The Ghent altarpiece: An unlikely fruit meaning original sin
By Kelly Grovier29th April 2021
Van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece features a surprising candidate for the forbidden fruit. Kelly Grovier explores how it gives spiritual coherence to the 15th-Century work.
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Great works of art contain seeds of strangeness from which their meaning endlessly emerges. Some of these seeds are impossibly famous: the twisting fingers of foam that tickle the breaking crest of Hokusai's Great Wave; the vibrating whorls of astral heat in Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night; the weightless orb dangling from the lobe of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Some are yet to be uncovered. In the case of the exquisite 15th-Century altarpiece designed by the Flemish artist Hubert van Eyck and painted by his brother Jan for Saint Bavo's Cathedral chapel in Ghent – the widely revered polyptych known as the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb – a juicy detail at the very heart of the work has been waiting to be plucked and squeezed into significance for more than 600 years.