How Van Eyck Painted Forever

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SSA058: What does forever actually look like on a canvas? That’s the question a simple Magnificat bookmark reignites for Kathryn Laffrey — the image on it turns out to be a detail of the Ghent Altarpiece, Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s 15th-century masterwork that she and Alix Murray have already rabbit-holed through in three previous episodes, including their Monuments Men crossover.

This time the two dive back in through closertovaneyck.org, the free zoom viewer built from the altarpiece’s landmark restoration, which lets viewers examine every centimeter of the painting and toggle between before-and-after restoration views. What starts as a search for a better look at the bookmark’s tiny background horizon turns into a breakdown of how Van Eyck painted distance itself: layer in more sky-blue the farther something recedes, and the eye reads it as endless.

Kathryn and Alix connect that painterly trick to their own experience of “forever” views — a coastal overlook at Lindisfarne, a walk along Lake Michigan, the simple comfort of a blue-painted room — and to how differently medieval and early Renaissance artists solved the same problem: the gold backgrounds of icons and Fra Angelico’s paintings, versus Van Eyck’s atmospheric, receding horizon. Alix ties it to C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, where Narnia’s heaven keeps opening “further up and further in.”

The restoration itself turns out to be its own rabbit hole. The zoomed-in, post-restoration altarpiece looks strikingly different from the version most people have seen for generations — richer blues, a visible mountain range, a distant tower, a river where a plain pond used to read. Kathryn and Alix walk through what changed and why: centuries of overpainting had reclothed Adam and Eve and altered the Lamb’s face to suit later, more conservative sensibilities, and the recent restoration worked to recover what Van Eyck actually painted.

It’s a conversation about art, but also about permanence — how long any image, restored or otherwise, can be trusted to look like what its maker intended, and what it means to build something meant to communicate “forever” in the first place.

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