Van Eyck Research in Open Access

The VERONA project (Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access), led by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK/IRPA), aims to stimulate research on Jan van Eyck. It aims to document and study all the signed and dated and generally accepted paintings by Van Eyck in European collections, consisting of seventeen paintings in ten different locations. These paintings will be documented with the same methods of technical imagery used recently for the Ghent Altarpiece, including macrophotography (normal light, raking light and infrared), infrared reflectography and X-radiography. In the interests of scholarship, the equipment and procedures of documentation will be standardised in order to create comparable data, and the newly-made images will be published online in open access, as an extension of the Closer to Van Eyck website. The online application will be a touchstone for comparative research on Van Eyck, enabling researchers for the first time to reconsider differences and similarities based on the same equivalent material. In addition, a critical essay on the state-of-research in Eyckian painting will be published, providing a framework for study of the scientific imagery.

As a result of the VERONA project, some masterpieces of the Flemish Primitives in the collection of the Groeninge Museum will temporarily not be on show. Both paintings by Jan van Eyck in the collection (Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele and the Portrait of Margareta van Eyck) will be examined from January 5 onwards and not be exhibited until February 10. The painting The Dormition by Hugo Van der Goes will also be away for examination through January 2. The Moreel Triptych by Hans Memling, in Rome for the Memling exhibition since September, will be on show again from February 3 onwards. During this period a temporary reduction fee will be applied, being €6 (indiv.) and €5 (red.).

(News item January 8 2015)