The Crucifixion; The Last Judgment

When it was painted

Picture Bruges in the mid-1430s, a busy trading city in Flanders. Jan van Eyck had been court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, for more than ten years. The duke trusted him with more than pictures. In 1428 Van Eyck sailed with a ducal embassy to Portugal to paint Princess Isabella, the woman Philip was hoping to marry.

By the time these panels were made, he was in great demand. He had finished the huge altarpiece in Ghent in 1432 and painted the Arnolfini Portrait in 1434. He also loved writing on his frames. He often added his name, the date, and his motto, ALS ICH CAN, which means roughly as best I can.

The Met presents this pair as the work of Van Eyck and his workshop. Exactly whose hand painted what has been argued over by scholars for a long time. They also disagree about whether the panels began as a diptych or as the two wings of a triptych. Van Eyck died in Bruges in 1441.

After that, the panels traveled far. In the nineteenth century a Russian diplomat, Dmitry Tatishchev, bought them in Spain, and his collection passed to Tsar Nicholas I. From 1845 they hung in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. Then, in 1933, when the Soviet government was selling paintings from the Hermitage, the Met bought them.

Somewhere along the way the paint was moved from its wooden panels onto canvas. The gilded frames, though, are the originals. They carry Bible verses in Latin, and conservators also rediscovered faded translations in Middle Dutch. Trace the frames slowly with your eyes. Those letters have stayed with the paintings for almost six hundred years.