Jan van Eyck and Manuscript Illumination

Jan van Eyck has “never not been famous.” The most gifted Flemish court painter is the subject of today’s podcast, prompted by the recent exhibition Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent. Host Sandra Hindman sits down with two leading scholars working on van Eyck; Dominique Vanwijnsberghe and Lieve de Kesel. They discuss both scholar’s contributions to the catalogue Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, and cover some of the most pressing questions concerning the artist. Was van Eyck a manuscript illuminator as well as a painter? The answer rests within the Turin-Milan Hours. Were Flemish painters following van Eyck paying tribute to the great artist, or were they perhaps working from model books? And why does Jan van Eyck remain inimitable, why is there no “Eyckian” school of painting? Dominique Vanwijnsberghe and Lieve de Kesel provide answers to all of these questions and more in today’s episode with Sandra Hindman.

This conversation was recorded at TEFAF in Maastricht, on Saturday March 7, 2020.