A Virgem na Igreja

This panel is tiny, about a hand's span tall, and yet it holds a whole Gothic cathedral with the Virgin standing inside it, so large she reaches nearly to the upper windows. That scale is deliberate. She is not a woman in a building, she is the Church itself. Van Eyck, working in the Low Countries around 1440, was obsessed with light, and here he does something no one else could. Sunbeams fall through the high windows and land in two bright pools on the stone floor. Look at where that light comes from. It floods in from the north side, where real sun never shines, so the glow filling this church is not daylight at all but a light meant to read as divine. Even the gold letters on the hem of her robe catch it.