"Writing is drawing," French schoolchildren were once taught when trying to master their first fountain pen. Well, the Musée du Louvre is proving that the reverse can also be true. The remarkable and patient – it started in 2021 – restoration of the oak panel known as The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, painted by Flemish Renaissance master Jan Van Eyck around 1430, along with the historical and scientific studies that have accompanied this work, have enabled the curators to formulate some stimulating new hypotheses.
The return of the panel from the restoration workshops is accompanied by a small but very rich exhibition (63 items) in the Louvre that contextualizes the work in its period. Sophie Caron, its curator, summed up the work as being more a book than a painting. When you see it hung high on the wall, as it once was, its design and multiple points of view are disconcerting. Once the work had been laid flat in the restoration workshops, Caron realized that the best way to look at it was not to raise one's head, but rather to bend over it. Hence the rather low placement in the exhibition, where the panel is not fixed to the picture rail, but presented on a stand, allowing viewers to walk around it.
Why this choice? Because the reverse side of the panel is also painted, with an astonishing abstract image revealed by the restoration, evoking the mottling of a stone that can't seem to be identified – geologists have tried. The conclusion is obvious: This painting was made not to be seen, but to be read. The visitor's bent posture allows him or her to fully appreciate the details, which abound, particularly in the landscape in the background.
Hence this other hypothesis, more risky but very seductive: The key to reading the painting lies in the two small figures painted in the middle ground, seen from behind. One is dressed in blue and stands upright, holding a staff as a sign of mastery. The other is leaning over the battlements of a wall, looking down. The first is Van Eyck, and the second is you, the viewer, finally looking at the work as the painter intended.
Ideal city
What was the purpose of this painting? First, to save the soul of the man who commissioned it, Nicolas Rolin, who, it seems, had a lot to be pardoned for. It was also for this purpose, and at the instigation of his pious wife, that he had the Hospices de Beaune built in northeastern France. Humbly praying over this image, Rolin, chancellor to the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, could see in the landscape on the left bank of a winding river the effects of good government, a prosperous city and vine-planted hillsides. On the other bank, past a bridge leading to it – all the characters using it seem to be moving in that direction – lies an ideal city that could be the heavenly Jerusalem.
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