WHILE THE DOUBLE portrait was establishing its reputation in the canons of Netherlandish art-history writing, its presence in Madrid meant that privileged visitors could see it. Wherever Philip II had originally hung it, it was definitely in the Alcazar by 1599 and was noted by a young German traveller. Jakob Quelviz from Leipzig spent most of that year touring Spain with a companion and wrote up his travels in the form of a journal, accompanied by illustrations. This was an enthralling text which covered the geography, customs and monuments of a mysterious and alien country.fn1 Describing his tour of the Alcazar, Quelviz noted in the Salle Chiqua ‘an image where a young man and woman are joining hands as if they are promising future marriage’ and added, ‘There is much writing’. This was not just van Eyck’s inscription or the motto of the de Guevaras on the shutters (as mentioned in Marguerite’s catalogue), but additionally two lines of Latin verse which he helpfully copied out (though slightly mistranscribed). It was a quotation from Ovid’s satire The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria), translated as: ‘See that you promise: what harm is there in promises? In promises, anyone can be rich.’ This was part of the poet’s advice to impoverished young men on how to get a girl – lie through your teeth – a text that gave the apparently innocuous portrait a surprisingly cynical interpretation.
Marguerite was unlikely to have had the verse added, because her cataloguer still knew of the Arnolfini connection. But Marie and Philip II both demonstrated a fashionable appreciation of Ovid by commissioning Titian to paint scenes from the Metamorphoses; for Marie he created the four huge canvases of The Damned for Binche that she took to Spain, and for Philip, six Mythologies, which eventually hung in the Alcazar. This demonstrated the later sixteenth-century fascination over the classical mythology underlying Christian philosophy, which made Ovid a topical subject. Adding his lines to the small portrait that had long belonged to the family gave it a meaning (although a totally misleading interpretation of the well-dressed Arnolfini as a poor man making a false promise) and brought it up to date. It is significant that the verses were of more interest to Quelviz than the name of the artist, which he did not note or perhaps even recognise.
The next recorded sighting was a century later. The painting was not included among the list of royal goods compiled after the death of Philip IV in 1665, but was listed as still being in the Alcazar in the 1700 inventory of the late Carlos II. This entry confirmed Quelviz’s mention of the Ovid quotations, and located them on the gilded frame. And it described another ornamental feature, the fact that the wooden shutters had been painted to imitate marble. As to the meaning, the inventory announced that the scene represented a pregnant German woman, dressed in green, giving her hand to a youth; they were getting married at night, but the verses declared that they would deceive each other. The compiler must have been in too much of a hurry to look at the painting properly, otherwise he might have noticed the sunshine outside the window, and the fact that the man was much older than the woman. He valued the work at 16 doubloons.
Carlos II was the last Habsburg king of Spain. He had no direct heir, and, following the inevitable succession conflict, was succeeded by Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV and a member of the house of Bourbon. For this new dynasty, the Austrian–Netherlandish elements in the royal art collection would have meant very little. In 1734, a fierce fire destroyed the Alcazar and many of the paintings in it. Miraculously, the van Eyck survived and was next seen in the new palace, the Palacio Real, constructed on the old site during the 1750s. The new building was ostentatiously decorated by modern artists, and became the home for most of the royal artworks.
The superintendent of the collection did not bother to include the van Eyck in the catalogue that he compiled in 1787 for Richard Cumberland. An unsuccessful English playwright who briefly lived in Spain, Cumberland decided to revive his career by writing a Vasari-style Anecdotes of Eminent Painters of Spain, and supplemented the second edition with an extra volume based on the superintendent’s work. This provided a fascinating insight into how the royal family displayed their masterpieces. There were forty Titians in the most public rooms of the Palacio Real, together with works by Velázquez and Bassano. Netherlandish artists, however, were no longer prominent (except for Rubens, a figure of international renown), confirming how tastes had changed from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. There was a handful of Bruegels, and, in the private space of the King’s Closet, a series of small paintings by Teniers and a landscape by Wouvermans; in the Second Closet there was a Dürer. Cumberland criticised the poor hanging throughout the palace, but stated that matters were even worse in the Escorial, where the gloom made it impossible to see anything properly. He described rather summarily some paintings kept in the Buen Retiro palace, where he noted some Flemish works in a passage and other possibly valuable items in dark corners. The contents of that neglected palace alone, he said, were enough to fill a superb new gallery.
Cumberland aimed his book at connoisseurs such as the exquisite William Beckford of Fonthill, who visited Madrid in December 1787, and whose travel diary recorded his pleasure at strolling in the Prado complex, although he found the ambience not particularly Spanish. In the Museum and Academy of Arts, he was impressed by the Persian vases and antique casts, but hated ‘several fierce, obtrusive daubings1 by modern Spanish artists’ – presumably including Goya. Much better was the Palacio Real, where he ‘enjoyed the entire liberty of wandering about unrestrained and unmolested. I remained in total solitude, surrounded by the pure unsullied works of the great Italian, Spanish and Flemish painters.’ His favourite was a Raphael Madonna. He even penetrated the king’s bedchamber, where he noted caged songbirds and mechanical chiming clocks.
The reason Cumberland and Beckford failed to see the van Eyck in the Palacio Real was its location. According to the inventory compiled in February 1794, after the death of Carlos III, it was kept in a retrete – the modern translation is ‘lavatory’ – in the royal family’s private quarters. Keeping favourite paintings in such a very intimate space appears to have been customary then. That catalogue entry simply described the painting as ‘a man and a woman holding hands’ by Jan van Eyck, the inventor of oil painting. There was no mention of marbled shutters or lines from Ovid. Perhaps it had been reframed. The compiler recorded the dimensions (which correspond approximately to those of the work now in the National Gallery), and estimated the value at 6,000 reals.
The French shared Cumberland’s implied view that modern Spain neglected its artistic heritage. They regarded the country, its official ally against England, as backward, insular, uncivilised even, because it had ignored the Enlightenment. ‘Greek slaves in Constantinople2 have more freedom than labourers in Madrid,’ sneered Voltaire. Extracting masterpieces from Spain, whether by national or by foreign artists, was already accepted practice because art collectors claimed moral justification in acquiring their neighbours’ goods. In 1779, for example, the Comte d’Angivillier, responsible for the French king’s arts and buildings, wrote to their ambassador in Madrid: ‘I know that there are3 old master paintings lost and forgotten in attics in Spain. I know that dealers have not yet got there … please let me know if you foresee being able to find some paintings or other curiosities in the storage rooms of private houses’. It was this sort of approach that had inspired Carlos III – a sort of benevolent despot attempting to drag his country, however belatedly, into the eighteenth century – to impose an art export ban in that same year. Its lack of success can be measured by the lament uttered by the artist Manuel Acevedo five years later that ‘paintings of the most famous4 [Spanish] painters as well as foreign have been acquired at great cost … it has become sensitive and painful to such a degree to see the best works not only being taken out of the kingdom, as happens every day but also the wretched prices at which they were disposed and sold.’
Carlos III died in 1788; the posthumous inventory that mentioned the van Eyck was not compiled until 1794, an example of traditional Spanish delaying tactics that so infuriated visitors from other European countries. He was succeeded by his son, the lacklustre Carlos IV, who, with his formidable wife (inevitably his first cousin) Maria Luisa and their children were painted by court artist Francisco Goya, in a memorable official portrait which its plain, proud subjects evidently liked but which many modern viewers interpret as cruel caricature. The court moved regularly between the various royal residences, for the king and queen did not like living permanently in the capital city, which they described as ‘the centre of gossip5 and scoundrels, that Babylon of Madrid’. One cause of gossip was the rise of the royal favourite Manuel Godoy, the king’s chief minister and the queen’s former lover, who lived for a while in the art-stuffed Buen Retiro palace in Madrid.
The Revolution and the subsequent European wars enhanced French greed for art from Spain. Seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century connoisseurs may have ignored van Eyck, but Napoleon’s restructuring of Europe – ‘Roll up the map!’ said Prime Minister William Pitt – made Netherlandish art desirable again. As Bonaparte moved into the Netherlands, the early Flemish masters were claimed as part of a wider French culture and targeted for display in the Louvre. Spain, with its Burgundian–Habsburg legacy of art, was a covetable source.
Late in 1800 General Napoleon Bonaparte appointed his troublesome younger brother Lucien the new ambassador to Spain, recalling him a year later. Lucien left Madrid with a collection of around 300 paintings. During his short time in the capital, he had become intimate with the controversial royal favourite Manuel Godoy, and it was noted that some of Lucien’s loot came from the collections in the Buen Retiro palace, which Godoy then occupied. This was all too familiar. One disgruntled Spaniard remarked in 1801: ‘So many and so alike6 are the foreigners who, on their own or through subalterns, continue today to take the steps and do the research in order to acquire paintings in and outside of the court, penetrating into all places and homes.’ So brazen was Lucien’s theft that Carlos IV swiftly, on 14 October 1801, reaffirmed his father’s export ban but it was just as ineffective; Napoleon knew that his brother, protected by diplomatic immunity, had been stealing national treasures but he did not care. Napoleonic plundering of old Spanish masters would be far worse seven years later, following his invasion of Spain.
Among Lucien’s haul was a work thought to be by van Eyck. It was in fact a Memling but this was a common enough mistake at the time, when one early Flemish hand looked much like another to eyes more accustomed to renaissance and baroque styles. Connoisseurs, however, were becoming increasingly appreciative of the northern tradition and of van Eyck’s seminal position within it. This was due in part to the artist and author Jean-Baptiste Descamps whose Lives of the Flemish, German and Dutch Painters (1756–63) drew heavily on the now forgotten van Mander’s Lives to explain the obscure early Netherlandish tradition to a modern French audience. In his section on van Eyck Descamps simply echoed van Mander on the double portrait; it showed two young people about to get married, and had been bought by Marie of Hungary from a barber. This helped to revive the name of Jan van Eyck, ‘inventor of oil-painting’, and provided further grounds for France’s official policy of art reclamation.
Despite the depradations of greedy foreigners, the magnificent art collections of Madrid remained a magnet for cultivated tourists, the sort of people for whom Richard Cumberland had intended his guidebook. One inexhaustible visitor was Elizabeth, Lady Holland, who arrived in Spain in 1802 and spent nearly three years there in search of a healthier climate for her sickly young son. Her journals give a vivid picture of the attractions of an insecure country clinging to old rituals in a time of change: she refers scathingly to Napoleon Bonaparte as ‘the Corsican chieftain’ although he was already First Consul for life and formulating plans to invade England despite the current Peace Treaty of Amiens.
In July 1803, Lady Holland visited the Escorial: ‘the pictures in the sacristy7 are very fine, but we had no light to distinguish them as a heavy storm was approaching’. On a subsequent visit she admired the library, with its beautiful manuscripts and full-length portraits of the ‘Austrian kings’ from Charles V to Philip IV and learned that two monks still prayed incessantly for the soul of Philip II, as they had been doing in six-hour shifts ever since his death. In August, the party cheerfully endured the scorching heat of Madrid (which the royal family always abandoned for Aranjuez in summer) for its cultural treats. She reported Carlos IV’s attitude to art on a visit to the Academy where ‘by favour we were8 admitted into the forbidden apartment into which the pious monarch has banished all naked pictures; indeed an order was given for their destruction, but upon a promise being made that the eyes of the public should not be shocked by such sights, they were spared … they are merely a beautiful Venus, Danae and others of that sort, by Titian, Albano and other celebrated masters: some are exquisite and might compare with those formerly at Naples and Florence.’
In the royal palace she noted works by Velázquez and Titian and in the now empty Buen Retiro ‘a few excellent pictures9 alone remain’, including portraits by Titian and Velázquez, but also some Flemish paintings – ‘admirable pieces’ – recorded by Richard Cumberland. The Casa del Campo, the king’s hunting lodge just outside town, provided a clue as to the royal family’s opinion of the Netherlandish paintings collected by Marguerite of Austria and Philip II: ‘The house is small10 and insignificant … There are some pictures mouldering on the chamber walls, chiefly bad portraits of the Austrian family. Some inexplicable allegories on human life by Jerome Bosch.’ The van Eyck was presumably still in the royal lavatory in the palace and not on the tourist trail.
Napoleon’s conquests encouraged the removal of allegedly neglected art from Spain. He argued that the way to save works from destruction or decay in their homeland was to bring them to Paris, new cultural capital of the civilised world. It was also an effective way of rubbing in the triumph of the French. Before his revolutionary army occupied the southern Netherlands in the late summer of 1794, the recently founded Arts Commission had drawn up a list of works to be confiscated, in accordance with the new official policy. It distributed the list to the army, and sent out art specialists to supervise the handling, packing and shipping of these acquisitions to Paris. With Flanders now designated a province of France, it was open season on the works of van Eyck, thanks to Descamps’ book. The French army accordingly seized the central panels of the Ghent altarpiece. (Ingres’s 1806 portrait of Napoleon as emperor was inspired by the figure of God in the altarpiece, which was then on view in the Louvre.) Soldiers also removed the Virgin with Canon van der Paele from St Donatian’s in Bruges before demolishing the ancient building altogether. They took many other paintings, including over forty by Rubens, for the seventeenth century was still more popular than the fifteenth. In September 1794, the Louvre put on a temporary exhibition of looted Netherlandish art to glorify French victories.
The Netherlands campaign served as a model for stealing art in Napoleon’s later wars. When he marched into the Italian peninsula in 1796, he made the surrender of works of art one of the conditions of peace treaties with the surrendering states. As a result statues, paintings and bronzes poured into the Louvre (soon to be renamed the Musée Napoléon) in a stream which almost overwhelmed Dominique Vivant Denon, Napoleon’s Director-General of Museums. Denon was aware that looting by the army was not the best way to acquire good-quality art, quite apart from the protests such confiscations engendered. So he became more selective, travelling in person to the defeated country in order to choose the very best works for Paris. He also appreciated that these had to be properly registered and well looked after, especially because one excuse for removing them was to rescue them from local neglect.
Denon reorganised the Musée Napoléon to emphasise the sequence of development of the great masters under the inspiration of a recent French translation of Vasari. Since van Eyck held a canonical role as the inventor of oil painting, this justified the acquisition and display of further works by him. Denon’s so-called ‘van Eycks’ included Memling’s Last Judgement and Gerard David’s Marriage at Cana. However, he also obtained authentic examples, such as The Virgin with Chancellor Rolin from Autun, and the Portrait of Jan de Leeuw from Vienna. Napoleon’s invasion of north Germany in 1806 ‘released’ around a thousand new paintings for Denon to incorporate into his ambitious displays. Two years later the emperor turned his attention to Spain.
MORE EVIDENCE OF money, and perhaps of virtue too, are the oranges in the painting, three on the chest under the window and a fourth on the windowsill. Visually, they contribute lively patches of colour which draw the eye to the otherwise dark, lower left side of the room, and offer yet another opportunity for van Eyck to demonstrate his virtuoso techniques. The orange on the sill looks almost three-dimensional because it casts a shadow and is simultaneously reflected on the window frame behind it, a stunningly effective piece of observation and illusionism. The three on the chest are beautifully modelled too, made tangible by the curves of the delicately indented, crinkly skin and soft highlights on top where the light falls from the window. They are a tour de force of still life in miniature at least a century before any other painter was working like this.
But van Eyck was not painting fruit just to show off his skills. In Bruges, oranges were a treat and a rare delicacy imported from the far south for the few who could afford them. The Spanish traveller Pero Tafur noted amongst the goods being unloaded at Sluys in 1438 ‘oranges and lemons from Castile, which seemed only just to have been gathered from the trees’. Citrus fruits originally came to the West from India in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests. They could not grow in the north but were abundant around the Mediterranean. The Romans cultivated them in Palestine, southern Italy and Sicily, and the Moslems spread them to Spain and Portugal, with the aid of pioneering irrigation schemes. By the fifteenth century, Andalucia was the main source of the oranges and lemons exported to Flanders.
In the north, oranges were mainly prized for their cooking properties. Seville’s bitter oranges, still the best for marmalade, were the basis for sharp-flavoured sauces that livened up dull Flemish winter fare by giving more flavour to meat or fish, and the pungent oily peel was just as important as the juice. The high cost of oranges and lemons meant that they were a preserve of the elite. At a dinner for clerics in Paris in 1412, for dessert the guests were each served one apple but only half an orange, for oranges cost six times as much as apples. The price was not such a concern for rulers. The King of France was served with fried oranges as garnish for a hare pie in 1457, and the Duke of Burgundy had lemons squeezed over his roast fowl. Citrus fruits were also appreciated for their medicinal properties: doctors recommended carrying and smelling them in order to stave off the plague.
Van Eyck probably saw them actually growing during his travels in the Iberian peninsula, for he included orange trees among the exotic vegetation he painted in The Ghent Altarpiece of cypresses, palms and olives. In the portrait, however, he was not only implying that the Arnolfinis’ cook could afford to make bitter orange sauce, but employing an artistic device that connected his innovative domestic setting with the established context of religious painting, and again referred specifically to the Virgin. Images of Eve giving in to the serpent’s temptation and seizing the forbidden fruit were frequent in manuscript, sculpture and stained glass, and often occurred in direct association with the scene of Mary with the Annunciation angel, contrasting one woman’s disregard of God’s word with the submission of the other. But the exact identity of Eve’s fruit was unclear, both theologically and artistically, and this was further confused by misleading terminology which described oranges as ‘apples’ or sometimes ‘golden apples’. When van Eyck painted his naked Eve for The Ghent Altarpiece, he placed in her hand not an apple or an orange, but a citron, knobbly-skinned cousin of the lemon, a fruit so pithy that it was consumed for medicinal rather than gastronomic qualities. Confusingly, the citron was known as ‘Adam’s apple’, in Latin poma citrina.
Another association with the Virgin was the legend that she picked oranges on the Flight into Egypt in order to quench her Son’s thirst. van Eyck referred to this incident by including the fruit in two of his Madonna paintings. In the Lucca Madonna, he placed two oranges on the windowsill of her chamber, a motif he (or his workshop) repeated in the Ince Hall Madonna. However, the purely religious connotations were subverted by the single orange on the sill in the undeniably secular context of his naked Woman at her Toilette. The fruit and its blossom could also symbolise love and the marriage ceremony, so the Arnolfinis’ oranges might have been a subtle reference to their relationship as well, perhaps even specified by the client as a distinctively Eyckian motif.
fn1 This has never been published but the original manuscript survives in the British Library. It was not until 1994 that Spanish art historian Fernando Checa, who consulted this document when preparing an exhibition on the history of the Alcazar, realised that Quelviz had described the Arnolfini portrait.