no doubt been taught to all of you. You know certain rules about
vanishing points and can apply them in your drawing. But you would
have found it very hard to invent perspective without being taught.
I can remember drawing a matchbox by the light of nature, and very
queer it contrived to become. Medieval artists were in exactly that
same case. The artists of the ancient world had discovered some of
the laws of perspective, but the secret was lost, and artists in the
Middle Ages had to discover them all over again. Hubert van Eyck made
a great stride toward the attainment of this knowledge. When you look
at the picture the perspective does not strike you as glaringly wrong,
though there was still much that remained to be discovered by later
men, as we shall see in our next chapter.

The brothers Van Eyck were, first and foremost, good workmen. Few other
painters in the whole of the world's history have aimed at anything
like the same finish of detail. In the original of this picture the
oriental pot which the green Mary holds in her hand is a perfect marvel
of workmanship. There is no detail so small but that when you look
into it you discover some fresh wonder. A story is told of how Hubert
van Eyck painted a picture upon which he had lavished his usual
painstaking care. But when he put it in the sun to dry, the panel cracked
down the middle. After this disappointment Hubert went to work and
invented a new substance with which colours are made liquid, a 'medium'
as it is called, which when mixed with colour dried hard and quickly.
It was possible to paint with the new medium in finer detail than before,
and the Flemish artists universally adopted it. While very little was
remembered about the facts of Hubert van Eyck's life, his name was
always associated with the discovery of a new method of painting, and
on that account held in great honour.