Why do early Netherlandish paintings attract so much high-pressure interpretation? This has been a matter not just of an abundance and complexity of scholarly response, but also a repeated concentration on individual objects. While the gaze of current art history settles more readily on bodies of material (oeuvres, periods, themes, collections, etc.), the scholarship of early Netherlandish art has an abiding, though far from exclusive, taste for deep accounts of single paintings.

The question rises anew with the appearance of Bret Rothstein’s Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting, which dwells chiefly on four famous works: Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele (c. 1434–36) and Virgin and Child with Chancellor Nicolas Rolin (c. 1435), Rogier van der Weyden’s Bladelin triptych (c. 1445), and Petrus Christus’s A Goldsmith in His Shop (1449). Beyond their spectacular technical accomplishment and canonical stature in northern Renaissance art, it might not be immediately clear what these different kinds of work have in common. Three include a patron in relatively unmediated proximity to divine figures, whether introduced by saints, alone with the Virgin and Child, or present at the Nativity. Assuming it offers a portrait, the Goldsmith is also occupied by someone known to the painting’s early viewers. More importantly for Rothstein’s project, each of the four works also devises deeply inventive relationships between depicted figures and each other, their circumstances, and the picture’s viewer.

Since “sight,” the prime term of analysis for the book, is instrumental for virtually all paintings, we need to attend carefully to the kinds of vision that are being deemed distinctive in early Netherlandish paintings. It is asserted, for example, that “seeing was a unique and culturally charged way of knowing to which painters consciously and reflexively appealed in order to validate the practice of making pictures” (19). Reflexiveness, in the sense of an ostensive engagement with one’s own means of communication or representation, threads much of the discussion. Several elements that spark such consciousness are familiar to those who know these paintings: the spectacles of Canon van der Paele or the reflection of what is usually assumed to be the painter in the armor of St. George; the starkly intersecting vistas of the Rolin panel or the open book from which the chancellor has turned his attention; the constellation of miraculous sights that unify the Bladelin triptych; the playfully permeable threshold of the Goldsmith image. Rothstein engages these and comparable aspects with palpable energy and often wonderful insight. The signal endeavor of his book, however, is its articulation of a rubric under which to relate them.

Chapter 1, “Picturing Vision,” revolves around the Bladelin Triptych, whose three panels include an array of gazing figures. Among these Rothstein intriguingly parses discrete “orders of seeing” (a term recalling the title of the dissertation from which the book is developed), which are experienced by those present at the Nativity (first-order) and those elsewhere who are apprised by divine communiqués (second- and third-order). For an observer of the painting, access is shaped by an alternation of convex and concave arrangements of figures relative to her or his position. In these arcs toward and away from the picture plane, Rothstein sees the viewer being held just beyond the orders available to our painted counterparts. The result is a blend of connection and separation that animates a dialectic of seeing and knowing at the heart of the triptych—and variously at work in most of the paintings under consideration.

The ancient distinction between perception of physical appearances and apprehension of deeper truths was a strong current in late medieval theology. The second half of this chapter ponders a parallel between the triptych and that strain of thought in Die geestelike brulocht (The Spiritual Espousals, c. 1335) of the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec (d. 1381). Each chapter of Sight and Spirituality, in fact, aligns its focus on paintings with kindred ideas in texts. In the juxtaposition of the van der Weyden triptych and Ruusbroec’s tract, the parallels involve the latter’s elaboration of stages of sight as steps toward pure faith, with a devout soul advancing ideally from optical sensation toward inspiration of the mind that may culminate in what Ruusbroec terms raptus. In this process, “the polyvalence of metaphor allows the simultaneous identity and difference of corporeal and supernatural sight to stand in a tense, reciprocal relationship with one another” (44).

As text and painting are joined, much of the cited imagery is irresistibly suggestive; Rothstein makes, for example, a terrific connection with Bladelin’s own reference to “fleshly eyes” in his 1471 endowment of a lantern to illuminate the sacrament. But all such suggestiveness must be gauged against the kind of relationship being posited. Well aware of this, Rothstein plots historically defensible parameters for his textual associations. Thus Ruusbroec’s tract is adduced in part because its vernacular language and evidently broad audience make it a relatively plausible reading—or set of received spiritual ideas—for the Flemish-speaking Pieter Bladelin. Still, for this alignment and others in the chapters to follow, the declared aim is not to read the authors as “direct textual influences but rather as examples of a widespread approach to devotion” (17). While this disavowal of tight correspondences is welcome, the chosen texts are at times explicated in such detail that it is hard to read their conjunction with individual paintings as more circumstantial than specific.

Anchored by the van der Paele Virgin, the second chapter, “The Imagination of Imagelessness,” invokes the venerable medieval contrast between image-based and aniconic devotion. The kneeling patron is seen as achieving the latter ideal, a conclusion based mainly on his paused reading, removed spectacles, and detached gaze. In the writings of Jean Gerson (whose Montaigne de Contemplation (1440) is cited at length here, among other texts), a suspicion about corporeal cognition is found to demonstrate that “while representation may initially be an accelerant for spiritual ardor, it ultimately becomes a retardant of which the soul must dispose” (69).

If these are ideas the canon had taken to heart and wanted to share, why do it with a big, flashy painting? Recognizing the conflict of a lavishly mimetic picture meant to repudiate sensory comprehension, Rothstein concludes that “paradoxically, what redeems religious imagery is its inevitable failure. . . . The simultaneous congruence and lack thereof between image and referent most profoundly fortify the otherwise feckless soul” (74). An intended paradox might make it unnecessary to explain why the canon and other clients would have spent as much as they did on works meant to demonstrate that they didn’t need them. Rothstein sees this as a lesson aimed mainly at viewers other than the patron (91). But given the probability that most viewers in the fifteenth century and ever since have not really felt chastened by time spent marveling at these images, it is worth wondering whether this should be judged a failing of either the painter or the observer.

From the ideal of imagelessness, the book’s third chapter, “The Devotional Image as Social Ornament,” turns to a more worldly self-consciousness in the Rolin panel. The central idea is that the chancellor is shown as knowing how to succeed in this life without losing sight of what matters for eternity. The ideal of a firm grasp on the vitas both activa and contemplativa is illustrated by further citation of Gerson’s Montaigne de contemplation. This main message is easy to accept for a painting renowned for contriving a divine audience in a setting richly allusive to the patron’s earthly domain. As with the readings of proximity vs. distance in the Bladelin triptych, and imagery vs. aniconism in the Van der Paele Virgin, this one, which regards the image as “a strikingly bold statement of humility” (129), sees an image reconciling conceptual poles. Here and more generally in the book, some of Rothstein’s most vivid observations involve different kinds of structural eloquence among the compositions, including his account of “nested literal as well as metaphorical spaces” continuous between the extraordinary setting of the Rolin Virgin and the chapel at Autun it is believed to have occupied (136).

The final chapter, “Senses of Painterly Strength,” centrally addresses the Goldsmith in the Studio, but it also moves more readily among other paintings than the preceding chapters do. Paradox and reflexivity are pursued more variously, beginning with the idea that early Netherlandish painters use the latter to “acknowledge the problematic nature of their trade and, at the same time, to define and promote themselves specifically in terms of it” (138). The grisaille palette on the exterior of triptychs can, for example, suggest both a conscious graduation of the observer’s experience (from one level of reality to another as the work is opened), as well as a paragone-like case for the superiority of painting over sculpture. Elsewhere among the paintings it is argued that such ambitious mimesis can at once advertise and short-circuit itself by drawing viewers close enough to see that it is only paint they are looking at.

This chapter provides some of the book’s freshest insights. One of the most absorbing is a sharp observation about Rogier van der Weyden’s monumental Last Judgment altarpiece (1443–51), a commission from Chancellor Rolin for the Hôtel-Dieu at Beaune. On the globe under the feet of Christ there is a vertically divided tripartite reflection that might be meant as catching daylight from the similarly divided central vistas of one or both of two earlier paintings: Van Eyck’s Rolin Virgin and van der Weyden’s own St. Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child (c. 1435). Rothstein suggests that for the patron, the detail could have been welcome reference to Rolin’s earlier patronage of van Eyck and potentially related meanings in that panel. For the painter, it might have cited one of his own earlier works—a painting manifestly about painting, and intimately related to a picture by his most esteemed colleague. The notion of three major works and three major individuals knowingly embraced by a small patch of light is hugely appealing. It squares well with what we already know of a sophisticated pictorial dialogue between these painters, and yields an associative payoff that seems all the greater for coming from such an unassuming cue.

This last point can partly explain why early Netherlandish paintings have solicited so much close reading. Where a casual viewer can mistake their sheer density of representation for a kind of self-fulfilling realism, others know that an extreme profusion of things, places, and relationships multiplies the number of decisions made by a thoughtful artist and, with them, deliberations about how they can provide something more than a cognate of things in the world. Those who ordered the paintings were anything but casual viewers—a point emphasized in the book’s epilogue, “Notes on the Rise of Visual Skill.” To spot and interpret such subtleties is to be flattered by them and to have one’s appetite whetted for more. They are therefore more than a matter of communicating ideas efficiently; the rarefied process itself becomes a commodity. Rothstein locates this among the senses of “play” framed in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), as well as among comparable forms of ingeniously self-aware literary performance in the work of Jean Molinet, Guillaume de Machaut, and others.

In the tension pursued throughout the chapters between the paintings’ simultaneous expressions of power and inadequacy (“dedicated to the destabilization of optical experience and to its subsequent reconstruction as a contingent and fundamentally flawed thing” ¹⁷⁴), the latter is harder to see consistently. One can also occasionally lose track amid the volleys between aspiration and abnegation being described among the paintings and related texts. In some degree, though, this must be intended, since Rothstein is obviously not after airtight interpretations of the sort preferred in earlier iconological scholarship. His goal is more reflective, and the intensity of his concentration on a handful of major works must be understood in that light. In this respect the book is an eager and revealing participant in the serious, motivated play it imputes to the paintings and their original consumers.

Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting is erudite and provocative in ways that will make it a vital resource for much discussion to come, and not only on the works at its core. It encourages us, for example, to think carefully about ways in which this culture “deeply invested in the primacy of sight” (11) was like or unlike its counterparts in, say, Florence, Cologne, or Paris. Were artists elsewhere more innocent about similar ramifications of their new representational strengths, or were they self-conscious in entirely other ways? As it compels reexamination of how we interpret early Netherlandish paintings, Rothstein’s intelligent meditation also demonstrates ways in which we can and should look ever more closely at the elemental kinship between representation and belief.