This remarkable print, which could easily be mistaken for a drawing, is actually a reproduction of a painting. Or, at least, it is the reproduction of a work done in oil on panel, though the character of the picture it captures in such perfectly lifelike detail is something of a mystery. Is the original work, which survives today in Antwerp’s Museum voor Schone Kunsten, finished? Or are the delicate lines that trace the figure of the martyred Saint Barbara, seated before the tower that is her symbol, the mere skeleton of a vividly colored oil painting that Jan van Eyck, who made the original, never completed? Finished or unfinished, drawing or painting, the work has been celebrated as one of van Eyck’s supreme achievements since the moment van Noorde made this print, commissioned by the Count van Enschede, who owned the original at the time.

Van Noorde intended his print to capture the full effect of van Eyck’s original, even printing the image and the reproduction of the painting’s frame on different sheets of paper, to highlight the difference between the two parts of the work. In an age before photographic reproduction, van Noorde used every available printmaking technique to capture the effect of van Eyck’s diminutive original. The result is unique, an astonishingly lifelike facsimile of the original painting, rendered in an era when printmakers were pushing the very boundaries of their medium to find ways to represent the many different sorts of marks made by brush, pen, and hand.

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