Hidden Symbolism in Jan van Eyck's Annunciations
1975; College Art Association; Volume: 57; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00043079.1975.10787151
ISSN1559-6478
Autores Tópico(s)Aesthetic Perception and Analysis
ResumoDuring the third and fourth decades of the fifteenth century, the new style of Flemish painting developed by Robert Campin and Hubert and Jan van Eyck created, for the first time in the history of art, the means to metaphorize adequately one of the central mysteries of Christianity: the miracle of the Incarnation, in which God took on human form. By disguising traditional religious symbols as the scrupulously observed objects of the artist's own world and time, by treating the very space and light of the pictures as symbols, these painters were able to create a world that was intimate and immediate and yet saturated with divine presence and sacred significance, a world in which the physical and spiritual interpenetrated, just as God and man coexist in the person of Jesus Christ. It is perhaps for this reason that the paintings of this period that deal with the subject of the Incarnation present the most innovative and complex interplay between naturalistically rendered detail and disguised symbolism, such as Campin's Nativity in Dijon, his Mérode Altarpiece,1 and Jan van Eyck's Annunciations in Washington and on the exterior of the Ghent Altarpiece. And it is especially in these two Annunciations, imbued as they are with what Panofsky has described as a “transfigured reality,” that the possibilities of this synthesis are most fully and effectively realized.
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