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There was a time, five hundred years ago, when science was regarded as an art, and art as a science. And in the contest between the senses, the ear, through which we had previously received all knowledge and the word of God, was conquered by the eye, which would henceforth be king. A new breed of painters aimed to reconcile the world of the senses with that of the mind, and their goal was to conceal themselves in the details and vanish away, like God. A new way of perceiving was born. Anita Albus describes the birth and evolution of trompe-l'oeil painting in oils in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, focusing her attention on works by northern European artists--both major and minor. As a scholar, she stands in the tradition of Panofsky; as a painter, she is able to see things others have not yet perceived; as a storyteller, she skillfully describes abstract notions in a vivid and exciting way. Like the multilayered technique of the Old Masters, her method assumes an ability to distinguish between the different levels, as well as a talent for synthesizing them. The first part of the book is devoted to the visibility of the invisible in the art of Jan van Eyck--his visual effects, perspective, artistic technique, and philosophy. The second and third parts are taken up with descriptions of the genres of "forest landscape," "still life," and "forest floor." In the midst of butterflies, bumblebees, and dragonflies, Vladimir Nabokov emerges as final witness to the survival in literature of all that was condemned to vanish from the fine arts. After a glimpse into the continuing presence of the past and some conjectures as to the future, the book's final part throws fresh light on the colored grains of the hand-ground pigments that were lost when artists' materials began to be commercially manufactured in the nineteenth century. The Art of Arts is thus both a dazzling cultural history and the story of two explosive inventions: the so-called third dimension of space through perspective, and the shockingly vivid colors of revolutionary oil paints. Albus makes abundantly clear how, taken together, these breakthroughs not only created a new art, but altered forever our perception of the world.

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Part One THE VISIBILITY OF THE INVISIBLE I Earth, Apple, and Fly Five hundred and thirty years before the Lunar Orbiter sent back from the icy, lifeless reaches of space the first images of the shining earth rising into the sky above the moon, Jan van Eyck painted a cosmic panorama, an image of the world as seen from flight, from the bird's-eye view. No bird could have flown so high that its gaze would encompass the three continents in van Eyck's painting, and as one looks out of an airplane window, the landscape shrinks gradually into geometric patterns, before even this patchwork vanishes from sight beneath the endless, barren banks of cloud. Van Eyck, the Duke of Burgundy's court painter and valet, depicted mountain ranges, hills, forests and oceans, cities, rivers, streets, and lakes with a topographical exactitude that produced an impossible visual effect of simultaneous close-up and distance. It was still several hundred years before either the telescope or the microscope was to be invented. But an awareness that the earth is round had been handed down since antiquity--and every traveler who carefully observed the stars on the horizon could confirm it from experience. The oldest German geographical treatise, dating from the twelfth century, compares the earth surrounded by the seas to the yolk floating in the white of the egg. A century later, in his poem Mappemonde, ou image du monde , Gautier de Metz wrote that a man could walk round the globe like a fly around an apple. In the Middle Ages, Jerusalem was regarded as the navel of the earth's apple--the place of pilgrimage, the battlefield of the lost Crusades. To the east of the Holy Land, world maps depicted Paradise. With the earthly sphere sufficiently far off for the Deluge not to have touched it, Paradise, with its four rivers--the Ganges, Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris--lies filled with the scent of flowers and the song of birds, concealed from the human race behind walls of mist and impenetrable wildernesses. On this side of the lost Paradise, the world beneath the moon is the center of a cosmos of hierarchic order, the realm of mutability, to which the sublunary elemental spheres of water, air, and fire also belong. The immutable structure above the moon reaches from the courses of the planets to the sphere of the fixed stars in the firmament, with its ultimate boundary lying in the primum mobile, which contains the divine spark of creation and communicates its movement to the other spheres. The earth had not yet been surveyed by geodesy. The only gauge in medieval world maps is the sacred history of salvation. Until the end of the fourteenth century, exact measurements were available only in portulan charts--sailing directions for coastal shipping. At the behest of Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy, Jan van Eyck took part in voyages to various countries between 1426 and 1436. In 1427, he was the portraitist accompanying a delegation to Spain whose task was to court the niece of King Alfonso V of Aragon on the Duke's behalf. The delegates negotiated in Valencia for two months, in vain. Isabella d'Urgel was not to become duchess of Burgundy, and the princess was never to be immortalized in a portrait by the painter from Bruges. The father of countless bastards, but lacking a legitimate heir, Philip the Good sent his envoys and his court painter to Lisbon a year later, again to court a bride. It was an age devoted to splendor, and one can imagine the two ships, magnificently decorated, setting sail from the port of Sluis in Zeeland on 19 October 1428. It was a stormy day, and the long swallowtailed pennants, decorated with Philip's coat of arms, would be flapping wildly from the top of the gold-plated mast. After spending several weeks in England to repair storm damage, the ships reached Lisbon in mid-December. It was almost a month before the Burgundian nobles were received at the court of King John I in Aviz, but after four more weeks Jan van Eyck had painted two portraits of Isabella, the King's eldest daughter, on whom the choice had fallen. For safety, the small portraits of the thirty-two-year-old beauty were sent to Philip the Good by two different routes--one overland, the other by sea. The portrait confirmed the Duke's resolve to extend his influence through a marriage to the Portuguese princess. In regal fashion, he celebrated his wedding by founding the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece. Its emblem was a flintstone with steel whetter and spark, and its motto was " Aultre n'auray "--I shall have no other. In fact, Isabella was his third and last spouse, and she had to share him with thirty-three mistresses. "What his eyes desired delighted his heart, and with the greed that was in his heart, his offenses multiplied. Whatever he desired, that came to pass," commented his chronicler, Chastellain.3 Playing the troubadour was only a minor role for him, however. He preferred his chroniclers to style him the last Alexander, a second Hector, a Hercules. The Grand Duc d'Occident hoped for recognition as the savior of Christendom. He planned to liberate Jerusalem, to reconquer Constantinople, to drive the Hussites from Bohemia. Long in preparation and loudly proclaimed, these crusades were later abandoned without further ado. The more distant the likelihood of the project's being fulfilled, the more elaborate the pomp and splendor with which the sacred vow to undertake the expedition was celebrated. Ships were commandeered, magnificent fleets assembled, banners of the Cross were unfurled in solemn processions, and diplomats reconnoitered the terrain on secret missions. Jan van Eyck joined two of these clandestine journeys. Certain motifs in his paintings--snow-covered mountain ranges, cliffs, a depiction of the Mosque of Omar (the Dome of the Rock) in Jerusalem--have been regarded by one art historian as indicating that the painter crossed the Alps to Italy, and made a pilgrimage from there to the Holy Land. But no lost paintings or documents, suddenly rediscovered, were produced to support this assertion, and it was not long before it was contradicted; the two sides have been passing the burden of proof back and forth ever since. No matter where the painter traveled, it seems likely that his covert journeys were connected with Philip's chimerical crusades, and that he turned cosmographer for reasons of strategy. The measurable distances on his world map show an awareness of the Ptolemaic network of parallels and meridians, coordinate lists, and projection procedures, which had only been discovered in Byzantium shortly before, in 1400. Eyck's mappa mundi has been lost. We know of the painting only because it was described by a Genoese humanist, Bartolomeo Fazio, who was chronicler and secretary to the King of Naples, Alfonso V of Aragon. In 1456, in a small volume entitled De Viris Illustribus, Fazio described van Eyck's world map as the most perfect work of its age. Excerpted from The Art of Arts: Rediscovering Painting by Anita Albus All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Artist and writer Albus presents us with an interesting little enigma of a book. Ostensibly tracing the birth of oil painting, Albus cloaks this story in a complex and often opaque cultural history of the 15th and 16th centuries. Focusing on a few key painters Jan Van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Gerard David, Hans Memlinc, and a few others Albus attempts to clarify how two features of modern painting three-dimensionality and the vivid colors of oil paints transformed the art form. Though the reader is occasionally caught up in her interesting stories (on the art of curing tobacco, for instance), they detract rather than add to the coherence of her thesis. The combination of a specialized focus and diffuse style result in an ultimately unsatisfying book. Recommended only for large collections of aesthetic history. Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Painter and writer Albus (The Botanical Drama) has translated writings by the Goncourt brothers into German, and has illustrated books, including one by Claude L‚vi-Strauss. This seems to have been insufficient preparation for tackling the present project, an examination of how the invention of oil painting by Jan van Eyck and his followers changed human perception. Secondary sources, particularly the great Erwin Panofsky, are quoted so heavily as to almost overshadow the project, especially since Albus's own reflections are often banal. We are told, for example, that on seeing van Eyck's Madonna of Chancellor Rolin at the Louvre Museum, "you have to rub your eyes." The prose is often redundant. In one instance, a kind of paint is called "a senile dotard." Some of this may be clumsy translation, which also refers to a "thick-as-a-fist black eye," but observations such as "[j]ust as not all art is art, not all science is science" don't help. Discussions of some painters less well known than van Eyck, such as still-life masters Georg Flegel, Johannes Goedaeart and Otto van Schriek, are somewhat more engaging, and in the last 60 pages, painters' colors are described in some detail and to some point. These pages might have made an interesting short book or pamphlet, instead of a welcome respite from a tedious treatise. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This handsomely illustrated book explores the development of northern European oil painting from the 15th to the 17th century. The first part, "The Visibility of the Invisible," explores the art of Jan van Eyck and displays writer-artist Albus's first-rate scholarship and technical knowledge. Her views are informed by her experience as an artist, and her skills as a writer make this an excellent account of the period. Her analysis of van Eyck's The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, for example, weaves together a compelling narrative of the politics of the court of Philip the Good, the philosophical influence of Nicholas of Cusa, and the complex tradition of metaphors and symbolism. The technical aspects of painting in van Eyck's time--perspective, pigments, glazes, color theory, optics, etc.--are thoroughly described, offering the reader both historical insight and a richer appreciation of the art. The second and third parts are accounts of the genres of "forest landscape," "still life," and "forest floor." The final part concerns ten pigments no longer used and provides the basis for an often-unfavorable comparison with today's materials. All in all, this splendid volume would be a welcome addition to any collection. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. R. M. Davis Albion College

Kirkus Book Review

Not exactly art history, not exactly critical analysis, but a rambling meditation on the aesthetics, materials, and purposes of Northern Renaissance oil paintings. Artist and writer Albus veers between sparkling observations, curious historical detail, and vapid pontifications on artistic genius, art criticism, and life in general. When she stands before specific canvasses and points out their most striking features, her comments are unexpected and illuminating: a three-page summary of van Eyck’s “Madonna of Chancellor Rolin,” for example, revels in every detail of the painting’s miniature world (cherishing the “tiny people” who stroll “along the winding path between the vineyards up to the wood on the hill, or chat to a neighbor under the lime-tree in a suburban square”). Art viewers in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance were trained to find innumerable layers of symbolism in visual images, and Albus provides leisurely, medieval-style explications of allegorical elements (including an explanation of the mysterious magpies in the “Madonna” that manages to be both playful and scrupulously researched). A discussion of a still life by Georg Flegel, a later follower of the school of van Eyck, unpacks the meaning of the elements it combines—“A glass of wine, a clay pipe, a roll of tobacco with a little pile alongside, a sheet of paper, a burning fuse, and two strawberries”—wandering over the history of smoking, the botanical and mythological significance of strawberries, the theory of the four humors, and the development of glass-blowing. Unfortunately, however, the author feels compelled to interrupt herself with mechanical attacks on “theory” in art criticism, accompanying her rants with grand-sounding but meaningless abstractions like “Nothing living can absolutize itself in the flowing stream of time without drowning in it as a corpse of illusion.” Still, the final chapter, which catalogues the thrillingly exotic and expensive materials (malachite, azure) used as pigments during the Renaissance, offers some thrills to make up for the pronouncements that bog down the work. Genuine insights into Northern Renaissance painting, mixed with minutiae and impenetrable philosophizing. (b&w illustrations; 12 pp. color illustrations, 10 color gatefolds, not seen)