EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Art and Eckhart

“Knowledge of Meister Eckhart’s work is indispensable to the understanding of medieval art, even though he has been almost totally neglected by those who like to call themselves ‘historians of art.’”

So wrote the Egyptologist and scholar of mystery religions Christian Jacq on the opening page of his book on the medieval cathedrals.¹

I don’t know how many readers are familiar with Meister Eckhart, an early 14^th century preacher in Germany, but I would go beyond Jacq’s claim and say that Eckhart’s writings and sermons are useful to understanding Western art from all periods. This may sound like a stretch but Eckhart is like a pivot at the end of the Middle Ages. His beliefs reflect the ideas of earlier mystics while later mystics reflect his. The basic ideas are those of all Christian mystics. Yet art historians hardly ever mention him, convinced that artists produced what their patrons in positions of authority wanted and not what they, the artists, believed. Yet Eckhart traveled and preached all over Europe and his sermons  became, if not common knowledge, then widely known in the Renaissance. God, he preached, is hidden inside each of our souls. If, through deep humility, we can annihiliate our own self then, paradoxically, our self returns to us, no longer selfish but pure and we become at one with God. We, then, are a reflection of God’s own face. As Nicholas of Cusa, a German cardinal and admirer of Eckhart, described it in the fifteenth century: “In all faces is seen the Face of faces, veiled, and in a riddle.” He also put it it more explicitly: “[God’s] face is that power and principle from which all faces are what they are.”²

That is why, unknown to art historians, artists like Durer (above), Gauguin and Van Gogh, to name a few, portrayed themselves as Christ. Christ, they believed, is the reflection of God in their own souls. Each of us can become at one with God, a condition that many artists must have thought was essential to their own ability to create such divine masterpieces. I would.  

1. Christian Jacq, Le Message des Constructeurs de  Cathédrales (Paris: Editions J'ai Lu) 2009, p.9

2. Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God (New York: Cosimo) 2007, p. 26, 28