For the consummate artistry, for the perfect sense of decoration and composition, the keen and exquisite line, the perception and recording of diversified character, the poignant love of all natural beauty and corresponding rejection of all ugliness, for the technique which is that of a master in the fashioning of precious metals and the cutting of priceless gems, for the colour that is now resonant with all the deep splendour of great music, now thin and aerial with all the delicacy of far horizons and misty forests at some pale dawn in a land of dreams--for all these things we may remember Hubert Van Eyck and his brother Jan, for this is their work, but beyond this we go elsewhere, at least as far as the mass itself, for the inspiration that has made this Flemish triptych one of the great, revealing creations of the world. The infinite variety of conception and rendition simply transcend experience. The three great, dominating figures--God the Father, Our Lady, and St. John Baptist--are of a Byzantine majesty transfused by a passionate humanism that is almost unique in any form. From them you pass to the central panel of the “Worship of the Lamb That Was Slain,” which is as tender and personal and human as the best of Fra Angelico, and, like his clear visions, irradiated by a kind of paradisal glory that sets it in a heaven of its own; from this you go to the panels of singing angels and splendid attendant knights and marching pilgrims that are pages out of the daily record of life in proud and beautiful Bruges, and finally you come to the Adam and Eve who are sheer, unadulterated realism unapproachable in its minute veracity. Surely, these two men were a type of the universal genius. They balked at nothing and found nothing too difficult of accomplishment, simply because they were perfectly trained and broadly accomplished craftsmen who knew that theirs was an exacting and a jealous craft for which “temperament”--artistic or otherwise--was not, and could not be made, a substitute. It is with a feeling almost of relief that we come down nearer the earth and confront the masterpieces of Jan Van Eyck. With Hubert we are taken into a kind of seventh heaven of mystical revelation; with his brother and those that follow we come back to what is more human, more in scale with experience. Great art still, as great as one can find elsewhere, and with all the mastery of methods, all the confident certainty, all the triumphant colour and the exquisite design and the faultless craftsmanship of the painted “Beatific Vision” itself. There once were many other pictures by Hubert Van Eyck, but all now are gone, destroyed by the savage hands of Calvinists and Revolutionaries, and the “Adoration of the Lamb” remains alone as an isolated miracle.