(cheerful music) Dr. Steven Zucker: According to legend, St. Luke had a vision of
the Virgin Mary and Child, and painted that vision. As a result, he is the
patron saint of painters. Dr. Beth Harris: You'll
notice that St. Luke's eyes are half-closed, so we know that he is not actually seeing the Virgin
and Child in front of him, but having a vision. Dr. Zucker: It is not
his painting, in a sense. He is literally the hand of this angel. St. Luke's image, then, of the Virgin Mary and Child has a kind of authority because it is God's,
actually, and not his. Dr. Harris: What's interesting
then is that the artist, Gossaert, is painting
his Virgin Mary and Child not from the same authority as the painter St. Luke, in his painting. One wonders about what
it was like for artists to paint heavenly figures. How does one imagine the Virgin Mary? How does one paint Jesus Christ? These are, I think, difficult
questions always for artists. Dr. Zucker: Right; we have absolutely no historical references
to their likenesses, and so where is the
authority of any painter who is transcribing their images? And that issue of even the legitimacy of transcribing an image
is called into question in the top right corner,
where the artist has rendered [in grise], in greys,
a sculpture of Moses. You can tell it's Moses
because he's holding the two tablets with the 10 laws. Dr. Harris: The 10 Commandments. Dr. Zucker: In the Christian tradition, he's shown with horns on his head, and so we know it's Moses. Moses seems to actually
be pointing at something, and one of the laws is
to not render people, not to render the fish below the sea, not to render the birds in the sky. The idea that the artist tries to take on the role of God, perhaps,
by trying to create. Dr. Harris: "Thou shalt
not create graven images," might be how most people
know that commandment. Gossaert is living right at the time that the Protestant reformation begins, and one of the things
that Luther's followers talked about is the danger of images, of people worshipping images instead of using them only as an aid in prayer. This is certainly reflecting
on the role of the artist and whether images have
a legitimacy or not. Dr. Zucker: Well, that's right. This is absolutely
supporting the legitimacy of the artist creating religious imagery. Dr. Harris: Because one of
the writers of the gospel, St. Luke himself, painted Mary. Dr. Zucker: And the artist
has blown out all the stops. He is rendering every
detail with a precision that comes out of the Northern tradition. Dr. Harris: We know that
Gossaert copied Van Eyck. He's fully steeped in
the Northern Rennaisance tradition of painting
everything with a clarity and exactitude and attention
to different textures. Dr. Zucker: Well, look
at the angel's wings. Look at the detail of the relief
carving in the architecture. This is an arist who is just enjoying the ability to magically render form. Now, look for just a second back at Moses and those two tablets. Notice the way that the
shape of those two tablets rhyme with the architectural space. I think when most art historians
look at this painting, they look back to this
tradition of dividing the earthly space from
the spiritual space. Certainly, that central column does that; but it also makes the
entire painting two tablets. There is this way in which the tablets that Moses holds is actually embodied in the architectural space itself. Dr. Harris: That's true. Although we think about the space as being very classical-looking,
looking like Ancient Roman architecture, with those
round arches and pilasters, it's still to me a very mysterious space, much more like Northern
Rennaisance spaces, where, as we look back toward Moses, we have those repeated
round arches, moving back into a space that we can't
quite determine there. Although the foreground of
the painting seems to be carefully mapped out
according to the rules of linear perscpective,
which obviously Gossaert has learned as a Northern Rennaisance artist from traveling to Italy, but we see so much of the North here. If we look at the drapery
that St. Luke wears, it's typical Northern Rennaisance, angular folds of drapery that we see in the art of Campin or
Rogier van der Weyden. Dr. Zucker: And so is the color. Dr. Harris: The green that
that angel wears against the complementary red
color worn by St. Luke. There's a real thoughtfulness
about color here. Dr. Zucker: This is an
artist who was working in Antwerp, which was one
of the great merchantile cities of the 15th and
early 16th Centuries. That was a culture and
an economy that was based on importation, that
was based on trade, and, in some ways, this is a
painting that is also trading. Dr. Harris: That idea of the North and the South coming together that we see in the work of [Dore] and beginning with Michael Pacher in the late 15th Century. (lively music)