As of this week, all the painted works, plus the unique miniatures of Jan van Eyck, can now be admired online in ultra-high resolution on the website Closer to Van Eyck (closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be). Almost the entire oeuvre of Jan van Eyck is now accessible online, including the miniatures from the Turin-Milan Hours manuscript. The digitalized art works will also feature in an interactive exhibition Facing Van Eyck. The Miracle of the Detail, which opens this fall in BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts.
The works by Jan van Eyck available on closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be
The VERONA project (Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access) of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) has launched a new chapter in the research of paintings by Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and his atelier, thanks to the production of high-quality, standardized image material. This is accessible in open access on the website Closer to Van Eyck. The paintings were photographed using macro photography (with normal light, grazing light, infrared light and UV fluorescence) and, in some cases, also X-ray photography and macro-XRF scanning.
Detail of a sleeping soldier taken from the Milan-Turin Hours (folio 77v, The Resurrection). Image: closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be
The presentation of the European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award for Research 2019 to the VERONA project on 14 January in BOZAR was the perfect moment to launch the macro photos of 28 folios with miniatures from the book Turin-Milan Hours (Palazzo Madama). The folios from the National University Library in Turin, which were partly burned in 1904, can now also be viewed in color for the first time. This is the result of a collaboration between the team of KIK-IRPA and Musea Brugge / Kenniscentrum vzw. From now on, you can also browse through the new image material of masterpieces, such as the Arnolfini Portrait and –presumed– Self-portrait from London (National Gallery), the Saint Francis from Turin, the Crucifixion from Venice, two altar panels from New York and a series of lesser-known works emulating Van Eyck. This brings the grand total to 30.
Visitors can also now enjoy an entirely updated viewer, allowing you to continuously zoom in. Plus, there are more configuration opportunities for the classification of images, support for touchscreens and user-friendly menus. Finally, the miniatures can be compared in minute detail with the much bigger paintings, thanks to the function for comparing images of different scales at the same size