Flemish Primitives | Techniques: Details and Symbols

The artists themselves were well aware of this. They demonstrated their virtuoisity in a staggering detail of realism that would never be paralleled. The details are often a source of information and bear symbolic meaning.

With the concept of disguised symbolism, the German-American Art Historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) points to the hidden religious symbolism in the visible everyday reality of the Flemish primitives. It became one of the most influential, sweeping and misused ideas of the 20th-century interpretation of art. Some researchers fall into overinterpretation and write that the quotidian was an icongoraphical complexity that the artists did not have in mind.

Text: Mieke Parez