No man could try to paint things as they looked, in the way Hubert did, without making great progress in drawing.  If you compare the drawing of the angel appearing to the Maries with any of the angels wearing the badge of Richard II., you will see how much more life-like is the angel of Hubert.  The painter of Richard II. was not happy with his figures unless they were standing up or kneeling in profile, but Hubert van Eyck can draw them with tolerable success lying down, or sitting huddled.  He can also combine a group in a natural manner.  The absence of formal arrangement in the picture of the Maries is quite new in medieval art.

The painter of Richard II. had known very little about perspective.  The science of drawing things as they look from one point of view has no doubt been taught to all of you.  You know certain rules about vanishing points and can apply them in your drawing.  But you would have found it very hard to invent perspective without being taught.  I can remember drawing a matchbox by the light of nature, and very queer it contrived to become.  Medieval artists were in exactly that same case.  The artists of the ancient world had discovered some of the laws of perspective, but the secret was lost, and artists in the Middle Ages had to discover them all over again.  Hubert van Eyck made a great stride toward the attainment of this knowledge.  When you look at the picture the perspective does not strike you as glaringly wrong, though there was still much that remained to be discovered by later men, as we shall see in our next chapter.

The brothers Van Eyck were, first and foremost, good workmen.  Few other painters in the whole of the world’s history have aimed at anything like the same finish of detail.  In the original of this picture the oriental pot which the green Mary holds in her hand is a perfect marvel of workmanship.  There is no detail so small but that when you look into it you discover some fresh wonder.  A story is told of how Hubert van Eyck painted a picture upon which he had lavished his usual painstaking care.  But when he put it in the sun to dry, the panel cracked down the middle.  After this disappointment Hubert went to work and invented a new substance with which colours are made liquid, a ‘medium’ as it is called, which when mixed with colour dried hard and quickly.  It was possible to paint with the new medium in finer detail than before, and the Flemish artists universally adopted it.  While very little was remembered about the facts of Hubert van Eyck’s life, his name was always associated with the discovery of a new method of painting, and on that account held in great honour.