Facing van Eyck. The Miracle of Detail

Facing van Eyck. The Miracle of Detail
(30.10.2020 > 17.01.2021)

BOZAR draws the Van Eyck year of 2020 to a close with an interactive digital exhibition that allows you to explore the mastery of the painter in the finest detail. 

Through a video projection based on extremely high-resolution images made by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA), you can navigate around the entire oeuvre of paintings by Jan van Eyck. Visitors can hop from one detail to the next, from the upper layer to the ground layer, or from one painting to another. This enables everyone to go on an intuitive and poetic journey through the universe of Jan van Eyck.

In partnership with Musea Brugge, the presentation also includes a video interview with Till-Holger Borchert, discussing the context of the work of Jan van Eyck and the influence of the Byzantine icons on the Flemish Primitives’ visual language.

"In Flanders, they paint with the intention of misleading the eye, or they paint things that make you happy and that you can’t say a bad word about, such as saints and prophets. They paint cloth, masonry, green fields, shadows and trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, and with lots of figures scattered around.” – Michelangelo, 1548

Even in the 16th century, the great masters of the Italian renaissance spoke of the success of the Flemish Primitives’ paintings. It is beyond dispute that the pioneer of this detailed brushwork was Jan van Eyck.

Now, over six centuries later, his exceptional mastery still intrigues. For the Ghent Altarpiece, Closer to Van Eyckand the KIK developed a standardized protocol for high-resolution scientific documentation. Using this protocol as a starting point, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) has photographed over the past six years all the other paintings by Jan van Eyck and his studio in exactly the same way. This was part of the VERONA project (Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access, 2014-2020). Innovative digital techniques and new scientific research reveal fascinating details that you cannot see with the naked eye, layer after layer, from underlying drawing and preparation to the final painting. These high-resolution images are available to all at http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/.

Under the curatorship of Bart Fransen (KIK), this visual material will be reworked into an interactive visitor experience for Facing van Eyck for the first time. All twenty of the paintings attributed to Jan van Eyck, scattered among collections all over the world, are now brought together virtually in a single space. Through interactive video projections, the visitors take a highly personal journey through Van Eyck’s micro-cosmos, deciding for themselves where to look more closely. Whether they choose to zoom in on landscapes, architecture, textiles, human figures, everyday objects or to navigate from a lion in a painting from Vienna to a similar motif in a work from Antwerp, the visitors create their own route as they go. Music reinforces the experience, thanks to a soundscape created especially for the exhibition by Belgian composer Benjamin Glorieux.

Facing Van Eyck not only offers a poetic and scientific experience, but also places it in a broader context. Till-Holger Borchert – general manager of Musea Brugge and specialist par excellence in 15th-century painting - delves into the history of Van Eyck and places him in his historical, artistic, and religious context. By looking more closely into the reception and appropriation of Byzantine models in Van Eyck’s work, the richly illustrated film explores the religious and artistic exchanges between East and West in the 15th century.