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Most people must be moved when they see the painting of Venetia Stanley by Anthony Van Dyck. She seems asleep, her head gently resting on her hand, but then you see one of her eyes is open in an unnatural way. You realise she is dead. Van Dyck, with just black and white paint, evokes a timeless image of serenity and beauty within death.
There are other sombre paintings in the exhibition of his works currently showing at London's Royal Academy. They reflect a seventeenth century of war, plague and premature death. However, the gallery also has evocative religious and mythological paintings and many portraits of individuals in gorgeous clothing, for which Van Dyck is most famous. They are constructed in a similar fashion, with the subject framed by a column and drapes, often with a small landscape view visible in the background. Van Dyck keeps symbolism to a minimum, so that you focus attention on the individual, particularly their facial expression and hands.
By the time I left, his Maria Louisa de Tassis had seduced me with a smile every bit as memorable as the Mona Lisa. And I felt some sympathy for King Charles I of England. Van Dyck's triple portrait of him is the epitome of royal aloofness, but he remains convincingly human with dark watery eyes.
Perhaps I had succumbed to what the historian Christopher Hill calls Van Dyck—“a conscious propagandist in the cause of absolutism,” who “falsified the truth of appearances.” Perhaps my response was a little more complex.
Van Dyck was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1599, a city on the battle line between the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation.
The city was built on trade, particularly luxury goods. Van Dyck's father was a cloth merchant and many of Van Dyck's first patrons were merchants.
This was a time of great artistic and cultural advance, particularly in Italy, where there had been a revival of the study of classical (Greek and Roman) culture during the...