What is the first name of the subject whose monumental stature reflects a tradition reaching back to an Italo-Byzantine type?
Van Eyck gives Mary three roles: Mother of Christ, the personification of the "Ecclesia Triumphans" and Queen of Heaven, the latter apparent from her jewel-studded crown. The painting's near miniature size contrasts with Mary's unrealistically large stature compared with her setting. She physically dominates the cathedral; her head is almost level with the approximately sixty feet high gallery. This distortion of scale is found in a number of other van Eyck's Madonna paintings, where the arches of the mostly gothic interior do not allow headroom for the virgin. Pächt describes the interior as a "throne room", which envelopes her as if a "carrying case". Her monumental stature reflects a tradition reaching back to an Italo-Byzantine type – perhaps best known through Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna (c. 1310) – and emphasises her identification with the cathedral itself. Till-Holger Borchert says that van Eyck did not paint her as "the Madonna in a church", but instead as metaphor, presenting Mary "as the Church". This idea that her size represents her embodiment as the church was first suggested by Erwin Panofsky in 1941. Art historians in the 19th century, who thought the work was executed early in van Eyck's career, attributed her scale as the mistake of a relatively immature painter.The composition is today seen as deliberate, and opposite to both his Madonna of Chancellor Rolin and Arnolfini Portrait. These works show interiors seemingly too small to contain the figures, a device van Eyck used to create and emphasise an intimate space shared by donor and saint. The Virgin's height recalls his Annunciation of 1434–36, although in that composition there are no architectural fittings to give a clear scale to the building. Perhaps reflecting the view of a "relatively immature painter", a copy of the Annunciation by Joos van Cleve shows Mary at a more realistic proportion scale to her surroundings.Mary is presented as a Marian apparition; in this case she probably appears before a donor, who would have been kneeling in prayer in the now lost opposite panel. The idea of a saint appearing before laity was common in Northern art of the period, and is also represented in van Eyck's Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele (1434–36). There, the Canon is portrayed as if having just momentarily paused to reflect on a passage from his hand-held bible as the Virgin and Child with two saints appear before him, as if embodiments of his prayer.
Mary