THE FIRST OWNER was the man who commissioned the painting from van Eyck. His aim was to make a statement about himself and his wife for the benefit of the select group privileged to see it. van Eyck’s aims, in contrast, would have reconciled flattering his patron with demonstrating his own distinctive talents – not necessarily the same thing. Whether or not the patron’s name was Arnolfini can never be known for sure but the circumstantial evidence is, at the very least, worth considering, and is generally accepted in this book. There are no problems, however, in identifying the painting’s subsequent owners, for it has an excellent pedigree. Catalogued, or itemised, as it passed from one collection to another, the work was found sufficiently interesting and curious to attract the comments of those who saw it and even those who had merely heard of it by reputation. Yet there is a shift in the response to it over the generations: the portrait remained a prized possession, but was valued for differing reasons. Like the mirror at its heart, it reflected changing times and changing attitudes.
The first recorded owner was Don Diego de Guevara, a Spaniard by birth who spent most of his working life in Flanders serving the Habsburg dynasty which succeeded the Dukes of Burgundy. In the late fifteenth century, the ruling houses of the Netherlands and Spain became inextricably linked because of a drastic shortage of male heirs. Although van Eyck’s employer, Duke Philip the Good, produced many bastards, his only legitimate son, Charles, was killed in a battle in 1477. Like his father, Charles married three times but had only one heir, a girl, Marie. Her grandfather, Duke Philip, allegedly refused to attend the baptism of this first grandchild because she was female. Aged only nineteen at her father’s death, the orphaned heiress hastily married the Archduke Maximilian, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick of the Austrian Habsburg family. They had a son, Philip ‘the Handsome’, and a daughter, Marguerite. Maximilian succeeded his father as emperor, but Marie died at the age of twenty-three after a riding accident.
Sometime in the 1490s, Don Diego de Guevara entered the household of the young Archduke Philip, sole heir to the Burgundian and Habsburg dynasties, and he served the family for the rest of his life. His name is just a footnote in the history of the Arnolfini portrait but if he had not acquired it and then given it to the Regent of the Netherlands, it could have disappeared without trace.
The Guevaras of Santander in Castile were an aristocratic family with distant royal connections: Inigo de Guevara attracted the rare favour of van Eyck’s patron Duke Philip the Good, who made him the first Spaniard to join the exclusive chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece, which Philip founded in 1429 as part of his wedding celebrations. His kinsman, Don Ladron de Guevara, and Ladron’s sons Diego and Pedro, decided to carve out careers in the lucrative service of the wealthy Duchy of Burgundy rather than in bleak and barren Iberia. For ambitious young men, the restrictions and insecurities of isolated Spain offered far less opportunity than the urban Netherlands. (One example of the clash of cultures was that the proud, reserved Spaniards viewed the locals as easy-going drunks.) Ladron worked for Philip’s son, Duke Charles, then served his widowed duchess, the English princess Margaret of York, before becoming chamberlain, councillor and ambassador to the Emperor Maximilian. His sons found employment in the service of Maximilian’s son Archduke Philip: in 1495, Pedro de Guevara was a member of the motley fleet that attempted to invade England under the pretender Perkin Warbeck, whose claim to be Duke of York and rightful English king was maliciously backed by Maximilian, Margaret and Philip in their campaign to destabilise the usurping Tudor, Henry VII. The Guevaras all profited from the royal marriage treaty of 1494, which for two years Ladron had worked to accomplish in Spain, and which linked the families of the Emperor Maximilian and of the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.
According to the archduke’s household ordinances of 1496, Don Diego de Guevara was one of twenty-six ‘écuyers tranchants’1 or ‘esquires of the carvery’. The household consisted of several hundred staff, all ranked according to the minutest nuances of Burgundian etiquette, from maistres d’hostel (chamberlains) down to the humblest scullions and stable boys. Écuyers tranchants were in the upper echelons, ranked after pannetiers (gentlemen of the pantry) but before écuyers d’écurie (esquires of the stable). Diego and his colleagues did not really sully their hands with food or straw because they were all gentilhommes and there were real servants to do the dirty work: their job titles were the fossilised record of the past functions of the Burgundian dukes’ retinue. Their role now was to attend the archduke and accompany him on the elaborate ‘Joyous Entries’ that marked his progressions from city to city. There were plenty of écuyers tranchants, who were divided into two teams of thirteen, each attending Philip for six months. Diego was sufficiently senior for his name to head the January to June team. He had done well, because Spaniards were very rare at court, and regarded with suspicion.
These elaborate household ordinances were based upon the long-established traditions of the Burgundian court, preserving the exquisitely refined etiquette of an earlier generation that Aliénor de Poitiers also sought to protect in her strictures on bed hangings. As in the days of van Eyck, over fifty years earlier, everyone had their proper place, from varlets de chambre upwards; this provided an established career ladder for the ambitious like Don Diego. Archduke Philip’s mother, the late Marie of Burgundy, had gravely diminished her son’s inheritance by yielding many of the duchy’s powers to the French and to the sturdily independent Flemish towns. But his marriage to a Spanish princess, the Infanta Juana, third child of Ferdinand and Isabella, could elevate him from a duke to a king. This was the scheme of his wily father, the Emperor Maximilian. Furthermore, it was part of a dual deal in which Philip’s sister Marguerite married Juana’s brother, the heir to Spain, epitomising Maximilian’s policy of extending Habsburg influence by weddings rather than wars. Don Diego, a native Spaniard now fluent in French, and a loyal Habsburg servant experienced in etiquette and in discretion, played a vital role as the intermediary between two very different cultures.
Michel Sittow, Don Diego de Guevara, c. 1515
The ever-impoverished Maximilian decreed that the fleet and huge train which escorted the Infanta Juana from Spain to Flanders for her wedding in the summer of 1496 should be reused to take Marguerite and her entourage back to Spain that winter. Diego was appointed one of her escorts. Among his colleagues was Jean de Bourbon, who wrote an account of their eventful journey (and complained that he had to buy lengths of silk himself to provide a smart new wardrobe – presumably Diego had to do the same). They sailed from Flushing in January 1497, just the wrong time of year, and the weather was predictably so bad that the fleet had to shelter in Southampton harbour for three weeks. This generated unctuous letters from Henry VII to Marguerite, about to become his kinswoman because his elder son Arthur was betrothed to Ferdinand and Isabella’s younger daughter Catherine. Spain, England, the Netherlands and the empire were being linked by a tight network of marriage alliances that surrounded and excluded France, their mutual enemy.
Marguerite and her armada reached Santander, Diego’s family home, in March 1497. From there they travelled to Burgos where she was married to the Infante Juan with huge pomp and ceremony. Diego then returned to Flanders (with a gratuity of 200 ducats from Juan for his expenses), to rejoin Philip and Juana’s household as Juana’s maistre d’hostel. He was probably relieved to escape from the rigid formality of the Spanish court to the more relaxed ambience of Ghent or Bruges, unlike poor Marguerite banished to Spain, and warned she would have to modify her dangerously open behaviour to accord with her new surroundings. Yet Diego had to be a cultural chameleon, because the presence in Flanders of the devout Juana and her sombre retinue was starting to make Spaniards unpopular. Diego’s burgeoning interest in Flemish art may have been one way of declaring his loyalty to the north, as well as demonstrating his prosperity. And he became involved with a girl in Brussels, who gave birth to their illegitimate son in 1500, naming him Felipe after the archduke. He also had a daughter by another local woman.
Don Diego witnessed a dramatic rise in his master’s prospects of ruling Spain as the heirs of Ferdinand and Isabella died in quick succession: first Juana’s brother, then her elder sister, then the latter’s infant son. By 1500 Juana and Philip were next in line to the throne. To establish a presence in Spain, and comply with Ferdinand and Isabella’s desire to make their son-in-law seem more Spanish and less Netherlandish, the young couple set off in September 1501 on what was a royal progress from Brussels to Granada. Don Diego accompanied them. The latest edition of the household ordinances proved that he had climbed right up the greasy pole and achieved the highest position in the ducal household, maistre d’hostel, or chamberlain, to Archduke Philip. Four men shared this elite rank, the most senior being Philip, the Bastard of Burgundy (sired by Duke Philip the Good at the age of sixty-eight), and ranked next to him was Don Diego de Guevara, Seigneur de Jonvelle. (Jonvelle was an estate in Franche-Comte, a region to the east of Burgundy which had fallen into Habsburg hands; Diego inherited the title which Maximilian had awarded to his late father Ladron.)
The courtier Antoine de Lalaing compiled a wonderfully detailed account of their journey. They travelled by land, taking advantage of an unusual phase of reconciliation with France. The new king, Louis XII, not only offered safe conduct but provided a spectacular welcome to celebrate the new rapport between former enemies. This was not, of course, altruistic because it was meant to remind Philip of his subservient role as a vassal of France, while also securing the friendship of the future rulers of Spain. They reached Castile in February 1502 and stayed for over a year, a time of growing tension between Philip and his devious father-in-law Ferdinand who, now anticipating the death of his sick wife Isabella, threatened to remarry and produce new heirs to supersede the Burgundian–Habsburg line. Diego’s services to all parties were invaluable. He attended a banquet that Philip held for Ferdinand in the summer of 1502, when he was presented with a generous sum of money for his services to Juana. Queen Isabella paid him 75,000 maravedis (an Iberian unit of coinage) in September, and in December Philip and Juana gave him 400,000 maravedis. Such rewards help to explain why men like Diego were so anxious to serve in royal households, and could afford to buy paintings.
After much ill will over the succession, Philip and his retinue returned to Flanders in July 1503, leaving the heavily pregnant Juana behind like a hostage, to join him after the birth. Diego went with him, returning in the spring of 1504 to escort Juana back to Flanders, minus the new baby whom Ferdinand insisted on retaining as a hostage. Queen Isabella used Diego as a continuing discreet supporter of Castilian affairs, for she gave him more money and, a few months before her death in 1504, signed a mandate to pay him 200 ducats a year while he was in Flanders.
Keenly anticipating his expectations of the Spanish crown, Philip promoted Diego to become his own most senior maistre d’hostel and a trusted councillor. Philip and Juana set off from Flanders for Spain in January 1506 to claim Isabella’s kingdoms before Ferdinand could persuade the Cortes to revoke their decision. Diego and his brother Pedro were crucial members of this entourage, undoubtedly among ‘those around her brother who had turned his head’ as Marguerite apologised to her father-in-law Ferdinand for Philip’s arrogant behaviour. As the French alliance had already broken down, the party travelled by sea in an ostentatious fleet of over thirty vessels containing around 3,000 men. But winter storms battered them and many ships were lost. Diego’s own ship went down, but he survived. (Philip was reported to have worn an early sort of life jacket, an inflatable leather garment labelled ‘Philip, King of Castile’, even though the title was not yet confirmed, for easy identification in case his body was washed up.) They limped into harbour at Plymouth, to be welcomed by Henry VII who, like a spider catching flies in its web, detained his increasingly desperate guests for almost three months until Philip had agreed a treaty of friendship including promising to marry his sister Marguerite to the ageing monarch.
When they finally reached Spain, Don Diego came into his own as Philip’s ambassador and spy at Ferdinand’s court. He was the ideal, and probably the only, man for the job. As a native Spaniard, he could communicate directly with Ferdinand and his advisers, who had little French; but he was also fluent in French, the language spoken by the Burgundian court. In his person, he epitomised the struggle between the Netherlands and Spain, between the land of his career and the land of his birth, and his loyalties must have been severely torn. His efforts to mediate between two very difficult men – his employer, the ambitious, arrogant Habsburg archduke who was desperate for a crown, and his employer’s crafty father-in-law, determined not to yield an inch of his own powers – were driven by a desire for peace, but also by the prospect of very great rewards.
During two tense weeks in June 1506, Don Diego had a series of meetings with Ferdinand, whose former supporters were increasingly deserting him for the Habsburg party, and reported back to Philip almost daily, giving measured and tactful advice in a precarious situation. Diego instructed the intransigent, greedy prince as firmly as he dared, warning Philip to think hard before declaring war on Ferdinand, and begging him to be more polite to his potential supporters, the touchy Castilian grandees: ‘kind words cost nothing’. He also advised Philip to scotch the rumour that he was holding his wife Juana a prisoner (which he was) by immediately parading her in public.
Don Diego also won the trust of Philip’s father-in-law and managed to negotiate a meeting between the two sides. One of his letters contained a PS: during their last encounter, when Ferdinand had received a message from his new wife, the French king’s niece, ‘he gave the greatest sigh2 in the world, cursing the hour he had even chosen her – he wishes she was in the middle of the sea’.
As the direct result of Don Diego’s smooth negotiating, on 27 June 1506 Ferdinand and his ‘very dear and most beloved son-in-law’ Philip signed the Treaty of Villafranca, which handed over Isabella’s kingdoms of Castile, Leon and Granada to Philip and completely bypassed the rightful heir, his wife Juana, on the grounds of her alleged madness. ‘Considering her maladies, passions and other behaviour’, she had supposedly declined the role, otherwise the ‘total destruction and perdition of these kingdoms’ would follow. So Don Diego had helped prevent civil war and won Philip’s confirmation as king, although at the expense of Juana’s status and apparent sanity; he backed the Habsburg, not the Spanish side. Reward followed soon. In August, Philip appointed him governor of the fortress of Carthagena, and gave him 400,000 maravedis. His brother, Pedro de Guevara, recently released after being arrested by Ferdinand for spying, received similar prizes.
The Habsburg triumph ended prematurely. In September, Philip suddenly died – of a fever, it was reported, but there were inevitable rumours of poison (Ferdinand? Juana?) and suddenly the Netherlanders had no place in Spain. The majestic funeral ceremonies included a procession of Philip’s gentilshommes, carrying items that belonged to the late prince: Don Diego bore his ‘cotte d’armes’, the garment he wore over his armour. Diego and other senior members of the household divided up Philip’s valuables with unseemly haste – the jewellery, priceless tapestries, ostentatious silverware, all the status symbols that were meant to demonstrate his majesty in Spain – for safety and for keeping out of Spanish hands as they scrabbled to leave the country. The Cortes (representative assembly) appointed Ferdinand regent of Castile on behalf of his grandson Charles (Philip and Juana’s eldest son). It was reported that Don Diego had unsuccessfully tried to retrieve Philip’s younger son, whom Ferdinand was bringing up as a proper Spanish prince, from the castle at Simancas but the crowd turned upon him. The Flemish party had a dangerous return journey through Spain, dogged by illness and the absence of safe conducts. Diego was responsible for the safe custody of the silver casket that contained Philip’s heart and brains extracted when his body was embalmed for burial in his native Flanders. This final mission succeeded, for the casket survives today in the church of Our Lady in Bruges, in the tomb of Philip’s mother Marie of Burgundy.
Don Diego had lost one master but immediately gained another when Maximilan appointed him councillor and maistre d’hostel to Philip’s eldest son and heir, Charles, then aged six (the same age as Diego’s own son, Felipe). Despite the alleged mental instability which had resulted in her convenient incarceration in Spain, the Infanta Juana had performed well as the mother of Habsburg heirs. She and Philip produced six children. The two youngest remained in Spain, but Charles and his three sisters were brought up in Mechelen in Flanders by their childless aunt Marguerite, whom Maximilian had summoned from mourning her late husband to become the children’s guardian, and governor of the Netherlands in Philip’s place.
Diego worked closely with Marguerite, who used him as a trusted diplomat in the most delicate negotiations. In September 1507, she and the Estates of Flanders sent him to England to seek Henry VII’s support against the French king’s threatened invasion. There was also gossip that he was there to negotiate the marriage between Henry and Marguerite which Philip had promised, though at the same time Henry was putting out feelers for the widowed Juana. De Puebla, the Spanish ambassador to England, reported to Ferdinand that Henry’s response to Diego’s request for help consisted only in evasive assurances of friendship.
It was fitting that such an important man, as he advanced from lowly esquire to senior diplomat and ambassador, should cultivate an interest in art. According to Felipe, Diego commissioned portraits of himself from ‘Rugier’ (Rogier van der Weyden), and ‘Michiel’ (Michel Sittow), artist to the courts of Europe. The Sittow portrait hangs today in the Washington National Gallery of Art. Its format, the devotional diptych, was a popular type in the Netherlands because it combined conventional piety with a modern, realistic image of the patron. It depicts an eminent man in middle age, the furrowed brow and deeply etched facial lines suggesting a long life of devotion to duty and the narrow, pursed lips hinting at an underlying ruthlessness. There is a touch of vanity in the way he has attempted to disguise his thinning hairline with a straggly fringe. Deliberately inserted is a reference to his membership of the ancient Castilian Order of Calatrava. Sittow has added its cruciform emblem, woven into the intricate pattern of his richly brocaded doublet, after starting work on the portrait. Over his doublet, Don Diego wears a robe whose magnificent striped and spotted fur collar is made from the Iberian lynx, perhaps a further reference to the land of his birth. Another luxury item is the oriental rug covering the sill before him, on which he rests a ringed hand.
The painting (the portrait is one panel of a diptych, whose other subject is the Virgin Mary, the object of Diego’s devotion) was also an acknowledgement of status because only the rulers and the rich had themselves portrayed praying to a saint or the Madonna in this way. Diego would have seen many suitable models in the court circles where he moved. The choice of artist was also significant, for Sittow had a prestigious reputation – he had trained in Bruges, was Queen Isabella’s official painter in Spain, then worked consecutively for Philip the Handsome, Marguerite and Charles V.
As well as commissioning paintings, Diego collected them. Behind his image of prosperous piety lay a life of ambition, cunning and loyalties divided between his native country and his adopted country. Buying a work by the great Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, and later presenting it (possibly as a bribe or a reward) to a Habsburg ruler, was typical of how Don Diego had reached the top in his chosen career. At some time in the first decade of the sixteenth century, he acquired the Arnolfini portrait and had his family arms and motto – ‘hors du conte’ – inscribed on the shutters which then protected the masterpiece. He may have bought it directly from a member of the Bruges-based Arnolfini clan, for the Lucchese merchants dealt on occasion in paintings and illuminated manuscripts in addition to luxury fabrics and other products. If the man and woman whom van Eyck portrayed had left no children, the heirs to their worldly goods might have felt less compunction about keeping the painting. Selling desirable commodities to those who wanted them was what merchants did. A work actually signed by the famous ‘Johannes de Eyck’ was of great value to a connoisseur like Diego who proved his interest in the Flemish master by acquiring a second piece by him, the Portrait of a Portuguese Lady. Possibly, this was the product of van Eyck’s 1429 trip to Portugal to make the likeness of the Duke of Burgundy’s bride-to-be, for it was uncharacteristically painted in tempera on cloth, more convenient for travelling than oil on boards.
Don Diego continued to serve on sensitive missions. When Charles reached his majority in 1515, he sent Diego to England on a goodwill embassy to the next English king, Henry VIII, warning his ambassador to gloss over the embarrassing fact that his long-planned marriage to Henry’s sister Mary had been broken off. But he was being watched. The English ambassador in Flanders warned Henry VIII of alarming rumours about Diego’s anti-Tudor, pro-Yorkist stance. The ambassador also wrote to Henry’s chief adviser, Cardinal Wolsey, to urge that the king ‘observe his accustomed serenity and prudence towards Don Diego de Guevara. He is a subtle fellow.’ And he passed on secret information that Diego intended to visit the Duke of Buckingham, one of Wolsey’s enemies. The Spaniard was clearly seen as a force to be reckoned with. In 1517, when he accompanied Charles to Spain to claim his southern inheritance after Ferdinand’s death, Charles appointed Diego as one of the receivers of royal revenues for Castile, at an annual salary of 300,000 maravedis, a post perceived as so lucrative that Diego sold it on for 5,625,000 maravedis two years later. This was one way for the shy, inarticulate young king, who understood barely a few words of Spanish, to acknowledge his gratitude to the Guevara family.
Diego did not remain in Spain with Charles, but after more than twenty years’ service he was at last permitted to retire. He returned to the Netherlands in 1519 and died in Brussels in December 1520. His burial in the church of Notre-Dame de Sablon was as magnificent as that of a prince. The coffin of gilded copper was laid in the choir in front of the great altar. The church was a fitting choice for this loyal servant of the Habsburgs since it was illuminated by magnificent stained-glass windows showing Philip and his family, which the archduke had presented in 1503, and other windows commissioned earlier by Duke Philip the Good. The glass included portraits of leading figures of the day, so Diego hoped to spend posterity in the same distinguished company he had known in his lifetime. Charles even came to the aid of Diego’s son Felipe, now himself a member of the royal household, by overturning Pedro’s challenge to Diego’s will that left everything to Felipe. There is no surviving catalogue of Diego’s possessions, but the inventory of the art collection of Marguerite of Austria, ruler of the Netherlands and the most powerful woman of her day, proves that by 1516 he had given her both the Portrait of a Portuguese Lady and the Arnolfini portrait.
THOSE WHO SAW the painting might have thought two other items to be accessories of the woman rather than the man – the beads and the brush which hang on the back wall on either side of the mirror. Like everything else in the portrait, they have more than one meaning. The string of amber prayer beads is a paternoster (named after the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’). The Bruges guild of paternoster makers produced many sets, so van Eyck was perhaps taking the opportunity to celebrate another local industry, as well as advertising a different element of Arnolfini’s import–export business, supplying a characteristically northern product to southern Europe. At the same time, the beads symbolised the woman’s piety, and were an appropriate gift from husband to wife. In mid-fifteenth-century Lübeck a paternoster was the standard present from a bridegroom to his bride.
The beads in the painting are not joined in a circlet, like a necklace, but are one long strand. Loosely strung to aid the counting and sliding process of praying, they hang asymmetrically over a nail in the wall. Apart from their religious significance, they illustrate van Eyck’s constant fascination with the brilliant effects of gemstones. He has painted the amber so transparent that it reveals the green silk thread running through the centre, terminating in long soft tassels at either end. It is difficult to work out the number of beads because they seem to reflect each other, the light bouncing off the wall behind and creating the impression of a virtual third strand. These are not the work of van Eyck’s imagination but further proof of the analytical power of his vision. There seem to be thirteen beads hanging to the right and sixteen to the left, suggesting a possible total of thirty, one of the standard figures for a set. Prayer beads were strung in familiar permutations which corresponded to Christianity’s complex number symbolism – three for the Trinity, five for Christ’s Wounds, seven or fifteen for the Joys of Mary, even 150 for the number of the Psalms. Few numbers lacked significance, but paternosters most frequently contained thirty or fifty beads.
They were an essential element of private worship. Reciting prayers compensated for not being able to read (a condition that affected many lay clergy as well as ordinary men and women), and the more times you repeated a prayer, the better it was for your soul. As it was hard to remember the number of repetitions, people kept count by sliding beads along the strand in their hands. In van Eyck’s day, the term paternoster referred to all prayer beads, though in an age of the cult of the Virgin, the female alternative to the Lord’s Prayer was to recite the Ave Maria. Later in the century the beads were called rosaries, the name derived from the image of the Virgin in an enclosed rose garden: the circle of beads echoed the perfect circle of the rose.
By 1420, the Bruges guild3 of amber-paternoster makers had seventy masters, and more than 300 apprentices and assistants, and the bilingual phrase book the Livre des Mestiers listed among typical local craftsmen Walter the paternoster maker, who sold beads of amber, crystal, glass and horn by the dozen. (In London, the street names Paternoster Row and Ave Maria Lane still commemorate the prolific medieval industry.) Although beads could be made from the humblest materials, such as fruit pips, wood or bone, most people preferred something more precious. Yet paternosters that were too ornate ran the risk of being perceived as a fashion accessory rather than a devotional aid and, as such, attracted sumptuary legislation. Later in the century, Leipzig maidservants were banned from wearing rosaries made of coral while an earlier offender was Chaucer’s vain Prioress who flaunted a pretty coral paternoster, from which hung a gold brooch bearing the ambiguous motto, ‘Love Conquers All’. The Burgundian court naturally chose the luxury option. On his death in 1467, Duke Philip left his son no fewer than thirty-five paternosters of gold, jet, chalcedony, coral, crystal and amber. He might have inherited some of the latter from the first duke, Philip the Bold, who owned several amber sets. If amber was good enough for the ducal family, that made it more than acceptable for the Arnolfinis’ reception room, whereas gold or chalcedony might have been a little ostentatious.
Amber was a magical hard stone (vegetable, not mineral) whose tones and transparency ranged from deep orange to an opaque, milky white. Beads were shaped from chunks gathered from the shores or fished from the icy waters of the Baltic and were a local product par excellence. The origins were a mystery. Guicciardini, an Antwerp-based Italian merchant writing in the late sixteenth century, tried to explain:
Amber is a juice4 not of a tree, but of a stone which groweth like Coral in a mountain in the North Sea clean covered with water … when any tempest ariseth in the North Sea especially in September and December, this liquor by violence of the sea is rent from the rock and cast into divers havens and upon divers sea coasts where the people gather it, to the great commodity of divers princes … Amber being taken out of the water hardeneth like to coral, neither is this amber found elsewhere but in those seas only.
He was nearly right. Amber is the fossilised resin of ancient conifers embedded in the strata of the prehistoric forested land mass subsequently swamped by the Baltic and Arctic Seas. Storms, as Guicciardini noted, broke fragments off and washed them ashore, while some daring fishermen even took to the water with nets and pronged poles to prise it out from under the rocks. This was a very risky procedure in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when amber was the monopoly of the Order of Teutonic Knights, who punished unlicensed gatherers by hanging them from gibbets placed prominently along the shoreline. The ‘Amber Knights’ sold their precious commodity to the merchants of the Hanseatic League, the trading alliance of Northern Europe, who shipped it to their main centres, especially the Bruges warehouse they established in 1411. This became the focal point of the whole amber trade, replacing the previously dominant centre of Lübeck. From Bruges, amber was shipped south, west and east, both as raw lumps and as finished products. By filing and smoothing, polishing with a paste of ash or chalk, then perforating with a sharp metal point, the craftsmen of the amber guilds transformed these mysterious stones into the sparkling, translucent miniature globes of the type that hang on the Arnolfinis’ wall.
The beads were also there as a recurrent device for painters to indicate the virtue of their owners. Many contemporary works contain examples in amber and in other materials. In van Eyck’s Virgin of the Fountain (1439, Antwerp), the infant Jesus holds a tasselled string of coral beads, while the posthumous St Jerome in his Study (1442, Detroit), attributed to van Eyck’s workshop, shows an amber, green-tasselled paternoster hanging from a shelf. In fellow Fleming Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece (1425, Cloisters, New York), the patron’s wife holds a coral string, while his St Barbara (1438, Prado, Madrid) carries a string in some other material. Campin’s pupil Rogier van der Weyden placed a tasselled string of dark amber beads in the background of his Magdalene Reading (1438, National Gallery, London); one of the figures in his Adoration of the Magi (1455, Munich) holds a coral set. So the paternoster seemed to be a device promoted by this pioneering group of Flemish realist painters to give a touch of authenticity that linked the everyday world to that of the Bible.
Also on the back wall, a Martha to the beads’ Mary, hangs a brush suspended from a nail in the wall immediately beside the chair by the bed. Made from the softest of twigs bound together at the top by coarse pink thread to form the handle, its presence in the formal reception room was an artistic device rather than a depiction of reality. An almost identical example hangs in the chamber of the Virgin in Campin’s Annunciation (Brussels), painted in the 1420s, and a work van Eyck might well have seen in Campin’s workshop in Tournai, a town he visited in 1427 and 1428. Campin was the first artist to paint the Virgin in a modern domestic setting, thus establishing a model for the Flemish tradition of showing biblical characters in contemporary settings and so imbuing ordinary furniture and accessories with new symbolic connotations. A brush, a basin and a towel represented the Virgin’s industry and humility. (In The Ghent Altarpiece, van Eyck placed a brass basin and a towel in the background of the Annunciation Virgin.) Such a brush would have had the functional role of keeping clothes clean, but it also represented the virtue of Christ’s Mother.