Jan Van Eyck's “Chancellor Rolin and the Blessed Virgin”

Abstract

According to Johan Huizinga, in his famous study, The Waning of the Middle Ages, the art of the brothers Van Eyck is pictorially a new form of expression, but intellectually a coda to the Middle Ages. Their “naive, and at the same time refined naturalism” satisfies a late Medieval “craving to turn every sacred idea into precise images.” Jan Van Eyck's Chancellor Rolin and the Blessed Virgin illustrates a “boundless passion for details”; and Huizinga asks his reader, “Are not unity and harmony lost in this aggregation of details?” Such details, he says, are anecdotal, the result of a “striving to render the beauty of nature.”