A world
unfolded.

The Erythraean Sibyl is one of two ancient pagan prophetesses placed inside this Christian altarpiece. Medieval writers believed that sibyls had foreseen aspects of Christ’s coming even without access to Hebrew scripture. She therefore widens the reach of prophecy beyond biblical Israel. Look at the astonishingly contemporary clothing: layered white fabric, a wrapped headdress and a body that turns naturally within the narrow niche. Her scroll loops above and behind her, while her hands gather in an inward, almost startled gesture. She is not presented as a classical ruin. Van Eyck makes her inhabit the visual present of fifteenth-century Ghent, collapsing pagan antiquity, biblical expectation and the viewer’s own time into one continuous history of revelation.

Across the central seam is the Cumaean Sibyl, traditionally associated by medieval Christians with a prophecy of a saviour and a new age. She mirrors the Erythraean Sibyl, but not mechanically. Her green and gold dress, delicate veil and slightly bowed head create a quieter presence. The fluttering scroll occupies the dark recess behind her, while the warm flesh and costly textile come forward. Placing women from pagan antiquity between two Hebrew prophets creates an extraordinary council of witnesses above the Annunciation. The argument is visual before it is theological: many voices, from different worlds, converge upon the event below. Also notice Van Eyck’s delight in difference—cloth, hair, parchment, masonry and skin are each given their own response to light.

Gabriel enters from the far left, yet the Annunciation stretches across all four panels of this middle tier. His white robe pools across the floor in weighty folds; the rainbow-coloured wings carry an almost mineral brilliance. He raises his hand in greeting and holds lilies, a traditional sign of Mary’s purity. Gold words emerge from his mouth: the angelic salutation, ‘Hail, full of grace.’ Van Eyck makes speech occupy the same convincing room as fabric and skin. Notice the distance between Gabriel and Mary. Instead of compressing them into a cosy domestic scene, the painters create a broad, austere interior divided by frames. The message must cross architecture, just as the divine is understood to cross into material human life.

No figure occupies this panel. That absence is the point. Through the open window, streets, stepped gables and church towers recede into pale blue distance. The city has often invited attempts to identify Ghent, but it is safer to treat it as an invented Netherlandish urban world rather than a literal map. Sacred history does not unfold in a vague golden heaven; it opens onto streets a fifteenth-century viewer might recognise. Inside, the room is almost severe: rafters, columns, a tiled or paved floor and a strip of bright sky. Van Eyck uses measured light and minute architecture to stretch the Annunciation across space. The ordinary city becomes a witness to an event occurring silently indoors.

This apparently uneventful panel contains one of Van Eyck’s deepest habits: letting ordinary objects carry sacred meaning. A white towel hangs beside a metal vessel and basin in a recessed niche. They belong to the practical equipment of a prosperous household, but within the Annunciation they also suggest cleansing and Mary’s purity. The objects are not crude symbols pasted into the scene. Their theology depends on being persuasively ordinary—metal reflecting dim light, cloth hanging with weight, water implied by use. The central panels also make the room feel wide enough for silence. Between Gabriel’s speech and Mary’s reply is an interval of architecture, air and domestic life. That pause gives the moment its gravity.

Mary kneels at the far right, interrupted in her reading. A dove—the Holy Spirit—hovers above her head, and her right hand rises in acceptance. Her reply is painted upside down and from right to left: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’ It is oriented not for us but for God above. That tiny conceptual trick transforms lettering into directional speech. Mary’s white garments rhyme with Gabriel’s, yet she remains physically distant across the broad room. Look closely at her face: there is no theatrical surprise, only concentrated assent. Van Eyck makes the Incarnation—the Christian belief that God takes human flesh—occur through light, language and the believable fall of cloth in an ordinary chamber.

At the lower left kneels Joos Vijd, the wealthy Ghent citizen who commissioned the altarpiece with his wife, Elisabeth Borluut. Van Eyck—or the Van Eyck workshop—does not idealise him into youth. The receding hairline, pouch beneath the eye, compressed mouth and roughened skin insist on an individual body. Yet the portrait is not cruel. His clasped hands and upward attention place worldly status inside a posture of prayer. He wears expensive but relatively sober red cloth, set apart from the simulated stone saint beside him. This contrast matters: Joos is living flesh in colour; Saint John is enduring sacred presence made to look like sculpture. Patron, paint and salvation meet in the same lower register.

Saint John the Baptist appears to be a pale stone statue, but every chisel mark is paint. This monochrome technique is called grisaille. Van Eyck makes painting compete with sculpture: the figure casts shadows, fills a Gothic niche and seems to stand on a projecting pedestal. John is identified by the lamb in his arms, recalling his declaration of Christ as the Lamb of God. The visual joke becomes more serious when the altarpiece opens. This stone-coloured Baptist on the exterior gives way to a vividly living Baptist beside the heavenly throne—and below him, to the actual Mystic Lamb at the centre. Closed and open views speak to each other across time.

The second painted statue is Saint John the Evangelist, youthful and clean-shaven. He holds a chalice from which a serpent rises, recalling the legend that he survived poisoned wine by blessing it. Like the Baptist, he is rendered in grisaille so convincing that colour seems to have become carved stone. The two Johns were especially appropriate for the Vijd chapel and for the altarpiece’s larger programme: one announces the Lamb; the other’s Book of Revelation supplies much of the visionary imagery revealed inside. Look at the impossible softness of the ‘stone’ curls and drapery. Van Eyck demonstrates that painting can imitate sculpture—and then surpass it by creating material, light and narrative at once.

Elisabeth Borluut kneels opposite her husband and completes the human frame around the two saints. Her clothing is costly but restrained: layered wool or silk, a white linen headdress and deep green sleeves. As with Joos, age is neither hidden nor exaggerated. The long face, tight mouth and concentrated eyes convey a distinct person rather than a generic pious woman. Notice how her coloured garments occupy the same fictive space as the stone-grey saint, while the real wooden frame separates them. The commissioners are outside the sacred vision, yet permanently oriented towards it. Their gift bought remembrance and prayer—but Van Eyck’s unsparing attention also grants them an extraordinary afterlife as individuals.

When the shutters open, Adam stands at the far left: almost life-sized, naked and startlingly human. He is not an ideal classical nude. Veins, body hair, weight-bearing legs and slightly splayed toes make him feel present in our space. One foot projects over the painted ledge, a bravura illusion that breaches the frame. Adam and Eve are the first sinners, but their place in the heavenly assembly also anticipates redemption by the Lamb below. Above him, painted reliefs show Cain and Abel’s offerings—the next generation and the violence that follows the Fall. Adam’s nudity therefore begins a chain: embodied humanity, sin, sacrifice and the promise of restoration.

Eight angels crowd around a carved wooden lectern, singing from an open book. They have no wings, yet their sumptuous vestments and place beside the heavenly throne identify them as celestial. Van Eyck differentiates every face and mouth: rounded vowels, narrowed lips, focused eyes, even the strain of collective performance. Scholars have connected these variations with polyphonic singing, although we should not pretend the exact music can be recovered simply from their mouths. Look at the contrast between living sound and precious matter—the patterned brocade, pearls and reflective gems. The panel tries to make silence audible. Even without hearing a note, we sense breath passing from eight bodies into one complex harmony.

Mary is no longer the humble white-robed figure of the closed Annunciation. Here she appears as Queen of Heaven, enthroned in deep blue and absorbed in a book. A jewelled crown floats or rests above her, packed with flowers, stars and pearls. Yet grandeur does not interrupt attention: her lowered eyes and gently separated fingers make reading the central action. The inscriptions praise her beauty through cosmic images, aligning her with sun, stars and divine wisdom. Look at the pages, the fine hair at her temple and the minute reflections in the gems. Van Eyck’s luxury is never merely decorative. Material splendour becomes a language for spiritual radiance.

The central enthroned figure is often called God the Father, sometimes Christ the King, and sometimes understood as a deliberately encompassing image of the triune God. The ambiguity is real; do not let a simple label flatten it. He wears a triple crown and a blazing red mantle, raises the right hand in blessing and holds a crystal sceptre. At his feet lies another crown, implying dominion beyond earthly rule. Every surface performs: pearls, gold embroidery, translucent crystal, flesh and dense cloth. Yet the frontal stillness is more powerful than the luxury. This figure is the immovable axis of the upper register, while Mary and John turn inward and the angelic choirs generate music on either side.

John the Baptist sits to the ruler’s left, balancing Mary. Beneath the green mantle you can glimpse his rough camel-hair garment—the wilderness prophet clothed in courtly colour. He holds a book and gestures towards the central figure, continuing his role as witness and forerunner. On the closed exterior he appeared as stone-grey sculpture carrying a lamb. Here he has become living flesh; below, the Lamb itself stands on the altar. That three-stage repetition—statue, saint, sacrificial Lamb—is one of the altarpiece’s most elegant chains of meaning. Study the rough hair, soft green wool, sharp page edges and bare foot. Different textures become different registers of truth.

Opposite the singers, angels make instrumental music around a small organ. One works the keys while another operates the bellows; nearby are a harp and bowed string instrument. The organ pipes are not generic gold tubes. Their changing reflections, seams and tiny irregularities make metal seem tangible. An ermine-trimmed robe, patterned carpet and hundreds of jewels turn the group into an inventory of costly surfaces. Yet the players appear concentrated rather than decorative. Fingers press, bodies lean, and eyes follow the work of performance. Together with the singing angels, they frame the central trio in imagined sound—as if vision at its highest intensity must become music.

Eve faces Adam from the far right. Her body is equally unidealised: narrow shoulders, a softly rounded abdomen, individual hair and feet grounded with real weight. She holds not the familiar red apple but a small citrus fruit, perhaps chosen for its bitter association with the Fall. The illusion again breaks the boundary between image and viewer, while the relief above shows Cain murdering Abel—the human consequence of the first disobedience. Eve’s frank physicality once provoked censorship and removal from public view. Here, however, her body is not an interruption to the sacred programme. It is precisely the vulnerable humanity for whom the Lamb’s sacrifice is offered.

This panel is the altarpiece’s most famous absence. The original Just Judges was stolen in 1934 and has never been recovered. What you see today is Jef Van der Veken’s replacement, begun before the Second World War and installed after it. The riders represent righteous secular authority—administrators and judges joining the pilgrimage towards the Lamb. Compare this panel with the neighbouring Knights: the copy’s colour and spatial depth do not quite behave like the Van Eyck original beside it. That difference should not be hidden. The replacement preserves the composition while marking a wound in the object’s history. An altarpiece about loss and redemption literally contains a missing image.

The Knights of Christ ride out of a rocky landscape in polished armour and bright heraldic colour. They embody militant or protective Christian virtue rather than a record of one historical cavalry unit. Lances, banners and overlapping horses build a compressed forward rhythm, but every reflective surface remains individually observed. Some writers have tried to identify particular saints or historical rulers among the riders; those proposals are uncertain. The secure meaning lies in their direction. Worldly force is subordinated to worship: the warriors carry no battle into the centre but join the universal approach towards the Lamb. Armour, in Van Eyck’s hands, becomes another instrument for painting light.

A dense procession of hermits emerges from a rocky wilderness. These are saints who sought God through solitude, fasting and withdrawal, yet Van Eyck gathers them into a community moving towards the Lamb. Saint Anthony is usually recognised among the leaders, while Mary Magdalene and a female companion—often identified as Mary of Egypt—follow at the rear. Their dark robes make the small passages of face, beard and hand unusually intense. The landscape is not empty desert but a richly vegetated northern vision of wilderness. Solitude here is not escape from salvation’s great assembly; it is one road into it.

At the far right, the holy pilgrims travel through a sunlit landscape. The giant in the red cloak is Saint Christopher, whose name means ‘Christ-bearer’; according to legend, he carried the Christ Child across a river. Behind him come travellers marked by hats, staffs and the accumulated fatigue of journeying. They answer the judges and knights on the opposite side. Rank, force, contemplation and pilgrimage all converge upon the same centre. Look beyond the figures to the palms, cypresses and distant blue country. Van Eyck makes the road to salvation geographically expansive—part northern meadow, part imagined holy landscape, and wholly continuous with the Lamb’s green paradise.