This is a well-reasoned criticism; thank you for taking the time to write it.
> Van Eyck must have spent days
I am curious, from your experience, how long do you think it would have taken Van Eyck to get the prayer beads this right?
> It’s longer than a normal human neck
I agree with you that people fetishize master artists. Yet, I think you must also agree that painters often alter reality to achieve an effect. I chose to use the neck as an example, for it's much more likely that he did on this purpose, and it really hit me as a surprise when I first looked at that painting.
> There is no consistent theory that makes a Botticelli "good" and both Van Gogh paintings "good".
The theory I proposed is "what affects humans". This is much fuzzier than mathematical theory, but I think you can judge both works as good, if they affect humans as the artists intended.
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If you have suggestions for books that explore painting, less from an art history perspective, and more from a painter's perspective, would love em!
Someone else mentioned that artists at the time would have made studies (nature morte) so that they already know how to paint these objects.
For the time itself, it depends on how fast he worked, etc. So I have no idea unless the process was documented.
A Chinese painter I know says his master spent one month in the mountain studying monkeys, and after that he only needed a glimpse to capture the image of one in full details. I think what matters here is that with time, your brain learns to reduce the complexity of the domain. In doing so you just have to remember a few key points (skull shape, expression, ...) that will capture the whole, most of "a monkey" being similar to another monkey, so you can reconstruct the missing pieces. Of course, a monkey is a tremendously complicated object compared to a set of glass beads, since there are many more dimensions (hairy, young, fur color, ...).
For mistakes of breaking the rules, I agree that it might have been intentional. Maybe he just made a gesture, found it to be good, and disregarded the anatomical accuracy. I was not intimate with him, so I wouldn't know. Many famous examples were not accepted as such a famous critic of the "Grande Odalisque" claimed she had three additional vertebrae compared to a normal human. Who has the best sensibility, the one who admires the painting nonetheless, or the one who sees a deformed human?
I don't know "what affects humans", or how that could separate "art" from "anything else".
It did not affect contemporaries of Van Gogh, and most people who are affected by it are so after having been immersed in a culture claiming it is high-art, or facing ridicule as uneducated rubes. I believe most of the time this actually means "has some market value".
For a reference from a painter's perspective, James Gurney's "Color and light - a guide for the realist painter" is probably the current standard.
Noted for the reference, will look deeper. I also reached out to a few specialists , to get a sense for how long the prayer beads would have taken. I am genuinely curious. Thanks for your thoughts.
> It did not affect contemporaries of Van Gogh, and most people who are affected by it are so after having been immersed in a culture claiming it is high-art, or facing ridicule as uneducated rubes. I believe most of the time this actually means "has some market value".
I agree that there's a lot of strutting in art, but I think this is too cynical of an assessment. This kind of argument can be made for books, obtuse mathematical works (Principia Mathematica, 1980s AI, etc), and the new programming paradigm du jour. Eventually critics and contemporaries die, and time begins to tell what was truly exceptional and what wasn't. I would bet Van Gogh falls into the great camp; but we'll see for sure in a few more centuries.
I spoke with a conservator at the gallery. He says that indeed the beads likely didn't take too long to put to the canvas. Hey may have looked at them a while, but at least the process of transferring them to the canvas was quick.
I've edited this section. You have made the essay stronger. Thank you!
> how long do you think it would have taken Van Eyck to get the prayer beads this right?
Not the parent poster, but: check out some YouTube videos on realistic painting. A professional artist would probably get them to 90% finished in like an hour or so with some fine tuning later.
It doesn’t have to be perfect raycasting, it just has to be convincing/good enough.
> Van Eyck must have spent days
I am curious, from your experience, how long do you think it would have taken Van Eyck to get the prayer beads this right?
> It’s longer than a normal human neck
I agree with you that people fetishize master artists. Yet, I think you must also agree that painters often alter reality to achieve an effect. I chose to use the neck as an example, for it's much more likely that he did on this purpose, and it really hit me as a surprise when I first looked at that painting.
> There is no consistent theory that makes a Botticelli "good" and both Van Gogh paintings "good".
The theory I proposed is "what affects humans". This is much fuzzier than mathematical theory, but I think you can judge both works as good, if they affect humans as the artists intended.
--
If you have suggestions for books that explore painting, less from an art history perspective, and more from a painter's perspective, would love em!