking glass. The painted convex mirror is less than five-centimetres in diameter, yet you are able to drop right into it and make out two rudimentary figures, one of whom is surely the artist.

What delights me most about this website, and it's illustrative of exactly what am I missing at the moment, is the level of autonomy that you can exercise as you look. Whilst I enjoyed the Spilliaert video and the adventure in Soviet Social Realism, these online encounters with Van Eyck felt utterly personal. I was in control and it gave you that frisson that you get in an actual gallery. You are not corralled in by the boundaries of a controlled or frozen, flat image on a screen. Edge towards these paintings and the cracks in the paint are suddenly visible. Move away and the undamaged whole is restored.

What a time to be alive, then. It used to be, centuries ago, that you could only see the whole of The Ghent Altarpiece on certain occasions. As Hilary Mantel hints, when she has Thomas Cromwell and his Flemish lover visit the altarpiece in the final part of her Tudor trilogy, The Mirror and the Light:

'One day they went to Ghent together and stepped into the church of John the Baptist to say a prayer.  It is only on a feast day of the church that they open the doors of the great altarpiece to show you the crowds of angels and prophets flocking to the Lamb of God. Instead they saw the donors of the piece, portrayed on the outer doors.' 

We need not wait for a feast day to take in the whole of this breathtaking piece of art. And neither will quarantine result in a cultural famine that leaves us unable to take in such incredible and illustrious masterpieces.

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Postscript: In response to this piece I got a wonderful tip-off from @Bluebell118 on Twitter. The Frida Kahlo Museum - La Casa Azul or, in English, the Blue House - also provides a virtual tour. Take yourself off to Mexico City. It's well worth a colourful half-hour (or more) of your time.