Bold Color, Bolder Message: Robert Campin's 'Mérode Altarpiece'

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Harry Rand

An ambitious ensemble overshadowed by the elevation of the
Italian Renaissance. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

NEW YORK---Trailblazers often get things right the first time. Just as Bach and Shakespeare supplied a touchstone for everlasting quality in their respective arts, an equivalent revolution, centuries earlier, forever reformed and altered painting. Among the obscured painters one of their geniuses languished, long known only as the Master of Flémalle—named for a town now in Belgium. Today we know him as Robert Campin (c.1375-1444), generally recognized as the teacher of the more famous Rogier (Roger) van de Weyden. Now in the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's upper-Manhattan outpost for Medieval art, Campin's Mérode Altarpiece (c.1427-32) can still startle with its revolutionary formal and technical innovations. A wooden triptych only 25½ inches tall, the work seems too diminutive for so important a painting. [link]

--Mr. Rand, an art historian, is senior curator of cultural history at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.