Arnolfini Portrait facts for kids
Quick facts for kids The Arnolfini Portrait |
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| Artist | Jan van Eyck |
| Year | 1434 |
| Type | Oil on oak panel of 3 vertical boards |
| Dimensions | 82.2 cm × 60 cm (32.4 in × 23.6 in); panel 84.5 cm × 62.5 cm (33.3 in × 24.6 in) |
| Location | National Gallery, London |
The Arnolfini Portrait (or The Arnolfini Wedding, The Arnolfini Marriage, the Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife, or other titles) is a 1434 oil painting on oak panel by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck. It forms a full-length double portrait, believed to depict the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife, presumably in their residence at the Flemish city of Bruges.
It is considered one of the most original and complex paintings in Western art, because of its beauty, complex iconography, geometric orthogonal perspective, and expansion of the picture space with the use of a mirror. According to Ernst Gombrich "in its own way it was as new and revolutionary as Donatello's or Masaccio's work in Italy. A simple corner of the real world had suddenly been fixed on to a panel as if by magic... For the first time in history the artist became the perfect eye-witness in the truest sense of the term". The portrait has been considered by Erwin Panofsky and some other art historians as a unique form of marriage contract, recorded as a painting. Signed and dated by van Eyck in 1434, it is, with the Ghent Altarpiece by the same artist and his brother Hubert, the oldest very famous panel painting to have been executed in oils rather than in tempera. The painting was bought by the National Gallery in London in 1842.
Van Eyck used the technique of applying several layers of thin translucent glazes to create a painting with an intensity of both tone and colour. The glowing colours also help to highlight the realism, and to show the material wealth and opulence of Arnolfini's world. Van Eyck took advantage of the longer drying time of oil paint, compared to tempera, to blend colours by painting wet-in-wet to achieve subtle variations in light and shade to heighten the illusion of three-dimensional forms. The wet-in-wet (wet-on-wet), technique, also known as alla prima, was highly utilized by Renaissance painters including Jan van Eyck. The medium of oil paint also permitted van Eyck to capture surface appearance and distinguish textures precisely. He also rendered the effects of both direct and diffuse light by showing the light from the window on the left reflected by various surfaces. It has been suggested that he used a magnifying glass in order to paint the minute details such as the individual highlights on each of the amber beads hanging beside the mirror.
The illusionism of the painting was remarkable for its time, in part for the rendering of detail, but particularly for the use of light to evoke space in an interior, for "its utterly convincing depiction of a room, as well of the people who inhabit it". Whatever meaning is given to the scene and its details, and there has been much debate on this, according to Craig Harbison the painting "is the only fifteenth-century Northern panel to survive in which the artist's contemporaries are shown engaged in some sort of action in a contemporary interior. It is indeed tempting to call this the first genre painting – a painting of everyday life – of modern times".
Description
In the typical Dutch style, this painting contains an incredible mastery of form, brushwork and colour to create intense details.
The painting is generally in very good condition, though with small losses of original paint and damages, which have mostly been retouched. Infrared reflectograms of the painting show many small alterations, or pentimenti, in the underdrawing: to both faces, to the mirror, and to other elements. The couple is shown in an upstairs room with a chest and a bed in it during early summer as indicated by the fruits on the cherry tree outside the window. The room probably functioned as a reception room, as it was the fashion in France and Burgundy where beds in reception rooms were used for seating, except, for example, when a mother with a new baby received visitors. The window has six interior wooden shutters, but only the top opening has glass, with clear bulls-eye pieces set in blue, red and green stained glass.
The two figures are very richly dressed; despite the season both their outer garments, his tabard and her dress, are trimmed and fully lined with fur. The furs may be the especially expensive sable for him and ermine or miniver for her. He wears a hat of plaited straw dyed black, as often worn in the summer at the time. His tabard was more purple than it appears now (as the pigments have faded over time) and may be intended to be silk velvet (another very expensive item). Underneath he wears a doublet of patterned material, probably silk damask. Her dress has elaborate dagging (cloth folded and sewn together, then cut and frayed decoratively) on the sleeves, and a long train. Her blue underdress is also trimmed with white fur.
Although the woman's plain gold necklace and the rings that both wear are the only jewellery visible, both outfits would have been enormously expensive, and appreciated as such by a contemporary viewer. There may be an element of restraint in their clothes (especially the man) befitting their merchant status – portraits of aristocrats tend to show gold chains and more decorated cloth, although "the restrained colours of the man's clothing correspond to those favoured by Duke Phillip of Burgundy".
The interior of the room has other signs of wealth; the brass chandelier is large and elaborate by contemporary standards, and would have been very expensive. It would probably have had a mechanism with pulley and chains above, to lower it for managing the candles (possibly omitted from the painting for lack of room). The convex mirror at the back, in a wooden frame with scenes of The Passion painted behind glass, is shown larger than such mirrors could actually be made at this date – another discreet departure from realism by van Eyck. There is also no sign of a fireplace (including in the mirror), nor anywhere obvious to put one. Even the oranges casually placed to the left are a sign of wealth; they were very expensive in Burgundy and may have been one of the items dealt in by Arnolfini. Further signs of luxury are the elaborate bed-hangings and the carvings on the chair and bench against the back wall (to the right, partly hidden by the bed), also the small Oriental carpet on the floor by the bed; many owners of such expensive objects placed them on tables, as they still do in the Netherlands. There existed a friendship between Giovanni Arnolfini and Philip the Good who sent his court painter Jan van Eyck to portray Arnolfini Double. The relation possibly began with a tapestry order including the images of Notre Dame Cathedral in return of a good payment.
The view in the mirror shows two figures just inside the door that the couple are facing. The second figure, wearing red, is presumably the artist although, unlike Velázquez in Las Meninas, he does not seem to be painting. Scholars have made this assumption based on the appearance of figures wearing red head-dresses in some other van Eyck works (e.g., the Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) and the figure in the background of the Madonna with Chancellor Rolin). A dog is an early form of the breed now known as the Brussels griffon.
The painting is signed, inscribed and dated on the wall above the mirror: "Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434" ("Jan van Eyck was here 1434"). The inscription looks as if it were painted in large letters on the wall, as was done with proverbs and other phrases at this period. Other surviving van Eyck signatures are painted in trompe-l'œil on the wooden frame of his paintings, so that they appear to have been carved in the wood.
Identity of subjects
In their book published in 1857, Crowe and Cavalcaselle were the first to link the double portrait with the early 16th century inventories of Margaret of Austria. They suggested that the painting showed portraits of Giovanni [di Arrigo] Arnolfini and his wife. Four years later James Weale published a book in which he agreed with this analysis and identified Giovanni's wife as Jeanne (or Giovanna) Cenami. For the next century most art historians accepted that the painting was a double portrait of Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini and his wife Jeanne Cenami, but a chance discovery published in 1997 established that they were married in 1447, thirteen years after the date on the painting and six years after van Eyck's death.
It is now believed that the subject is either Giovanni di Arrigo or his cousin, Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, and a wife of either one of them. This is either an undocumented first wife of Giovanni di Arrigo or a second wife of Giovanni di Nicolao, or, according to a recent proposal, Giovanni di Nicolao's first wife Costanza Trenta, who had died perhaps in childbirth by February 1433. In the latter case, this would make the painting partly an unusual memorial portrait, showing one living and one dead person. Details such as the snuffed candle above the woman, the scenes after Christ's death on her side of the background roundel, and the black garb of the man, support this view. Both Giovanni di Arrigo and Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini were Italian merchants, originally from Lucca, but resident in Bruges since at least 1419. The man in this painting is the subject of a further portrait by van Eyck in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, leading to speculation he was a friend of the artist.
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Provenance
The provenance of the painting begins in 1435 when it was dated by van Eyck and presumably owned by the sitter(s). At some point before 1516 it came into the possession of Don Diego de Guevara (d. Brussels 1520), a Spanish career courtier of the Habsburgs (himself the subject of a fine portrait by Michael Sittow in the National Gallery of Art). He lived most of his life in the Netherlands, and may have known the Arnolfinis in their later years.
By 1516 he had given the portrait to Margaret of Austria, Habsburg Regent of the Netherlands, when it shows up as the first item in an inventory of her paintings, made in her presence at Mechelen. The item says (in French): "a large picture which is called Hernoul le Fin with his wife in a chamber, which was given to Madame by Don Diego, whose arms are on the cover of the said picture; done by the painter Johannes." A note in the margin says "It is necessary to put on a lock to close it: which Madame has ordered to be done." In a 1523–4 Mechelen inventory, a similar description is given, although this time the name of the subject is given as "Arnoult Fin".
In 1530 the painting was inherited by Margaret's niece Mary of Hungary, who in 1556 went to live in Spain. It is clearly described in an inventory taken after her death in 1558, when it was inherited by Philip II of Spain. A painting of two of his young daughters, Infantas Isabella Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela of Spain (Prado), commissioned by Philip clearly copies the pose of the figures. In 1599 a German visitor saw it in the Alcazar Palace in Madrid. Now it had verses from Ovid painted on the frame: "See that you promise: what harm is there in promises? In promises anyone can be rich." It is very likely that Velázquez knew the painting, which may have influenced his Las Meninas, which shows a room in the same palace. In 1700 the painting appeared in an inventory after the death of Carlos II with shutters and the verses from Ovid.
The painting survived the fire in the Alcazar which destroyed some of the Spanish royal collection, and by 1794 had been moved to the "Palacio Nuevo", the present Royal Palace of Madrid. In 1816 the painting was in London, in the possession of Colonel James Hay, a Scottish soldier. He claimed that after he was seriously wounded at the Battle of Waterloo the previous year, the painting hung in the room where he convalesced in Brussels. He fell in love with it, and persuaded the owner to sell. More relevant to the real facts is no doubt Hay's presence at the Battle of Vitoria (1813) in Spain, where a large coach loaded by King Joseph Bonaparte with easily portable artworks from the royal collections was first plundered by British troops, before what was left was recovered by their commanders and returned to the Spanish.
Hay offered the painting to the Prince Regent, later George IV of the United Kingdom, via Sir Thomas Lawrence. The Prince had it on approval for two years at Carlton House before eventually returning it in 1818. Around 1828, Hay gave it to a friend to look after, not seeing it or the friend for the next thirteen years, until he arranged for it to be included in a public exhibition in 1841. It was bought the following year (1842) by the recently formed National Gallery, London for £600, as inventory number 186, where it remains. By then the shutters had gone, along with the original frame.
