Jan van Eyck It is the name of a famous painter who has left his mark like many others in art.
Very little is known about his training, the first thing that has come to light has been his time in the service of the Duke John of Bavaria, the Earl of Holland in the year 1422.
And in these same times, approximately three years Van Eyck is documented with the Duke of Burgundy, Felipe the Good, as a painter and valet.
This man has intervened in a series of diplomatic embassies that have taken him to Valencia, with the aim of possibly arranging the marriage of the duke with the king’s niece Alfonso V of Aragon, Isabel de Urgel.
Soon after, arriving in the year 1428, with another mission to fulfill, he traveled to Portugal, this time to arrange the marriage of the duke with doña Isabel, daughter of King John I, this time if obtaining satisfactory results.
When the decade of the ’30 arrived, Jan documented in Bruges, he married, bought a house in 1432, the year in which the artist presented his first signed and known panel, his great masterpiece, the “Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb”.
This has been commissioned by Joos vijd and his wife, Isabel Borluut, always thinking of his inspiration, so much so that he bears an inscription by the painter in homage to his older brother, Hubert.
Because there have not been many years in which this artist has borne fruit, many of his works stand out, such as “The Virgin of Lucca from the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt”, “The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin from the Musée du Louvre”, or “The Virgin of Canon Van der Paele from the Groeningemuseum in Bruges”.
He has also managed to stand out in portraits, such as that of “The Arnolfini marriage”, dated 1434, where the artist displays what has been called symbolic realism, or “The man in the turban”.
Jan van Eyck has been regarded as the founder of the Ars nova, pictorial style of the late Gothic in the fifteenth century, which heralds the renaissance in northern Europe.
It has been characterized by the naturalism of vivid oil colors, the meticulousness of details, the precision of textures and the search for new systems of representation of three-dimensional space.
In his impeccable career, his most famous work stands out, “The mystic lamb”, presented in 1432, in the church of Saint Bavo, Ghent, an altarpiece composed of several panels that are opened to show the painting.
Finally, his works are preserved carefully signed and dated between 1432 and 1439, his nine works, four of them on a religious theme and the other five are portraits.