Ghent Altarpiece

• Key terms that relate to this work

  Polyptych - consisting of more than three leaves or panels joined by hinges or folds.

  Tempera - The technique of painting with pigments bound in a water.

  Grisaille - A style of monochromatic painting in limited shades, usually of brown or grey onto a mid-toned background.

  Predella - the long horizontal structure at the base or 'foot' of an altarpiece
• Patrons:


  Joos Vijd and his wife Elisabeth Borluut. Vijd was a burgher, serving on the Ghent City Council intermittently from 1395, also a member of the minor nobility and a landowner. Elisabeth came from a patrician family of Ghent that had included knights and abbots.

  Their wealth probably came from wool, onwhich the prosperity of Ghent was founded and so, for them, the Lamb of God, which had appeared on the city’s seal since the 13th century must have had special significance.
• Motive


  They paid for the construction of the chapel where daily masses were to be said for them and their ancestors in what was then their parish church, dedicated to St John the Baptist, whose emblem is a lamb. The chapel has high windows and a Gothic vault.
• Iconography


  High level of symbolism gives meaning to the doctrine of Redemption
• Originally there was a predella beneath, representing the hell or limbo into which Christ descended to redeem the virtuous.
• On the outside of the doors, the donors are portrayed life size, kneeling before simulated stone statues, painted in grisaille of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist.
• The windows of the Virgin’s room open on to a townscape of typically Flemish buildings. When the doors are opened a more brilliantly coloured celestial vision is revealed. In the centre of the top register, Christ (sometimes mistaken for God the Father) more than life size, is enthroned as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords (the inscription embroidered on the hem of his robe) wearing the papal crown, raising his right hand in benediction and holding a sceptre in his left, with a jewel encrusted royal crown at his feet.
• Christ is flanked by the Virgin and St John the Baptist, with angels singing and making music on either side of them. Adam and Eve, depicted in the end panels in niches beneath simulated stone reliefs of Cain and Abel, seem to have been placed there to record the origin of sin that necessitated redemption.
• Lower register has unified background, a panorama of wooded hills surrounding a lush meadow bright with flowers of all seasons. 


  There are trees that grow in different parts of Europe, including the palms, cypresses, stone-pines, pomegranates, olives and oranges of the Mediterranean region. Swallows and other small birds swoop in the clear summer sky. This is a vision of paradise where all the most beautiful plants flourish and they are depicted with such precision that they may be botanically identified.
• Towers and spires rising above the horizon include those of Utrecht Cathedral and the church of St Nicholas in Ghent;


  ; they symbolise the heavenly Jerusalem where the whole community of the redeemed, the ‘ransomed of the Lord’ will be united in worship
• The meadow is approached over rough ground in the other panels by Just Judges (stolen in 1934 and replaced by a copy) Christian warriors, hermits and a giant St Christopher leading pilgrims. Patriarchs and prophets (including Virgil); popes, bishops and other clergy are in the foreground of the main panel, as well as confessors who avowed the Christian faith despite persecution, and an endless procession of female saints beyond them.
• In the centre beneath the dove of the Holy Spirit, the Lamb of God stands on an altar, blood flowing from his breast into a chalice. A fountain in the foreground is inscribed ‘This is the fountain of the water of life proceeding out of the throne of God.” The meaning of the open altarpiece would have been explicit when it was seen above the head of a priest celebrating the Mass and, after the consecration of bread and wine, reciting the Agnus Dei “Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us”.
• Susan Jones "the defining monument of the “new realism”
• Located in Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium
• "The astonishing realism of the altarpiece rests not only in the fidelity with which figures, plants, and animals are represented in a convincing space, but also in its ability to forge a sense of continuity between the pictorial and the real world." Jones
•  The lamb, whose blood flows into a chalice, symbolizes the Eucharistic sacrifice of Christ and its repeated celebration through the daily masses in the Vijd Chapel.
• Hickson " a picture of the completely natural world saturated by the light of God—the perfect intermingling of divine illumination with the created world—and all described in paint."
• Beside Gabriel, a window opens onto a view of buildings in Ghent, beside the Virgin, a recessed niche holds a silver tray, a small hanging silver pitcher and a linen towel neatly hanging from a rack.


  These items are consistent with iconography of the period that uses domestic objects as a means of expressing the purity of the Virgin.
• God’s first human creatures are therefore the parenthetical figures of this upper register and the figures that necessitate the salvation scene below). Their literal marginalization—at the edges of the altarpiece—is indicative of their state of sin. 

  Eve holds the forbidden fruit and covers her genitals. Opposite her, Adam assumes the classical pose of the so-called “modest Venus,” one arm across his chest, the other covering his genitals (a rather peculiar pose for a male figure to assume).
• The Lamb bleeds from a wound in his side, and this stream of blood flows directly into a chalice set on the altar cloth 


  The flowing of the blood, visually linked to the spouts of water in the foreground fountain, is probably an allusion to Christ as the “living water” of God.