Surely this would be thought a beautiful picture had it been painted at any time, but when you compare it with the Richard II. diptych does it not seem to you as though a long era divided the two?  Yet one was painted less than fifty years after the other.  It is the attitude of mind of the painter that makes the difference.

In the diptych, although the portrait of Richard himself was a likeness, the setting was imaginary and symbolic.  The artist wished to tell in his picture how all the Kings who succeed one another upon the throne of England alike depend upon the protection of Heaven, and how Richard in his turn acknowledged that dependence, and pledged his loyalty to the Blessed Virgin and her Holy Child.  That picture was intended to take the mind of the spectator away from the everyday world and suggest grave thought, and such was likewise in the main the purpose of all paintings in the Middle Ages.  But we are now leaving the Middle Ages behind and approaching a new world nearer to our own.

Hubert van Eyck, in attempting to depict the event at the Sepulchre as it might actually have occurred outside the walls of the City of Jerusalem, was doing something quite novel in his day.  His picture might almost be called a Bible illustration.  It is at least painted in the same practical spirit as that of a man painting an illustration for any other book.  It is not a picture meant to help one to pray, or meditate.  It does not express any religious idea.  It was intended to be the veracious representation of an actual event, shown as, and when, and how it happened, true to the facts so far as Hubert knew them.

[Illustration:  THE THREE MARIES From the picture by Hubert van Eyck, in Sir Frederick Cook’s Collection, Richmond]

He has dressed the Maries in robes with wrought borders of Hebrew characters, imitated from embroidered stuffs, such as at that time were imported into Europe from the East.  The dresses are not accurate copies of eastern dresses; Hubert would scarcely have known what those were like, but was doing his best to paint costumes that should look oriental.  Mary Magdalen wears a turban, and the keeper on the right has a strange peaked cap with Hebrew letters on it.  Hebrew scholars have done their best to read the inscriptions on these clothes, but we must infer that Hubert only copied the letters without knowing what they meant, since it has not been possible to make any sense of them.  In the foreground are masses of flowers most carefully painted, and so accurately drawn that botanists have been able to identify them all; several do not grow in the north of Europe.  The town at the back is something like Jerusalem as it looked in Hubert van Eyck’s own day.  A few of the buildings can be identified still, and a general view of Jerusalem taken in 1486, sixty years after the death of Hubert, bears some resemblance to the town in this picture.  The city is painted in miniature, much as it would look if you saw it from near at hand.  Every tower, house, and window is there.  You can even count the battlements.  The great building with the dome in the middle of the picture, is the Mosque of Omar, which occupies the supposed site of Solomon’s Temple.