JAN VAN EYCK: THE MYSTERY OF THE MAN IN A RED TURBAN

One of the greatest masters of 15^th-century Flemish painting, Jan van Eyck revolutionized the art of portraiture with a painting that endows the human face with a previously unknown level of intensity and accuracy: Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban (1433).

Although there is no way to say for certain, it has long been believed that this painting may be the first self-portrait in Western history. Beyond the identity of its subject, the canvas is shrouded in other mysteries. How was an artist, at the end of the Middle Ages, able to produce on a simple wooden panel an image so precise that it already seems to foreshadow photography? What new techniques and processes enabled the master to achieve such a level of detail?

Through expert commentary and drawing on a new theory grounded in the field of optics, the film investigates the technology that allowed Van Eyck to create portraits of unsettling realism and unprecedented modernity.