Singing Angels

The altarpiece these angels belong to was installed in its Ghent chapel in May 1432. Van Eyck was then court painter and valet de chambre to Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, whose chapel employed some of the most admired singers in Europe, so trained polyphony was part of his working life. The angels on this panel are not singing one line together. Their brows are pulled differently, their mouths open to different shapes, and musicians who study the panel read those mouths as separate parts, the high voice, the middle, the bass. The panel left the cathedral in 2023 for the restoration studio at the city's Museum of Fine Arts, where the whole upper row of the altarpiece was being cleaned of overpaint added by later hands, work scheduled to run into 2026.