Georges Duby – the human predicament / la condition humaine

The tragic burden of man’s estate
… In Eve’s body, which Van Eyck painted as if it were an intricate landscape, the smooth flow of light into shadow lends greater distinctness to the texture of every part. Not only does the artist pay minute attention to physical substance; he also combines discrete sensory experiences in a coherent whole, embracing every dimension of reality. Thus the Illumination of the Holy Ghost unites the souls of all men in bliss beyond compare; thus the Light reveals the universe in the act of continuous creation. In Masaccio, painting has become a mental process in itself. His frescoes are the offspring of architecture, an abstract, numerical art, measuring and begetting space, subduing matter to the intellect, heedless of physical likeness. The architect employs logic and mathematics to realise his concept. The new style of Renaissance architecture, initiated in Florence by Brunelleschi, discarded Gothic luxuriance and all extraneous ornament, reverting to the pure symmetry of the church of San Miniato. Masaccio, likewise, made of emptiness, of pure, abstract space the main element in his paintings. In it, he placed Man, present in the flesh. “That flesh,” as Leon Battista Alberti was soon to write in his Treatise on Painting, “will crumble to dust; but as long as it breathes, whoever spurnes the flesh, spurns life itself.” Masaccio built flesh as if it were a monument. All his figures, like the faces of the statues carved by Donatello, are imbued with the seriousness of a steadfast faith, uncompromising, rational and resolute, calmly assuming the tragic burden of man’s estate.

Le tragique de la condition humaine
… Sur le corps d’Ève, que Van Eyck traite comme un paysage complexe, le glissement onctueux de la lumière vers l’ombre approfondit l’analyse du grain extérieur de chaque objet. Il explore attentivement la matière, mais il relie aussi chacune des expériences sensorielles; il fond leur dispersion dans un ensemble cohérent, étendu dans les trois dimensions du monde sensible – de même que l’illumination de l’Esprit réunit dans l’ineffable la communauté de toutes les âmes, de même que la lumière divine établit la réalité de l’univers dans une création continue. Alors que, pour Masaccio, la peinture est bien déjà «chose mentale». Ses fresques sont filles de l’architecture, d’un art de calcul et d’abstraction qui mesure l’espace et le crée, qui conquiert l’univers par l’intelligence et qui ne se soucie nullement de ressemblance. L’édifice réalise un concept, par le recours aux sciences mathématiques et par le jeu de la raison. Dans Florence, la nouvelle architecture, celle de Brunelleschi, repousse l’ornement gothique, toutes les parures superflues; elle tend à retrouver la pureté et l’équilibre de San Miniato. Dans la composition de Masaccio, l’élément majeur devient donc le vide, l’espace pur, abstrait. Il y place l’homme, présent par son corps. « Ce corps, » lira-t-on bientôt dans le Traité de la peinture de Leon Battista Alberti, « tombera en poussière, mais non longtemps qu’il respire, le mépriser, c’est mépriser la vie. » Cette présence corporelle est bâtie comme un monument. Tous ces corps d’hommes – comme tous les visages que sculpte Donatello – sont établis dans la gravité, celle d’un christianisme tendu, qui refuse toute complaisance, se veut lucide, fondé en volonté et qui assume, en pleine sérénité, le tragique de la condition humaine.

In the circles of the dukes of Burgundy, in Dijon, then in the Netherlands, the sculptors outstripped the painters in audaciousness. In Florence too. Just as, about a hundred years earlier, Nicola Pisano had opened the trail for Giotto. But all the experiments culminated in painting, in Van Eyck and Masaccio. Van Eyck carried the analytical vision of Occamism to its utmost acuity, attentive to the singularity of each object. Yet, in the wake of the Limburg brothers, he succeeded in assembling his manifold observations and in uniting the diversity of visible appearances in a world which owed its coherency to the luminous principle of the Oxford theologians. Light, the breath of the Holy Spirit, the illumination of the mystics of Groenendael, which the painters of Cologne had already attempted to establish within the closed garden of the Virgin Mary, dispelled the mists of chivalrous escape. The play of the enveloping shadows, the changing reflection between mirrors and precious stones within the space of secluded rooms, the iridescence created in the open air when light pervades the atmosphere, gave truth and unity to the spectacle of the real. Whereas Masaccio, to express a stoic Christianity dissatisfied with reverie and mystic illumination, a Christianity of austerity, equilibrium, and self-control, returned to the majesty of Giotto. He discarded the superfluities of the arabesque, did not linger over the accidents of phenomena or the modulations of light. In his country, the architects who appreciated uncluttered masses and the dignity of bare stone, not only measured objects but space as well, or rather emptiness, arranging it with geometric simplicity. Like them, like Donatello, whose prophets express every human torment, Masaccio endowed virtù, as understood in Roman literature by the humanists, with the monumentality of the statues of the Empire. For him, painting was quite definitely cosa mentale [a thing of the mind]. And the reality he portrayed, as opposed to the view of Van Eyck, was the abstract world of Aristotelian concepts. His art showed a logical universe set out with rational clarity, itself measure and calculation.
Yet Van Eyck’s Occamism and Masaccio’s peripateticism converged in a common sense of human greatness. Both placed man at the center of their works. New man: Adam and Eve. For Van Eyck, the body of Eve was the visual discovery and acquaintance with the delights of sensible nature. His hills are converted into caressing shadows, his vegetation into a wonderful landscape even more persuasive than that of the Adoration of the Lamb. And Masaccio’s woeful pair offer to religious meditation the spectacle of man crucified on his own destiny instead of Jesus nailed to the cross. At that moment in the history of the arts, however, the real novelty still lay elsewhere. Jan van Eyck worked to commissions. He had produced the portraits of canons, princely prelates, and the financial magnates who directed the branches of the great Florentine firms in Bruges. One day he decided to paint a picture of his wife. Not as a queen, as Eve or as the Holy Virgin. But true to life. She was not a princess. Her image had no value except for its author. That day the court painter attained his independence. He had won the right to create freely, for sheer pleasure. At the same time, in Florence, while Ghiberti was preparing to write the Commentaries on his work, just as Caesar wrote about his victories, Masaccio placed his own image among those of the apostles in the Tribute. A man’s face. Also the face of the freedom of the artist.