The Music-making Angels of the Ghent Altarpiece

The Music-making Angels of the Ghent Altarpiece

The organist bends towards a keyboard beneath a towering bank of pipes. Behind the seated figure, a harp rises beside a bowed string instrument, while other heads peer through the compressed space. The group occupies the opened Ghent Altarpiece between John the Baptist and Eve, opposite the Singing Angels. Saint Bavo’s Cathedral identifies it as the instrumental company of heaven, giving particular attention to the organist’s ermine-bordered robe. Here, celestial praise takes the form of things made and handled: wood, metal, strings, keys and moving air.^[1]

The title gathers the figures into one musical activity, but their actions differ. The organist’s hands reach towards the instrument; the angel carrying the fiddle is not visibly bowing its strings. The harp is partly screened by the organ pipes. Far from offering a transparent record of a concert, the panel makes us look between active playing, attentive waiting and nearly concealed assistance. Its remarkable precision has encouraged instrument makers to reconstruct the organ, while conservation has revealed that the instrument and its player changed during the making of the painting.

Compare the panel before and after varnish removal

Details from The Music-making Angels of the Ghent Altarpiece

1

Published March 2024: two treatment stages

Left: before treatment. Right: after varnish removal. Unmodified published comparison, 944 × 1,032 pixels; KIK-IRPA, March 2024 press kit, page 22, photograph 6. © Sint-Baafskathedraal Gent, www.artinflanders.be, photo KIK-IRPA. Varnish removal is a treatment stage, not the completed campaign.

A seated player and a hidden assistant

The organ fills the left side with an imposing diagonal of pipes. Its case stands upright on the patterned pavement, and the player sits beside it on a folding seat. The tall metal tubes meet an elaborately carved wooden band above the keyboard. Their regular repetition contrasts with the broken folds and spreading pattern of the robe. The figure’s lowered head and forward arms turn a splendidly dressed celestial being into someone absorbed in a demanding physical task.

Visit Gent explains an easily missed part of that task: another angel operates the bellows. A trace of hair at the far left indicates the helper, almost concealed by the organ. The arrangement allows the seated musician to use both hands for the keys. The guide also points to the carrying handle and interprets the case’s grain as oak. Portability and cooperation are therefore central to its account, although painted grain alone cannot certify the timber of an actual surviving instrument.^[2]

This is more than a charming hidden detail. The most conspicuous performer depends on work assigned to a figure the composition barely shows. The air supply sits outside the dramatic focus, while fingers and face remain visible. A viewer can recognise the collaboration without being able to inspect the complete bellows mechanism. The picture distributes attention unevenly, making the player prominent while allowing a small clue to reveal the practical dependency behind the apparent performance.

What kind of organ is represented?

Instrument historians generally discuss this as a positive organ, a movable instrument placed for playing. In his 2021 article’s published summary, Wim S. Ros describes a two-level construction with shutters and an asymmetry arising from the arrangement of the pipes. He suggests that the model could already have been old when it was painted. That is a specialist interpretation of the depicted instrument, not a preserved manufacturing date.^[12]

The case’s silhouette makes the design unusually memorable. Long pipes rise at the left, shorter ones descend towards the musician, and a diagonal wooden member crosses their upper field. Beneath the mouths, each pipe tapers towards its foot. Reflections vary from one tube to another rather than forming one flat silver stripe. Beside them, the warm wooden surface carries small marks and hardware. These transitions make the object look assembled from distinct materials rather than painted as an undifferentiated emblem of music.

The keyboard is less straightforward than the brilliant pipes suggest. Nicolas Meeùs’s French version of his 1987 study follows Edwin Ripin’s examination of an earlier keyboard visible through infrared imaging. Meeùs distinguishes the chromatic keyboard encountered at the surface from an underlying arrangement with very few upper keys in its lower portion. The change involved the player’s hand as well as the keys. The organ consequently preserves two related designs, not one mechanically consistent specification that can simply be copied from a colour photograph.^[4]

Meeùs asks how the earlier layout could have served modal melodies and chant-based playing. His discussion considers the relationship between a low tenor part, the singers and the instrument’s pitch. The argument makes that unfamiliar keyboard intelligible within historical musical practice. It does not recover an exact tuning standard or identify the work played in the panel. Nor should an interpretation that the keyboard was modernised before installation become a certain assignment of the alteration to one particular Van Eyck brother.^[4]

A separate French study by Meeùs draws attention to an isolated key below and to the left of the main keyboard, with a small device capable of holding it down. That feature encourages us to examine the case below the obvious row of pipes. It also demonstrates how a minor painted mechanism can be important to the history of keyboard design without supplying a complete account of the organ’s internal action.^[18]

Pipework, perspective and reconstruction

Andrzej Perz, Jan Boon, Patrick De Baets and Francis Ponseele investigated the panel for a reconstruction at the School of Arts in Ghent. Their 2016 paper identifies fine evidence of manufacture, including a soldered junction and details at the pipe mouths associated with voicing. These observations support their hypothesis that a real instrument served as a model. Yet they also find that the visible pipe lengths are difficult to reconcile with the expected musical arrangement. Infrared evidence of longer rear pipes leads them to propose an earlier doubled chromatic layout.^[5]

The same study uses perspective to construct a preliminary three-dimensional model. Many lines converge towards two zones, but the handle, ornament and keyboard do not obey a single perfectly consistent geometry. The authors treat spacing, pipe diameters and absolute length as problems to test through physical construction. Their reconstruction is an experiment that can challenge assumptions about the picture. It is not a declaration that every painted measurement must already describe a workable mechanism.^[5]

The panel can preserve a real manufacturing detail while adjusting a larger shape for visual clarity. A working reconstruction must resolve that tension through comparisons and experiments; the painted surface cannot settle every decision.

The Netherlands offers a particularly concrete example. The Nationaal Orgelmuseum’s Dutch annual report records the inauguration of its Ghent retable-organ reconstruction on 9 September 2017. The museum commissioned Winold van der Putten to build it, with Wim Ros closely involved as an adviser. Its account presents the result as an attempt to approach the painted instrument as closely as possible. That statement documents the museum’s aim, rather than independently proving that a lost fifteenth-century original has been recovered in every respect.^[11]

Ros’s later summary credits both Van der Putten and Ingrid Noack for the construction, with research contributions from Ros and Koos van de Linde. It is useful to distinguish this Elburg instrument from the Ghent research project described by Perz and his colleagues. They belong to a wider effort to learn from the same painting, rather than constituting one uninterrupted project under interchangeable names.^[12]

At a 2018 conference on keyboards, Catalina Vicens, Van der Putten and Jankees Braaksma described the interaction between reconstruction, materials and performance. Their abstract identifies the 2017 museum commission and explains that building choices have consequences for the performer’s experience. The painting’s modern significance therefore extends beyond an organ’s outward appearance. It prompts practical questions about how fingers meet keys and how a reconstructed object permits, encourages or limits musical actions.^[13]

Watch: Jan van Eyck in context

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Jan van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece (2 of 2)

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Harp strings and a fiddle held in readiness

The harp provides an open network of lines beside the organ’s solid case. Its curved upper member almost echoes the panel’s arch, while its strings descend through a narrow space between pipes and faces. The instrument is partially concealed, so that the eye has to follow it in fragments. Its open frame and delicate lines create a visual contrast with the dense vertical rank beside it.

Visit Gent notes differences between thick and thin harp strings, corresponding to lower and higher tones. It places both the harp and the vielle within the prestigious musical culture of troubadours and trouvères. The guide also cautions that medieval names and construction were variable. In this heavenly setting, familiar instruments can carry associations beyond ordinary church use. Their presence does not establish that this exact combination regularly accompanied services in the donors’ chapel.^[2]

The bowed instrument is easier to see as a physical body. It rests diagonally in front of a red garment, its pale wooden soundboard punctuated by dark openings. One hand supports the neck; the bow is held away from a convincing stroke across the strings. That pause gives the figure a different rhythm from the organist. The title’s music-making does not require every pictured instrument to be producing sound at once.

Belgian Science Policy’s exhibition account carefully distinguishes an angel seated at the organ, another holding the harp, and a third carrying a vielle. Its wording is helpful because it avoids making every figure perform the same action. A broad inventory identifies the principal instruments; it should not become a count of all the partly concealed angels present. The painted group is more densely populated than the three most obvious instrumental roles.^[8]

Weale’s 1912 catalogue describes a five-stringed viol with two crescent-shaped sound holes and calls attention to its unusual outline. Such descriptions are valuable witnesses to how instrument historians approached the picture. His terminology should not turn the object into a modern violin or imply that every medieval bowed instrument had the same construction. Looking at the supporting hand, sound holes and bow separately is more informative than selecting a familiar modern name and assuming the rest.^[3]

Instrument numbers and sacred interpretation

The instruments have also attracted numerical readings. In her 1970 Princeton study, Kathi Meyer-Baer connects a count of twenty-four harp strings with Revelation’s elders, five fiddle strings with symbolic associations of five, and twenty-one organ pipes with a proposed three-octave, Trinitarian scheme. She acknowledges historical variation in instrument construction. These are interpretive proposals, not an authenticated list of meanings supplied by the commission. Later research into the organ’s changed pipework makes it particularly important to distinguish symbolic counting from a demonstrated account of its original mechanism.^[16]

The frame inscription invokes praise through strings and organ, as Weale’s transcription records. Above it, pipes and stringed instruments turn those words into visible objects. Their shared devotional purpose is clearer than their exact coordination in a particular performance.^[3]

The Alamire Foundation’s account of the Mystic Music exhibition treats that relationship as a question. Does the organ accompany the singers, and are the harp and fiddle about to join them or perform something else? Its interpretation stresses the distance between imaginable earthly music and inaccessible heavenly sound. Recognising that distance does not weaken the musicians’ human character. Their bodily actions make the sacred scene intelligible while the painting leaves its complete music beyond recovery.^[14]

Brocade, ermine and a changing robe

The organist’s mantle is one of the panel’s most arresting surfaces. Black motifs spread over a warm metallic-looking ground and bend through broad folds towards the floor. Pale fur with dark spots appears at the neck and around the lower edge. Against the red seat, the heavy fabric makes the musician seem firmly settled, even as the hands reach forward. The robe’s strong pattern competes with the organ’s regular construction without dissolving the figure’s posture.

Lukas–Art in Flanders contrasts the other musicians’ tunics with the organist’s elaborate ermine-trimmed clothing, suggesting that the lighter garments leave arms free. Its collection description cautiously allows a possible identification of the organist as Saint Cecilia. Weale rejects that traditional identification. The disagreement should remain visible: an organ and a richly dressed figure have encouraged the saint’s name, but the heavenly ensemble does not provide an unambiguous identifying inscription.^[17][3]

The tiles beneath the musicians carry emblems as well as a repeating blue-and-white pattern. Visit Gent identifies references to Christ, Mary and the Lamb, together with AGLA, across the musical panels. The ornament gives the seated figure a place on the same sacred ground as the choir. The fuller discussion of the abbreviation belongs with the singers’ inscribed floor, rather than requiring a second account of the same interpretive debate here.^[19]

Technical examination reveals a more tangible revision. Anne van Grevenstein-Kruse and Hélène Dubois describe an earlier, probably pale-purple robe beneath the organist’s dark brocade. Its folds were different and stiffer. Their discussion relates extensive changes during the painting’s execution to the development of severe cracking, with this mantle a striking example. The surviving surface therefore records a reconsidered design. It cannot be explained simply as one original garment that has darkened uniformly with age.^[6]

The same study illustrates the musicians in ordinary light, X-radiography and infrared reflectography. Strands of hair that register clearly in the X-radiograph do not appear equally clearly in the infrared image. Different forms of examination answer different questions. A detail absent from one technical image is not necessarily absent from the painting; the response of its materials and layers to the method matters. This is another reason to resist deciding the panel’s authorship from one photographic effect.^[6]

An earlier harp-player’s hand

The current campaign has added a particularly specific finding. KIK-IRPA’s March 2024 press kit explains that macro X-ray fluorescence maps helped clarify an earlier hand of the harp-playing angel. Infrared reflectography and X-radiography had already detected its underlying design; elemental imaging supported the conclusion that the hand had also entered the painted composition. This is evidence of an executed earlier choice, not merely a loose preliminary sketch that never received paint.^[7]

The discovery belongs to this instrumental panel. It does not tell us that the opposite choir contains the same concealed hand, and it does not by itself name the painter responsible for either version. Together with the changed keyboard and underlying robe, it shows several kinds of reconsideration within one apparently seamless scene. The organ, body and garment have separate histories of revision that need to be studied in their own layers.

The dated varnish comparison also deserves close attention. Its lighter right-hand view follows varnish removal, not completion of every treatment stage. Belgian Science Policy captions the comparison in those terms. A clearer blue sky and more legible surfaces can change our perception of depth and colour, but they do not automatically settle the meaning of a gesture or the precise construction of an instrument. Cleaning and interpretation contribute different kinds of knowledge.^[8]

The surviving object and its present treatment

The panel’s wooden support underwent a much later transformation. According to KIK-IRPA, the angel shutters were sold in 1816, reached Berlin in 1821, and were divided through their thickness in 1894 so their painted faces could be displayed separately. Cradling followed that intervention; the panels came back to Ghent in 1920. The organ’s intricate painted carpentry therefore survives on wood whose own structure was fundamentally changed long after the musicians were created.^[9]

KIK-IRPA currently dates the upper-register campaign from 2023 to spring 2027 and records drying cracks and compositional revisions among the angel panels’ particular challenges. Work addresses the stability of supports and paint, later surface layers and the visual relationship among the panels. These are continuing investigations. Discoveries concerning the organist should be described at the scale demonstrated by the evidence, rather than converted into a completed division of the entire panel between Hubert and Jan.^[9]

The December 2024 update reported that cleaning of both angel groups was progressing. Its figure for removing roughly half the later additions concerned the cloaks of the central enthroned figures. It was not a measured percentage for the organist’s brocade. Keeping those statements separate prevents a dramatic finding elsewhere in the altarpiece from becoming a misleading claim about this painting.^[10]

Hearing the painting through modern experiments

The panel continues to shape performance through openly interpretive projects. The Alamire Foundation’s 2019 programme explains that the Van Eyck Project used a replica built in 2010 from several sources, including the Ghent painting, Van der Goes’s Trinity Altarpiece in Edinburgh and the Peterborough Psalter. Research into pipe metal also informed its sound. This was a reconstruction assembled through comparison, not a claim that one painted organ supplied every necessary measurement.^[15]

That programme combined voices, organ, harp and fiddle, but drew music from surviving manuscript collections and allowed instrumental improvisation. The distinction is productive: the painting can suggest relationships among performers while historical musical sources supply material to perform. Listening to such an experiment lets a modern audience explore possibilities. Returning to the panel afterwards, we can see its hands, strings and pipes with greater understanding while recognising how much the picture leaves unsounded.^[15]

Related reading

Eve on the Ghent Altarpiece

The Singing Angels of the Ghent Altarpiece

Ghent Altarpiece

References

1. Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, Dutch Ghent Altarpiece panel guide, upper-register musicians and ermine-bordered robe. View Source
2. Visit Gent, “Heavenly notes and angelic song,” bellows helper, organ case, harp strings and medieval instrument terminology. View Source
3. W. H. James Weale, The Van Eycks and Their Art, 1912, pp. 43–44, instrument description, Cecilia debate and frame inscription. View Source
4. Nicolas Meeùs, “Le clavier disparu,” French translation of the 1987 Dutch study, especially pp. 1–4 and 7, earlier keyboard and musical function. View Source
5. Andrzej Perz, Jan Boon, Patrick De Baets and Francis Ponseele, “Reverse Engineering and Reconstruction of the ‘Van Eyck’ Organ,” 2016, pp. 57–60. View Source
6. Anne van Grevenstein-Kruse and Hélène Dubois, “The Ghent Altarpiece Revisited: 2012–2017,” in Van Eyck Studies, 2019, pp. 17–20, earlier mantle and imaging methods. View Source
7. KIK-IRPA, 26 March 2024 press kit, pp. 17 and 22, harp-player’s earlier hand and published varnish comparison. View Source
8. Belgian Science Policy, “Singing and Music-Making Angels,” instrumental roles and captions distinguishing treatment stages. View Source
9. KIK-IRPA, upper-register project record, altered supports, panel condition and 2023–spring 2027 campaign. View Source
10. KIK-IRPA, 10 December 2024 press release, dated progress and central-cloak overpaint figure. View Source
11. Nationaal Orgelmuseum, Dutch annual report for 2017, pp. 3 and 13, commission and inauguration of the reconstructed retable organ. View Source
12. Wim S. Ros, published summary of “‘Lavdant evm in cordis et organo’,” Het ORGEL, 117/4, 2021, organ type and Elburg project credits. View Source
13. Catalina Vicens, Winold van der Putten and Jankees Braaksma, “From Images to Sound,” 2018 conference abstract, reconstruction and performance. View Source
14. Alamire Foundation, Mystic Music, exhibition account, uncertain relationship between the pictured performers. View Source
15. Alamire Foundation, Laus Polyphoniae 2019: Maria van Bourgondië, pp. 190–191, Van Eyck Project, replica sources and performance practice. View Source
16. Kathi Meyer-Baer, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death, Princeton, 1970, pp. 359–360, numerical interpretation of instruments. View Source
17. Lukas–Art in Flanders, The Ghent Altarpiece: Angels playing music, collection description, whole-panel image and rights. View Source
18. Nicolas Meeùs, “L’origine de l’octave courte,” figure 1 and caption, isolated key and revised keyboard. View Source
19. Visit Gent, “The symbolism behind the Ghent Altarpiece,” motifs on the angel panels’ tiled floors. View Source