The Modern Art Notes Podcast: Jan van Eyck

This week's Modern Art Notes Podcast is devoted to Jan van Eyck, the greatest painter of the northern Renaissance.

Remarkably, there's only one English-language monograph on van Eyck's art. Titled "Jan Van Eyck: The Play of Realism," it was written by my first guest, Craig Harbison. A revised, expanded version of the book is just out from Reaktion Books.

My second guest, Ron Spronk, coordinated the "Closer to van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece" web project. This new website is remarkable for many reasons. First: It's difficult to see the Ghent Altarpiece in any detail in person: Many of the panels are 15 feet off the ground, leaving them impossible to examine closely. Now anyone can examine high-resolution, digital versions of them in never-seen-before quality.

But the site is much more than that: Unlike popular macrophotography sites such as the Google Art Project, "Closer to van Eyck" offers four layers of technical documentation of the Ghent Altarpiece: The straightforward macrophotographic image, but also infrared macrophotography, infrared reflectography and x-ray images.