Handbook of Painting:  the German, Flemish, and Dutch Schools,
    based on the handbook of Kugler remodelled by Dr. Waagen and
    revised by J.A.  Crowe (London, 1874).

FOOTNOTES: 

[11] Carton, Les Trois Freres van Eyck, p. 36.

[12] Marc van Vaernewijck in a MS. of 1566-8, describing the Ghent troubles, states that on the 19th of August, two days before the iconoclasts plundered St. Bavon, the picture of the Mystic Lamb was removed from the Vijdts chapel and concealed in one of the towers.  See the MS., Van die Beroerlicke Tijden in die Nederlanden{b}, recently printed at Ghent (1872), p. 146.  On the same page in which Vaernewijck relates this story he says that he refers his readers, for the lives of the Van Eycks to his book, Mijn leecken Philosophie int xx^e bouck.  This book, which probably still exists on the shelves of some library, has not as yet been discovered.

[13] “The pictures here exhibited as the works of Hemmelinck, Messis, Lucas of Holland, A. Duerer, and even Holbein, are inferior to those ascribed to Eyck in colour, execution, and taste.  The draperies of the three on a gold ground, especially that of the middle figure, could not be improved in simplicity, or elegance, by the taste of Raphael himself.  The three heads of God the Father, the Virgin, and St. John the Baptist, are not inferior in roundness, force, or sweetness to the heads of L. da Vinci, and possess a more positive principle of colour.”—­Life of Fuseli, i. p. 267.  This is a very remarkable opinion for the period when it was written.

[14] This appears from the following inscription of the time, on the frame of the outer wing:—­

“Pictor Hubertus ab Eyck, major quo nemo repertus Incepit; pondusque Johannes arte secundus Frater perfecit, Judoci Vyd prece fretus [VersV seXta MaI Vos CoLLoCat aCta tVerI].”

[The last verse gives the date of May 6, 1432.] The discovery of this inscription, under a coating of green paint, was made in Berlin in 1824, when the first word and a half of the third line, which were missing, were [imperfectly] supplied [with “frater perfectus”] by an old copy of this inscription, found by M. de Bast, the Belgian connoisseur.

[15] [Dr. Waagen did not always hold decided opinions as to what portions of the altar-piece of Ghent are by Hubert and John van Eyck, respectively.  There is no doubt that some of “the sublime earnestness” which Schlegel notes in the Eternal, the Virgin, and John the Baptist, and much of the stern realism which characterizes those figures, is to be found in the patriarchs and prophets, and in the hermits and pilgrims, and in the Adam and Eve; but it is too much to say that these wing pictures can “with certainty be assigned to Hubert,” and it is not to be forgotten that John van Eyck worked in this picture on the lines laid down by his elder brother, and must have caught some of the spirit of his great master.]