The Madonna in a Church

The Virgin, crowned and holding her Child, stands impossibly large within a soaring Gothic cathedral - her giant scale a deliberate symbol, for she embodies the Church itself, the mother church of the faithful. On this small panel Jan van Eyck, supreme master of the new oil technique in the Netherlands, renders the building with miraculous precision and, for perhaps the first time in painting, shows real sunlight slanting through the windows to pool in bright patches on the floor. Where his Italian contemporaries Masaccio and Fra Angelico built space through perspective, van Eyck conjures it through light and the patient observation of surfaces.