Church Monuments Society

 Visitors to Ghent will want to include a trip to St Bavo’s Cathedral (fig. 1) to see the famous Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, also known simply as the Ghent Altarpiece (fig. 2). This stunning polyptych was begun by the painter Hubert van Eyck in the early 1420s but finished after his death by his brother Jan van Eyck (d. 1441) in 1432. Jan’s grave in Bruges has been lost but Hubert’s surviving tombstone in Ghent is the subject of this essay.

The patrons who commissioned the Ghent Altarpiece for their new family chapel on the south side of the choir of St Bavo’s Cathedral – then the parish church of St John – were Joos (Judocus) Vijd (d. 1439) and his wife Lysbette (Elisabeth) Borluut (d. 1443). Joos and Lysbette are depicted on the exterior wings of the altarpiece in adoration before two illusionistic painted grisaille ‘statues’ of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist (fig. 3a-b). The couple had no children.

No contract survives between the patrons and the painter, and little is known about Hubert van Eyck himself. His date of birth is unknown but the family may have come from Maaseik in the Belgian province of Limburg near the Dutch border: a white marble statue to the brothers was unveiled there in 1864 (fig. 4). There is no record of any wife or offspring so it has been suggested that Hubert may have been in minor orders, perhaps attached to St Bavo’s Abbey in Ghent.

Hubert is known to have had a workshop in Ghent. In contemporary records his name is variously spelled as Hubrecht, Ubrecht or Luberecht. However, no surviving work can be securely attributed to him other than the Ghent Altarpiece. A Latin quatrain inscribed onto the frames of the of the exterior panels (fig. 3b) informs us that the great painter Hubert began the work, but that it was finished by his brother Jan, ‘secundus arte’ (second in art). How much of the altarpiece is actually Hubert’s work is still hotly debated.

Hubert is believed to have died on 18 September 1426, age unknown Yet recently the year 1427 has been proposed, based on a new reading of the inscriptions on the banderoles in the brocade cloth of honour behind the Virgin Mary in the Ghent Altarpiece (fig. 2). Although Hubert never finished the altarpiece his patrons Joos Vijd and Lysbette Borluut must have valued the painter greatly as he is believed to have been buried in the crypt beneath the Vijd family chapel where his altarpiece was to be housed after its completion. His grave was marked in the chapel floor by a tombstone with an unusual iconography (fig. 5).

The worn slab measures 208 x 119 cm and survives as an indent: its inlays have been stripped, probably during the 1578 iconoclasm. We can still see the typical indent of a brass inscription band along the outer margins of the slab with medallions in the four corners, which may have featured the evangelist symbols, and again in the centre of each of the four sides, probably for heraldry. The unusual aspect is the cadaver figure in the central field who once held a lost rectangular tablet.

In 1568 Ghent chronicler Marcus van Vaernewijck (1518-1569) described Hubert’s memorial as ‘een witte steenen doode / in eenen Zaercsteen / die een metalen Tafeletkin voor haer houdt / daer dit (na die oude vlemsche carmina) in ghegraveert staet / so ic van / letter tot letter gheortographieeert hebbe’ (a white stone corpse in a tomb slab, which holds up a metal tablet on which is engraved (after the old Flemish verses) what I have copied letter by letter). The cadaver figure was thus probably made of inlaid white marble, not brass, and the original effect must have been startling.

Van Vaernewijck recorded the rhymed inscription on the ‘metal tablet’ as follows:

Spieghelt U an my die op my treden
Ick was als ghy, nu bem beneden
Begraven doot, alst is anschyne
My ne halp raet, const, noch medicine,
Const, eer, wijsheyt, macht, rijcheyt groot
Is onghespaert, als comt die doot.
Hubrecht van Eyck was ick ghenant
Nu spyse der wormen, voormaels bekant
In schilderye zeer hooghe gheeert:
Cort na was yet, in nieute verkeert.
Int iaer des Heeren des sijt ghewes
Duysent vierhondert, twintich en zes,
Inde maent September achthien daghen viel,
Dat ick met pynen God gaf mijn ziel.
Bidt God voor my die Const minnen,
Dat ick zijn aensicht moet ghewinnen
En vliedt zonde, keert U ten besten
Want ghy my volghen moet ten lesten.

(Translation: Mirror yourself in me, you who tread on me. / I was like you, but now lie below, / dead and buried, as you will be. / Advice nor art nor medicine could help me. / Art, honour, wisdom, power, great riches / are not spared when Death comes. / Hubrecht van Eyck I was called: / now food for worms, [but] formerly famous / [and] very highly honoured for [my] painting. / Soon after I became nothing. / In the year of our Lord, know this well, / Thousand four hundred twenty and six, / in the month of September on the eighteenth day, / I gave my soul to God with pain. / Pray to God for me, [all] you who love art, / that I may see His face, / and flee sin, turn towards good / for ultimately you must follow me.)

The opening lines with the exhortation to regard the cadaver image as a mirror (‘spieghelt’) evoke inscriptions on medieval transi tombs and related imagery, notably ‘Sum quod eris’ (I am as you will be). Also traditional is the reference to the body as ‘food for worms’. The dead artist thus addressed viewers with a moralising warning. The reference to pain (‘pynen’) may be simple convention or suggest that Hubert suffered a fatal illness.

Stripped of its inlays, Hubert’s slab was eventually re-used as building material in the foundations of the north portal of the church where it was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century. It was then housed in the Lapidary Museum in the ruins of St Bavo’s Abbey before being moved back to St Bavo’s Cathedral in recent years. A combined ticket allows visitors access to the cathedral’s romanesque crypt where Hubert’s slab is now located, and to the Ghent Altarpiece in its new location in the apse above.

Sophie Oosterwijk

Further reading:

Elisabeth Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1980), esp. 29-31.

Sophie Oosterwijk, ‘Food for Worms – Food for Thought: The Appearance and Interpretation of the “Verminous” Cadaver in Britain and Europe’, Church Monuments, 20 (2005), 40-80, 133-140, esp. 46-47.

Jacques Paviot, ‘The Van Eyck Family‘, in Maximiliaan Martens et al. (eds), Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution (Ghent: Hannibal/MSK, 2020), 58-83, esp. 60.

Hélène Verougstraete and Wim Verbaal, Het retabel van Jan voor †Lubrect. Een raadsel op het Lam Gods eindelijk opgelost (Openbaar Kunstbezit in Vlaanderen/OKV, 2021).

(Click to see full image)

• Fig. 1. St Bavo’s Cathedral (formerly the parish church of St John), Ghent, Belgium. Photo: Moody 75 at https://www.flickr.com/photos/43039959@N00/3030725486 (2008).
• Fig. 2. Hubert and Jan van Eyck, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Ghent Altarpiece), open (completed 1432), oil on panel, 3.4 x 5.2 m, St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent (Belgium). Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghent_Altarpiece#/media/File:Lamgods_open.jpg (Public Domain).
• Fig. 3a. Hubert and Jan van Eyck, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Ghent Altarpiece), closed (completed 1432), St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent (Belgium). Photo after restoration: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ghent_Altarpiece_%28closed,_after_restoration%29.jpg (Public Domain).
• Fig. 3b. Donors Joos Vijd and Lysbette Borluut before Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, lower register of the exterior wings of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Ghent Altarpiece), closed (completed 1432), St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent (Belgium). Photo after restoration: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ghent_Altarpiece_%28closed,_after_restoration%29.jpg (Public Domain).
• Fig. 4. Public white marble monument to Hubert and Jan van Eyck, unveiled in 1863, situated at the marketplace (Markt) in Maaseik (Belgium). Photo: Kleon3 at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maaseik,_Markt07.jpg.
• Fig. 5. Stone tomb slab commemorating Hubert van Eyck (d. 1426), stripped of its brass inscriptions, photographed in 2011 while still situated at the Lapidary Museum in the ruins of St Bavo’s Abbey, now situated in the crypt of St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent (Belgium). Photo: Karel Julien Cole at https://www.flickr.com/photos/juliensart/5652407709.