Portrait of a man: Hubert Van Eyck

Van Eyck’s paint

Before the invention of oil paint, tempera was used for paintings and manuscript illustrations. True to tradition, icons continue to be painted with tempera. The most common type of tempera is egg tempera.

Countless books have been written on this subject, but the mystery was not unravelled before the end of the previous century. This was thanks to researchers who examined minute fragments of paint from Jan Van Eyck’s works of art under a microscope and performed chemical analyses.
They succeeded in determining the exact composition of Jan Van Eyck’s paint. The theory that is was oil paint was confirmed. However, lead had been added to the oil paint to accelerate the drying process, and tempera had been added as well. Jan Van Eyck’s oil paint was an emulsion, a suspension of oil and water-dilutable liquids. In an emulsion, oil and water never mix entirely; tiny globules of oil are suspended in the water.

Technical mastery
Jan Van Eyck and paint makers before him must have experimented a great deal to come up with this type of paint: boiling, mixing and stirring of liquids with various oils, white lead and lead salt. In addition, the paint used by Jan Van Eyck was difficult to apply. Jan Van Eyck’s biggest mystery is perhaps his ability to paint seemingly effortlessly with such technical skill.

Make your own egg tempera.pdf

Jan Van Eyck’s secret

In his book Secret Knowledge, Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, famous contemporary British painter, draftsman and photographer David Hockney writes: "from the early 15th century many Western artists used optics – by which I mean mirrors and lenses (or a combination of the two) – to create living projections." This book caused quite a stir among art historians.

David Hockney explored European art history.

With colour copies of paintings, he turned a long wall in his studio into an illustrated timeline with works of art by Northern European painters on top and Southern European painters at the bottom. He noticed that the transition to a more 'photographic' manner of painting occurred quite suddenly, circa 1420-1430. All of a sudden, portraits like those by Jan van Eyck became much more realistic, complex patterns in folded fabrics were depicted perfectly and painters no longer seem to have had any problems with the perspective renderings of objects. He believes that this evolution must have been based on a technical innovation: he suspects that these artists somehow made use of lenses to project images.

Camera obscura.pdf

Portrait of a man: Hubert Van Eyck

Van Eyck’s paint

Jan Van Eyck’s secret

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