book reviews 593

Harbison, Craig : the Play of . 1991. 2nd Rev. Ed. Chicago il and London: Distributed by University of Chicago Press for Reaktion Books, 2011. Pp. 317 + 139 illustrations. $29.95 paper.

This is an unusual contribution to the extensive literature about Jan van Eyck. It is a personal appreciation of a great artist, rather than a book about the “erudite theological matters” that (the author claims) pedantically preoccupy others. Professor Harbison identifies his approach as having been “conditioned by the social and political unrest” of the 1960s, which led him to investigate the “everyday social, economic, and political as well as religious forces” of Jan van Eyck’s lifetime. The author pays attention to previous interpretations of the artist’s work, but focuses on his own ideas about what van Eyck intended to reveal. It is refreshing to see the work of a scholar with the courage to counter established methods. That is true even if others will not all agree with the results, and therefore continue to omit this volume from their discussions of the “specialized art-historical literature” on van Eyck. Professor Harbison’s ideas have not changed significantly since 1991, when the first edition of this book appeared. He has read widely in the interim, however, and offers an Afterword that brings some earlier discussions up to date, particularly concerning the double portrait in London. The Afterword and its illustrations also take account of underdrawings and other preparatory steps in creating early Netherlandish , as revealed to us by x-rays and infra-red reflectography. He includes an extensive art historical bibliography with many useful additions, although the discussions of court life omit some important publications about that subject produced in the last two decades, primarily in Germany and the . (Harbison either does not know of their existence or he may have purposely omitted them since he could not extensively revise the text of the first edition to discuss them, but only add an afterword.) The book suffers from a lack of revision of the text as a whole in other ways as well. By now, for instance, it is not necessary to disparage the older theory of “disguised symbolism,” that claimed a religious meaning for all the details in a ; most recent literature includes revisions or dismissals of that idea. A novice reader will likewise not entirely understand the references to Erwin Panofsky’s formulations, and will not grasp the brilliance of Panofsky’s work, even when later scholars have shown it to be incorrect. Professor Harbi- son still avoids discussing the development of the artist’s work or what Jan did or did not paint alone or with the help of his recorded assistants, his wife, or a brother named Lambert—not the Hubert of the Altarpiece inscription

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/15685292-01804007 594 book reviews

(died 1426) but a brother who outlived Jan. To circumvent problems of attribu- tion, the author restricts his list of paintings to those that most other art histo- rians have never or only rarely questioned as the work of Jan van Eyck. Even though the intended audience is probably not one concerned with matters of attribution, workshop practice, chronology, and other academic preoccupa- tions, those factors are more biographically relevant than Harbison realizes, as they do help define the person about whom the book has been written. Jan van Eyck: the Play of Realism instead offers the opportunity for both author and reader to speculate about the social impact of these works of art, as well as how they are the byproduct of “the everyday social, economic, and political as well as religious forces present at the time in the .” Thus, he treats van Eyck’s paintings as a group, to the extent possible, discerning in them social tendencies related to the court of Burgundy and to the artist’s middle-class patrons. He asks questions about their possible patronage when it is not documented, and tries to situate the pictures’ meaning within the religious tendencies of the 1430s, when the eastern and western branches of Christianity attempted to reunite. An ideal reader might be an enthusiast attracted to a book about Jan van Eyck that asks questions about the social meaning of the works shown, even if scholars find that some of the paintings are products of Jan’s workshop rather than of his own hand (the origin that the author claims for them). Another ideal reader might be a historian who looks for suggestions in works of art to supplement information from documents. Professor Harbison reviews the existing literature when he needs to, so that the reader can learn about useful art historical sources. The author avoided foot- or endnotes, perhaps in order to attract general readers who are thought to recoil from numbered notes, but it is less easy to hunt for sentences in a bibliographical paragraph at the end of the book than to find references in notes. In addition, single sentences including the reference do not always offer enough information to support all the ideas presented in the text. A third ideal reader might be a sociologist who looks for examples of stratification in older centuries; Professor Harbison offers hypotheses about the patrons of the paintings when they are not documented, so as to ground the paintings in their social context. What I call his ideal readers and other non-specialist investigators may or may not be persuaded by the proposals offered, but they will find ideas to think about and speculations in which other scholars indulge less often. Professor Harbison often implies that most aspects of paintings other than the came from Jan’s own mind rather than that of a theologi- cal adviser or a patron. Some scholars will disagree, at least for Jan’s major paint- ings, but of course any writer is free to express and defend his own ideas. The

Religion and the Arts 18 (2014) 591–602