1390       1441
Flemish painting   •   Jan van Eyck @ Wikipedia

No matter how many requirements a medieval court painter had to fulfill - in addition to the making of portraits, this included the designing of clothing or the painting of signs - so little space often remained for creative artistic development according to their own ideas. Illustrations of the rulers always had to be beneficial, and murals were about a narrow subject area, especially about religious motives. These restrictions were also faced by Jan van Eyck, who from 1425 at the court of Philip III. was active from Burgundy.

Van Eyck, however, took advantage of his position at the court to further develop his arts and he became one of the most important representatives of Old Dutch painting. He knew how to give his works a naturalistic, lively atmosphere, which made the pictures more realistic than what was previously known in the arts. To achieve this, van Eyck experimented a lot with colors and techniques. It was he who popularized oil painting. The more intense colors of his works also contributed to the viewer's closer access to the work of art, and his contemporaries sometimes referred to him as the "king of painters". Van Eyck's most famous work is the winged altar in the St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, which was completed in 1435. © Meisterdrucke