Note 204 — Chapter VII · (XXI.)

Frederick of Urbino (there were not two of the name as Vasari supposes) seems to have had a bathroom decorated with secular compositions by the Flemish master. Facio, whose tract De Viris Illustribus, written in the middle of the fifteenth century, was printed at Florence in 1745, writes, p. 46, of ‘Joannes Gallicus’ (who can be identified as Jan van Eyck) who had painted certain ‘picturae nobiles’ then in the possession of Cardinal Octavianus, with ‘representations of fair women only slightly veiled at the bath.’ Such pictures were considered suitable decorations for bath chambers. There is a curious early example of mediaeval date in the Schloss Runkelstein near Botzen in the Tyrol, in the form of wall paintings round a bathroom on one side of which nude figures are seen preparing to enter the water, while on two other walls spectators of both sexes are seen looking in through an open arcade. The pictures here referred to by van Eyck are now lost, but by a curious coincidence attention has just been directed to an existing copy of one of them, of which Facio gives a special notice. The copy occurs in a painting by Verhaecht of Antwerp, 1593–1637, that represents the picture gallery of an Antwerp connoisseur at about the date 1615. There on the wall is seen hanging the van Eyck, that corresponds closely to the full description given by Facio. The painting by Verhaecht was shown at Burlington House in the Winter Exhibition, 1906–7, and in the ‘Toison d’Or’ Exhibition at Bruges in 1907. See also the Burlington Magazine, February, 1907, p. 325. It may be added that the Cardinal Octavianus mentioned above was a somewhat obscure prelate, who received the purple from Gregory XII in 1408.