Talk:Fountain of Life: Difference between revisions

 

The Prado work was found in a mountain of paintings dumped om the nascent Prado in the late 1830s after a Revolution closed the Monasteries. It had essentially been mounted on the wall of the Sacristy of the Monastery of the Parral in Segovia since it's painting, which was redated scientifically in the general review of the attribution of the entire contents of the Prado after some serious misattributions were discovered in the early 1990s: the dendrochronology of the boards it is painted on date the felling of the wood to c1419, which implies the work was done in the early 1430s, at a time when van Eyck is known to have passed through there on a diplomatic mission. The previous attribution to an otherwise unknown follower of van Eyck's in the 1450s, based on the otherwise necesary imputation that it had to have been painted soon after his death, has therefore been corrected: the Prado piece is now recognised to be from his hand, and therefore a pair with The Mystic Lamb, with the sole distinction that the two are on different substrates.

I declare the following paragraphs to be my own Original Research, which has been discussed with Till Holger Borchert and Jonathon Sumption, the world experts on van Eyck and Agincourt, who agree. It so cannot therefore at this point be included in the meme: it may however be noted here.

As a student of the Salazar Chapel which stood on the Rue des Sols in Brussels, erected in 1432-4 at the behest of Pope Eugenius IV, and dedicated to the Eucharist, it is very much in my mind that the Prado work may be a copy or draft of a lost main piece, as it is almost perfectly sized for the altar of the Salazar Chapel. Although the Chapel no longer exists, having been demolished in 1955 as part of the renovation of the centre of Brussels, an exact copy of the building was constructed slightly to the South, which is now the Chapel of the European Commission, on Rue van Maerlandt: both were attached to a convent belonging to the Sisters of the Eucharist, the ArchiAssociation declared to be the "perpetual and universal" home of the Eucharist by Pope Leo XIII. This, however, is as yet unpublished and subjective, and so cannot be included in the meme: I list it here for future reference.

The two works together therefore represent the geometric-cosmological facets of a quadrivium justification, paired with Dufay's L'Homme Armé cantus firmus mass covering the arithmetic-musical facets, reflecting the underlying theology of Jan van Ruusbroec's On the Spiritual Tabernacle, which consolidated the doctrine of the relationship between the Eucharist (the inchoate precursor) and the Last Judgement (the fulfillment of Christ promise of salvation): the relevant text on the Mass is Professor Craig Wright's The Maze and the Warrior. A tunnel, of which the last traces remain under the far end of the Chaussée de Groenendael, connected the convents, also passing under the last of the Order at Watermael.