INTRODUCTION
Admiration has always been accorded to early Netherlandish painting due to its visual realism, the way it seemed to reproduce, on a two-dimensional surface, aspects of the world we see around us. Writing in 1456, the Italian historian Bartolomeo Fazio marveled at a now lost work by Jan van Eyck where:
there is a lantern in the bath chamber, just like one lit, and an old woman seemingly sweating, a puppy lapping up water, and also horses, minute figures of men, mountains, groves, hamlets, and castles, carried out with such skill you would believe one was fifty miles distant from another. But almost nothing is more wonderful in this work than the mirror painted in the picture, in which you see whatever is represented as in a real mirror.
Over five hundred years later a modern commentator, writing about van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait [FIG. 25], echoed Fazio's fascination:
A simple corner of the real world had suddenly been fixed on to a panel as if by magic. Here it all was – the carpet and the slippers, the rosary on the wall, the little brush beside the bed, and the fruit on the window-sill. It is as if we could pay a visit to the Arnolfini in their house.
Today we may realize that fifteenth-century observers like Fazio were describing early Netherlandish painting in ways to a great extent determined by the categories and conventions of ancient writings on art – ancient writings that they were in the process of rediscovering. Apparent imitation of the visible world was such a category. But as the modern quotation given above reminds us, we are still seduced by this quality in the art. And we have great difficulty seeing such painted realism for what it was: a complex artistic device mingling convention, idealization, and conscious manipulation with direct, first-hand observation.
We do know that the apparent visual accuracy of early Netherlandish painting mattered to patrons and artists alike. The images themselves are perhaps enough evidence to prove this point, but literary documents provide striking substantiation of it as well.
