The queen of heaven: Jan van Eyck, Lucca Madonna

We're in the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, and we're looking at a painting by Jan van Eyck known as the Lucca Madonna. She is our visual destination. She completely fills this room. She couldn't stand up without hitting her head on the canopy above her. The room is diminished in comparison to her scale. This is an image that asks us to think about Mary as the queen of heaven, Mary nursing the Christ child, Mary as an intercessor between God and man. Look at the way that Mary's impossibly small right hand is pushing up the skin on Christ's back. You can feel the softness of his flesh, and then there's that wonderful tussled hair of the infant. And so we have this focus on the body of Christ, something which was important at the time in devotion and prayer. But he also has a kind of uprightness, even as he suckles very much like a baby. One of the questions that art historians ask is where are we? Mary and Christ are seated on a throne. There is this magnificent cloth of honor that frames them, and then this carpet that falls down the bottom step and comes towards us as if we're standing on that carpet, connecting us to this space. But this space is small. It's confined. It almost looks as if it might be a domestic space rather than the space of a church. If we think about van Eyck's painting of the Virgin and a church holding the Christ child, that's clearly a church setting. At the same time, we have artists like Campin painting images of the Madonna and child in a much more domestic setting. So the question emerges, which one is this? In a way, it seems like a bit of both. It would help, of course, if we knew the setting in which this painting was intended, but we don't know what it was painted for. We don't know who commissioned it or who was the audience. And so what we're left with are the clues that the painting itself offers. This is a very simplified space with a window on one side with fruit on the sill, objects on the right, a basin, a flask, maybe a candle holder, objects that refer to Mary's virginity, Mary's purity. The throne is decorated with lions, which was a reference to the throne of Solomon. We're in a heavenly setting, and that's also indicated by the crown on her head, the jewels that are embroidered into her royal red robe, the pearls, the gold threads of the embroidery. All of this speaks to a heavenly environment suggested by the wealth of material things. The extraordinary detail that Van Eyck is able to achieve, the luminous light and color, is a testament not only to the artist's skill, but also to the medium that he's mastered, that is oil paint. Oil paint allows for glazing. It allows for thin layers of paint to be applied one atop the other to create a greater degree of brilliance, a greater degree of luminosity. The way that he's able to exploit this medium and give us this sense of natural light, of textures. I mean, look at the way that the texture of her hair feels so different than that velvet that she wears, or the gold glistening in the light. The light enters in the bottle glass on the left. It moves across the lions, illuminating the left side, leaving the right in shadow, and that continuity of light and shadow is seen throughout the painting, across the body of the Christ child, of the Virgin Mary, and especially her face. And then as we move to the right, you can see on the shelf, not only the light reflecting on the water, but in the vase at the top, you can see a reflection of the window opposite. And so there's a continuity and a veracity that is created in the handling of light. The kind of realism that we're seeing here, this is what Panofsky called Ars Nova, the new art, this new naturalism that we see in the cities in Northern Europe. This was a moment in the North, very much like what was happening in Italy, where cities had become wealthy, where there was a thriving merchant class, and that money was often lavished on works of art like this. And it's an interesting time too, because artists are painting both for an older nobility, but also for this merchant class. And so we can ask, who was this painted for? One suggestion is that it was painted for a female patron, because of the emphasis on domesticity, of the maternal relationship of the mother and child. Every aspect of this painting is telling us about the holiness of the Virgin Mary, from those lions, from the fruit on the windowsill, which probably is an allusion to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and that first sin that Mary and Christ come to rectify, the vessels which speak to Mary's purity, her red robe, the jewels. There's no way to mistake this for anything other than an image of the divine. The oil paint allows Van Eyck to create what is, in a sense, a jewel of a painting. ♪♪♪