SCHOLARS HAVE MADE many conflicting claims about the meaning of the picture and the names of its subjects. Yet the features which puzzle modern viewers posed no problems for the painting’s spectators in fifteenth-century Bruges. These days, we expect da Vinci code enigmas, a trail of deliberate clues planted by the artist in a cultural treasure hunt: spot the symbol, join up the dots and the secrets will emerge. But there are no conspiracies: if we cannot understand the picture, it is because we live in the wrong period and can no longer read the information it presents.
It is proof of the work’s eternal appeal that it still stands on its own and speaks to modern viewers, just as it attracted earlier owners. But do the various interpretations enhance our appreciation? Or do they detract from the pleasure of the work’s poise and restraint, its colours and shapes? Being aware of the speculations about this couple and what they are doing there adds layers of complexity which can distract rather than enlighten. The label in the National Gallery in 2011 calls it simply The Arnolfini Portrait. Confusion over the identity of the man and the woman has increased as more documents have emerged. The first association with the name Arnolfini, made in the 1516 inventory, was revived by Crowe and Cavalcaselle in their 1857 claim that the painting was linked with the Italian merchant of Bruges, and that the couple were Giovanni Arnolfini and his bride Giovanna Cenami. This identification was not seriously challenged until the late twentieth century. But new archival research has suggested that Giovanni did not marry Giovanna until 1447, six years after van Eyck’s death.
So the next likely candidate became a cousin, Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, who married Costanza Trenta in 1426. The Trentas were another Bruges-based family, and Costanza’s aunt was married to Lorenzo de Medici. But Costanza had died by 1433, the year before the date on the painting.
Did the portrait show Nicolao Arnolfini with his second wife, or was it a memorial to the late Costanza, who might have died in childbirth? This memorial reading gives new meaning to the various objects in the room: in the chandelier, one candle is lit and one has guttered out, the rich carpet was the correct accessory for the birth chamber, as of course was the bed – which was also an accessory of death. The little figure carved on the chair, which can be seen over the woman’s left shoulder, is St Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth. So perhaps the portrait was a statement of enduring love, and the wife should be seen as an apparition, or a vision. The presence of the mirror may add weight to this theory. Through their very rarity, mirrors were also more sinister objects of awe for their capacity to reveal the hidden, and even bring the dead to life. The thirteenth-century French allegorical poem The Romance of the Rose stated that mirrors ‘make phantoms1 appear to those who look within. They even make them quite alive, outside the mirror …’, a thesis which originated in classical learning: the Roman encyclopedist Pliny claimed that mirrors reflected the shadows of the dead.
Others have continued to argue that it is a betrothal scene, at a ceremony which was just as significant legally as was the rite of marriage: betrothal was a civil ritual involving a ring and the presence of witnesses. Although marriage was solemnised and depicted in art by the joining of the couple’s right hands, here the woman’s right hand rests in the man’s left hand. Nor could it be a proper marriage without the presence of a priest.
But before assuming the work does record a betrothal or a marriage, it is necessary to appreciate the customs that would be followed by Italian families living in Flanders. Would they retain their own national practices, or would they follow the rites of their host country? Are the closest artistic and literary parallels Italian or Flemish?
The marriage theory had been powerfully argued by Panofsky in 1934, who saw the painting not only as a representation but almost a visual contract in itself, bearing witness to marriage, but recent scholars have challenged the concept of disguised symbols and thus undermined Panofsky’s entire argument. In his reviews and lectures, the distinguished art historian Otto Pächt pointed to the naturalism as opposed to elaborate ‘symbolism’ of Netherlandish art. Disagreeing with Panofsky’s theory that the scene commemorated the contracting of a private, non-church wedding, Pächt argued that the full-length pose was entirely appropriate for a traditional bethrothal or marriage portrait and this was made more specific by being located in a nuptial chamber, a specific place at a specific time. Pächt noted that the subjects are not getting on with their lives but are forced to pose, ‘lost in an inner world of their own’. He found in the painting a sense of dualism, the medieval apprehension of the split between mind and body, and a suggestion of the creation of human inner life through contemplation – casting further doubt on Panofsky’s ingenious interpretation that the portrait was a pictorial marriage certificate.
Alternatively, some commentators have argued that the painting was not meant to show any sort of ceremony but was simply the portrait of a married couple. Only then might the woman be pregnant, which of course she could not honourably have been at the time of betrothal or marriage. Thus in 1902 an article in the Fortnightly Review declared:
The Arnolfini and his wife2 realises in the presentment, hand in hand, of the quaintly costumed Italian merchant and his not specially well-favoured young wife, a moment of unusual solemnity, or mystic union between the couple. Can it be doubted, by those who have carefully and sympathetically considered the picture, that it is intended to commemorate the condition of the wife, so clearly indicated not less by her form and attitude than by the expression of the husband, in whom a moment of the holiest emotion, though it is made manifest neither by word nor gesture, transfigures to a solemn beauty a countenance of almost grotesque ugliness.
Wider artistic comparisons, however, suggest that the gown billowing over her stomach was a fashion statement matched in contemporary works; it was also a particular mannerism of van Eyck, who gave a similar posture to his virginal St Catherine. But the theory still has its adherents, the most recent being Pierre-Michel Bertrand. He argues strongly that not only is the woman heavily pregnant, but also that she is actually the painter’s wife Margaret van Eyck: the real subject of the picture is the painter’s son who is about to be born. He points out that the dismissal of the pregnancy interpretation on the grounds that the Arnolfinis had no recorded children becomes invalid if the woman is Margaret. And, in a detailed analysis of the portrait in support of his argument, he finds symbols of procreation everywhere: beds are shown in all birth scenes, pregnant women offer candles to the Virgin Mary, they eat oranges and cherries to prevent sickness, and a dog often appears in Nativity scenes signifying an unborn child.
A recent, feminist-influenced interpretation made by Linda Seidel is that the painting does demonstrate a legal moment – not however the betrothal or marriage ceremony, but the moment when the husband is officially giving his wife the right to act for him and run his business in his absence, as was the case for some powerful fifteenth-century women in a French–Burgundian context.
A host of other theories have been put forward: the portrait is a charm against infertility, an alchemical symbol of the elemental union of fire and water, a morality tale on the theme of chastity, a pictorial prayer for a child; the woman is really a ghost, van Eyck’s muse, a mother consulting her doctor, a woman having her palm read; it is all an elaborate joke on the part of the artist to show off his skills. Like the soothsayer’s crystal ball, people see in it what they want to see.
The portrait continues to intrigue modern artists and designers, serving as a source of inspiration for new media as well as old. The briefest search of Google images reveals cartoons, posters, T-shirts, fridge magnets, cufflinks shaped like the convex mirror, mugs, copies, reproduction on everything from calendars to wedding announcements, weird adaptations on YouTube and some startling new versions. Pop artist Richard Hamilton turned it into a screen-print poster in the 1970s. Others have realised that its luminous clarity is particularly suitable for creating staged photographic works; the Australian art photographer Anne Zahalka’s version Marriage of Convenience (1987) adds modern items like a radio but retains the haunting quality of the original. Epiphany (1992), one of the early works of the sculptor Gavin Turk, in homage to van Eyck, features his name scrawled in permanent marker on a convex mirror. More recently, the Irish portrait painter Oisin Roche, who like van Eyck uses subtle devices, included himself in the background of his pastel portrait of a young woman called Fatou, by being reflected in the fisheye mirror. This has echoes of William Orpen’s The Mirror (1900, Tate Gallery) where he shows himself in a mirror with easel and modern candelabra above the head of a young woman sitting in a room. In 2006, New York artist Alyson Shotz made a work featuring a group of twelve fisheye mirrors, which reflect each other into infinity, and called it Arnolfini 360 Degrees x 12.
Chinese, South Korean and Latin American artists have reinvented it in their own distinctive styles, including the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo who commemorated her marriage to fellow artist Diego Rivera by reworking the Arnolfini into a double portrait of them both. David Hockney drew inspiration from the Arnolfini for his Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy in the Tate Gallery. Painted between 1970 and 1971 as one of a series of large double portraits, it depicts the fashion designer Ossie Clark and the fabric designer Celia Birtwell in their Notting Hill bedroom shortly after their wedding. The positions of the two figures are reversed, making the standing Celia dominant while Ossie is seated with Percy, one of their cats, on his knee. Another beguiling modern take is Benjamin Sullivan’s portrait of his partner, Virginia, in their shared home, which was shown at the 2009 BP Portrait Award in the National Portrait Gallery. In the same year, the Hungarian ceramic artist Sandor Dobany created a contemporary reinterpretation in a porcelain piece called The Visitors which put himself in the painting as a fifteenth-century ceramic artist whom the Arnolfinis are visiting in his studio. So iconic has the work become that no written explanations are ever required.
Habitat advertisement,3 2006
For advertising, it is a useful tool, although it has not been used as much as one might have expected. In 2006, the home furnishings store Habitat launched its autumn range with a campaign that featured three jokey executions updating a piece of classic portraiture; Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus was changed into a contemporary mother-and-daughter scene, Holbein’s The Ambassadors became a gay biker couple and the Arnolfini duo became a young modern couple wearing dressing gowns (purple for him, green for her) eating their morning toast surrounded by Habitat furniture. The images were used for print ads that brightened the pages of fashion magazines and newspapers. They also appeared on sales postcards which showed the original on one side, and the new version on the other, a clever device that prompted potential purchasers to flip over to compare, viewing product details as they did so. The portrait’s luminosity and photographic clarity makes it ideal for digital billboards which use computer-painted vinyl bulletins, the first big change in printed technology since the advent of colour lithography in the nineteenth century. Such billboards can be changed rapidly, allowing precise targeting of audiences, and also draw in the eye in a way that static outdoor formats cannot; apparently twice as many people look at these out-of-home televisions than at traditional posters. The National Gallery, eager as always to embrace the latest technology, has used the rows of digital billboards along the sides of escalators in the London Underground to promote itself by alternatively flashing up the Arnolfini portrait with details of its opening times and location.
It is a gift for cartoonists. Dave Brown’s4 The Arnolfini Divorce put George W. Bush and a skeleton in a bombed room, with Tony Blair as the dog. Bush is saying, ‘OK … you get to keep the house … I keep the alimony … and the dog can go take himself walkies!’ Martin Rowson5 has also used it for political satire: a 1996 drawing showed Bill Clinton and Blair, then opposition leader, with a dollar-decorated pig as the dog and a bank of mikes instead of the chandelier. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are shown reflected in the mirror. The caption reads, ‘After Jan van Eyck.’ Next to the cartoon is an account of Blair’s highly successful visit to Washington; it is headlined, ‘Blair is the bride of Bill.’ Peter Brookes,6 poking fun at the delicate manoeuvres in 1983 to ally the Social Democratic and Liberal parties, has David Owen saying to a heavily pregnant David Steel, ‘Frankly, I think we should wait awhile.’ A Times cartoon on the BBC7 Today programme competition to find the greatest painting in Britain featured John Humphrys and James Naughtie as the figures, with an old-fashioned radio replacing the mirror. The newspaper caustically commented that the competition ‘is ripe for mockery, and so we have obliged. Which of John Humphrys and James Naughtie was responsible for agreeing to the idea that paintings would make good radio?’
Newspapers have also cannibalised it. When Neil and Christine Hamilton, in yet another publicity stunt, posed nude for GQ magazine to mimic Lucas Cranach the Elder’s classic picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Mirror was inspired to give similar treatment to other celebrities. The Arnolfini portrait duly featured in this photomontage series of famous faces on famous paintings, displaying Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant under the headline ‘WILL HUGH BE MINE’.8 Another photomontage, by the Mail on Sunday, headlined ‘A Brush with Fame’,9 used the same idea to turn soap stars into old masters; this time Coronation Street’s Claire and Ashley Peacock (Julia Haworth and Steven Arnold) were in the frame. The familiar image is always appearing in spoofs elsewhere. Typical is the item ‘Art, Sacred and Profane’ in Reading University’s 1964 rag magazine Rattler which has a bubble caption from the man’s mouth saying, ‘You can tell the Press that we’re just good friends’, a gag that has been used many times before and since. Another spoof featured Kermit the Frog, host of The Muppet Show, the 1970s television variety show of deranged puppets, and his diva superstar Miss Piggy, as ‘The Marriage of Froggo Amphibini and Giopiggi Porculini’ in Miss Piggy’s Art Masterpiece Calendar.
United Nations stamps, 1991
Despite the critics’ doubts, the portrait has become a symbol of marriage. When the United Nations printed a series of stamps on the theme of human rights, it was chosen as the image to illustrate matrimony. The citation accompanying the commemorative set issued on 20 November 1991 read in part, ‘Men and women of full age, without any limitations due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage, and at its dissolution.’ It has also come to symbolise bethrothal, as in the exhibition Ron and Roger by the photographer Richard Ansett which was shown in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in 2002. This was a study of the first gay couples to join the Greater London Authority’s London Partnership Register, which recognised relationships of same-sex couples, and was intended to celebrate the progress made by this new scheme. It featured the home lives of couples who had signed the register, in poses that were inspired by the Arnolfini.
Illustrators love it. Susan Herbert turned the couple into cats for the cover of her witty feline versions of famous masterpieces, The Cats Gallery of Western Art (2002). Children’s Laureate Anthony Browne has a similarly surreal adaptation in his book for young children, Willy’s Pictures (2000), which shows the couple reflected in a small television that has replaced the mirror. The portrait was the subject of one of the imaginative ‘meet the artist’ performances conceived and performed by artist James Heard for nine- to eleven-year-old schoolchildren in their Easter holidays. Van Eyck breaks off from painting the Arnolfini portrait to discuss his methods and the unfinished work with his young audience.
On television, it featured among the range of striking images in the credit titles of Desperate Housewives, and appeared as an example of censored art in the film V for Vendetta (2005), a thriller set in London in the near future. A South Korean horror film, Into the Mirror (2004), offered the National Gallery’s postcard of the portrait as a clue in a mystery over strange murders possibly done by a vengeful ghost operating through the endless mirrors of a Seoul department store. It was the subject of an engaging 1980 BBC television play by satirist John Wells, starring himself and Alison Steadman as Mr and Mrs Arnolfini, which showed the portrait coming to life in a picture restorer’s basement. The daft but charming conceit, in an experiment that gets out of hand, was that the painting wanted to prove that the couple were not posing for a painted portrait but for the world’s finest example of coloured photography. Every few years the portrait pops up in a television documentary, for example in 1966, 1982 and 2002, under such titles as Renaissance Secrets, usually trailed as promising ‘new historical and scientific evidence’. Radio documentaries include the BBC World Service series Artists in a Nutshell in 1993 and, four years later, Piers Plowright’s thoughtful feature for BBC Radio 3, What Are They Looking At? In 2010, BBC radio broadcast Jonathan Pinnock’s prize-winning short story about a husband and wife tightrope-walking team touring America. It was entitled, presumably in homage, The Amazing Arnolfini and His Wife.
The Arnolfini portrait is discussed on blogs worldwide, by undergraduates, art enthusiasts and amateur experts in chandeliers, perspective and fashion. Typical of the many references is a blog that described a particular look as ‘Persian Rug + Arnolfini Wedding Portrait’. Yves Saint Laurent once designed a rather strange ‘Marriage of Arnolfini’ long, babydoll dress for American actress Kirsten Dunst, star of the Spider-Man films, to wear at a New York fashion gala. In 1998, students from a Wimbledon art school brought the couple to life when they recreated the costumes from masterpieces at the National Gallery in an exacting exercise involving precise sewing and dyeing of fabrics to get the exact look. Models then paraded the costumes (each student had to do a male and female costume) past their muses, allowing the famous paintings to be seen in the third dimension.
There have been several computer reconstructions of the room. A 2001 video installation by Norah Ligorano and Marshall Reese, called van Eyck’s Mirror, features a man wearing the red ‘turban’ in what may be van Eyck’s 1433 self-portrait looking at himself in the Arnolfini mirror. British artist Mark Leckey won the 2008 Turner Prize with a witty body of work that included a film in which Jeff Koons’s Bunny, a polished steel sculpture of a rabbit, appears to reflect Leckey’s studio in its convex surface. For their 2005 piece, The Peach and the Pair, the Stepback dance company projected the work onto a video screen for some amusing sequences whereby the dancers’ faces were superimposed on the portrait, one as a swaggering bridegroom, the other as a naive bride.
The portrait has also been the theme of several recent novels. The poet Ciaran Carson’s hallucinatory Shamrock Tea (2001) takes the painting as the focal point for a dazzlingly complex set of stories within stories involving Wittgenstein, Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde and medieval Flanders: the intense scrutiny of colours and the questioning of reality are common to the book and to the painting. Jack Thomas’s Arnolfini: Reflections in a Mirror (2004) describes the experiences of an amateur art historian who, in the middle of giving a lecture about the portrait, finds himself transported to van Eyck’s studio in Bruges to become a witness at the wedding. Pauline McLynn’s novel The Time is Now (2010) consists of interlinking stories over a century about the inhabitants of a Soho townhouse; one, set in the 1940s, features David, a former security guard at the National Gallery who seeks relief from the war in the Arnolfini portrait which he stole before it could be removed to Manod. Some minor characters in Dorothy Dunnett’s complex series of historical novels of the early renaissance are also based on the couple; Niccolo Rising (1987), first of the ‘House of Niccolo’ series, begins in 1460 in Bruges and features a silk merchant called Giovanni Arnolfini. The masterpiece has even given the Arnolfini gallery on Bristol’s harbourside its title. Since its foundation in 1961 this internationally renowned contemporary arts centre has consistently presented work in the visual and other arts which is genuinely innovative, and has thus lived up to its illustrious name – a name that has achieved, and deserved, truly global fame.
Perhaps the last word should go to the Arnolfinis. In 1994, the portrait inspired the poet Paul Durcan to write a quirky dramatic monologue called ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’. It starts with the enigmatic couple telling us:
We are the Arnolfinis.10
Do not think you can invade
Our privacy because you may not.
We are standing to our portrait,
The most erotic portrait ever made
Because we have faith in the artist
To do justice to the plurality
Fertility, domesticity, barefootedness
Of a man and a woman saying ‘we’:
To do justice to our bed
As being our most necessary furniture;
To do justice to our life as a reflection.