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[email protected]. Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Yale French Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 146.201.208.22 on Wed, 17 Sep 2014 14:51:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LINDA SEIDEL The Value of Verisimilitude in the Art of Janvan Eyck Verisimilitude, the appearanceof truth, was the quality most praised by Bartolommeo Fazio in his midfifteenth-century discussion of Jan van Eyck's painting. In a description of a triptych by Jan,the Genoese humanist noted an Angel Gabriel "with hair surpassingreality," and a donor lacking "only a voice;" Jerome, probablypainted on one of the wings, looked "like a living being in a library,"and the viewer had the impression when standing a bit away from the panel that the room "recedes inwards and that it has complete books laid open in it. ..." Fazio remarked that a viewer could measure the distance between places on a circular map of the world that Janpainted for the Duke of Burgundy;on another painting, the viewer could see both a nude wom- an's back as well as her face and breast through the judicious placement of a mirror.Indeed, Fazio noted, "almost nothing is more wonderful in this work than the mirror painted in the picture, in which you see whatever is represented as in a real mirror."' Although none of the paintings Fazio described has survived, no one doubts or discounts the substance of his praise.