What Is the Meaning of the Arnolfini Portrait? The Mirror, the Dog and the Mystery Couple

Van Eyck's 1434 Arnolfini Portrait is famous for its mirror and riddles: who the couple were, whether she is pregnant, and what it may mean.

There is no single agreed meaning of the Arnolfini Portrait. Jan van Eyck's 1434 oil painting shows a richly dressed Italian merchant and his wife in a room in Bruges, and for decades the leading theory, put forward by the art historian Erwin Panofsky, was that it records their marriage like a painted certificate, complete with witnesses. Today that idea is not accepted by everyone. Some scholars see a betrothal, others a portrait of a married couple, and one recent theory even suggests the wife had already died when it was painted. What everyone agrees on is that it is one of the most original and complex paintings in Western art.

The basic facts

The painting is an oil on oak panel by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck, dated 1434, and it hangs in the National Gallery in London, which bought it in 1842. It is a full-length double portrait, believed to show the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife, probably in their home in the Flemish city of Bruges.

Together with the Ghent Altarpiece, which van Eyck painted with his brother Hubert, it is the oldest very famous panel painting made in oils rather than tempera. The art historian Ernst Gombrich wrote that it was as new and revolutionary in its way as the work of Donatello or Masaccio in Italy, and that for the first time the artist became "the perfect eye-witness".

Why it looks so real

Van Eyck built up the picture with many thin, translucent layers of glaze, which give the colours their glow. Because oil paint dries more slowly than tempera, he could blend colours wet-in-wet to create soft shifts of light and shadow and make the forms look three-dimensional. He shows the light from the window on the left reflecting off different surfaces, and it has been suggested that he used a magnifying glass to paint tiny details such as the highlight on each bead hanging beside the mirror.

The art historian Craig Harbison noted that it is the only surviving fifteenth-century Northern panel in which the artist's contemporaries are shown doing something in a contemporary room, and that it is tempting to call it the first genre painting, a painting of everyday life, of modern times.

A room full of wealth

Almost everything in the room says "money". The couple are dressed in fur-lined clothes even though the cherries on the tree outside show it is early summer. The brass chandelier is large and elaborate, the oranges by the window were very expensive in Burgundy, and there is a small Oriental carpet on the floor. The room is probably not a bedroom but a reception room; in France and Burgundy at the time, beds in such rooms were mainly used for sitting.

The small dog in the foreground is an early form of the breed now known as the Affenpinscher. For Panofsky, details like the dog and the single candle carried hidden religious or moral meanings. His idea that ordinary objects in Netherlandish paintings carry "disguised symbolism" is broadly accepted, even by scholars who reject his marriage-certificate theory.

The mirror and the signature

The most famous detail is the convex mirror on the back wall. Its frame contains small scenes of the Passion of Christ, and the mirror itself is shown larger than such mirrors could actually be made at the time, a quiet departure from realism. In the reflection you can see two figures standing in the doorway, facing the couple. The one in red is presumably the artist himself.

Above the mirror, van Eyck painted his signature as if it were written on the wall: "Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434", meaning "Jan van Eyck was here 1434". Panofsky argued that this unusual signature, together with the figures in the mirror, showed the painter acting as a witness to a legal event.

Who are the couple?

For about a century, most art historians believed the painting showed Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini and his wife Jeanne (Giovanna) Cenami. Then a document published in 1997 showed that they married in 1447, thirteen years after the date on the painting and six years after van Eyck's death.

Scholars now think the man is either Giovanni di Arrigo or his cousin Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, both merchants from Lucca who had lived in Bruges since at least 1419. One recent proposal is that the woman is Giovanni di Nicolao's first wife, Costanza Trenta, who had died by February 1433, perhaps in childbirth. If so, the painting is partly a memorial, showing one living and one dead person. The snuffed-out candle above the woman and the scenes after Christ's death on her side of the mirror frame fit this reading.

Is she pregnant?

Many viewers assume so, but art historians generally think not. Many paintings of virgin saints show women dressed the same way, and the look seems to have been the fashion for women's dresses at the time. Both women proposed as the wife, Giovanna Cenami and Costanza Trenta, died without children, though if the sitter is Costanza and she died in childbirth, a hint at pregnancy would make more sense.

How it reached London

The painting had a long journey. By 1599 a German visitor saw it in the Alcázar palace in Madrid, and it survived the fire that destroyed part of the Spanish royal collection. It later appeared in Britain, probably after the Battle of Vitoria in 1813, when British troops partly plundered a coach full of portable artworks loaded on the orders of Joseph Bonaparte. The National Gallery bought it in 1842.

So what does the Arnolfini Portrait mean? It may be a wedding, an engagement, a statement of a merchant's status, or a memorial to a lost wife. Its real power may be exactly that uncertainty: van Eyck painted a room so convincingly that, almost six hundred years later, we still feel we could walk in and ask the couple ourselves.

Learn with the Arnolfini Portrait: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to read between the lines	to find a hidden meaning	Read between the lines and you'll see the joke.
the devil is in the details	small details matter a lot	Check the contract; the devil is in the details.
to bear witness	to see something and confirm it happened	The mirror seems to bear witness to the scene.
a status symbol	something that shows wealth or rank	Oranges were a status symbol in Bruges.
open to interpretation	able to be understood in different ways	The ending is open to interpretation.

Try this: Describe a photo or painting you like in three English sentences, using "the devil is in the details" and "open to interpretation".