Early Flemish Portraits 1425-1525: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ...

27. It has been proposed that each
sentence of the carefully composed
inscription in Jan van Eyck's Portrait
of Jan de Leeuw contains a
Roman-numeral chronogram, a
type of sophisticated word puzzle
popular among humanists of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The inscription reads: -IAN DE
[lion pictogram replaces Leeuw]
OP SANT ORSELEN DACH / DAT
CLAER EERST MET OGHEN
SACH 1401 -/GHECONTERFEIT
NV HEEFT MI IAN /VAN EYCK
WEL BLIICT WANNEERT BEGA[N]
1436. (underscoring added for emphasis;
see p. 35 for translation).
If each w is counted as vv (twice
5), the Y as I (1), and the D's
discounted-at the time the picture
was painted, D (500) had not been
used in dates for almost half a
century-the first sentence tallies
M (1000) ccc (300) LL (100)
I(1) = 1401, and the second
MCCCLL (1400) vvvvvv (30)
IIIImm (6) = 1436. Hence the lion
pictogram-to avoid LEEVW with
its three V's. However, if the Y is
not counted as I, and if the M's,
C's, and L's are discounted, the second
sentence contains a different
chronogram: vvvvvvIrll (35),
the sitter's probable age. The portrait
would then commemorate specifically
Jan de Leeuw's thirty-fifth
birthday. Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna
memorial of some sort. In this regard, the parapet
deserves special consideration. The simulated
deterioration of the chipped and cracked
stone denotes recognition of the transience of
the material world, and hence, of the vanity
of all earthly pursuits, even of the attempt to
establish a lasting memorial. Although the
artist's technical skills enabled him to create an
image that seems to have captured life and preserved
it for more than five and a half cen-
turies, he used that same skill to acknowledge,
with this worn ledge, the impermanence of
physical stuff The eternal quality of spiritual
values is thereby implied.
The sensibilities evident in these two portraits
by van Eyck are manifestly apparent in
the most engaging early Flemish portrait at
the Museum, the Portrait of a Carthusian (figs.
6, 28) painted in 1446 by Petrus Christus, van
Eyck's most gifted follower. Like van Eyck,
Christus recognized that a portrait's restricted
field of vision seemed arbitrarily cropped be-
cause of the heightened illusion of form. He
sought here to validate the cropping by including
in the painted field a simulated frame
that functions as an aperture. The frame appears
to be marbleized at the sides and top,
and at the lower edge it imitates red hardstone