BRUGES EPITOMISED THE golden age of Flanders. Its supremacy was based on international trade, and it was as much the wealth of merchants as of the court that helped the arts to flourish there. Art needs money and its innovations were ultimately underpinned by decent wages and stability in the cost of living following the duke’s reform of the disparate currencies. The character and attractions of Bruges are brought vividly to life in the eyewitness account of a traveller from Castile, Pero Tafur, who toured Flanders in 1438 at the tail end of an epic journey from the Holy Land. Impressed first by Brussels where ‘the multitude1 of people and their refinement and splendour can scarcely be described’, Tafur was overwhelmed by Bruges:
a large and very wealthy city, and one of the greatest markets in the world. It is said that two cities compete with each other for commercial supremacy, Bruges in the West and Venice in the East. It seems to me however, and many agree with my opinion, that there is much more commercial activity in Bruges.
He noted that this Venice of the West offered:
everything which2 the whole world produces. I saw there oranges and lemons from Castile, which seemed only just to have been gathered from the trees, fruits and wine from Greece, as abundant as in that country. I saw also confections and spices from Alexandria, and all the Levant, just as if one were there; furs from the Black Sea as if they had been produced in the district. Here was all Italy with its brocades, silks and armour, and everything which is made there; and indeed there is no part of the world whose products are not found here at their best.
He could almost have been describing the Arnolfini portrait, in which van Eyck depicted some of the luxury imports – oranges, furs and silks – that helped make his town rich. Tafur explained how this cornucopia flowed from ‘all the nations of the world; they say that at times the number of ships sailing from the harbour at Bruges exceeds 700 a day’.
Rubbing shoulders in the cosmopolitan throng were Spaniards importing the merino wool that was overtaking the once-predominant sacks from Lincolnshire, Shropshire and Yorkshire; the adventurous Portuguese bringing back sugar, spices and sweet wines from Madeira and Africa; the German traders of the Hanseatic league, for Bruges (together with Novgorod, Bergen and London) was a Hanse centre where ships unloaded the products of the north – furs from Russia and Siberia, cereals, ores and timber from Sweden, iron and copper from Prussia, ales from Hamburg, woad from Thuringia, and the Danish herring and Norwegian cod preserved in salt from Portugal or western France. The scope and particular privileges made Hanse members unpopular in Bruges: in 1436, for example, there was an unfortunate incident at Sluys, when locals attacked and killed a group of German traders.
Sluys was a bustling seaport on the Zwyn estuary, some 6 miles from Bruges, and directly linked to the town by the river and a series of ingenious waterways. Tafur explored its harbour, which ‘looks as if half3 the world had armed itself to attack the town, so great a fleet of ships is always at anchor here: carracks, sloops from Germany, galleys from Italy, barques, whalers, and many other kinds of vessels according to the different countries’. Most merchandise was carried up the river Zwyn as far as the port of Damme, on the outskirts of Bruges, where it was transferred to flat-bottomed barges to travel along a canal recently extended into the very heart of the town. Here, the goods were unloaded at the Waterhalle, the great depot that framed the east side of the Market Square. Heavy items, such as barrels of wine, were winched up by the town crane, a huge apparatus operated by sturdy lads marching its two treadmill wheels.
Traders disposed of the goods they had brought, then refilled their holds with new produce, including local wares, the expertly woven woollens, linens and tapestries that helped make Flanders so prosperous. Foreign merchants had to obey the protective restrictions imposed by the town guilds: they could sell imported products in Bruges, but not newly purchased Flemish fabrics, which were for export only. Nor were they permitted to deal directly with local traders, but could only negotiate through a makelaer, or broker, who was a member of the Bruges guild of brokers. Such men conveniently combined their trade with running the hostels where foreigners lodged. Tafur attributed the strength of the local industries to ‘the barrenness of the soil, since very little corn is grown, and no wine, nor is there any water fit for drinking, nor any fruit. On this account, the products of the whole world are brought here, so that they have everything in abundance, in exchange for the work of their hands.’
The need for locals and strangers to communicate inspired a Bruges schoolmaster to compile the first ever bilingual phrase book, the Livre des Mestiers (Book of the Trades) in the mid-fourteenth century. This took the form of a Flemish/French conversation manual which proved so popular that it was regularly updated. In 1483, William Caxton published a French/ English version in Bruges which continued to stress the skills of local artisans like Gabriel the linen weaver, Elias the cloth dyer, Ferraunt the hosier, Vedaast the furrier, and Colard the goldsmith, all of whose works van Eyck celebrated in the outfits worn by the Arnolfini couple.
In the 1430s, the population of Bruges numbered around 40,000, and the city impressed visitors like Tafur with its civilised and prosperous atmosphere: ‘the inhabitants are4 very wealthy. It is well peopled, with fine houses and streets, which are all inhabited by work people, very beautiful churches and monasteries, and excellent inns … the people of this part of the world are exceedingly fastidious in their apparel, very extravagant in their food, and much given to all kinds of luxury.’ But there was also a downside. ‘Without doubt, the goddess of luxury has great power there, but it is not a place for poor men, who would be badly received.’ And Tafur noted the presence of the many prostitutes who solicited trade around the market, and the proliferation of the notorious bathing houses, whose mixed-sex bathing, he suspected, was just an excuse for immorality.
In addition to his official work for the duke, van Eyck developed a profitable sideline painting the darker side of Bruges. In marked contrast to his demure Madonnas, he produced a range of saucy bathing scenes that featured naked ladies. (The originals have not survived, but there are later copies and contemporary references.) The town would remain famous for its forbidden delights. A generation after Tafur, an aristocratic Bohemian, Leo of Rozmital, visited Bruges as an essential stop on his tour of Europe. His travel diary duly recorded the notorious baths where men and women bathed together, and evoked an unsettling image of disguise and travesty during Carnival Week, when ‘it is the custom5 for noblemen to go about masked, each striving to be more fantastically dressed than the others … the servants are similarly dressed’.
Bruges’s ambiguous reputation was long established. In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, who had travelled in Flanders in the late fourteenth century, cited the town as the essence of permissive behaviour. The workaholic merchant in ‘The Shipman’s Tale’ left his frustrated wife in Paris (where she cheerfully submitted to seduction by his hypocritical cousin, a monk) and went on business to Bruges, where he bought goods and arranged credit, but stubbornly refused to participate in two of the local attractions, gambling and dancing. Chaucer also used a Flanders setting for ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, a morality story about three corrupt companions who haunt brothels and taverns, dance, gamble, blaspheme, and eat and drink too much: the tale ends in treachery and murder.
Bruges’s outward prosperity in the decade of the Arnolfini portrait barely masked the effects of recent political conflict. Tafur noted many high gallows around Bruges and Sluys displaying the heads of dead men. These were the remains of the unfortunates who had dared to oppose the duke in an unsuccessful uprising in 1437 when the burghers were attempting, as ever, to demonstrate their autonomy over the alien ruling dynasty which imposed unreasonable taxes and regarded the town as an inexhaustible money box to fund the court’s luxuries: the high-spending duke seized one-seventh of Bruges’s annual revenues. The mood of growing unrest climaxed in May, when the citizens virtually imprisoned the duke by closing the town’s main gate after his ceremonial entry but before his troops could follow him. He escaped, but took his revenge by demolishing the offending gate and executing the ten leading rebels, whose heads he stuck on the other ten gates as a warning. Further reparations included a huge fine, which temporarily drove the town into poverty and famine. The honourable Tafur was shocked when a starving woman in Sluys offered him one of her daughters for money. He gave them 6 Venetian ducats and optimistically made them promise never to do it again.
While prostitutes prowled the arcades of the great trading Halls on Market Square, the real red-light district was the St Gilles area to the north-east, where van Eyck lived. Here the brothels and bathhouses flourished, together with all the hostels, taverns and gaming houses that catered for cosmopolitan gangs of sailors kicking their heels and bent on pleasure until their ships left port. van Eyck’s house was in St Gilles Nieuwstraat, a teeming zone where hard-working artisans lived side by side with a transitory and often unruly population speaking unfamiliar tongues – English and Scots, Portuguese and Italian, Prussian, Scandinavian and Slav. This was just a few minutes’ stroll from the respectable trading area colonised by foreign merchants, centred on Beurse Square (named after the family of innkeeping brokers who lived there, whose money-changing activities are thought to be the origin of the term ‘Bourse’).
Bruges’s origin as a marketplace for north and south, east and west, began with the great fairs that punctuated the European year, magnets bringing buyers and sellers together. Flanders hosted five annual fairs; the one in Bruges ran for six weeks in the spring, then the cavalcade moved on. However, the town’s convenient location near a seaport meant that traders found it more profitable to establish permanent bases there to deal with the volume and variety of goods arriving. The different nationalities initially occupied hostels for temporary living and storage space, but by the fifteenth century they had established their own separate headquarters, and acquired the necessary accommodation. Such houses came to contain the necessary status symbols of tapestries, furniture – and paintings.
Among the foreign merchants living around Beurse Square were members of the Arnolfini clan from Lucca, one of the autonomous city states of the Italian peninsula which, together with Genoa, Venice, Florence and Milan, established permanent bases in Bruges. These Italians were vital members of the town’s commercial community. Combining trade and finance, they became the first merchant bankers.
The intrepid seafaring Genoese were the first to sail to Bruges in the late thirteenth century in sturdy galleys purpose built to withstand the battering of the North Sea. The Venetians soon followed, adding a new northern base to their maritime empire in the south and east. The arrival of the Venetian galleys at Sluys each spring was a major event in the year. They brought silks and gold-woven fabrics from Byzantium and Islam, wonderful southern luxuries for the table (semi-tropical fruit, cane sugar, malmsey wine) as well as the ‘spices’ needed not just for garnishing food but also for manufacturing. The French term épices covered not merely condiments but also all sorts of products from Africa and the East, including the dyes and mordants essential for the cloth industry; the alum that set colours permanently was an essential element for Flemish and English cloth workers. The next wave from Italy, the Florentines and Lucchese combined their import–export businesses with the operation of innovative banking systems which enabled merchants to obtain short-term credit in the major European cities.
The Church defined as usurers those who profited from loans by charging interest – they were sinners who would go to Hell. But theologians did not object to the use of bills of exchange for buying and selling foreign currencies, and this was how bankers really made their money: their loans managed to conceal substantial interest rates within the fluctuating exchange system. Those sophisticated accountants, the Florentines, who invented the revolutionary method of double-entry bookkeeping, were the first to exploit this principle, and they made Bruges the northern point of a financial network that linked the major centres of Paris, London, Montpellier and Barcelona. In 1439, the Medici bank opened a branch in Bruges.
Their banking rivals were the Lucchese, who also specialised in trading superb silks made in Lucca. The ‘Community of Lucchese residing in Bruges’ acquired new headquarters in 1394 in a house just off Beurse Square, the base for the consul and a three-man council, whose role was to support members and ensure they maintained the necessary standards. These premises were close to those of their compatriots, for the Florentines, Genoese and Venetians all had properties in the square itself, the latter having taken over the Beurse family hostel. (The enterprising Genoese would surely be delighted that their former headquarters now houses the world’s first Museum of Chips, opened in May 2008.) Their young men came to Bruges to work in the family business for a year or two as one stage in a developing career, but some remained as permanent expatriates, well integrated into local society. These included the Arnolfini, Rapondi and Giudiccioni families, all from Lucca. Like the other Italian groups, the Lucchese retained a distinctive national identity, and worshipped in their own chapel, dedicated to the Volto Santo, Lucca’s famous Crucifixion relic.
It was probably a source of pride for the Duke of Burgundy that such discriminating patrons sought the works of his own court painter. van Eyck received a number of commissions from the Italian community, and his reputation soon spread to Italy, generating further demand. Anselm Adorno, a prominent member of a Genoese family long established in Bruges (where he built a remarkable church that imitated the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem), bought at least two works by van Eyck, showing scenes from the life of St Francis. Another Genoese merchant, from the Giustiniani family, commissioned a triptych of the Virgin and Child that included an image of the patron himself wearing elegant Flemish dress. And the Genoese Lomellini family also commissioned a triptych, so desirable that King Alfonso of Naples subsequently bought it. Lorenzo de Medici acquired St Jerome, probably commissioned via the Bruges branch of his family bank. Cardinal Ottaviano of Florence managed to get his hands on one of van Eyck’s titillating bathing women, a piece originally commissioned by Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, if Vasari’s lives of the artists can be believed. And the painting known as the Lucca Madonna (because it was identified in that town in the nineteenth century) must have been commissioned by one of the Bruges Lucchese. This suggests that by the 1430s, the works of van Eyck, court painter to the magnificent Duke of Burgundy, were becoming major status symbols for Italian collectors and connoisseurs. So when a Bruges-based member of the Arnolfini family decided to commemorate himself and his wife, the only artist to approach was the duke’s painter. van Eyck’s double portrait represents the ultimate assimilation of the Italian merchant community, a man from Lucca and his wife in a setting and a style which were entirely Flemish. The work could only have been created in cosmopolitan Bruges.
THE PRECISION AND subtlety with which van Eyck has treated the faces of the couple in his portrait is extraordinary. He depicts the man with almost photographic accuracy – long, lean face, high cheekbones, deep-set greyish eyes which deliver a cold stare, prominent ridge of the nose and slightly cleft chin. The image appears to be truthful, for van Eyck painted the same recognisable features again in the half-length portrait of a man (now in Berlin), recreating the same character with a face that was hard to forget. (To modern eyes, it bears an uncanny resemblance to Vladimir Putin.)
Van Eyck gave the same detail to the woman’s features. Tilting modestly downward, her face is a smooth oval whose peachy texture is enhanced by the delicate highlights cast by the reflection of her creamy linen headdress onto the underside of her plump jaw. The mouth is small, its curvaceous lower lip casting a shadow on the rounded chin, which has a tiny dimple at the tip. But there is something not quite right with the proportions of this face. Even making allowance for the fashionably over-plucked pencil-thin eyebrows, they are still unnaturally high above her eyes. Although van Eyck was capable of applying the same unflinching gaze to his female as well as his male sitters – exemplified by the careworn expression of the donor’s wife on the Ghent altarpiece, and the pursed lips and quizzical stare of his own wife in the portrait in Bruges – the Arnolfini woman seems to be an archetype, an image existing in his mind rather than before his eyes. For by now he has painted this face several times. The high eyebrows and puffy skin below them, the long straight nose and rosebud mouth already characterise his angels on the Ghent altarpiece, especially the angel of the Annunciation. And he repeats these formulaic features on other Annunciation angels (Washington, Madrid) and St Catherine (Dresden). The faces of his serene Madonnas also have these particular proportions. This all implies that, in contrast to his all too accurate treatment of her husband, van Eyck did not draw this woman from the life but chose to turn her into a vision of idealised holy beauty.
However truthful or idealised their faces, it is by their clothes that van Eyck locates them in the external world. They both wear the products that made Bruges the centre of a trading empire – fur, silk, wool, linen, leather, gold – and they personify the wealth of the city in its heyday. Dressed to impress, they are stating their position in society. For the colleagues, family and friends whom the painting was meant to impress, the code was perfectly clear. It spelled discreet ostentation, and celebrated the merchant class in all its permitted finery.
Those in control have always tried to regulate what other people wear. In the Middle Ages, morality and conservatism combined to create sumptuary legislation designed to preserve a strict social hierarchy. This reached a climax in the burgeoning urban consumer societies of the fifteenth century, driven by the shameless rise of nouveaux riches who could outspend the old feudal aristocracy. Kings and dukes felt they had a right and a duty to flaunt a lavish public persona, for extravagant dress and jewellery confirmed their dynastic status, glamorous court, and access to the wealth needed to support them. Their dress was also an opportunity to show off the skills of their craftsmen – tailors, embroiderers, furriers, goldsmiths and others – working to glorify their patron and inspire admiration and desire for their exquisite products. For the lesser nobility, however, striking the correct note was more challenging, and it was a positive minefield for a merchant, no matter how wealthy. Evidence of contemporary anxiety about social transgression is given by a statute drawn up in 1430 by the Duke of Savoy, ally and neighbour of the Duke of Burgundy, which defined thirty-nine different social ranks, and specified the clothing and accessories appropriate to each.
Van Eyck applied the insights of a courtier who would have appreciated every nuance, and ensured that the Arnolfini couple got it just right. Her outfit demonstrates seemly prosperity, and his controlled opulence, a man with a finger on fashion’s pulse. He wears the dark shades pioneered by Duke Philip, who made this fashion a political statement, including cutting-edge linings of brown marten fur. In contrast, her bulky green gown could have been worn at any time during the previous generation, and its fur lining is made from the more common and (relatively) cheaper squirrel. His dashing straw hat is a stylish import but she wears a provincial, domestic headdress of linen.
Although subsequent varnishing and cleaning have muted the original colours, Arnolfini wore fabrics that had been dyed rich plum and black, tones that not only copied court fashion but also announced his own gravitas and virtue. Jean Courtois, writing in the fifteenth century on the significance of colours in heraldry, declared that a merchant wearing black was indicating his ‘loyauté’, his trustworthiness; obviously an essential quality to project.
Arnolfini’s outer garment is a heuque,6 a long tabard, sleeveless and open at the sides. The shape originated as a form of Italian military dress that could be worn over armour, but it became fashionable as civilian wear in the early fifteenth century (like our modern-day use of camouflage patterns or combat trousers). The one in the painting seems to be made of silk velvet, and was thus a blatant advertisement for the luxury textiles imported to Bruges from Italy, and specifically Lucca, where the Arnolfinis came from, an important centre of velvet production. Making velvet required an enormous amount of the finest quality silk thread to achieve the closely sheared, wondrously smooth surfaces that gave the fabric its special nature. Duke Philip wore the most luxurious type of all, velours sur velours, made from a complex weave of two different heights of pile. The dense folds of Arnolfini’s tabard prove that it was made of many metres of costly material.
The deep plum tone was another statement of wealth, for dark shades required more laborious processes to achieve a permanent dye and were therefore more expensive to produce. Woad and madder were used to dye silk black, but violet shades also needed kermes, an even more expensive ingredient. Kermes (kermes vermilio) came from a wingless parasite living on the leaves and branches of the scarlet oak that grew around the southern and eastern Mediterranean, in the Levant and further east. Laboriously gathered in the spring and killed with vinegar or steam, the scaly insect bodies were crushed, dried and powdered to produce a powerful and permanent carmine dye that was one of the vital components of the spice trade. It was among the goods, for example, carried in 1432 by a caravan of 3,000 camels that swayed their way on a fifty-day journey from Damascus to the port of Bursa by the Sea of Marmara. Here, Florentine and Venetian merchants bought up much of the precious load and shipped it to northern Europe. That was how the dyers of Bruges got their hands on this powdered dye.
The quality of the dyes used was another useful way of demonstrating status. From the thirteenth century, the statutes of the Lucca dyers’ guild warned that any member using an inferior red would be fined, or lose his right hand if he couldn’t pay the fine. In the complex social hierarchies of fifteenth-century Venice, the colour of clothes was restricted to black for every day and red for festivals. Here the range of dyers’ recipes for kermes red was far more extensive than for reds made from cheaper products, which were inevitably less intense and prone to fading. Madder root, dried and powdered, produced alizarin, effective as an ingredient in making black but when used on its own appeared terracotta rather than bright red. For this reason, it was banned as an additive to kermes, which cost three times as much. When the Venetians adopted the Burgundian fashion for dark colours, dyers were, however, permitted to combine kermes with woad and madder to achieve the desirable strong black. Another red dye was Brazilwood (called verzino) which initially produced a vivid scarlet or crimson but tended to fade, so Venetian dyers were forbidden to mix verzino with kermes. To guarantee the purity of their product, they even had to colour-code the finished edges of woven cloths to indicate the constituent dyes.
Yet the ultimate refinement of the Arnolfini tabard is not its colour but the fur lining, visible at the neck, the long side openings and the hem. These are so exquisitely painted you can almost touch its gleaming softness. Fur linings and trimmings were a standard feature of high-status clothing, worn all year round as a form of portable central heating in an era of draughty rooms, glass-free windows, uncarpeted floors, and fireplaces that gave out more smoke than heat. Wearing fur was socially contentious and inevitably inspired many sumptuary restrictions. In late fourteenth-century England there were strict categories of use from top people’s ermine down to commoners’ cat or rabbit.
The most prestigious fur of all was sable, reserved for royalty and the top aristocracy. Almost black, wonderfully smooth and enormously expensive because it had to be imported from far distant Siberia, it appealed to the sombrely clad Duke Philip as a superb contrast in texture to the fine wools, brocades and damasks of his dark robes. Ducal accounts for 1432–33 record the purchase of several black velvet, sable-lined heuques. Arnolfini would not have dared to wear this princely fur. His tabard was lined with the next best thing, the lighter brown coat of the pine marten, which was not restricted to princes but was almost as prestigious. The English King Henry V wore both sable and marten and owned twenty furred gowns, ten fur linings and six furred cloaks, according to his will of 1422. The Duke of Savoy also possessed marten-lined heuques. And van Eyck’s other portraits suggest that many wealthy Burgundians wore marten. He portrayed the duke’s right-hand man, Chancellor Rolin, kneeling before the Virgin and Child in a brocaded gown the neckline, cuffs and hem of which reveal the same gleaming brown fur as Arnolfini’s tabard. Another devoutly kneeling client was Canon van der Paele, whom van Eyck depicted in the white surplice of his office, which however failed to conceal the marten collar peeping up from the robe beneath. Other subjects wearing marten linings include the knight Baudouin de Lannoy, and Jodocus Vidt, patron of The Ghent Altarpiece. When van Eyck painted his second portrait of Arnolfini, he showed him in marten again, lining a long-sleeved, high-necked brown robe. As a member of the court, van Eyck may well have worn marten himself: Man with the Red Turban (1433, National Gallery, London), assumed by many to be a self-portrait, wears an almost identical garment. van Eyck’s use of sable, however, was restricted to the tips of his paintbrushes.
Arnolfini’s costly lining followed fashion and at the same time advertised his own wares. Bruges was the hub of the fur trade,7 another luxury product which featured in many merchants’ portfolios. Marten was almost as expensive as sable because it was trapped far away in the remote forests of Russia and northern Scandinavia, and the pelts passed through sundry middlemen before the furriers even got started on their own laborious manufacturing processes. Many skins were required to line a garment. A long gown made for the Duke of Touraine in 1391 required 170 skins, and his short gown seventy. A calf-length tabard like Arnolfini’s required at least 100 skins.
Beneath the opulent outer layer, Arnolfini wears a black doublet – a high-necked, long-sleeved jacket in another costly silk-based fabric, probably satin, elaborately woven into leafy patterns. The sleeves are clasped at the wrist by elegant silver-braided cuffs, fastened with scarlet laces. His legs are clad in purple hose, the colour carefully selected to match that of the tabard. Hose were long stockings, joined to each other like modern tights, and normally attached by laces to the hem of the doublet. Woollen hose were a famous local product, mentioned by Chaucer, who had a professional eye for such details from his time working as a controller of imported cloths. In The Canterbury Tales, listing the wardrobe of the elegant Flemish knight Sir Thopas, he specified ‘Of Brugges were his hosen broun’.
Over his hose, Arnolfini wears close-fitting ankle boots with a fashionably pointed toe. These were evidently made of the softest leather because they reveal the contours of his feet. Another luxury touch is that they are dyed purple to match his tabard. These boots were evidently so precious or delicate that when he was outside he protected them from the dirt of the street by wooden overshoes, or pattens. van Eyck implies that Arnolfini has only recently come into the house, because a pair of muddied pattens lies on the floor beside him as if he has just kicked them off. Even these functional overshoes are a fashion statement, carved into the excessively long pointed toes that bore little relation to the shape of actual feet and caused moralists to rail. Pattens were made of light and malleable woods such as alder or aspen, cut into rough sole forms when still green and properly shaped after the wood had dried and shrunk. Then the shoemaker nailed broad leather straps to the sole on each side of the instep, to be fastened by a buckle in the middle. van Eyck has included all these details, down to the slightly concave insole carved to accommodate the ball of the foot, and has meticulously put in every grain of the wood.
Perfect from toe to top, Arnolfini wears a hat that is, naturally, in the latest style. High crowned and wide brimmed, it is a clever reworking of the tall Flemish ‘beaver’ hat (so-named because it was made from the woven hairs of the rodent). But this is a superior model, far lighter on the head because it is made of straw woven into tiny plaits, then minutely coiled into the required shape. The light from the window picks out the detailing on the left side – van Eyck has revelled in recording the intricate construction as well as employing the dark halo of the brim as a striking counterpoise to the pallor of the man’s face. The hat is another example of a luxury import, for Italian straw hats had been traded north from the beginning of the century. And Arnolfini’s is even more of a status symbol because it is dyed black to match his doublet. Dyeing straw (whether as plaited strands or as a finished object) such a strong shade was just as complex as dyeing silk or wool, and required the same range of ingredients.
The contrast between the modish hat and the woman’s head covering could not be more extreme, and suggests a whole range of deliberate oppositions – black/white, cosmopolitan/local, up-to-date/old-fashioned, dashing/demure. Her modest face is framed, indeed almost overwhelmed, by an elaborate linen veil made, as costume historian Margaret Scott has demonstrated, from one long strip of material which has been folded backwards and forwards into five separate layers, the edges shirred and fluted to give the effect of lacy trimming. Yet it is a relatively simple version. Such a cloth could be folded as many as twelve times to make a really elaborate headdress; van Eyck painted his own wife wearing a seven-fold variant in his 1439 portrait of her. Such headdresses were held together with the aid of strategically placed pins. Although van Eyck does not show any here, they can be spotted in contemporary Flemish portraits, like Robert Campin’s Young Woman (c. 1435, National Gallery, London).
This head-wear may represent a distinctive Bruges variant of a wider Flemish fashion (as in Brittany, where the women from each district sported a distinctive lace coif, a medieval custom which survived into the early twentieth century). It also denoted the necessary restraint of a merchant’s wife. An aristocratic woman would have worn something wider or higher, for this was an era of extreme head-wear, like the outrageous hennins, consisting of great horns of stiffened fabric on either side of the head, spanned by a veil. These were at their peak in the 1420s, and attracted the church’s disapproval on the grounds that the Devil also wore horns. But van Eyck gave the woman in the portrait a head covering so discreet that it would have caused no concern. Her hair, fairish in colour, has been coiled into two conical buns on either side of her temples, held tightly in place by russet silk hairnets trimmed with a narrow plait. Great ladies, even married ones, were permitted to reveal more hair than can be seen in this austere version; van Eyck portrayed his own wife with wider and taller hair cones.
The high smooth forehead and extremely thin eyebrows suggest the moral ambiguities of a woman’s image, with real life impacting on van Eyck’s idealised vision. For he makes it look as if the merchant’s wife has succumbed to the morally reprehensible fashion for plucking the hairline and eyebrows. According to an etiquette manual which the Chevalier de la Tour Landry compiled for his daughters in the late fourteenth century, and still widely read in the fifteenth, facial depilation represented the sin of Vanity. In punishment for every hair plucked, the Devil thrust a red-hot needle into your skull.
Her green gown must be the most recognisable garment in the whole history of dress. It has astonishing dimensions, and although she is already holding up quantities of the fabric, a heavy train still trails on the ground. (The replica made in 1997 by students from the Wimbledon School of Art as part of their ‘costume interpretation’ course required 35 metres of material.) Such excess angered moralists at a time when the poor wore rags. Regulations compiled in Bologna in 1401 decreed that no robe should measure more than 10 bracci8 around the hem (a braccio, or arm-length, was approximately 60 centimetres). The hem of the green gown would have been far longer than this. Apart from its exceptional volume, however, the garment was a conventional example of the full-sleeved, high-waisted dress which had come into fashion in the late fourteenth century, replacing the tighter-fitting clothes of the previous generation. The garment was first known as a houppelande, but this term was now out of date, having been replaced by robe, in the French of the Burgundian court, or gown in English.
The green gown was undoubtedly made from the famous woollen cloth spun from quality Spanish or English fleece and woven by the renowned Flemish weavers who produced fabrics as fine as silk or as thick as felt. It is clearly of the most delicate texture. It must have been cut from a circular pattern, because the front is just as long as the back, with a hole in the centre for the neck, and slits in the side for the arms. The sleeves are separate, made of rectangular lengths of material, and attached kimono-style, at the shoulders. There is a belt just below the bust which creates a high-waisted effect and helps to give the impression of a protruding stomach. This is a desirable feature, both socially and visually, and is enhanced by the stance that artists give women. Fertility is a vital quality in a wife and many are in a recurrent state of pregnancy. Those who are not are failures. So a posture which emphasises the stomach, stressed by a high waistline and the folds of a voluminous gown, is the height of elegance. Arnolfini’s wife may or may not have been pregnant, but van Eyck gives other definitely non-pregnant women the same profile. In The Ghent Altarpiece, the stylish Cumaean Sibyl wears a similar, sap-green gown and, like Arnolfini’s wife, places her hand on the swelling curve of her high waist; the naked Eve also has a very prominent belly. St Catherine in the Dresden triptych has the long loose hair that indicates virginity, yet her stomach is so protruding she rests her prayer book on it.
The sleeves are as voluminous as the rest of the gown. Cut in the wide, trailing style known as ‘bag-sleeves’,9 they practically touch the ground. (Bag-sleeves were regarded as so decadent, quite apart from impractical, that Scottish peasants were banned from wearing them in 1430.) And van Eyck has made them even more prominent through their rich appliquéd decoration. This consists of a further layer of fabric cut and shaped into a fancy trim sewn in overlapping layers around the lower half of the sleeves. Called ‘dagging’ because the edges are stamped into the characteristic ‘dagged’ or zigzag outline, and cut into little shapes resembling Maltese crosses, the edges are deftly trimmed with pinking shears to stop them from fraying. Such ornamention proved how much time as well as fabric had been invested.
Yet it is all slightly out of date. The dagging of sleeves, hems and hats was a decoration the popularity of which peaked in the late fourteenth century, a time when such modish lavishness was feared to carry grave spiritual risks. Chaucer’s moralistic Parson railed against ‘so much dagging of shears, with the superfluity in length of the said gowns trailing in the dung and in the mire, on horse and eke on foot, as well of man as of woman’ because it manifested the sin of Pride. And he pointed out that this was ‘a waste of cloth in vanity’ that should have been given to the poor. Prior William of Stranton went even further in his 1409 vision of Purgatory, wallowing pruriently in the punishments threatening men and women who wore dagging and long hems: ‘I saw the jagges10 [dagging] that men were clothed in turn all to adders, to dragons and to toads, and many other horrible beasts sucking them and biting them and stinging them with all their might.’ As for ‘women with gowns trailing behind them a long space … I saw the side trails cut off by the fiends and burned on their head.’ But Arnolfini’s wife had no need to worry about the afterlife because by 1434 dagging offended no one, except perhaps followers of fashion: the sleeve decoration proved that she was dressed very conservatively indeed and, despite the cost, was making no claims to be a style setter.
Nearly as outmoded as the dagging is the colour of her gown. While Arnolfini boasted the new black, his wife seemed to be locked in the previous century when bright colours like red, blue and green were the preferred options. Although, of course, van Eyck may have chosen the colour to provide a contrast with her husband’s black and purple. Green dye was made from a combination of woad and the herb weld (Dyer’s Yellow) and was easier to brew than fashionable dark shades. Green clothes did of course remain in use in the fifteenth century. Rogier van der Weyden painted a contemplative Mary Magdalene, wearing a very similar full green gown (1445, National Gallery, London). A contemporary English wearer was Margaret Paston who, in 1441, instructed her husband to buy cloth for a new outfit, otherwise ‘I have no gown11 to wear this winter but my black and my green a lyere [cloth from Lierre, Brabant] and that is so comerus [cumbersome] that I am weary to wear it.’ Blaming the great weight of the old gown was a fine excuse for a new one. (She also demanded a new girdle as her advancing pregnancy meant that the old one no longer fitted.) Selling Flemish cloth to English customers like the Pastons may have represented another aspect of Arnolfini’s portfolio, as advertised by van Eyck, as an exporter as well as an importer: Flemish-woven woollens were in demand all over Europe.
Van Eyck painted another feature of the green gown as lovingly as the dagging. The fur lining helps explain its bulk and further confirms the wearer’s status as the wife of a wealthy man. Creamy fur can clearly be seen at the neck, hem and generously bordering the prominent sleeve openings. The whole skirt seems to be lined, not just trimmed at the lower hem, because more fur is visible behind the portion of the skirt she holds up, while the concertina folds of the train trailing on the floor look far heavier than if they were just wool. It is impossible to imagine the weight and warmth of the whole garment.
As linings for womenswear needed more furs, they were much more expensive than those used for men’s shorter robes. Perhaps this was why they were so often made of squirrel. According to the complex hierarchies of use, the white fur called ermine (which came from the stoat) was reserved for the aristocracy, while lesser ranks used the plump winter coat of the squirrel, turned white as camouflage against the harsh snows of the far north. In the early fifteenth century, squirrel was still an important product in the fur trade but prices were starting to go down because its widespread use made it less attractive to the marten-preferring elite. (van Eyck gave his green-gowned Cumaean Sibyl a marten lining as proof of her high status.)
There were different types of squirrel fur, graded by the furriers according to colour and quality: gris was the back, vair the alternating bands of grey and white from the softer belly, minever was white belly fur with a faint edge of grey, pured minever had all the grey trimmed away. The whole skin was divided into these separate sections, which the furriers then stitched with silk threads into conventional sizes and lengths. This was all done according to the high standards that the guilds set and monitored. In Bruges, for example, it was decreed that no minever hood should contain less than 30 skins.
The lining for a woman’s gown required at least 600 skins, but a really full one, as in the painting, might use as many as 2,000. The flatter belly fur, minever, was the best. When Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of Henry IV, married the King of Denmark in 1406, her wedding robes were lined with 2,114 skins of pured minever, together with thirteen of ermine to edge the sleeves. Her outfits included another five minever-lined gowns. The Duchess of Bedford (who was the Duke of Burgundy’s sister) had a green woollen houppelande12 made in Paris in 1421 lined with 2,000 pieces of minever. The trousseau of the Duke of Savoy’s daughter, on her marriage to the Duke of Milan in 1426, included twelve fur-lined gowns. Even her nightwear, a short-sleeved gown and a cloak, were cosily lined with gris. One way for the nobility to look expensive while secretly economising was to have the unseen part of the lining made in gris, reserving ermine only for the visible cuffs and neck. Fur linings aroused as much disapproval as dagging: Chaucer’s Parson listed among the sins of Vanity ‘the costly furring of their gowns’, and clad his worldly Monk in ‘sleeves rounded at the hand / With gris, and that the finest in the land.’
Beneath her green gown, the woman wears a long-sleeved underdress, another mode which reflects the styles of the previous century when close-fitting garments were the norm. This is bright blue, in some sort of textured fabric which might be crushed velvet or patterned damask; van Eyck has gone to some pains to suggest a rippling, slightly uneven surface. It too has fur at the hem, though surely cannot have been lined throughout. This fur trim is whiter than that on the gown, and might represent the pured minever that was paler than gris, or perhaps lettice, the winter coat of the weasel. These were both more expensive than gris, and therefore more suitable for hem-trimming than for the whole lining. The tight blue sleeves are clasped at the wrist by little braided cuffs decorated with interlacing patterns in pink and gold (echoing her husband’s black and silver cuffs). Such braids were made of silk and gold threads imported from Italy, where the different cities all boasted distinctive techniques. Margaret Paston referred to ‘gold of Venice’ and ‘gold of Genoa’, when ordering quality thread for her embroidery. Lucca produced its own versions of luxury braid too, so this was probably another advertisement for Arnolfini’s wares. The costume’s final detail is the belt, essential to pull the green fabric into the desirable high-waisted effect. Clasped just below the bust, it is made of gold-embossed leather, geometrically patterned with intersecting diamond shapes and borders decorated with little squares.
Her feet are hidden by folds of fabric so copious that she gives the impression of being unable to move. Yet there is a pair of sandals on the floor behind her, not neatly parallel but splayed out in a very natural way, as if she has just stepped out of them to pose for van Eyck. They are as beautifully made as the rest of her outfit, and are the one fashionable element of her ensemble, a relatively recent type of open sandal developed from the basic patten shape. Made of red leather delicately ornamented with three rows of tiny brass studs, they are fastened by broad leather straps across the instep attaching in the middle with brass buckles. Dyed leather was another luxury, and the shades worn by the couple – the purple of his boots and the scarlet of her sandals – were the hardest colours to achieve. The red was almost certainly made from Brazilwood, an imported dye from the redwood sappan tree that grew in India. Its heartwood or pods were chopped up and simmered to produce a strong, permanent red that dyed skins and hides. (Brazilwood gave its name to the richly forested Portuguese colony in South America rather then vice versa.) With the embellishment of the shiny brass studs, the sandals must have been very expensive, a status symbol as prized as Louboutins or Jimmy Choos today.
A merchant’s wife was in a difficult position. The genteel French author Christine de Pisan wrote an etiquette manual for women in the early fifteenth century, bemoaning the increasing blurring of social boundaries and urging bourgeois wives not to go too far. She warned them against trying to dress like young noblewomen: wearing extravagant and ultrafashionable clothes would damage their reputations by proving them vain and frivolous and, worst of all, by showing up their attempts to attract young men. (Social grounds argued a different case for restraint. In Florence, in 1433, there were calls to prevent women from threatening the very fabric of society by dressing too extravagantly because young men, reluctant to pay for such clothes, were refusing to marry.) However, she did concede that the expensive, showy clothes of women married to very rich Italian merchants in Lucca, Venice or Avignon were more acceptable worn in those places than in France, because they were at least demonstrating their husbands’ professional status.
Rogier van der Weyden, Portrait of a Lady, c. 1460
As if to avoid potential criticism, the jewellery of husband and wife is restrained, though still undeniably costly. He wears one ring only, on the third finger of his right hand, which appears to have a raised bevel as if it contains an inset cameo or seal. She has two plain gold rings on her left hand, one placed near the tip of her fourth finger, and the second halfway down her little finger. This does not necessarily mean that the rings did not fit, and may just have been a custom. The lady in van der Weyden’s Portrait of a Lady (c. 1460, National Gallery of Art, Washington) wears a ring which sits just below the joint of her finger, while his other Portrait of a Lady (c. 1460–9, National Gallery, London) has two rings above her finger joints. Round the neck of Arnolfini’s wife is a double-stranded slim gold chain crafted from droplets of filigree. van Eyck knew at least two men who might have created such a lovely object. One was Jan de Leeuw, a prominent member of the Bruges goldsmiths’ guild, whose portrait he had painted; the other was John Peutin, the duke’s own goldsmith.