Jan Van Eyck’s 1432 Portrait of a Man has the Greek inscription, and rendered in transliteration, that reads “Tum Otheos” (ΤΥΜ ωΘΕΟς) that has baffled art historians and specialists on the painter for a very long time. It is well known that Van Eyck, the pioneer of oil painting, was fond of leaving all forms of writing in his pictures in Greek, Hebrew, and trilingual idioms that through the centuries have become incomprehensible jottings [1]. At a time when Van Eyck was painting in Northern Europe, the magical efficacy over names and naming was a dominant cultural and religious belief, and the expanded arts of the ‘names of god’ were used to heal and relieve pain, and protect against potential enemies and keep demons at bay [2]. Following Hermann Usener, one could see how the original act of the naming of the gods was no longer tied to ‘momentary divinities’ (Augenblicksgötter), but rather they were functionalized to specific anthropological needs for survival. Nonetheless, it is quite ashtonishing to witness how the painting at year zero that Van Eyck embodies – the very birth of oil painting and the “coming to life” of the figure in depiction – coincided with a divinization itself of the expanded field of the arts [2].  

In Erwin Panofksy’s early interpretation the inscription “Tum Otheos” should be read in light of the musical revolution that had taken place between 1420-1440 in the Netherlands, where the ars nova meant a thorough musical renovation towards a new expressive energy and “exquisite sensibility” nourished by the myth of Timotheos, who was taken as the ancient model of sublime harmony of the new arts and style of bringing life into depiction [3]. Overtly dependent on the transmission of the ancient figure of sound, for Panofsky the inscription “Tum Otheos” pays homage to the lyre Timotheus of Miletus as creator of the “new music”. But, could the same be transplanted into painting? Could painting at “year zero” be taken as precisely this new tonality of the arts? 

A second possible rendition of “Tum Otheos” is one what has been merely registered, although not elaborated, by art historian Alfred Acres, for whom “tum otheos” is not indexing the ancient musician but more importantly, it is registering an event or what is taking place [4]. Thus, for Acres “Tum Otheos” should be read as “and then God”; as if the relationship between painter, depiction, and spectator was the very taking place of a minor and invisible god of creation that painting facilitates. It is not difficult to recall here what Luca Giordano said of Velazquez’s painting: “this is the Theology of Painting” [5]. Although directed at Las Meninas, one could perceive that in the early stages of the secularization of the forms of the modern, the nexus between theology and painting becomes a clandestine partnership that resists its full integration into the autonomization of forms of representation. In other words, there is always a theos reminder in the act of depiction that is irreducible to the general economy of forms, as if the dissonance of the soul endured underneath at the nearness granted by the concrete realization of a picture. “And then God”, as proposed by Acres, should not be taken merely as the eruption of the divine in the symbolic structuration of the world, but rather as the very act of naming that allows divinization to continue in spite of the closure announced by the flight of the gods. 

Just one year after Van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (1432) where the inscription “Tum Theos” appears, in Italy Alberti will write in his De Pictura that the gesture of painting “possess a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with please and deep admiration for the artist” [6]. And if Postel is right that Van Eyck’s Arnolfini masterpiece is one in which the picture reconvenes the dead bride and the rich merchant into pictorial space, then one could deduce that for the Flemish artist the divinity of painting is defined as the only passage left to the moderns to negate the world of the living and inhabit the invisible world of the dead against the coming of the monothematic world-image and its material crust of Gaia [7]. “Tum Otheos” – and then God – is literally registering the transfigured and expressive dimension of painting; that is, the taking place of depiction and its secret fidelity to what appears only to banish and become forever unfathomable. 

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Notes 

1. Susan Frances Jones. “Jan van Eyck’s Greek, Hebrew and Trilingual Inscriptions”, in Van Eyck Studies, September 2012, 294.

2. Noa Turel. Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century (Yale University Press, 2020).

3. Erwin Panofsky. “Who Is Jan van Eyck’s “Tymotheos”?, Journal of the Warburg Studies, 1949, 88-89. 

4. Alfred Acres. Jan van Eyck within His Art (Reaktion Books, 2023), 177.

5. Daniel Arasse. Take a Closer Look (Princeton U Press, 2013), 134.

6. Leon Battista Alberti. On Painting (Penguin Classics, 1991), 60.

7. Jean-Philippe Postel. El affaire Arnolfini: Investigación sobre un cuadro de Van Eyck (Acantilado, 2023).