PHILIP II WAS AS much a pawn to Habsburg destiny as his aunt and great-aunt. Inheritor of the vast territories that had ultimately destroyed his father, his role was to produce male heirs to secure an infinite succession. Yet despite four marriages, Habsburg inbreeding took its toll. Philip’s first wife was his first cousin twice over, while his fourth wife was his niece. Only one son survived into healthy adulthood. Determined to honour and obey the father who had trained him from birth for this role, Philip was reluctant to follow Charles’s peripatetic existence, living in one kingdom after another with no permanent base. He made Spain the heart of his empire, and it was here that he indulged his passion for art and for building.
For Philip, Netherlandish painting was a key part of Spanish culture, and the early Flemish masters represented the proud Burgundian strand of the multiple Habsburg empire. Any work by van Eyck was therefore of merit, although the image of a married couple in a modest domestic setting (by Philip’s standards anyway) might have meant less to him than to his great-aunt Marguerite. He inherited her whole collection in the Coudenberg palace, as well as the paintings Marie had left behind at Turnhout and those she had taken to Spain, and acquired further works that proved his interest in his northern inheritance.
Philip concentrated on devotional painting, moved by the distinctive combination of religious intensity and contemporary precision of the Netherlandish style. van Eyck’s The Ghent Altarpiece made such an impression that he commissioned Michiel Coxcie (Marie’s former court painter, now director of the royal tapestry works in Brussels) to copy the whole masterpiece for the chapel of the Alcazar palace in Madrid. Its subject, the adoration of the mystic Lamb as a symbol of the Eucharist, was appropriate for the Habsburgs, who had a long-standing devotion to this rite. He had additional copies made of some of the individual figures from the altarpiece, and also commissioned replicas of two of van Eyck’s Madonna paintings, and a St Francis. Further proof of Philip’s taste for northern art was his unsuccessful attempt to acquire Metsys’s Lamentation from the Antwerp furniture makers’ guild; he did manage to buy van der Weyden’s Calvary from the Charterhouse of Brussels. He already owned Coxcie’s copy of the Louvain Descent from the Cross, which Marie had commissioned for him because she had bought the original herself. He also acquired Campin’s Annunciation, and works by Gerard David, Jan Gossart, Michel Sittow, Juan de Flandes and Antonio Moro.
Antonio Moro, Philip II of Spain
Philip’s favourite Netherlandish painter was Hieronymus Bosch of Brabant. The artist’s combination of grotesquerie with medieval Christian symbolism, his way of blending sensuality with pain, and the surreal conjunction of fantastic and microscopically accurate landscapes epitomised the distinctive Spanish character and the fanatic power of Spanish religion. Philip’s imposition of the Inquisition had contributed to the unrest in the Netherlands and the Council of Trent promulgated strict Catholic reforms to counter the dangerous spread of Protestantism. Philip inherited several works by Bosch from Marguerite’s collection, and bought many more, including six from the estate of another avid collector, Felipe, son of Don Diego de Guevara.
Being a de Guevara supplied useful connections for life. Felipe transferred from Charles’s household to that of Philip, and returned to Spain for good in 1543. He inherited his father’s enthusiasm for art as well as his painting collection. On the basis of this expertise, in 1560 he wrote a pioneering history of art, the Comentarios de la Pintura. Its introduction declared that art had slept for centuries until it was awakened by Michelangelo and Raphael in Italy, and by van Eyck and van der Weyden in Flanders. Felipe made a bold attempt to define the differences in national styles, making a positive acknowledgement of Flemish art in an era of Italianate influence. This can only have arisen from Felipe’s early exposure to Diego’s collection, which included works by Bosch as well as the two van Eycks presented to Marguerite. Felipe dedicated the Comentarios to Philip, and boldly urged him to make his galleries accessible to art lovers because painting and sculpture only flourished if they were shared and not concealed – a daring exhortation to a Habsburg. Felipe died in Madrid in 1563.
The inventory of royal possessions and collections compiled after Philip’s death in 1598 included 337 paintings. While it did not specify the van Eyck double portrait, it was by no means complete. Though listing the contents of various royal residences, the inventory excluded everything in the Escorial, the gigantic complex of palace, basilica, monastery and royal mausoleum Philip founded some 45 kilometres north-west of Madrid to commemorate Habsburg power. Here he transferred the bodies of his father and mother, as well as Marie’s. The more public areas contained suitably epic works by modern Italian masters, and imposing family portraits which were hung in a purpose-built gallery. However, Philip kept the paintings that meant most to him in his private apartments, including his works by Bosch. But there was no report of a van Eyck here.
In the earlier part of his reign, Philip’s court had no fixed base, and the king travelled with his household, possessions and pictures (including his beloved Titians) to spend long periods of time in the largest castles of his court. The size of his entourage and the swelling bureaucracy of the court made a permanent home essential, so in 1561 he decided to settle in Madrid and resume the work Charles V had begun on modernising the Alcazar palace, a former Moorish fortress on a hill overlooking the city. When the luxurious renovations were completed in 1565, Philip installed many of the paintings he had inherited from Marie. This was the most likely location for the van Eyck, though another possible home was the palace of El Pardo, just outside Madrid, also begun by Charles V and finished by Philip as a country retreat in 1578. There were many works of art here but much of the building burned down in 1604, and the few paintings that survived were transferred to the Alcazar or the Escorial. Yet another palace was Aranjuez, which he began in 1565. So there was no lack of places to display the van Eyck, which may well have moved from time to time, as Philip expanded and reordered his collections.
In Philip’s day the name of van Eyck, the ‘Johannes de Eyck’ inscribed on the portrait, signified an artist whose works graced any collection and proved the taste and discrimination of the owner. During his reign the painting’s fame spread beyond the restricted viewing circle of the king and his court. Sixteenth-century writers believed that van Eyck was not merely the master of realism but the inventor of oil painting, and they expanded his life with stories which grew in the telling, as one author embellished the works of another (done in the spirit of research rather than plagiarism). Like Fazio a century earlier, the Tuscan painter Giorgio Vasari wrote about illustrious artists, in his Lives of the Most Excellent Architects, Painters and Sculptors. He aimed to demonstrate the superiority of modern Florentine art and show how it had developed through the ages, a theme which also conveniently flattered the enlightened Medici ruling family, his patrons. However, Vasari also sought to recognise the relative merits and contributions of artists from other regions and centuries. The first edition of his Lives, published in 1550, referred briefly to ‘Giovanni of Bruges’, the inventor of oil painting, who had passed on the secrets of his technique to Antonello da Messina. For his revised and expanded second edition of 1568, Vasari incorporated the eyewitness evidence of Lodovico Guicciardini, the Antwerp-based Italian merchant who had actually seen examples of van Eyck’s work and who described The Ghent Altarpiece in a section on Flemish artists in his 1567 Account of a Tour of the Netherlands. Guicciardini had already drawn upon Vasari’s first edition to repeat the claim that van Eyck invented oil painting, and Vasari returned the compliment in his second edition, which now included a proper account of Flemish painting based on Guicciardini’s account. Guicciardini may also have come across Lucas de Heere, a Ghent poet and portrait painter, who affirmed van Eyck’s connection with the altarpiece in St Bavo’s (and that of his brother Hubert) in an ode in praise of the altarpiece in 1565. The ode included the absolutely unsubstantiable claim that the brothers included their own self-portraits amongst the crowd of riders in one of the panels, an alleged biographical detail that many subsequent writers accepted.
The first reference to the double portrait came from another Ghent author, the chronicler Marcus van Vaernewyck in his book The Mirror of Netherlandish Antiquity (Dem Spieghel der Nederlandscher Audtheyt). This was published in 1568, just too late for Vasari to have consulted it for his second edition. Van Vaernewyck attempted to define the nature of Flemish art and culture in a time of political unrest, when Netherlanders were rebelling against Spanish rule. The section on the van Eycks mentioned a small painting owned by the Queen of Hungary of a man and a woman holding each other by the hand as though united by faith. It is extremely unlikely that van Vaernewyck had ever seen the original, which had been taken to Spain over ten years earlier. But it must have lodged in someone’s memory, or he might have been describing a local copy of the work: at least two later replicas ended up in Spain and in Portugal. However, his account of how it came into Marie’s possession was wildly inaccurate, for he claimed that she acquired it from a local barber, whom she rewarded with a place in her household worth 100 gulden. This story made no acknowledgement of the extensive collection Marie inherited from Marguerite, but it just might refer back to Don Diego’s working in Marguerite’s service. Elsewhere, he actually conflated the two female regents. Another example of his imaginative writing was an elaborated version of van Eyck’s biography, inventing a sister, Margaret, who was herself a talented and prolific artist. This probably reflected genuine confusion with van Eyck’s wife Margaret.
The next link in the written history of the portrait was Karel van Mander, poet and painter, and former pupil of Lucas de Heere in Ghent. Van Mander took Vasari’s work as his model for the Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters (1604), arranged in a sequence of artistic development which began with the van Eycks, the founders of Flemish painting: ‘it is astonishing 1 that they appeared so perfect and brilliant at such an early date’. He drew on Vasari and de Heere to explain Jan’s innovative rapid-drying oil-varnishing techniques, the secret ingredient being a combination of linseed and nut oil. He knew that Philip II owned Coxcie’s copy of The Ghent Altarpiece, and repeated the text of de Heere’s ode, which now hung in the Vydt chapel opposite the altarpiece; however, the latter was not normally visible because its shutters were kept closed. After listing van Eyck’s better-known paintings like those in Florence and Naples (the information presumably taken from Fazio), van Mander referred to his ‘many portraits, each one2 painted with great diligence and patience’, and added that ‘the same Jan also made one little painting in oils, two portraits of a man and a woman who offered each other their right hand as though they were embarking on matrimony and they were married by Fides, who bound them together’. This was a clear misunderstanding of van Vaernewyck’s account, because it assumed that the reference to ‘faith’ implied the presence of a third character who carried out the ceremony. Van Mander then repeated the story of Marie, ‘this art-loving, noble princess’, and the barber of Bruges.
THE RUG BY the bed has a dual function, with precedents both in art and in etiquette. A rug is often associated with images of the Virgin, and in secular terms Aliénor de Poitiers specified that there must be a carpet beside the bed in a reception or a birthing chamber. The rug in the Arnolfinis’ room appears to be anchored under the feet of the settle and chair, and it stops behind the figure of the woman, who is not actually standing on it. The design of its central portion is concealed behind the bulk of her gown but the borders are visible, their patterns depicted with van Eyck’s usual precision. It has three zones of decoration. The outermost is very narrow, consisting of a row of tiny, five-petalled rosettes in alternating light green, red and blue against a dark ground. The next border has larger motifs, geometric forms in light green or blue, alternating with a six-petalled rosette in white, all with red centres, and set against a dark blue ground, while the innermost band repeats this sequence, but moves it along one unit for the sake of variety. Without being able to see the centre of the rug, it is hard to say whether van Eyck was copying an actual model or simply creating from his prodigious memory something that looked right. He regularly featured rugs in other works to demonstrate his expertise in painting textures and textiles, like all the surfaces he tackled. He enhanced the majesty of three of his seated Madonnas with a rug covering the steps of her throne to balance the rich brocades of the canopy and tester. The one in the Madonna with Canon van der Paele has the same six-petalled border rosettes as the Arnolfini example (both works were painted in the same year), while that in the Lucca Madonna has very similar rosettes in its central zone and an enlarged version of one of the geometric forms. However, van Eyck (or his workshop) employed the same pattern as a design for floor tiles, for example, in the posthumous Madonna of Jan Vos (c. 1450, Berlin). So he must have selected a range of standard motifs to create another luxury item of the kind he saw in the palaces of his patron, the Duke of Burgundy, without necessarily having to draw it from life.
Rugs were a rare commodity in fifteenth-century northern Europe, and they were meant for display rather than for standing on: Venetian painters showed them hung like flags from walls or windowsills to celebrate the city’s festivities and processions. Even in the eighteenth century, artists were still showing rugs as table or sideboard covers rather than on the floor, because they were too valuable to be worn out by the passage of feet. Like so many other goods that reached van Eyck’s Bruges, they were imported from the Islamic world by the wide-ranging Venetian traders, stockpiled in Constantinople, then taken from Venice in the annual galleys to Bruges, or carried by mule train over the Alps. Examples in fifteenth-century art are based on types made in Western Anatolia woven in the geometric style favoured by the Ottoman Turks and prized for their glowing colours and smooth pile-knotted surfaces, which contributed elegance and luxury to any setting. Desire for their distinctive products outweighed contemporary hatred of the Turks or suspicions of Islam, nor did the fact that many rugs were specifically designed for praying to Allah arouse anxiety. Displaying such an item was further proof of the Arnolfinis’ gentility and wealth: only rich people had rugs, and in court circles displayed them beside beds. At the same time, it paid homage to the wife’s piety by visually associating her with yet another artistic attribute of the Virgin.