Jan van Eyck inscribed his works with "Als ich can," a motto adapted from prologs by Middle Dutch poet Jacob van Maerlant. The device invoked truthfulness, clarity and brevity, principles which he implemented in clear descriptions of carefully observed textures, colors and forms. He distinguished oil painting from French painting and introduced critical discourse in picturing. His vernacular innovations shaped cultural identity and his self-representation engendered artistic identity. In The Madonna with Canon Van der Paele he identified Christ as his artistic model by painting himself reflected on a shield with Passion symbols, evoking Maerlant's construal of the crucifixion as a shield colored with blood.

In Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata he presented the imprinting of Christ's wounds as a type for image replication. Detailed description of the wounds in successive stages of "dead-color" underpainting and oil coloring paralleled descriptive characterizations of Christ's physical death and the release of his spirit with his blood in Passion poetry. Francis's pose, which corresponds to Flemish missal illustrations, alludes to Christ's sacral presence and evokes celebrants' recapitulation of the Passion. Signaling Christ as the exemplar for reproductive picturing, the artist endorsed the Philadelphia copy, perhaps the first replica in oils. The Turin panel, which may contain a donative portrait of chaplain Jan Beert, may have decorated the Jeruzalemkapel built by the Adornes, who owned both paintings. The Arnolfini Double Portrait may also be donative. Its inscription and imagery convey a prayer for a child. Van Eyck may have created this picture and The Lucca Madonna as a votive complex, promoting oil as a consumptive substance.

In the Ghent Altarpiece imagery of the Annunciation, the Eucharist and the Last Judgment corresponds to preparations for meeting the Bridegroom, a theme elaborated by symbols of Christ preparing his Bride with pigments and oil. Hell depicted in water-colors on the predella figured alienation. Signifying oil's agency in making the foreign familiar, van Eyck advanced painting as a vernacular art. Modeling Self-Portrait (Man in a Red Turban) after the Bridegroom at the Window, he metaphorically construed his consummate painting in oils as Christ's union with the soul.