The Arnolfini Portrait
The merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife in a room in Bruges. Van Eyck displays a new precision in oil painting: the fur, the brass chandelier and the oranges by the window look tangible.
In the convex mirror on the wall two figures can be seen in the doorway – one of them perhaps the painter himself.
The painting is signed and dated on the wall above the mirror. There it says in Latin that Jan van Eyck was here, followed by the year 1434. Van Eyck was court painter to the Duke of Burgundy and lived in Bruges, one of the richest trading cities in northern Europe. Arnolfini was an Italian merchant from Lucca who worked in the city. The picture is small, about 82 by 60 centimetres, and painted on an oak panel.
Who the couple are has long been debated. The man is usually identified as Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini. His wife Costanza Trenta probably died before 1434, so the woman may be a later wife or a memorial portrait. Another Giovanni Arnolfini did not marry until 1447, after the painting was finished. The question has still not been settled.
The couple stand in a room with a red bed. The man raises his right hand, and the woman places her hand in his. She wears a green fur-trimmed gown and holds up the fabric in front of her belly. This was long interpreted as pregnancy, but many scholars believe it reflects the fashion of the time. In the chandelier a single candle burns in the middle of the day. A small dog stands on the floor, and wooden clogs lie cast off in the corner. The oranges by the window were an expensive import.
The round mirror on the back wall is surrounded by ten small scenes from the Passion of Christ. The mirror shows the room from behind and two figures in the doorway. One of them may be the painter himself. Beside the mirror hangs a string of glass prayer beads, and on the bedpost is a small carved figure of a saint, probably Saint Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth. The mirror is painted so precisely that its convex shape distorts the room just as a real mirror would.
Van Eyck built up the paint in many thin, translucent layers of oil. This gives depth and glow and makes surfaces such as fur, metal and glass look real. Infrared examination has shown that he changed details as he worked, including the position of the hands.
In 1934 the art historian Erwin Panofsky interpreted the painting as a pictorial record of a marriage, in which every object had a hidden symbolic meaning. The interpretation was long highly influential but has since been questioned. Today many see the painting as a double portrait displaying the couple’s wealth and status, perhaps with some form of legal or religious significance.
The painting has belonged to several princes, among them Margaret of Austria and the Spanish royal house. After the Battle of Vitoria in 1813 it ended up in England, and in 1842 it was bought by the National Gallery in London. It became very important for the English Pre-Raphaelites. Today it is one of the best-known paintings of Early Netherlandish art. The fur, the brass and the glass of the mirror have become textbook examples of what oil painting can achieve.