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(piano music)
Steven: There is this marvelous way
that Jan van Eyck can create a sense of the real
even when he's representing the impossible.
Beth: Mary is impossibly large
within this exceptionally beautiful
and perhaps impossibly beautiful Gothic church.
She fills this space,
and is shown here as the Queen of Heaven,
with a crown on her head, studded with jewels,
and a gown embroidered with gold.
We know what we have before us is a vision.
A vision of Mary in a church
not unlike the one that people
would go to in the fifteenth century,
which must have made this a very real vision.
Steven: If we look to the far back,
we can see this beautiful tracery,
and within that wooden carving,
we can actually see stories
of the life of the *** Mary.
Through the doorway we can also see two angels
that seem to be singing from a hymnbook,
and if we look just over Mary's left shoulder,
we can see a sculpture that shows
the *** Mary holding her son
just as the *** Mary before us holds Christ.
Beth: It's as though that sculpture
in the niche behind Mary has come alive
and is flesh and blood before us,
and what makes this all so much more believable
is what van Eyck is able to do with light.
We see it flooding in the Gothic windows,
and two pools of sunlight on the floor in front of Mary.
We know that we're looking toward
the east end of the church;
therefore the light that we see
reflected on the floor
is coming from the windows on the north,
and those spots of light
would be impossible in that case,
so the light must be mystical; supernatural.
Steven: This painting is about the way
that light passes through the great windows
of a Gothic cathedral into its sacred interior space,
because that functioned, in the medieval mind,
as an important symbol of Mary's chastity;
of her virginity.
This is an ideal church.
This architecture doesn't exist in the world,
but is Jan van Eyck's fantasy
of the perfect interior for Mary, to enthrone Mary.
This is a way of representing the heavenly sphere
in an environment that we can recognize.
This painting was stolen in 1877,
and although the panel itself was recovered,
its frame was not.
The frame, however, had an inscription,
which was recorded, and it read as follows.
"As the sunbeam through the glass passes but not stains,
"so the *** as she was, a *** still remains."
(piano music)