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

1. One of the most important
monuments of early Netherlandish
realism, this triptych, painted by
Robert Campin about 1425-35,
nevertheless displays certain discrepancies.
Whereas the room of the
Annunciation (center) and the
workshop of Saint Joseph (right) are,
judging by the window views, well
above the street, the donor (left) is
clearly at ground level. Also, the
donor's panel has a greater natu-
ralness than does the Annunciation
scene, in which space is abstracted.
Thesefeatures must have been deliberately
devised to differentiate
between secular and sacred realms.
Central panel, 25/4 x 247/8 in.;
each wing, 253/8 x 103/4 in. The
Cloisters Collection, 1956 (56.70)
Early Flemish Portraits
1425-1525
t is frequently observed that the rise of the
portrait during the Renaissance was a logical
result of man's rediscovery of himself in
a newly anthropocentric age. It is less often
observed that northern European artists were
the first, in the early 1400s, to perfect the technical
means to paint in a style particularly
suited to the creation of lifelike portraits. The
oil-base medium, first exploited to the fullest
by Hubert and Jan van Eyck (giving rise to the
legend of their invention of it), allowed painters
to simulate the appearance of the real
world with all its variety of textures and nuances
of light and shadow. Flemish paintings,
particularly portraits, were admired in Italy
precisely for the naturalness this technical perfection
allowed. In 1456 Bartolomeo Fazio, a
Genoese humanist at the Neapolitan court of
Alfonso V of Aragon, expressed such appreciation
in his description of the donors' portraits
on a now-lost triptych by Jan van Eyck.
Fazio wrote, "On the outer side of the same
picture is painted Battista Lomellini, whose
picture it was-you would judge he lacked
only a voice-and the woman he loved, of
outstanding beauty; and she too is portrayed
exactly as she was."
During the fifteenth century the leading
painters of Ghent, Bruges, Tournai, Brussels,
and Louvain made for their patrons images
that appeared real and alive, be they mysteries
of the Church, such as the Incarnation, or portraits
of a wealthy and powerful local patrician
and his wife. These artists observed and recorded
the visual properties of the physical
world more closely and carefully than had
ever been done before. Theirs was the power
to create the illusion of a reality in which mortal
and divine beings met. An awareness of
this capability led them to develop a refined,
internally logical system of pictorial representation
that distinguished between levels of reality
and often separated the temporal from
the sacred.
In Robert Campin's Triptych of the Annunciation
of about 1425-35 (fig. 1), which includes
the earliest Flemish portraits at the Museum,
the artist has taken obvious care to give his
subjects a convincing physical presence. His
desire to represent the mystery of the Incarnation
as timeless yet real has caused him to set
the Annunciation in a fifteenth-century domestic
interior. The observation of natural detail
is so thorough that objects consistently
cast their multiple shadows in accord with the
various light sources. A similar degree of pictorial
sophistication is exhibited in the panel of
the male donor, who, with his hat in his
hands, kneels reverently. Although the door
before him opens onto the Annunciation
scene, the donor is framed in a space of his
own, out-of-doors and apart from the inner