page_title: Ghent Altarpiece
section_title: Annunciation
hierarchical_section_title: Ghent Altarpiece / Closed view / Annunciation
caption_attribution_description: Jan van eyck, annunciazione, dettaglio, 1434-36 circa
context_page_description: The Ghent Altarpiece is a large and complex 15th-century polyptych altarpiece in St Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium. It was begun c. the mid-1420s and completed before 1432, and is attributed to the Early Flemish painters and brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck. The altarpiece is considered a masterpiece of European art and one of the world's treasures.
  The panels are organised in two vertical registers, each with double sets of foldable wings containing inner and outer panel paintings. The upper register of the inner panels represent the heavenly redemption, and include the central Deësis of Christ the King, the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. They are flanked in the next panels by angels playing music and, on the far outermost panels, the figures of Adam and Eve. The four lower-register panels are divided into two pairs; sculptural grisaille paintings of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist, and on the two outer panels, donor portraits of Joost Vijdt and his wife Lysbette Borluut. The central panel of the lower register shows a gathering of saints, sinners, clergy and soldiers attendant at an adoration of the Lamb of God.
context_section_description: Beneath the lunettes are the four panels of the upper register. The two outer panels of the middle register show the Annunciation to Mary, with the Archangel Gabriel on the left and the Virgin Mary on the right. Both are dressed in white robes, and occupy what appear to be the opposite ends of the same room. Gabriel and Mary's panels are separated by two much narrower images showing unoccupied domestic interior scenes. The back wall in the left-hand image has a window opening onto a view of street and city square, while that in the right-hand image has a niche. Some art historians have attempted to associate the street with an actual location in Ghent, but it is generally accepted that it is not modeled on any specific place. The sparseness of these narrow panels seem anomalous in the overall context of the altarpiece; a number of art historians have suggested that they were compromises worked out by Jan as he struggled to accommodate his design within the original framework set out by Hubert.
  Mary and Gabriel are disproportionately large in relation to the scale of the rooms they occupy. Art historians agree that this follows the conventions of both the International Gothic and late Byzantine traditions of the icon by showing saints, especially Mary, in a much larger scale than their surroundings. In this instance their size is probably a device to convey the idea that they are heavenly apparitions who have come momentarily before the donors who are in the lower register. Van Eyck used this conceit most dramatically in his Madonna in the Church, (c. 1438–40) which is likely a panel from a dismantled diptych.
  Gabriel has blond hair and multicoloured wings. His right hand is raised and in his left he holds lilies, traditionally found in paintings of the annunciation as symbols of Mary's virginity. His words to Mary are written alongside him in Latin: AVE GRACIA PLENA D(OMI)N(U)S TECU(M) ("Hail who art full of grace, the Lord is with you"). The horizontal inscription extends out the panel and halfway across the neighbouring image. As in van Eyck's Washington Annunciation of c. 1434–6, the letters of Mary's reply are inscribed in reverse and upside-down; as if for God to read from heaven, or for the holy spirit, as represented by the dove, to read as he hovers directly above her. She answers ECCE ANCILLA D(OMI)NI ("Behold the handmaiden of the Lord").
  Art historian Penny Jolly suggests that in the mid to late 1420s Jan may have traveled to Italy at the behest of the Duke of Burgundy where, in Florence, he probably saw an iconic 14th century annunciation, and perhaps visited more contemporary annunciation scenes. The Florentine annunciations have a number of iconographic similarities to the Ghent panels, including Gabriel's multi-colored wings, the upside down writing, the treatment of light beams, and the separation between angel and virgin by a thin architectural feature. Some of these elements, particularly the spatial separation between the two figures, can be found in Lorenzo Monaco's Bartolini Salimbeni Annunciation in Santa Trinita, finished before his death in 1424, and one that Jan may have seen. In Monaco's painting the angel and Mary are separated by two small spaces, one external and one internal, similar to the city-scape and domestic lavabo panels in the Ghent annunciation.
  The style of the furnishings of the room and the modernity of the town visible through the arched window set the panels in a contemporary 15th century setting. The interiors have been cited as one of the first representations of medieval "bourgeois domestic culture". Borchert sees this familiar setting as a device to allow 15th century viewers to connect with the panel and so reinforce the conceit that the two saints are apparitions occupying the same space and time as the donor or observer. Yet a number of features in the interior suggest that it is not a secular domestic space, most obviously the cool and austere surfaces, the domed windows and stone columns.
  The four panels are most obviously connected by the floor tiling and vanishing po
caption: The Archangel Gabriel in a cope with a jewelled morse in Jan van Eyck's Annunciation, 1434–36
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