A prosperous economic and cultural context
The Flemish Primitive movement originated in the prosperity of Flanders in the late Middle Ages. Bruges, a commercial hub, attracted rich merchants and bankers from many countries. Beyond the parishes or Christian patrons who wished to embellish their churches, we witnessed the emergence of these artists in vogue in the bourgeois salons in the fifteenth century, starting with Jan Van Eyck, in the service of the Dukes of Burgundy. His life is well documented in theHistorium Brugge. Many artists settled in his wake. Petrus Christus' clientele included the bourgeoisie and wealthy foreign merchants, like Hans Memling later. These paintings were commissioned primarily to illustrate religious scenes and portraits, more rarely narrative paintings and mythological subjects. Memling became the most sought-after portraitist in Bruges.
Unique painting techniques
Thanks to the new technique of glazing, this oil painting allows a luminosity and purity of colors, as well as an innovative transparency of shades. It uses natural pigments in powder, vegetable or mineral, linseed oil as a binder, turpentine as a solvent and natural resins as varnish. Gérard David, one of the last representatives of the Flemish primitives, was inspired by his predecessors to depict landscapes and the sky with a dramatic pictorial expression and the use of striking chiaroscuro and subtle modeling. An accomplished mastery of this oil technique. More consistent, this new oil paint allows a more meticulous finish; drying more slowly, it can be worked in a more meticulous way.
In addition, these paintings are done on painted wooden panels, usually oak, in the form of a diptych, triptych or polyptych, on both sides of each panel. The famous altarpiece of The Mystic Lamb by the Van Eyck brothers has no less than 12 panels and therefore 24 paintings! The viewer can admire different compositions, depending on whether the altarpiece is open or closed.
Edifying paintings of realism
The Mystic Lamb, begun by Hubert Van Eyck and completed by his brother Jan in 1432, is a founding masterpiece of this pictorial movement. The Van Eyck style is found in the reproduction of three-dimensional spaces in aerial perspective, in the plasticity of the forms and in the realistic representation of the characters and the decor. Jan Van Eyck brought the painting of details (especially the rendering of materials) to a level never reached before. The transition between the more iconoclastic medieval Gothic art and the humanistic Renaissance art takes on its full meaning here. After him, Petrus Christus took up his idea of realistic precision and added other forms of perspective. The other great pioneer of the Flemish primitives with Van Eyck is Robert Campin, who also produced realistic rather than symbolic representations of people, scenery or objects from the end of the 14th century. He sketched with a fascinating realism, through the prism of religious scenes, the daily life of the little people as well as the bourgeois, as in hisTriptych of the Annunciation. Trained in Campin's workshop, Rogier van der Weyden settled in Brussels and became the official painter of the city in the service of the Dukes of Burgundy. Inspired by Van Eyck's painting of The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin, he painted two altarpieces on Justice(The Justice of Trajan and The Justice of Archambaud) around 1450, which were unfortunately destroyed in a bombing during the Second World War. Another great master of realism was Hugo van der Goes from Ghent, who made his mark with the Portinari Triptych, whose central panel, The Adoration of the Shepherds, commissioned by a wealthy Italian merchant and exhibited at the famous Uffizi Museum in Florence, played a role in the emergence of Renaissance painting in Italy. He produced great masterpieces, including a version of the Last Judgment (circa 1445), magnificent in its realism and the expressions on the faces of the characters.
Attention to detail and symbolism
The other great name of the Flemish primitives to illustrate the legendary Last Judgment is Jerome Bosch. Commissioned in the 1500s by Philip I the Handsome, this triptych is striking! We are still surprised to discover this series of paintings depicting monsters, nudity in horror and lust at a time so prudish. Every detail of this work is worked to the extreme, interweaving dozens of scenes into each other. One could spend hours observing these paintings. However, Bosch was far from being a heretical eccentric, on the contrary, he was a bourgeois perfectly integrated into his contemporary society. His depiction of this religious scene is very avant-garde, as is the Garden of Delights, his other great painting that breaks with the paintings of the time. It will inspire the great Pieter Brueghel the Elder, in the light of the Northern Renaissance, who will paint the terrifying Tower of Babel in the same vein.
Where to see the paintings of the Flemish primitive painters?
Although today most of these works are on display in the most prestigious museums around the world, and very few in Belgium, we can still discover some of the masters of early Flemish painting. Among the masterpieces on display at the Musée Sint-Janshospitaal are The Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine, the Triptych by Jan Floreins and the famous Shrine of Saint Ursula. At the Groeningemuseum, Jan van Eyck's The Virgin with Canon Joris van der Paele, Memling's Moreel Triptych and Hieronymus Bosch's Last Judgment, and at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, which has just reopened this year, Memling's God the Father Surrounded by Singing Angels and Musicians and Van Eyck's Santa Barbara de Nicomedia. Above all, Van Eyck's famous Mystic Lamb is back on display in Ghent's St. Bavo Cathedral, where it originally belonged, after several years of X-ray restoration. A few paintings by each of the Flemish primitives are also on show at the Oldmasters Museum in Brussels.
