The Flanders Panel

She looked at the painting. Almost all of the top layer of oxidised varnish was gone, and with it the yellowish surface that had dulled its colours. Unvarnished and with the inscription uncovered, there was a luminosity about it and a perfection of colour that was apparent even in the near darkness of the room. The outlines of the figures could be seen in all their extreme precision, perfectly clear and succinct, and the sense of balance that characterised the domestic scene – paradoxically domestic, thought Julia – was so typical of a certain style and period that the painting was sure to fetch an astonishing price.

Paradoxically domestic: the phrase was exactly right. Nothing about the two serious gentlemen playing chess or the lady by the window dressed in black, reading, her eyes lowered, a demure expression on her face, would lead one to suspect the drama that lay coiled beneath the surface, like the twisted root of a lovely plant.

She studied the profile of Roger de Arras as he leaned over the chessboard, absorbed in the game, a game in which he was already dead. The steel gorget and the leather cuirass made him look like the soldier he once was, like the warrior whose insigne he had worn (perhaps dressed in burnished armour like that worn by the knight riding alongside the Devil) when he had escorted her to the nuptial bed to which she was destined by reasons of state. Julia could imagine Beatrice clearly – still a virgin, younger than she appeared in the painting, before bitterness had etched lines about her mouth – peeping out between the curtains of the litter, a maid by her side, and admiring the gallant gentleman whose fame went before him: her future husband’s best friend, still a young man, who, having fought beneath the fleur-de-lys of France against the lion of England, had sought peace by the side of his childhood companion. And Julia imagined Beatrice’s wide blue eyes meeting, just for a moment, the calm, weary gaze of the knight.

It was impossible that the two of them were never united by anything more than that one look. For some obscure reason, by some inexplicable twist of the imagination – as if the hours spent working on the painting had spun a mysterious connecting thread between her and that fragment of the past – Julia contemplated the scene in the Van Huys painting with the familiarity of one who had experienced every detail of the story alongside the characters depicted in it. The mirror on the wall in the picture reflecting the foreshortened figures of the two chess players also contained her, in the same way that the mirror in Las Meninas reflected the king and queen as they watched – was it from inside or outside the picture? – the scene being painted by Velazquez, or just as the mirror in The Arnolfini Double Portrait reflected the presence and the meticulous gaze of Jan Van Eyck.

The flame from the match as she lit a cigarette dazzled her for a moment, hiding The Game of Chess from her view until, gradually, her retina readjusted to the scene again, to the people and the colours. She herself had always been there – she was sure of that now – right from the beginning, ever since Pieter Van Huys first imagined that moment, even before he had begun the careful preparation of calcium carbonate and animal glue with which to impregnate the wood before he started painting.

Beatrice, Duchess of Ostenburg, a touch of melancholy in her eyes intent on her book – perhaps prompted by a mandolin played by a page outside at the foot of the wall – remembers her youth in Burgundy, her hopes and dreams. Above the window framing the pure blue Flanders sky, a stone St George plunges his lance into the dragon writhing beneath his horse’s hooves. It does not escape the implacable eye of the painter observing the scene – nor that of Julia observing the painter -that time has blunted the tip of St George’s lance, and where his right foot, no doubt once wearing a sharp spur, used to stand out in sharp relief, there is only a broken stump. This St George, putting the vile dragon to death, is not only half-armed, with his stone shield worn away by time, but also lame. Perhaps that only makes the figure of the knight all the more touching, reminding Julia, by a curious transposition of ideas, of the martial pose of a lead soldier.