The Arnolfini Portrait: A Mystery

Jan van Eyck was born in present-day Belgium around 1380 or1390, and he worked successively in The Hague for John III ‘the Pitiless’ and in Lille for Philip ‘the Good’, Duke of Burgundy, before basing himself in Bruges from 1429 until his death in 1441. Of his 20 or so known paintings (in addition to which we have the spectacular Ghent Altarpiece, executed in collaboration with his brother Hubert, and an illuminated book of hours) ten are dated, between 1432 and 1439, and signed.

 

The Arnolfini portrait is dated 1434. It was long believed to be a visual record of a wedding, based on the raised hand of the man and the inscription seen on the wall beyond the couple ‘Johannes de eyck fuit hic.1434’/’Jan van Eyck was here. 1434’ which suggests that the artist served as witness. In historic scholarship by Crowe & Cavalcaselle (1857) the couple is identified as the Lucchese merchant Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini and his wife Jeanne (Giovanna) Cenami, an identification that was widely accepted for over a century. In 1997, however, it was discovered that the couple married in 1447, thirteen years later than the date on the painting – and six after the artist’s death. National Gallery scholars explain the logic behind a more contemporary theory, which proposes that the sitters are Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and an unnamed second wife, given that his first wife, Costanza Trenta, had died, perhaps in childbirth, by February 1433. At the time the work was painted, at least five Arnolfini brothers and cousins lived in Bruges, but the other candidates appear to have been ruled out, like Giovanni di Arrigo, on the basis of their dates of marriage.

 

Yet, even if we are reasonably confident as to the identify the sitters, there is seemingly no convincing evidence that – despite historical assumption – the picture represents the wedding ceremony itself. Much of the evidence in favour of that theory was put forward in 1934 in an article by the influential scholar Erwin Panofsky, in which he argued that the painting depicted the marriage of Giovanni di Arrigo and Jeanne Cenami. As curator Lorne Campbell explains, Panofsky’s claim that the man’s gesture represented the ‘fides levata’ of the marriage ritual was inaccurate, and the term itself his invention, while there was no contemporary evidence to substantiate the notion that candles were burned during a marriage ceremony. More probably –given that the room is a reception room (despite the presence of the bed, common at the time), and the gesture is clearly one of greeting, with many parallels, it would seem instead that he is presenting his wife to two visitors, seen in miniature in the convex mirror on the far wall. The inscription by the artist suggests, further, that he is the man in the turban, probably with a valet accompanying him. Indeed, the existence of a second portrait of the same man (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) by Van Eyck suggests that the two were friends.

 

Symbolic or not, the extensive and intricate details of the interior, costume and furnishings tell us a great deal about the period and the couple’s wealth and status, as well as their setting and even the time of year. Outside the window of the brick house, the fruiting cherry tree suggests summertime. The bed, hung with expensive scarlet cloth, was a sign of prosperity, and thus deliberately on display in the reception room rather than tucked away in a private bedroom. Likewise, the wooden bench against the far wall is covered in additional red cloth, as well as red cushions. Further signs of wealth include the oranges carelessly piled on the windowsill and wooden chest, imported from Spain at great expense; the exotic, oriental carpet; the expensive, polished brass chandelier and costly wax candle that burns down; and the convex mirror with ten scenes from the Passion of Christ, among others. The man wears a velvet cloak lined with sable, his wife a fine green wool gown trimmed with white ermine or miniver (of a type that, in fact, was not available in 1434 and thus comes from the artist’s imagination) and both are adorned with gold jewellery. Their costumes are expensive without being showy, but clearly designed with public image in mind, given that they are wearing costly furs in summer.

 

In the National Gallery catalogue, Campbell notes that this ‘may be the earliest surviving portrait on panel of two persons who were not rulers and the earliest known portrait on panel where the subjects are seen in a domestic setting.’ The fine detail and precision tempt the viewer to accept the scene as a literal transcription of a couple, their home and their belongings, but it is in fact an idealised and composite view of an imagined space, designed by Van Eyck with deceptive perfection.