アダム

When the Ghent Altarpiece was unveiled in 1432, worshippers looking up saw something no Northern European painter had attempted at that scale, a life-size naked man rendered as if he were a specific person and not an ideal. Van Eyck painted Adam with individual hairs on the legs, veined hands and sunburnt forearms above paler skin, the body of someone who has worked outdoors. Adam stands in a shallow niche high on the wing, and his right foot is foreshortened so it seems to press forward over the painted ledge, into the church's own space, because he was made to be seen from below. The panel has survived theft, fire and wartime hiding, and still stands in Saint Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent.