Jan van Eyck: The Play of Realism (review)

Twenty years after the first publication of Craig Harbison’s Jan van Eyck: The Play of Realism comes this updated and expanded version of the popular text. Harbison’s commitment to his original argument and its format are reflected in the decision to leave the chapters of the first edition untouched (but for a handful of minor changes), which allows earlier incarnations of this book to remain almost as useful. The second edition, however, includes a new preface, an extended afterword, and an updated bibliographic commentary as a means of integrating the last twenty years of Eyckian research into the book.

In the core chapters, Harbison presents a string of intimate readings of Van Eyck’s works, concentrating on the artist’s images of the Virgin and Child. Harbison situates Van Eyck and his patrons in a liminal space of their own design, negotiating between a variety of oppositions: convention and innovation; institutional religion and private devotion; spirituality and worldliness; sincerity and irony; humility and self-promotion. Harbison reads details of Van Eyck’s paintings to reveal instances of intentional slippage between these opposing categories. It would seem that Van Eyck and the patrons that he so carefully presented brought a measure of pragmatism to the construction of these images; dependent as their fortunes were on power politics in courtly and ecclesiastical circles, patrons like Nicolas Rolin and George van der Paele commissioned works that can sometimes be read to show a deep-seated skepticism about the authority of received social and religious structures and strictures. Harbison consciously and patiently attempts to orient his readers away from art historical currents that would see Van Eyck’s panels as pictorial manifestations of complex religious doctrine, since such views deny the primacy of the visual (accordingly, the Ghent Altarpiece gets short shrift). Rather, Harbison asserts that the personal circumstances and histories of Van Eyck’s patrons can help explain the idiosyncratic details of the artist’s panels. Van Eyck’s distinctive brand of realism creates visually convincing yet idealized worlds that reflect the personal needs and aspirations of the individuals who commissioned the works.

The most noteworthy features of the second edition of Harbison’s book are its new preface and its afterword. The latter recapitulates and extends the arguments made in the earlier chapters while taking into account some of the notable Eyckian scholarship of the intervening two decades. Harbison draws on technical analyses of Van Eyck’s work, using infrared reflectograms to support his claim that the artist’s positioning of his holy figures and his portrait sitters was contrived and subtly adjusted to create and emphasize psychological connections. Harbison next uses research into Van Eyck’s feigned stone frames and textual inscriptions in and around the paintings to further his thesis concerning the artist’s playfulness—such experimentations emphasize Van Eyck’s interest in cultivating meaningful ambiguities around time, materiality, and local history. Finally, a few dense and hurried paragraphs mention newly uncovered biographical information about Van Eyck’s sitters that bear on Harbison’s interpretations. The near list-like presentation gives a good sense of the unresolved yet evolving questions concerning the artist’s patrons. However, it reads at times like an anonymized version of Harbison’s bibliographic commentary and is one of the few instances where minor revisions to the original chapters might have been preferable. Harbison’s afterword precipitates a new section in the bibliographic commentary, and it is among the back pages of the book that some of the more recent Eyckian scholarship is explicitly acknowledged. In turn, this expansion is reflected in the addition of seventy-five sources to the bibliography itself.

Harbison’s new preface reflects on the critical reception of the first edition and reiterates the author’s unwavering mission to move Eyckian scholarship away from elaborate theologically minded iconographic readings. The author acknowledges that the decision to annotate the text with a running bibliographic commentary rather than endnotes left the book open to criticism and has excluded it...