These two panels are each only about 22 inches tall, and they hold hundreds of people. Jan van Eyck painted them around 1435 to 1440, and the detail is so fine that a magnifying glass reveals faces in the crowd, the weave of the clothing, and individual hairs on the dead.
On the left is the Crucifixion. Christ hangs between the two thieves while Mary collapses in the arms of her companions, and the mourners are painted in deep blue and green that glows against the red ground. The Jerusalem behind the hill looks like a Flemish city of van Eyck's own time, with tall gabled houses. He placed the story in his own world.
The right panel is the Last Judgment. Christ sits in glory above, flanked by Mary and John the Baptist and the apostles, while the dead climb out of the earth below. At the bottom, the damned fall into a tumbling mass of bodies, and a skeletal figure of Death sprawls in the middle of the horror. It is one of the most crowded pictures of hell painted before Bosch.
The two panels form a pair. They arrived at the Metropolitan Museum in 1933, after a long stay in Russian collections. Scholars still debate how much of it is by Jan himself and how much by his workshop.
It is also an object lesson in how small a masterpiece can be. Van Eyck, who helped bring oil painting to maturity, could pack an entire cosmos into a space the size of a book.
Van Eyck's The Crucifixion; The Last Judgment appears on our: