INTRODUCTION

When, in the early nineteenth century, the reassessment and collecting of early Netherlandish painting began to stimulate art-historical research, scholars were faced with the summary, indeed fragmentary character of their knowledge of the painters and their works. Since archival research on early Netherlandish masters was undertaken only later, the available historical sources were limited. Among them were the passages on Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden that the Italian humanist and historian Bartolomeo Fazio wrote in his De viris illustribus of 1456; they cite works by these artists, which were in Italy at the time. Giorgio Vasari's famous Vite, whose first edition appeared in 1550, credits van Eyck with the invention of the painting in oil, adding that in his old age he passed this discovery on to his pupil ‘Rogier from Bruges’. In his Spieghel der Nederlandscher audtheijdt of 1568, among other works, the painter and historian Marcus van Vaernewijck devoted attention to early Netherlandish masters; from Vasari he borrowed the story of how Jan van Eyck invented the oil technique while searching for a quick-drying varnish. Van Vaernewijck also mentioned the inscriptions on Jan's grave in the church of Saint Donatian in Bruges and on that of his brother Hubert in the church of Saint John in Ghent. Carel van Mander used both Vasari and van Vaernewijck for his Schilder-boeck of 1604, which contains a number of biographies of early Netherlandish painters.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries information gleaned from these sources was put in several lexicons and compilations of artists’ lives. Hubert and Jan van Eyck were cast as the founders of a new school of painting, but there was no real interest in their works until Jean-Baptiste Descamps distinguished himself by recording his personal observations on early Netherlandish pictures. The most important contribution of the Enlightenment was to prove the groundlessness of the myth, taken for granted since Vasari, that Jan van Eyck discovered oil painting: in 1774 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing demonstrated that the technique was already described before van Eyck. The first studies on early Netherlandish painting were thus based on the limited factual material, on a general knowledge of the history of the Burgundian Netherlands, and on the works themselves.