For centuries the story went that Jan van Eyck invented oil painting overnight. This episode dismantles that Vasari myth and replaces it with something more impressive: a scholar-painter who knew Latin and worked Greek and Hebrew letters into his panels, who served as valet de chambre to John of Bavaria and then Philip the Good of Burgundy, and who was sent on secret diplomatic missions to distant lands. Historians believe the accurate Jerusalem skyline in The Three Marys at the Tomb came from one such trip.

We follow the 1428 mission to Portugal, where plague trapped him for nine months at the Castle of Avis while he painted Princess Isabella's portrait for a duke he could not disappoint. The reward was a fixed salary allowing him to paint whenever he pleased, and that gift of time is what made his revolution possible: thinning oil into tr ...