CRAIG HARBISON
What draws us into the painting of course, initially is the feeling that this is like a photograph. Then you want to know why they're there. What they're doing? Why have all these other objects have been brought together in this room? In this way?

Everything seems then to come alive and to ask a question: what is going on?

NARRATOR
In 1434, in the merchant city of Bruges, a painter called Jan Van Eyck painted a picture of a man and his wife standing in a room.

It was a painting unlike anything that had existed before and it was to become a landmark of the Renaissance.

CRAIG HARBISON
This is one of the most important paintings in the history of art. It is the first painting which shows two contemporary people posed in a contemporary interior engaged in some sort of interaction, conversation.

EVELYN WELCH
This painting has become one of the most famous pictures of our time. And yet frustratingly, amazingly in fact, still remains one of the most problematic pictures we know today.

NARRATOR
This painting contains a secret that has challenged generations of historians. Why was it painted and what does it show? Who was Van Eyck and who paid for his work?

Every time someone gets close to the answers, a new discovery plays a trick and history changes, creating new problems and deeper mysteries.

CRAIG HARBISON
The painting keeps drawing me back. I mean it's so concise, so many things brought together so perfectly that I think of it as a magnet which I simply cannot stay away from.

NARRATOR
CRAIG HARBISON is a Renaissance expert. He's been on a mission to understand Van Eyck's painting for more than half his life.

CRAIG HARBISON
I can't put it aside and put it out of my mind for long. Then I look again. I find I read something else, another detail emerges. The painting again shifts and changes, and a whole new level of mystery or intrigue is opened up.

NARRATOR
Van Eyck's painting was ground-breaking art, drawing us in to a cosy, harmonious world - the outside shoes have been discarded and slippers lie by the couple's bed as their pet dog looks contentedly out towards us.

In the whole history of art no one had painted a domestic scene like this before. No one had signed a painting so prominently. And no one had created anything that looked so real.

EVELYN WELCH
We feel we ought to be able to walk into that room, touch that clothing, respond to those individuals, look out the window. It's an illusion; it's an illusion of a space that's created with oil paints.

CRAIG HARBISON
Van Eyck painted in oils; today this might seem you know, perfectly ordinary, but in fact, it's a turning point in the history of European Art - Western European Art.

This great oil painting survives fortunately in immaculate condition which allows us to appreciate the fact, that in the fifteenth century Van Eyck was considered even to have invented the technique. He did it so perfectly, so miraculously.

NARRATOR
Oil paints allowed Van Eyck to create textures in unprecedented detail - the polished brass of the chandelier which glints in the light, the skin of an orange, the fur of a cloak, the stitching of a hat.

In the hairs of the dog, Van Eyck painted flecks of pure colour, confident in an ability to produce - on a wider scale - the silky texture of a living animal.

Van Eyck is a magician of colour conjuring reality from the careful strokes of his brush. The illusion is so complete that the closer you go, the more you see. The frame of a mirror contains more paintings - scenes from the life of Christ - and its curved glass shows us another image of the room with all its details reproduced as reflections.

Van Eyck became the master of light and shadow with a photographic eye the like of which had never been seen before. His amazing skill with oil paints was so remarkable that it was to make him one of the most famous renaissance painters in Europe.

EVELYN WELCH
We tend to think of the Renaissance as being in Italy, often in Florence. In fact, if you actually look at what wealthy, erudite Italians are collecting, buying, keeping in their studies in the mid fifteenth century it's the work of artists, such as Jan Van Eyck.

NARRATOR
So just who was Jan Van Eyck? We know that he lived in Bruges, but much of his life remains a mystery. We cannot even be sure what he looked like, although some experts think that one of his paintings known as Portrait of a Man is in fact a self-portrait.

MARTIN KEMP
One of the great ideas traditionally about the Renaissance is it is the age of the discovery of the individual - you have portraits, you have self portraits.

You begin to find these people who would have been considered artisans in the past becoming grand figures. I've called them super artists. Jan Van Eyck in a sense is almost there, Albrecht Durer certainly is - Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael... these are self aware super artists making their bid for immortal fame.

And on the wall Jan Van Eyck writes: "Jan Van Eyck was here" (Jan Van Eyck fuit hic in Latin) This is an extraordinary act of self-awareness.

NARRATOR
Some people even believe that one of the two sketched figures painted as reflections in the convex mirror is also a self-portrait - Van Eyck placing himself at the very centre of the world he had portrayed - the super artist.

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Content last updated: 24/03/2005

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