DIEGO HAD KNOWN Marguerite, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian and sister of Philip the Handsome, since he accompanied her on her wedding trip to Spain in 1497. The catalogue of her collections, compiled in her presence in July 1516, named the Arnolfini portrait as the first entry in a long list: ‘a large picture1 which is called Hernoul-le-fin with his wife within a room, which was given to Madame by don Diego, whose arms are on the cover of the picture. Made by the painter Johannes.’ Safety must have been an issue when rulers travelled with all their precious possessions, for a note in the margin added that ‘it was necessary to put on a lock to shut it; which Madame ordered to be made’.
Perhaps it was a present for favours received or in hope of good things to come in an age of bribes and sweeteners, when one of the perceived roles of a ruler was to award places and pensions to endless petitioners. There was just such an occasion in January 1513, when the Emperor Maximilian requested Marguerite to find a position in the service of the three young princesses, her wards and nieces, for the niece of ‘our friend and loyal chevalier, the councilor and maistre d’hostel to Archduke Charles, don Diego de Guevara’. Maximilian added that the girl was the daughter of Diego’s brother and that she was aged thirteen or fourteen. Marguerite had little choice in the matter, because, as her father pointed out, he had already promised this to Don Diego, who naturally expected him to keep his pledge. (Another usefully connected young girl who joined Marguerite’s household in 1513 was Anne, daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, the English envoy who had charmed Marguerite with his winning ways. Placing your daughter at this highly cultivated finishing school was an excellent way of of widening her horizons and improving her marital prospects.)
Keeping in the good books of Marguerite, Regent of the Netherlands, would certainly include making presents of artworks, for she was an avid collector with a keen eye who was turning her court in Mechelen into a centre of culture. For her, art was both a political statement and a source of pleasure. She combined the acquisition and display of works which referred to her distinguished family and its allegiances with genuine appreciation and taste. Her art inventories make constant value judgements – a fi ne painting, a very fine painting, very well made – undoubtedly expressing the opinions and sensibilities of a talented woman who herself painted and composed music and poetry, and who personally supervised the compilation of the catalogue. Collecting art was not just a leisure interest but a vital element of her persona as a leader. For her, van Eyck’s significance was his status as the famous painter who had been in the service of her glorious great-grandfather Duke Philip the Good in the Burgundian Golden Age which she sought to recreate in far more turbulent times. The Arnolfini portrait was a fine product of that era. But the picture of a staid married couple may also have meant something more personal to a woman who by the age of twenty-four had been married three times, rejected by her first husband and widowed by the next two.
Marguerite of Austria was the ultimate princess pawn. She lost her mother, Marie of Burgundy, when she was still a baby, then her father Maximilian betrothed her to the son and heir of the French king, and sent her, aged three, to France to be trained and educated as befitted a future queen. Here she was married to the twelve-year-old Dauphin, and did become Queen of France at the age of four when her husband, Charles VIII, succeeded his father. But seven years later he dissolved their union in order to marry a more strategic candidate. (Expedient dissolutions were not unusual, as long as the marriages remained unconsummated.) Marguerite then spent two humiliating years in France until Maximilian eventually let her return to the Netherlands. She was only thirteen.
Two years later, he brought her into play again as part of his new double alliance with Ferdinand and Isabella: by marrying their only son, Marguerite, former queen of France, would become the future Queen of Spain. But this marriage only lasted for six months, because her delicate husband, the Infante Juan, died suddenly in the autumn of 1497. Marguerite was already pregnant but lost the baby in the shock of her grief. Again, it was a long time before she could leave, because Ferdinand haggled over her dower settlement and Maximilian had no immediate need for her. In 1501, however, he married her off to a new candidate, his ally, Philibert, Duke of Savoy. The young couple seemed fond of each other but produced no children. This gave the energetic Marguerite the opportunity to become the true ruler of Savoy, for her husband preferred to hunt and play. This happy state only lasted three years, as Philibert died unexpectedly in 1504. Marguerite flung herself into widowhood, cut off her golden hair and vowed to devote herself to the pious rebuilding of the family church of Brou, where he was buried. She had her motto carved all over the church: FORTUNE. INFORTUNE. FORT. UNE. It implied that ‘fate was very cruel to women’.
But it was also fate, in the form of her brother Philip’s death in 1506, that brought her back into the wider world and made her such a dominant female leader, La Grande Mère de l’Europe, as she was called. Philip’s son, the archduke Charles, was only six, so the States General of the Netherlands appointed his grandfather, Emperor Maximilian, as regent. Maximilian, who preferred to live in Austria, summoned Marguerite from her widow’s seclusion to become his deputy, and official guardian of Philip’s children. In March 1507, he installed her as Governor-general of the Netherlands, and in 1509 appointed her Regent – the first woman to hold this position.
She established a base for herself and her household at Mechelen, in Brabant, and made it the first permanent capital of the Burgundian Netherlands. This was where she had lived sporadically when it was the home of her step-grandmother Margaret of York, the last Duchess of Burgundy. But Margaret’s palace, the Kaiserhof, was too small for the new ruler and her family, so Maximilian bought the building across the road for her. Renaming it the Hotel du Savoie, Marguerite had it refurbished and extended over the years to provide a fitting space for her official duties and domestic responsibilities, as well as her growing art collection.
The 1516 inventory that mentioned the Arnolfini portrait was compiled at a difficult time in Marguerite’s life, for her nephew Charles had come of age, assumed rule over the Netherlands and abruptly dismissed her from her post. (He became Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor in 1519.) Critics had accused her of embezzling money, exceeding her powers, and upsetting the pro-French faction, the latter possibly justified because she maintained a constant hostility towards the French after her childhood humiliation at their hands. But perhaps Charles just wanted to free himself from his dominating aunt and guardian.
She had certainly succeeded in her aim of keeping the Netherlands as peaceful and neutral as possible by attempting to defuse French hostility and maintain the English alliance, while employing all her wiles to reject Henry VII’s persistent proposals of marriage. Despite Maximilian’s pressure, she firmly refused to marry again (though she tactfully let Henry know that if ever she changed her mind, he would be her first choice). Maximilian claimed that Henry would let her remain Governess of the Netherlands and spend several months there each year, but these unlikely promises failed to tempt her, likewise the six horses and the greyhounds that Henry sent her, as the Spanish ambassador de Puebla reported to Ferdinand. Another reproachful letter from Maximilian recalled her bitter complaints over her first two marriages, her resentment that she had been sent wandering away and abandoned like a forgotten orphan. Never again was she going to risk being in that position. She was a key participant in the talks establishing the 1508 treaty called the League of Cambrai, which temporarily allied most of Europe against the Venetians. An observer of the negotiations noted how ‘this princess had2 a man’s talent for managing business, in fact she was more capable than most men, for she added to her talents the fascination of her sex, brought up as she had been to hide her own feelings’.
Bereft at being dismissed from her job as regent after eight years of power, Marguerite had time on her hands to survey the possessions which she perhaps feared having to remove from the palace in Mechelen. The 1516 inventory proved her interest in earlier Flemish paintings, many of which she had inherited from the collection of Duke Philip the Good. As well as the Arnolfini portrait and that of the Portuguese lady presented by Don Diego, she also owned copies of van Eyck’s Madonna at the Fountain and Madonna in a Church, the latter a diptych which had originally belonged to Duke Philip whom the other panel showed kneeling in prayer. Marguerite took this as a model for the diptych she commissioned of herself praying to the Virgin, in a room which imitated the architecture and furniture of an earlier Burgundian style rather than the modern renaissance features of her palace. The one up-to-date detail was the inclusion of her pet dog Bonté (Lucky). Other parallels with the Arnolfini portrait were the draped bed in the room, and fruit on a sideboard at the left. Her other earlier Flemish paintings included van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross and works by Memling, Bosch and Juan de Flandes. She had already proved her commitment to the family heritage in 1509 when she unsuccessfully requested from Maximilian the title of Countess of Burgundy rather than Marguerite d’Autriche or Madame de Savoie.
Listing her treasures prior to packing and moving out proved unnecessary, for the overstretched Charles soon reinstated her. After Ferdinand died in 1516, Charles invited his aunt to join the Regency Council before he set off for Spain. Realising how much he needed her support in the Netherlands while he was so far away, he learned to trust her again and gradually increased her responsibilities. In 1519, after he succeeded Maximilian as Emperor (an election in which she campaigned vigorously to support him), he appointed her Regent and Governor of the Netherlands. Charles’s domains were now so vast that he was unable to manage them without the most trusted deputies – the success of Maximilian’s pan-European Habsburg network imposed a terrible burden on his grandson. As Marguerite resumed control, she became the most senior figure in a Europe dominated by three young rulers, Henry VIII of England, François I of France and her own nephew Charles V. She unsuccessfully backed Cardinal Wolsey in his efforts to be elected Pope in 1523, but triumphed in negotiating a rare peace treaty between the empire and France in 1528; this was known as ‘la paix des dames’ because the two leading participants were Marguerite and her sister-in-law Louise of Savoy, queen-mother of France.
In Mechelen, Marguerite continued to expand her palace and gave the ‘Court of Savoy’ a new extension which consisted of a suite of eight rooms, and a loggia and graceful colonnades, the first example of renaissance architecture in the Netherlands. The regent filled the new space with her remarkable art collection and commissioned a second inventory, between July 1523 and April 1524, which was over 400 pages long and also noted which rooms her possessions were in. It is a remarkable record of one woman’s personality and preoccupations.
On 9 July 1523, her catalogue described the Arnolfini portrait as ‘a very fine picture [fort exquis, very rare praise indeed] with two shutters attached, where there is painted a man and a woman standing, with their hands touching; made by the hand of Johannes, the arms and motto of don Diego the person named on the two shutters Arnoult fin’. It was kept in ‘the second chamber, with a fireplace’. The way Marguerite distributed her artworks throughout the palace emphasised the functions of each room, ranging from the public reception areas to her personal suite, showing how she attempted to distinguish her official from her private life. The room where she kept the Arnolfini portrait was separate from the more formal areas, yet was hardly private because eight guards attended her there in rotation and it was where she received special visitors. In the room was an altar, chests, cupboards and a bed. Adjoining it was the ‘small cabinet’ which served as her study and held books, a table and writing equipment. The walls of both rooms were covered with green taffeta, material which was also used to curtain some of the paintings. The art displayed in these apartments was quite different from that in the première chambre, where she received ambassadors and other official visitors and was an impressive portrait gallery exhibiting some thirty images of members of the Burgundian dynasty and their allies, including the Tudors. The library, where she hung more family portraits, was also accessible to visitors.
The room where she kept the Arnolfini portrait, however, contained works that meant something to her spiritually and emotionally rather than politically. As well as the altar, there was the diptych of herself praying to the Virgin, another diptych of her grandfather Duke Charles the Bold and the Virgin (‘rich and very exquisite’ according to the catalogue), and thirty more religious paintings. More personal were wooden busts of herself and her late husband Philibert, carved by court sculptor Conrad Meit. (She displayed larger marble versions of these among the other family portraits in the première chambre.) In these images, which she commissioned after Philibert’s death, she was portrayed, exceptionally, not wearing the widow’s headdress of her official persona but touchingly with the loose hair of a bride. (Posthumous portraits were not unusual in an era of sudden and premature deaths. Maximilian continued to commission paintings of his wife Marie of Burgundy long after her fatal accident.)
It was within the poignant context of memorials to her own brief but happy third marriage that Marguerite chose to display the van Eyck that Don Diego had given her. Contemplating the serenity of the hand-holding couple, pet dog at their feet, may have provided some refuge and respite from the incessant burdens she shouldered on behalf of the family. One personal connotation in van Eyck’s painting was the little figure carved on the chair beside the sumptuously hung bed, depicting her patron saint and namesake St Margaret. In the adjacent portrait of her late husband, the same saint appeared on the badge he wore on his hat, an accessory he had deliberately chosen because of its reference to her name.
Among other clues to the very personal nature of this room was the paintbox, disguised as a book with a purple velvet cover bearing arms, which contained five silver-decorated brushes and a little silver bowl. For Marguerite’s pastime was painting, a skill she had learned during her childhood in France. Continuing to practise art must have been another lifeline, and understanding the techniques may have given her greater appreciation as a collector. Also in the room was a painting of a little girl holding a dead parrot. This again held a special meaning, for among her menagerie of pets Marguerite had a favourite green parrot which had belonged to her mother Marie of Burgundy. When it died, Marguerite wrote a rhyming epitaph, and her court chronicler, Jean Lemaire de Belges, composed the bird’s imagined response in his poem ‘L’amant vert.’
Bernard van Orley, Marguerite of Austria
In the tradition of the earlier Dukes of Burgundy, she attached artists to her court. One of her varlets de chambre was the painter and manuscript illuminator Gerard Horenbout (who later worked for the Tudors). She also retained Michel Sittow (who portrayed Don Diego), and the Venetian Jacopo de Barbari, donor of the paintbox, who had already worked in other European courts. After his death in 1518, Marguerite appointed Bernard van Orley, the ‘Raphael of the North’, as her court painter. He created and disseminated her public image (of which he painted at least nine examples) as a demure woman wearing the traditional white peaked hood and pleated ruff of Netherlandish widowhood; this made it clear that she was no longer on the marriage market but wedded to her country.
Marguerite’s collections became renowned throughout Europe. She had inherited most of Philip the Good’s vast store of tapestries and metalwork, manuscripts and paintings, prized possessions which included another example of van Eyck’s work in the form of the mappa mundi which he made for the duke. By acquiring many more works, she pioneered in northern Europe the sort of ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ of Italian renaissance patrons, blending art and science and evidence of distant cultures. The 1523–24 inventory included exotic things from the New World, brought back to Spain by stout Cortez and presented to Marguerite by Charles V – Moctezuma’s feather cloak, Aztec mosaic masks, a stuffed bird of paradise. Together with corals, minerals and shells, and some daring renaissance nudes, these treasures were displayed in the purpose-built exhibition space of her ‘garden cabinet’, the large room which led from her study. She even employed a full-time curator, plus two assistants, to look after all her paintings and precious possessions.
This made the palace at Mechelen a vital destination on the itinerary of privileged tourists. One such was an Italian cardinal, Luis of Aragon, whose chaplain Antonio de Beatis kept a journal of their travels through Europe in the years 1517–18. In July 1517, they arrived at Middelburg, near Flushing, where Charles was waiting, accompanied by Don Diego, to embark for Spain, the expected long absence that had led to his aunt’s political resurrection. Here Luis met Marguerite, ‘a person of about thirty-five,3 I would say, not ugly at all, and of a great and truly imperial presence; she has a certain most pleasing way of laughing’. She also spoke excellent Spanish. A few days later, the travellers reached Mechelen (‘superior to all other towns of Brabant and Flanders’) and found Marguerite’s residence ‘very fine and well appointed, though not particularly imposing’. But her library was magnificent, and they were particularly touched by Meit’s marble busts of her handsome late husband and of herself. They were almost certainly admitted to the room where she kept the Arnolfini portrait, for de Beatis noted the ‘fine panel paintings4 and other pictures by different artists, all of them good masters’. De Beatis was not familiar with van Eyck’s name or reputation. When they visited Ghent a week later, they admired the famous altarpiece in St Bavo’s Cathedral, ‘the finest painting in Christendom’5 which, the cathedral canons told them, was painted ‘a hundred years ago by a high German master named Robert’.
Another visitor was Albrecht Dürer, who toured the Netherlands in the summer of 1521. He already knew Marguerite’s sculptor Conrad Meit, and her painter Bernard van Orley, and wanted to present her with his portrait of Maximilian, which she rather ungratefully rejected on the grounds that it was not a true enough likeness. (Or perhaps it was too Germanic, for the official portrait she displayed showed Maximilian as a proper Burgundian, wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece.) But Dürer’s journey was not wasted: ‘Lady Marguerite6 showed me all her beautiful things; amongst them I saw about 40 small oil pictures, the like of which for precision and excellence I have never beheld. There also I saw more good works by Jan.’ Dürer admired van Eyck whose works in Bruges he had already inspected.
Marguerite remained in the service of her nephew and the Netherlands to the end of her life. Maximilian had arranged the marriages of his three granddaughters, her nieces, to spread the family web across Europe, and Marguerite took on domestic responsibilities for another young family when her niece Isabella died and her son and two daughters came to live at Mechelen. Although Marguerite longed to step down and resume a private life, hoping to complete her late husband’s memorial at Brou and enter the Convent of the Annunciation at Bruges, her sense of duty to Charles came first. Death intervened. In December 1530, at the age of fifty, Marguerite died from gangrene. Her will, made many years earlier, left everything to Charles V, but it was her niece Marie of Hungary who inherited the role of Regent of the Netherlands – and the Arnolfini portrait.
AMBIGUITY EXTENDS TO all the furnishings in the room in this most complex of paintings. van Eyck has ensured that they are as informative and specific about the Arnolfinis’ status as the clothes they wear, yet the particular ensemble he has selected places them simultaneously in a material world and a symbolic one. There are four pieces of furniture, together with their covers and hangings, and a rug on the floor. Each has its own significance. The man and the woman may not have possessed any of the items so lovingly shown, but van Eyck has chosen this particular setting because it is the most seemly and flattering way to depict his patron.
Like clothes and accessories, furniture was an aspect of self-display that was entirely controlled by status and rank. In the etiquette-obsessed courts of fifteenth-century Burgundy and France, there were protocols that were ignored at your peril. Visiting and receiving, dining and drinking, marrying, giving birth and dying were all modulated by the exact contents of the rooms where carefully choreographed social rituals took place. Bowing, kissing, knowing the correct salutations and making suitable conversation were all designed to maintain the rigid degrees of precedence that kept people in their correct ranks, firmly reinforced by the appropriate accessories and furniture. The court which employed van Eyck was a role model for anyone connected with it, like an Italian merchant who supplied goods and services to the demanding duke.
Fascinating hints of what was permissible at court, and what had percolated down to the Arnolfini room, were supplied by Aliénor de Poitiers, daughter of one of the ladies who came to Flanders in 1429 in the train of Isabel of Portugal, the duke’s third wife. As van Eyck had been on that expedition too, he would have been just as aware as Aliénor’s mother of the contrasts between Burgundian and Portuguese etiquette. Brought up in the court of the new duchess, Aliénor was a stickler for the status quo and had a mission to preserve the protocols she feared the next generation was forgetting. She laid down the rules of conduct in her manual Les Honneurs de la Cour, written in the 1480s in the unhappy political vacuum that followed the death of Duke Philip’s successor, Charles the Bold. Her tract harked back to the golden age of the old duke, and tried to preserve an idealised Burgundian court where there was perfect courtesy and everyone knew their place. Her specification of the differences between the bed hangings and covers permitted for queen, princess, duchess or mere countess suggested once rigid forms of precedence that were being dangerously eroded. ‘These old rules7 have been changed in several instances,’ she lamented, ‘but that cannot degrade or abolish such ancient honours and estates, which were made and formed after much thought and for good reasons.’
Van Eyck shows Arnolfini and his wife apparently welcoming guests, the two tiny figures reflected in the mirror on the back wall, whose entry into the room seems to be acknowledged by the raised right hand of their host. This makes it a reception room. The furniture, including the bed, is what honoured guests would expect to see there: Aliénor’s list of the contents of a grand receiving chamber included a bed, a chair and a carpet. These vital features are all present in the painting, together with a draped, cushioned settle beside the chair, and a chest under the window. Aliénor does not mention the two latter items in her inventory of what was de rigueur for the nobility, but she does specify that there must be a low couch with hangings and fine cushions, and a buffet, or sideboard, on which to show off gold and silver plate. The number of shelves on the latter was a key indicator of rank. Aliénor referred disapprovingly to Marie of Burgundy, Duke Philip’s granddaughter, who breached all the rules by having five shelves to her buffet when, as a mere archduchess (despite being the greatest heiress in the land), she should have been content with four. Only queens were entitled to five shelves. The Arnolfinis’ simple chest could have been van Eyck’s way of not getting them entangled in the etiquette of buffets for fear of getting it wrong.
Chests were popular and versatile, for they combined the function of furniture and luggage and were an archetypal form whose French name huche (hutch) became the title of the guild of cabinetmakers, the huchiers. Chests were used for domestic storage, for transporting personal possessions, as seats, tabletops or sideboards, and they might be painted or decorated with carved panels or metalwork. They were a way of showing that you owned things, and that you expected other people to be aware of this: a 1405 inventory of the Duke of Burgundy’s possessions listed ten chests that were kept in the public Great Hall. A chest might also represent the stability of marriage, and was therefore another conventional gift from a husband to his bride in which she stored the lovingly assembled clothes and linen of her dowry. van Eyck might have learned from his Italian clients that, on marriage, a prosperous Florentine was expected to furnish his camera, or reception room, with a pair of chests (cassone), together with a bed and a settle.
The chest is a standard type, probably made of oak (though walnut, which was easier to carve, was becoming increasingly popular during the fifteenth century). It stands off the ground, in order to protect the contents from damp, on the four legs created by the extended corner supports which frame the panelled sides. On surviving examples of the type, the sides were made of boards which slotted horizontally into the uprights, and the bottom boards might be strengthened by iron nails. The legs and flat top of the Arnolfini chest suggest that it was not used for travelling, because those which served as luggage normally had a rounded lid and sat flat on the ground. The front panel is obscured by Arnolfini’s tabard, otherwise van Eyck might have embellished it with carvings to match those on the settle and the chair. There is a chest of identical proportions and construction in the Ince Hall Madonna (1433, Melbourne), attributed to van Eyck’s workshop if not his actual hand. The front of that is visible, displaying ornamental iron hinges and a keyhole. Perhaps the artist himself owned such a chest and used it as a model in these two separate contexts, making the Virgin seem accessibly human by placing her in a secular setting, while flattering the Arnolfinis by attributing to them an item also connected with Christ’s Mother, like the other pieces in the room.
During the fourteenth century, craftsmen started to specialise in making different types of furniture. For the first time there was a distinction between general carpenters and the huchiers and menuisiers, the cabinetmakers and joiners who crafted and decorated the contents of domestic and religious interiors. However, their range remained limited. The basic form of seating was a bench, ultimately a plank on legs. Those who could afford it preferred something that had a back and arms as well, so the bench developed into a settle with wings the same height as the back, like a church pew. Benches and settles were generally placed against a wall in the summer, and moved closer to the fire in winter. To avoid too much disruption, the huchiers developed a superior type of settle known as a banc à perche with a cunningly designed back rail which pivoted towards or away from the fire so that people could sit on one side or the other without having to drag a heavy oak piece around. It is impossible to see whether the Arnolfinis’ settle had a pivoting back but it certainly possessed another status indicator, the projecting footboard at the base. It was also embellished with a striking piece of decoration, a curious finial of two grotesque little figures seated back to back on the one visible arm. Squatter than a lion, though both have manes, the creature facing the room has a malevolent, half-human face. The pair give a bizarre touch to the otherwise serene scene. Rather than making some kind of satirical statement, van Eyck was perhaps recalling or reproducing something that he had actually seen, one craftsman celebrating another’s fantastical flourish; at the same time he was providing a humorous version of the more conventional lion finials, like the one on the adjacent chair.
What distinguishes the settle is its drapery, for it is entirely covered by a vivid red cloth, draped all the way from the back down to the footboard and beyond, so lavish that it spills onto the floor. With the additional refinement of two plump, red cushions on the seat, the settle looks as comfortable as possible in an era of unyielding wooden furniture. Being thus able to soften and embellish an otherwise standard item, while providing an opulent splash of colour to warm the room, was another form of display. Anyone seeing the painting would realise that Arnolfini could afford these extras. They might also have recognised the imagery associated with the Virgin. Again, Robert Campin had got there first. In his Brussels Annunciation (which probably predated The Ghent Altarpiece and the Arnolfini portrait) the Virgin’s settle had very similar drapes and cushions, while his Virgin and Child before a Firescreen (c. 1440, National Gallery, London) also has a settle with carved figures and red cushions; the drape in this case is green.
Squeezed so close to the settle that the arms touch is another status symbol, a high-backed chair. Having a big chair was the privilege of the head of a household, and it represented his office, whether he was a duke, a merchant, a professor (they still occupy Chairs today) or a bishop (who still has a throne). Aliénor de Poitiers stressed that there must be a tall chair beside the bed in a reception chamber, on which a host might invite a distinguished visitor to sit as a mark of honour and respect. van Eyck is again relating the Arnolfinis to Burgundian etiquette.
Their chair is a very fine specimen, carved and partly upholstered – the one visible arm is padded and covered with red material to match that on the settle. Contemporary sources refer to chairs upholstered with down or leather, so, although the seat is obscured by the woman’s figure, it may have been quite comfortable. The chair was there to be admired. Its wooden back is decorated by neat carving like low-relief architectural ornament. On the very top is a row of spiky fleurs-de-lys like a battlement, below them is a band of circles with little sun-like flowers in the centre, then a cusped arch with a triquetra (the three-pointed knot that symbolised the Trinity) at the side, with two clusters of berries hanging from the cusps. This decoration provides a satisfying and subtle combination of naturalistic and geometrical patterns, worked in shallow yet sharply faceted carving whose angles van Eyck has exploited to the full to stress the contrasts between highlights and shadows. It looks like a layer of brown wooden lace draped over the back, to match the fluted edges of the woman’s headdress.
Like the settle, the chair also bears three-dimensional sculpture. At the front of the arm is a proud little lion (and presumably a second, identical one on the concealed side). It has pricked ears, a well-defined face and a fine mane which flows in rows of curls halfway down its forelegs. On the very top of the chair back is the carved figure of a haloed woman, her hands clasped in prayer, apparently emerging from the body of a scaly-winged dragon whose paws clutch the wooden frame. This could be St Margaret of Antioch, one of the major saints, whose faith helped her escape from the belly of the Satanic monster who devoured her, thus turning her into the patron saint of women in childbirth. Another candidate, however, might be Martha, the patron saint of housewives, who famously overcame a dragon in Tarascon, Provence, where she was converting the pagan Gauls. Martha was symbolised in art by the brush she allegedly grasped while defeating her dragon; it is perhaps significant that the carved figure is immediately adjacent to the brush which hangs from a nail just beside the chair.
But did such a chair actually exist? van Eyck excelled in recreating in paint the detailed ornament of stonemasons and carpenters. His interiors abound with minutely carved capitals, arches, window openings and niches which he must have copied from buildings that he knew, then added to the vast repertoire of motifs that he reworked as necessary. The main decorative features of the chair back are already present in The Ghent Altarpiece, together with images of wooden furniture adorned with statuettes of animals or people, and there are similar figures on the Virgin’s chair in Madonna with Canon van der Paele (1436, Groeningemuseum, Bruges). The lions on the Arnolfini chair are identical to those on the splendidly canopied chair of Madonna in an Interior (1437–38, Stadel Museum, Frankfurt), which has four lions, two on the arms and two on the back, with the same alert ears, elaborate manes and sturdy stance. When associated with such images of the Virgin in a domestic setting, lions take on a definite Christian symbolism. According to the Book of Kings, Solomon’s throne had lions on its handrests and others who guarded it all around. Robert Campin’s settle in his Brussels Annunciation has four lions on the back and arms, while the panel between the legs has the architectural motif of cusped arch and bunches of berries, which van Eyck seems to have borrowed for the Arnolfini chair.
Immediately beside the chair is the chamber’s focal point, the piece designed to impress the most. Chest, settle and chair contribute to the desired impact of the room, but all are outranked by the richly hung bed. This, however, did not prove that the room was used for sleeping. On the contrary, it implied that the master of the household was a person of sufficiently high status to exhibit such a possession as an adornment to his reception room. As part of the wedding ceremonies of the Duke of Burgundy and Isabel of Portugal in 1429, a bed of ostentatious dimensions was installed in the great hall of the ducal palace in Bruges; the same etiquette was observed in the placing of a bed in the state room at the marriage of Philip’s son to Margaret of York in 1468. Displaying such a bed to select visitors rubbed in the superiority of the host, not only for owning one, but especially for being able to afford the hangings. According to Aliénor of Poitiers, the fabric and colour of the textiles rather than the bed’s size or construction (which remained fairly standard) showed off the social position of the owner. She refers quite specifically to the rich curtains, canopy and coverlet of the bed that was not intended for sleep but had to be present in an elite reception room.