The Arnolfini Portrait may show a husband standing beside his dead wife.
Jan van Eyck's 1434 double portrait is famous for its tiny convex mirror and the graffiti-like signature 'Jan van Eyck was here'. For decades scholars read it as a wedding certificate in paint. A newer theory suggests the wife had already died, and that the painting is a memorial.
The Arnolfini Portrait, in the National Gallery in London, shows an Italian merchant and his wife in a room in Bruges. It is signed and dated on the back wall, not on the frame as usual, in large decorative letters: 'Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434', 'Jan van Eyck was here'. Along with the Ghent Altarpiece, it is among the oldest very famous panel paintings made in oils rather than tempera, built up in thin glowing glazes.
In 1934 the art historian Erwin Panofsky argued it was a kind of legal record of a marriage, with the signature acting as a witness's, and that ordinary objects in the room carried hidden religious symbols. The convex mirror at the back reflects two figures in the doorway, one probably the painter himself; Panofsky's reading made them witnesses. Later scholars disputed almost every part of this. Some see a betrothal, some a statement of the husband's authority, and the National Gallery's catalogue sees no need for a special narrative at all.
Recent archival work suggests the man is Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, and the woman may be his first wife, Costanza Trenta, who had died, perhaps in childbirth, by February 1433, before the painting's date. On that reading, it partly memorialises one living and one dead person. Supporting details include a snuffed-out candle on her side of the chandelier, a lit one on his, and scenes of Christ's death and resurrection on her side of the mirror's frame. It remains a proposal, not a consensus.
One popular assumption can be set aside: most art historians do not think the woman is pregnant. Her full, gathered dress was the fashion of the day, echoed in images of virgin saints. The painting later belonged to the Habsburgs in Spain, survived a palace fire, was bought after Waterloo by a wounded Scottish officer, and was acquired by the National Gallery in 1842 for 600 pounds.
Source: Wikipedia — Arnolfini Portrait · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
