Enjoy van Eyck. He was more than just a painter
It is being billed as the cultural event of the coming year — a “once-in-a-lifetime exhibition”. Next autumn, for the first time in history, the National Gallery will display all of Jan van Eyck’s portraits together. And this time the hype is actually justified. This exhibition won’t just be a window into the past. It will also, if this doesn’t sound too far-fetched, help answer one of the biggest questions facing us today: how profoundly will artificial intelligence affect our lives? But before we get to that, let’s talk about the paintings.
You could make a strong case that art as we know it — certainly portraiture — began with Van Eyck. Before the early Netherlandish master came on the scene, the profiles in most portraits, even those by fine artists, were essentially flat and featureless. Van Eyck’s were the first faces that were genuinely lifelike.
These were not just icons; they were humans.
Were the couple from the Arnolfini Portrait, probably his most famous such work, to pass you in the street, you would have no trouble recognising them — not something you could say about anyone in a Giotto fresco.
For me, though, what makes this exhibition especially interesting is something else, something that might first strike you as a little nerdy, but is, in its own way, rather mindblowing.
The conventional wisdom is that the Renaissance, in which Van Eyck played a critical role, is best thought of as a story of human enlightenment — a sequence of “aha” moments. All of a sudden, painters, first in northern Italy and then across much of Europe, including the Netherlands, began to grasp the importance of perspective. They twigged the need to create images that were true to life. These mental leaps changed the world for ever.
But a few years ago David Hockney came up with an intriguing counterargument. What if the thing that paved the way for the Renaissance wasn’t so much a collective brainwave as something else: technology? To be specific, optical technology.
The key context here is that at the very same time Van Eyck and many of the Italian Renaissance masters were painting, something else was happening too. Artisans on the island of Murano in Venice had cracked the secret of how to make breathtakingly clear glass. That glass enabled the production of, first, perfect mirrors and then, soon enough, lenses.
Not everywhere had access to these mirrors and lenses, the silicon technology of their day, but Van Eyck certainly did. Bruges, where he worked, was where much of the glass melted in Murano was honed and fashioned into lenses.
The painters and mirrormakers of Bruges belonged to the same guild.
If you make it to his exhibition next year, be sure to pause before the Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele. There, in the hands of the canon, you will see the first painterly depiction of a pair of eyeglasses.
But the most intriguing clue is in the Arnolfini Portrait, where, right in the middle, smack bang between the couple depicted, is a convex mirror. Turn that mirror inside out, says Hockney, and you have a sort of primitive lens you could use to project an image onto a wall ... or a canvas.
What if, wrote Hockney in his book, Secret Knowledge, Van Eyck had been using such a device to help him sketch the faces and details he would later paint over? What if he was actually tracing the outline of projected images instead of just painting by naked eye? That would help explain how he managed to paint the extraordinary chandelier in the Arnolfini Portrait — the sophisticated shading, the complex foreshortening of the arms as they reach towards the viewer — with barely any underdrawing or preliminary sketching.
It would also explain the other occasional hallmarks of optics in his works and those of later Renaissance masters. Sometimes the perspective shifts in the middle of the picture: a telltale sign that the artist has moved a lens.
Sometimes a detail is fuzzy, as if out of focus.
An image projected onto a canvas might go out of focus; the human eye does not.
Van Eyck, if you buy Hockney’s thesis (and it’s worth saying that many art historians do not), was not just a great painter. He also leveraged technology to enable him to depict the world in a breathtakingly novel way. And, as glass and lens quality improved in the following years, so too did artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Caravaggio and, later, Vermeer.
Mirrors and lenses were the silicon tech of the Renaissance
Say Hockney is right. Is Van Eyck, or Caravaggio, or Vermeer, any less of a genius because they might have traced some of the outlines in their work? Does it matter if the conventional wisdom is wrong, and the Renaissance was not purely a eureka moment but the product of exciting new tools, created by artisans and craftsmen? I ask the question because, well, here we are at a similar juncture. Much as 15th-century artists like Van Eyck embraced new creative tools, we have our own 21st-century silicon technology that threatens to disrupt art and creativity.
Artificial intelligence will, if some are to be believed, spell an end to art as we know it.
Today, AI will generate you a Van Eyck-style painting in a few seconds (I asked for Donald Trump holding a Melania Trump icon and the results were, well, amusingly uncanny).
For many visual artists, this is a crisis of unprecedented proportions. And it is certainly tempting to glance at AI-generated paintings and react as the artist Paul Delaroche did when he saw his first photograph nearly two centuries ago. “From today, painting is dead,” he is supposed to have said.
But photography didn’t kill painting, or indeed art. On the contrary, it opened the door for Impressionism, as artists sought out new forms of expression that recoiled from the merely photorealistic. It birthed new artforms, not least photographic art itself.
My hunch is that something similar will happen with AI, which is, rather like photography, just another tool, albeit a phenomenally powerful one. Tools like this always disrupt lives. They steamroller certain jobs and livelihoods. But over time we humans usually leverage them to create new jobs and to devise new art.
Two centuries from now I suspect we’ll look back on today’s AI fears in much the same way as we now regard that 19th-century panic over photography. After all, people are far more interested in the human beings wielding the tools than the tools themselves. The Van Eyck works in the forthcoming exhibition are just as magical and intriguing — maybe even more so — when you understand a little more about how he might have painted them.
Ed Conway is economics and data editor of Sky News. Dominic Lawson is away
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