Hans Hummer highlights the Contributions of WSU Medievalist Edwin Hall

Edwin C. Hall, professor of history (1955-1998), solves a mystery at the DIA

The careers of many faculty of the history department have richly intersected with the city of Detroit. As unlikely as it may seem, this was true also of retired medievalist, Edwin Hall, who helped solve the mystery of one of the most valuable and enigmatic paintings in the Detroit Institute Arts' collection: the authenticity of Jan van Eyck's St. Jerome. The portrait, one of about seventeen known Van Eyck paintings in existence, had reappeared only in the early twentieth century after nearly four centuries of obscurity. It soon found its way to the art market, was purchased in 1925 by the City of Detroit, and four decades later was pronounced an ignominious forgery.

Ed's role in resuscitating the St. Jerome was unlikely. Ed was born and raised in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1928. His father owned a small shop fabricating steel bases for machinery in the tool and die industry, but Ed was drawn instead toward an older family tradition of medicine. "My great-grandfather studied anatomy with Oliver Wendell Holmes, and my great-great-grandfather studied medicine at Yale. I think my father wanted desperately to be a physician, but the money wasn't available for him to study medicine."

Ed entered the University of Wisconsin as a pre-med student and was accepted into medical school after his junior year. However, that summer he went to Europe for two months. "I went everywhere, from Ireland to Italy, and Germany, and France. It changed my life." He entered medical school that fall but withdrew after two days. "After the second day I thought, this is not for me, and so I went home to talk to my parents about it, and they did not want at all to push me." He decided he would study medieval history instead, so he completed all of his coursework for a history degree during his senior year and stayed on for graduate school.

Ed studied under the canon and Roman law scholar, Gaines Post, and the historian of science, Marshall Clagett, both of whom eventually moved to Princeton - Post to Princeton University, and Clagett to the Institute for Advanced Studies. Post sent Ed off to Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship to do his dissertation with general advice to do something with Pope Gregory IX. His advisor at the University of Rome suggested he work with a trove of papal documents in a Cistercian monastery, but the abbey was impractically remote and accessible only by foot or donkey. Ed took up residence in the Vatican Library and Archives instead and "just read things [because] my professor said I'd find something, and I did in the end." He wrote his dissertation on the revival of the ancient procedure for arbitration in Roman law in the 12th and 13th centuries.

"In those days Rome was really - I would compare it to what it is now - it was quite beautiful." Only a few streets had heavy traffic, "but mostly you could walk through Rome and you wouldn't see any cars." The library closed at 1:30, "so you were free in the afternoon, and you went around to bookstores." Most exhilarating was the intellectual life in the archives, especially the courses on paleography and diplomatics. "The professor would bring in documents from the archives. One day he brought in the document with the excommunication of Frederick II at the Council of Lyon. You could see and touch it, but I don't know that they would even do that anymore." There were no limitations on what students could order up, so Ed decided one day that he wanted to see the Vatican Virgil, one of the oldest and most precious European manuscripts dating to around 400. "Today they would never let that out."

After two years in Rome, Ed completed his PhD, and in 1955 Department Chair Al Kelly hired Ed over the phone: "He had written to Wisconsin and I was then recommended by Gaines Post. [Kelly] looked at the letters and decided that would be fine, called me on the telephone, and offered me the job." "It was hard for me [at first]. I had just come from two years in Rome." Kelly himself said to me, 'It will take you a while to get acclimated'." Detroit however was a large and vibrant city and preferable to his other job offers, Reed College and Grinnell. "Those places did not appeal to me. I didn't care to live in a small town, especially after I had lived in Rome, or on the West coast."

Ed was hired on a four-year contract, standard in those days, and was assigned to teach surveys in European history. "We had two courses, one which went from the beginning of civilization to the end of the middle ages, and the other went from there to the present. And that's what I did - you taught that and nothing else." Junior faculty were subsequently renewed yearly until they reached the sixth year, at which point a person was either let go or put up for tenure. Ed recalls that the department was very autocratic then. "At one point they decided that there should be one junior member elected to attend these meetings and I often was in that position. So I was suddenly privy to the internal discussions of the department, and I was sometimes shocked at the things that were said." After a time, however, "I wanted to be out of department politics because it got to be quite messy, and I didn't care for that."

The salary was $3,000 and because Ed never owned a car, he routinely lived close to campus. "There were row houses on the site of the present student center building, and they went down Second Avenue to Prentis. I rented a room in [one of them] and I shared a bathroom with the other people in the house." Ed then moved to an apartment at Palmer and Woodward, where he weathered the 1967 Riot:

"I'll tell you a funny story about the riot in 1967. It was a hot night and I was reading in my room, and I remember hearing someone say, "Burn baby burn!" Even that wasn't enough to alert me to anything. So I sat all through the first night of that riot not knowing what was happening. The way I found out [is] I got a call around 7 o'clock in the morning from a friend of mine in the political science department, who lived in Ann Arbor. He was teaching summer school and he said, "Is it safe to come in?" And I said, "What are you talking about?" So he told me, and I said, "Just a minute." I went to the window and looked out and saw all these fires. I later met a French couple who had been living in Lafayette Park and they only found out about the riot when their relatives in Paris called to see if they were all right. So I didn't feel quite so bad about not noticing."

Ed eventually moved into a beautiful place in the Cultural Center. "There were lots of interesting university people who lived in that apartment building," among them art historian Horst Uhr. When the College of Creative Studies bought the building in 1985, Ed and Horst moved to a house in Grosse Pointe, where they still reside.

"When I arrived [in 1955] the department was not so small; there must have been 12-15 professors. Oh more than that, because there were these people like myself," many of whom left and "often went on to impressive careers." Chemistry and History had the reputations for being the best departments; "it was always true and probably is true now. So we had that reputation and we tried to live up to it."

The students were especially delightful: "Their minds were open and they got very excited about ideas." The New York Times did a survey "not too many years after I came" based on responses from graduates throughout the country. The conclusion was that college had had no impact on their outlooks, but there were two places where that was not true, and Wayne State was one of them.

Wayne was home to a vibrant and fascinating faculty too. "In those years my friends particularly were emigres from Nazi Germany, of whom there were quite a few around here" in the History department and elsewhere. "Margaret Sterne was a close friend of mine and I had lots of friends and connections through her and I was often in her house. She had a very large circle of important people in Detroit and she would have parties and I was often invited. Margaret was very good to me." Another good friend was a historian from Romania, who moved on to Colorado-Boulder. "There was a wonderful professor in political science who was an Austrian Jew and he escaped from Germany by taking the trans-Siberia railway all the way to China. So you can imagine people like that were very interesting." "We used to go for lunch to Hamtramck and there were very good Polish restaurants. Hamtramck then was so interesting because there were still everyday outdoor markets where you could buy a live goose."

All in all, "I found Detroit quite interesting because there was a cultural life here," symbolized most poignantly for Ed by the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Van Eyck's St. Jerome in particular, an intricate painting no larger than a postcard. "When I came to Detroit the thing that excited me most was the Detroit Institute of Arts. That's how I got involved in the Saint Jerome, because when I saw this picture I couldn't believe it, it was so wonderful." Just the year before Ed's arrival in 1955, the great art historian Erwin Panofsky had inspected the painting and its inscription, the first clues to the painting's historical meaning. (So great was Panofsky's authority, rumor had it that the DIA had sent the painting to him so that he could personally examine it, a deed which now would be unthinkable.)

As Ed became intrigued by the painting's historical significance, the plot surrounding its provenance thickened. The Belgian government in 1960 sent a collection of early Flemish paintings for exhibition at the DIA as a thank you to the United States for help during the War. The exhibition was then shown in Bruges, and St. Jerome was the image for the poster in Europe. However, questions had circulated since the 1920s about the painting's Eyckian credentials, in part because of its mysterious whereabouts for four centuries, and in part because of oddities in the painting itself.

After the exhibition, apparently, to put these doubts to rest, Edgar Richardson, the director of the DIA, had the painting sent to the laboratory of Paul Coremans in Brussels, then the world's leading authority on early Flemish painting. Coremans found several things that provoked suspicions. By contrast with other Van Eycks, the St. Jerome lacked underdrawing and had a paper backing pasted to the board, so Coremans adjudged it a forgery of the nineteenth century. He prepared two reports, one that would "satisfy the authorities in Detroit for the insurance for keeping it for a longer time in Brussels," and a second confidential report on the laboratory's findings for Richardson, explaining to him that "you can consider it part of your private papers or put it in the Museum archives."

Meanwhile, all of this intrigue was unknown to Ed, because when Richardson retired he did not put the report in the archives, but "took all the correspondence, all the letters, and the report, with him"; and Coremans had forbidden anyone in his lab to speak of the report without his permission.

Thus it was that independent of all this, Ed published two papers in 1968 and 1971 arguing that on historical grounds the painting had to be of fifteenth-century provenance and must have been presented as a gift to Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, the principal ecclesiastical mediator at the Council Arras, the late medieval equivalent of the Council of Vienna, convened in 1435 to settle the Hundred Years War. The evidence was both internal and external: a description of the painting in a de Medici inventory of 1492 accords with the picture in the DIA, and the date on the astrolabe in the portrait, which Ed had bothered to decipher, corresponds to the opening date of the Council.

The notion that this could have been confected in the nineteenth century was preposterous. Ed's research had exposed "the limitations of traditional and scientific connoisseurship when applied to art in a historical vacuum." Richardson, now feeling the ground shift, returned to the DIA the Coremans report and associated documents. The saga led to a reexamination not only of the painting but also of the assumed criteria of authenticity. Other Van Eyck paintings have since been discovered to have no underdrawing; paper backing has been found behind other fifteenth-century works; and St. Jerome's pigments and the dendrochronology of its wood panel are of fifteenth-century origin.

"What I did here at Wayne, that's the thing I'm most pleased with. I feel I saved the Van Eyck [at the DIA]. Of the Old Masters' paintings, it's probably one of the two or three most important pictures in the Museum." This hardly exhausted Ed's scholarly contributions, which included his reappraisal of Panofsky's interpretation of another Van Eyck, the famous Arnolfini Double Portrait in London (The Arnolfini Betrothal, Univ. of Calif. Press, 1994); and his monograph on early printing in Italy (Sweynheym and Pannartz, Bird and Bull, 1991), which made a crucial contribution to the reevaluation of early printing in Rome (and whose print quality is so precious, former Chair Alan Raucher kept the department's copy under lock and key).

Ed explained his method: "I discover something, and then I want to know more about it." Or as Paul Needham, one of the world's foremost authorities on the early history of printed books put it in an article he dedicated to Ed for his contribution to the history of printing:

"It is worth noting that Hall got his result not by the use of any particular new tool of bibliographical analysis, but simply by examining, a little more closely and critically, exactly the same evidence that the many other experts had at their disposal. The foundation stone of all scholarship is – thinking."

Hans Hummer