Singing Angels

These Singing Angels from the Ghent Altarpiece (completed 1432) are among the most celebrated details of Jan van Eyck's magnum opus in St. Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent. The altarpiece, completed with his brother Hubert, is considered the founding masterwork of early Netherlandish painting — the work that demonstrated oil painting's full potential for achieving a luminous, jewel-like beauty that no previous medium could match. Jan van Eyck perfected the Flemish oil technique, achieving a microscopic precision and luminosity that made Northern European painting a revelation to Italian contemporaries, and these singing angels demonstrate the full resources of his technique: the individual characterization of each angel's open mouth, the brocade robes with threads seemingly individually rendered, the organ pipes described with technical drawing precision, all combined in a vision of celestial musical splendor.

The angels' mouths are opened in song with physiological accuracy, their expressions individually differentiated. Van Eyck's oil technique creates luminous, jewel-like colors in the brocade robes, each thread seemingly visible.