The first artistic Renaissance that appeared at the beginning of the thirteenth century inevitably consisted of a movement towards realism, a return to nature and the living in an art that had since the end of ancient times been nothing more than a servile imitation of Byzantine models and techniques. From an unknown source, a new breath animated the paralysed limbs and almond-like mosaic eyes of the oriental Madonnas. Their forms took on weight, connecting them to reality, and painters no longer hesitated to enliven their dull eyes with the glint of a gaze, the flickering flame of a soul. This trend surely occurred in the Netherlands at the same time as Florence, Siena and Pisa, and the production of unknown Flemish artists must have corresponded to the works of the great precursors of the Italian Renaissance like Giotto or Duccio di Buoninsegna.

      The inherent genius of the Flemish artists was also active, that talent for perceiving and rendering colour were too deeply ingrained in their character for them not to have realised the inanity of the conventionalism that characterised the art at that time. They must have sought to express their innate thirst for truth, perhaps gropingly and clumsily but nevertheless with power and frankness. The scholarly work of Deshaines and the admirable teachings of Courajod and Flerens-Gevaert put an end to the legend that claimed the Van Eyck brothers had sprung forth suddenly, as though prepared by Providence, to create the masterpiece of the human spirit, The Adoration of the Lamb, without recourse to guide, lesson or example.

      Today we know their predecessors, works like the Broederlam hanging in Dijon, previously mentioned. His small panel in the Musée van den Bergh of Antwerp depicts the Virgin wearing an azure dress asleep on gold-speckled fabric next to the naked Christ child warmed by the breath of a cow and a donkey. Though Broederlam is the only Flemish artist whose fragmented work has survived from this period, he must have had many students and emulators given the richness of his time, its numerous fertile spirits, and generous patrons who created an atmosphere favourable to art. In the absence of paintings, surviving fragments of sculptures attest to the vigour of execution and the strength of temperament of the Flemish sculptors in the second half of the fourteenth century. By that time they had already achieved the supreme integrity, harmony and equilibrium that mark perfection.