Commonly known as the "Arnolfi Wedding" or "Giovanni Arnolfi and His Bride", Jan van Eyck's double portrait in the National Gallery, London, painted in 1434, is probably the most widely recognized panel painting of the fifteenth century. One of the great masterpieces of early Flemish art, this enigmatic picture has also aroused intense speculation as to its precise meaning. Erwin Panofsky's view that the painting represents a clandestine marriage was almost universally accepted until recently, when scholars began to abandon his principle of "disguised symbolism" in favor of more theoretical approaches to the panel's interpretation. Edwin Hall's study - firmly grounded in Roman and canon law, theology, literature, and the social history of the period - reveals new meaning for this wonderful painting: instead of depicting the sacrament of marriage, Hall argues, Van Eyck's double portrait commemorates the alliance between two wealthy and important Italian mercantile families, a ceremonious betrothal that reflects the social conventions of the time. Hall's illuminating book not only unlocks the mystery surrounding the content of this work of art; it also makes a unique contribution to the fascinating history of betrothal and marriage custom, ritual, and ceremony, tracing their evolution from the late Roman Empire thorough the fifteenth century and providing persuasive visual evidence for their development. Since the fifteenth century, Jan van Eyck has been one of the most admired artists in the history of early northern painting. His pictures are jewels in themselves, crafted in luminous colors on wooden panels with a newly perfected oil technique, achieved by the application of transparentglazes over more opaque underlayers of pigment, permitting each detail to be rendered with astonishing verisimilitude. The Arnolfini double portrait is Van Eyck's quintessential work and a striking example of how art and its meaning endure and engage us for centuries.

The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck's Double Portrait

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By Edwin Hall

University of California Press

Copyright © 1997 Edwin Hall
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520082516

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One—
From Inventory Description to Symbolic Reading

Commonly called the "Arnolfini Wedding," in part because of Panofsky's well-known view that the couple are engaged in contracting a clandestine marriage, Jan van Eyck's double portrait in the National Gallery in London depicting a man and a woman in a bourgeois interior (Plate I) is probably the most widely recognized northern panel painting of the fifteenth century.1

The reasons for this celebrity are not difficult to discern. The domestic subject matter doubtless makes the painting psychologically more accessible in a secular age, and the inherent interest this creates for the modern viewer is reinforced by the uniqueness of the picture as the earliest extant representation of two living individuals in a realistically defined interior space. In other respects the "Arnolfini Wedding" is simply a quintessential example of Van Eyck's art. By his consummate mastery of the then recently perfected technique of painting with colors and transparent glazes worked up in an oil medium, Van Eyck transformed the wooden panel into a tour de force of the painter's craft, seldom if ever equaled and certainly never surpassed. Standing before the picture is a riveting experience for any but the most insensitive viewer, and something at least of the spellbinding effect the painting can have on the beholder survives even in photographs and reproductions. Further arousing our fascination and curiosity, the picture is pervaded by a mysterious solemnity that seems accentuated by the extreme realism with which each detail has been rendered. We wonder, for example, what this couple, so rigidly and hieratically posed, is actually

doing; or why the painter tells us so cryptically that "Jan van Eyck was here" by signing the panel with a calligraphic flourish on the rear wall of the chamber: "Johannes de Eyck fuit hic"; or what the single lighted candle in the chandelier can possibly signify in this room so flooded with daylight.

While the sense of enigma doubtless intensifies our interest in the picture, it needs to be emphasized at the outset that nothing in the work suggests that the painter consciously intended to puzzle us, although critics have commonly assumed the contrary. This air of mystery is really no more than an accidental consequence of the passage of time, which severely restricts what a modern viewer readily brings to an intellectual perception of the painting. Van Eyck's equally enigmatic "Timotheos" portrait (Fig. 1), also in London, provides a useful analogy. We will probably never know who this man was, why he was called Timotheos, what the inscription "Leal Souvenir" was intended to convey, or why the picture was signed in a quasi-legal way: "Transacted on the 10th day of October in the year of our Lord 1432 by Jan van Eyck."2 But we can be virtually certain that what is now so obscure for us was once perfectly clear to both the sitter and the painter.

From early in the sixteenth century until the eve of the French Revolution, the London double portrait is well documented in inventories of Hapsburg collections, giving the painting an unusually secure provenance prior to 1789. Besides preserving important historical information apparently transmitted earlier by an oral tradition, these sources illustrate a deteriorating understanding of what the picture represents.

For a time the panel remained in Flanders, belonging at first to Margaret of Austria and then passing at her death in 1530 into the collection of Mary of Hungary. Respectively a daughter and granddaughter of Mary of Burgundy (the last direct descendent of the Burgundian ducal line), these illustrious women were also the aunt and sister of Charles V, whom they served with considerable distinction, administering in succession the Netherlandish territories of the Hapsburg empire as regent-governor during the first half of the sixteenth century.

The earliest known references to the London panel are found in inventories of 1516 and 1523/24 drawn up while the picture was in Margaret's possession and kept in Malines, where the regent presided over a court whose patronage of the arts and letters extended to Erasmus, among others. The relevant entries establish that the panel was a gift to the regent from Don Diego de Guevara, a prominent figure at Hapsburg courts in both Spain and northern Europe. And because the donor's arms and device are mentioned as being painted on protective shutters then attached to the picture, it is probable that Don Diego owned

Figure 1.
Jan van Eyck, "Timotheos" Portrait, 1432. London, National Gallery.

the painting for more than a short time before presenting it to Margaret, which would establish the provenance back at least to the early years of the century. That Margaret herself was personally concerned for the safekeeping of the panel is apparent from a marginal notation in the 1516 inventory that a lock was to be placed on the shutters as "Madame had ordered." Besides naming the painter, both inventories describe the picture in terms that, though similar, differ enough to indicate that the two entries are textually independent: "a large painting that they call Hernoul le Sin with his wife within a chamber" (1516) and a "most exquisite picture . . . in which are painted a standing man and woman touching the hand of one another . . . the personage being named Arnoult Fin" (1523/24).3

The variant spellings of the surname strongly suggest that it was not inscribed on the frame, as has sometimes been argued, but rests instead on an oral transmission of "Arnoulphin" or "Ernoulphin," the common vernacular forms of the name in contemporary documents, thus strengthening the probability that an authentic tradition identifying the male figure was still current at the beginning of the sixteenth century.4 In 1857 J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle made the only lasting contribution of nineteenth-century scholarship to our knowledge of the picture by linking the painting described in the inventories of Margaret's collection to the double portrait that was by then in the National Gallery.5 The widely held modern view that the couple portrayed in the picture are Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini and his wife, who is known from other sources to have been named Giovanna Cenami, rests on Crowe and Cavalcaselle's discovery.

The choice of Giovanni di Arrigo rather than any of the other Arnolfini known to have been active in Bruges at the time is plausible simply because he was the most prominent member of the family in the fifteenth century and the one most likely to be called Arnoulphin without further qualification. A great merchant capitalist who enjoyed close commercial and financial ties with the Burgundian court for half a century, Giovanni Arnolfini was eventually also knighted and naturalized as a Frenchman by Louis XI, and he served this king of France as well as Philip the Good and Charles the Bold of Burgundy in various important positions. Along with more than a dozen other families from Lucca, the Arnolfini and the Cenami had been active in northern commerce and finance since the middle of the fourteenth century. Paris and Bruges were the centers of this activity, which consisted in purveying luxury goods—tapestries, textiles, gold plate, and jewels are mentioned in the sources—and lending money to the French and Burgundian courts as well as to Netherlandish communes such as Bruges. According to a tradition preserved by the Clarisses of Bruges, in whose church Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife were eventually buried, Giovanna

Cenami was born "ex corona Franciae" and could boast of royal blood, perhaps by descent through a bastard line. Although it would be easy to dismiss the tradition as a romantic invention of pious nuns, the pension Louis XI awarded Giovanna Arnolfini shortly after her husband's death, in the form of revenues derived from ships docking in the harbor at Richebourg, seems to confirm it. Since Giovanni di Arrigo and his wife were still well remembered in Bruges in the eighteenth century, it is unlikely that a man so famous could have been forgotten or confused with someone else in the short time that elapsed between his own death in 1472 or that of his widow in 1480 and the early sixteenth-century inventories, especially since during at least part of the interval between 1480 and 1516 the picture was in the hands of the important collector Don Diego de Guevara.6

In October 1555, as part of the arrangements made for the breakup of the Hapsburg empire following Charles V's decision to abdicate, the emperor transferred his sovereignty over the Netherlands to his son, Philip II, and Mary relinquished her regency. As a consequence of this development, an inventory was made of Mary of Hungary's movable property in the following year, as the Hapsburg princess prepared to depart for Spain. The principal interest of the 1556 inventory, which also provides the earliest reference to the mirror reflecting the man and woman seen from behind, is an annotation that Mary intended to take the picture with her. And this certainly did happen, for after her death in 1558 the Arnolfini double portrait entered the Spanish royal collection and remained there at least until 1789, when it is documented for the last time as being in the Royal Palace in Madrid.7

Some memory of the picture nonetheless lingered on in the Netherlands long after the physical transfer of the panel to Spain. In his book on Netherlandish antiquities first published in 1568, Marcus van Vaernewyck mentions the double portrait as a work by Van Eyck once possessed by Mary of Hungary. And he also describes its subject matter in a brief passage, whose ambiguity can be suggested at the outset by a closely literal translation: "a small panel . . . wherein was depicted an espousal of a man and a woman espoused by fides ." Karel van Mander, the earliest biographer of Netherlandish painters, not fully understanding what this meant but trying to make sense out of what he appropriated from Van Vaernewyck, ended up presenting his readers with a mistaken interpretation of a picture he had never seen. According to Van Mander's imaginary reconstruction, the man and woman take each other by the right hand "as in coming together in wedlock" (whereas it is rather the man's left hand that is associated with the woman's right). As for the puzzling reference to fides, this in Van Mander's mind became a personification of Fides, who offi-

ciated at the couple's wedding and "joined them together." Originally published in 1604, more than a century and a half after the date of the Arnolfini double portrait, Van Mander's interpretation of Van Vaernewyck's description was the first to clearly imply that the London panel was intended to represent a marriage.8

The most detailed entry for the double portrait in later inventories of the Spanish royal collection dates from 1700; it provides striking evidence of how completely the original meaning of the picture had been lost by the beginning of the eighteenth century. The female figure is now described as "a pregnant German lady . . . who is giving her hand to a man," in what the redactor of the inventory presumed to be a surreptitious nocturnal event, apparently because of the lighted candle. "They seem to be getting married at night," he says, adding that verses from Ovid on the frame (which unfortunately are not further specified) "declare how they are deceiving one another."9

How the panel was pilfered or otherwise alienated from the Spanish crown during the turbulent years of the Napoleonic Wars is obscure. But the Arnolfini double portrait had somehow made its way back to the Netherlands by 1815, when a British army officer, Colonel James Hay, discovered it in the lodgings in Brussels where he was convalescing after being wounded at the battle of Waterloo. Following his recovery, Hay purchased the picture and took it to England, where he apparently tried to arrange for its purchase by the prince regent, for the picture is documented in Carlton House records (part of the time in an attic) between 1816 and 1818. Failing to sell the panel, Hay left it with a friend, who hung it for some years in a bedroom while the colonel pursued his military career abroad. Eventually, in 1842, on the advice of a restorer named Seguier, the National Gallery bought Van Eyck's masterpiece from Hay, by now a major general, for the sum of £630.10

In cataloguing the new acquisition shortly thereafter, the National Gallery noted: "The subject of this Picture has not been clearly ascertained."11 The reserve of that description contrasts sharply with the tenor of interpretations advanced during the 1850s. Assuming that the woman was pregnant, one critic of repute, Louis Viardot, suggested that chiromancy was the theme of the painting: the man, he explained, was trying to read from the woman's hand the future of her unborn infant.12 With no less ingenuity, the noted historian Léon de Laborde, who discovered and first published some of the basic archival documentation on Van Eyck's life, entitled the picture "La Légitimation," theorizing that the man was swearing an oath acknowledging paternity of the child in the presence of his neighbors, who were shown crowding into the room through the open door.13 As amusing as these early iconographic interpretations may seem today, they are nonetheless fascinating as

manifestations of an intellectual need to come to terms with the picture's enigmatic quality in the years following the first public exhibition of the work; Laborde's explanation is of further interest as apparently the earliest attempt to interpret the gesture of the man's right hand.

Other nineteenth-century writers were usually more circumspect, contenting themselves with a descriptive analysis of the composition and displaying little concern, beyond recognizing that the artist had depicted a married couple, about the specific action portrayed. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, for instance, after identifying the couple as "Arnoult or Hernoult le Fin" and his wife on the basis of Margaret of Austria's inventories, continued by observing that the picture "represents the union of a man and woman dressed in state and holding each other's hand; the lady wearing a wedding ring halfway up her finger, and attended by a terrier of wondrous workmanship."14

Only a decade before Crowe and Cavalcaselle first linked the London panel to Giovanni Arnolfini, a different proposal for the identity of the sitters began a new misadventure in the history of the double portrait's interpretation that lasted for more than a century. The artist's signature precipitated this development, even though as a document within the picture itself the inscription "Johannes de Eyck fuit hic" provides the most authentic piece of information there is concerning the panel—namely that, for some reason, in 1434 "Jan van Eyck was here." The 1847 edition of the National Gallery's picture catalogue transcribed the Latin text correctly, but in explaining what it meant, Charles Eastlake, the museum's director, advanced the idea that if translated literally, the inscription signified "John Van Eyck was this (man)." Having construed "hic" as a demonstrative pronoun rather than an adverb, Eastlake was himself disturbed by the implications such a reading seemed to have. Nonetheless he went on to suggest that the picture "may be Van Eyck's own portrait with that of his wife," although if such were the case, he thought her name ought to have been included as well.15

John Ruskin endorsed Eastlake's tentative interpretation the following year, expressing the opinion that the panel was "probably the portrait" of the artist.16 And shortly thereafter Laborde, having used a loupe to examine the picture with the protective glazing removed so as to verify for himself that the verb was indeed "fuit" and not "fecit," accommodated the self-portrait interpretation to his own legitimation theory. Van Eyck, he thought, had in this bizarre but ingenious way formalized "a natural marriage already well advanced," thereby "hallowing his good faith with a masterpiece."17 In 1854 Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the first director of the Berlin Museum and an early authority on Van Eyck, lent his support

to Eastlake's theory, popularizing the idea in his book The Treasures of Art in Great Britain .18

A perceived resemblance between the woman in the London panel and Van Eyck's later portrait of his wife, Margaret, in Bruges led to the revival of the Eastlake-Waagen hypothesis in the 1930s. The subject of lively discussion during the next two decades, the theory has no serious supporters today. It is of interest only as another example of how the picture continued to be discussed apart from its historical context, for by the early 1950s the self-portrait hypothesis, in its fully developed form, required nothing less than a rejection of the documentation on the double portrait in the early Hapsburg inventories. Because these established with high probability that the sitter in Margaret of Austria's picture was someone named Arnolfini, it was necessary to argue that the painting in the Spanish royal collection had been destroyed in order to claim that the National Gallery's picture was an entirely different work that had never left the Netherlands. Further compromising the theory was the continuing need to force the signature inscription into the unacceptable reading "Jan van Eyck was this one," which had troubled Eastlake when he first proposed that the picture represented the painter and his wife.19

An interesting sidelight to these controversies over the identity of the sitters is the difficulty writers who opted for the Arnolfini alternative had in dealing with the signature inscription. Even W. H. James Weale's important Hubert and John van Eyck: Their Life and Work (1908), the earliest scholarship on Van Eyck that remains useful, gives only the Latin text, neither translating nor interpreting it.20 Max [Friedläder's simple statement of 1924, in the first volume of his monumental Die altniederländische Malerei, that the inscription was perhaps meant to express the idea "the master was here, he was present, as a witness" is thus something of a watershed in the historiography of the painting, and it seems to have directly inspired a key element in Panofsky's famous interpretation of the London panel.21

The modern history and criticism of the Arnolfini double portrait, as well as the common belief that it depicts a clandestine marriage, begin with Erwin Panofsky. In a classic piece of art-historical writing, first published sixty years ago in the Burlington Magazine and subsequently reworked in Early Netherlandish Painting, Panofsky developed his familiar exposition of the painting's hidden meaning. Since there are significant differences between the two versions, it seems useful to summarize the argument by drawing from both accounts. In Panofsky's reading, before the Council of Trent condemned clandestine marriage, it was possible for two people to "contract a perfectly valid and legitimate marriage whenever and wherever they liked, without any witnesses and independently of any ecclesiastical rite, provided that the essential condition of a 'mutual consent expressed by word

and actions' had been fulfilled." For "according to canon law," Panofsky continues, "marriage was concluded by taking an oath, and this oath (fides ) implied two actions: that of joining hands (fides manualis ) and, on the part of the groom, that of raising his forearm (fides levata, a gesture still retained by our legal procedure)."

Panofsky further argued that the unusual signature of the painter above the mirror indicated that Van Eyck himself, accompanied by another individual whose image is likewise seen reflected in the mirror, was present to witness an otherwise private ceremony and that thus the "Arnolfini Wedding" not only portrays a couple "in the act of contracting matrimony" but also functions as a "pictorial marriage certificate." Panofsky concluded with an iconographic reading of various objects in the room whose plausibility depends on the painting as the "representation of a sacramental rite." The "sacramental associations" of the marriage, for instance, so hallow this "nuptial chamber" that Panofsky was reminded of the holy ground on which Moses stood during his encounter with the Lord himself in the theophany of the burning bush. And in his final summation of the thesis Panofsky went so far as to claim that in the London double portrait Van Eyck had "demonstrated how the principle of disguised symbolism could abolish the borderline . . . between 'profane' and 'sacred' art."22

With his characteristic felicity for combining erudition and eloquence, Panofsky, in a few pages, managed to resolve all the apparent enigmas of the London double portrait in a way that was not only effective and persuasive but also highly satisfying as an intellectual construct. Not surprisingly, his interpretation of the painting soon acquired an authority that few thought to question. Often without specific mention of Panofsky, authors of textbooks and other works directed toward a larger audience have repeated it with only minor variations based on their own predilections or misunderstandings of what Panofsky actually said, so that doubtless many who know all about the "Arnolfini Wedding" would not recognize Panofsky by name. While this accolade may well be the ultimate one for a humanistic scholar in an age of mass culture, the popularization of Panofsky's ingenious explanation has in itself further contributed to the celebrity of the Arnolfini double portrait.

In the more esoteric world of scholarship, Panofsky's view that the picture depicts a clandestine wedding has occasionally been criticized, but generally—until recently—only with a view toward further clarification or modification.23 More significant, however, since it transcends the interpretation of a single work, the theory of disguised symbolism in early Flemish painting—and the Arnolfini double portrait is the foundation on which the theory was constructed—has had a far-reaching impact on iconographic studies. Because of Pa-

Figure 2.
Gallo-Roman stele from Weisenau
(detail), mid-first century. Mainz,
Landesmuseum.

Figure 3.
Robert de Freville and his wife,
Clarice. Monumental brass, c. 1400.
Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire.
Photo courtesy of the Monumental
Brass Society, London.

nofsky's continuing influence, scholars today are divided into opposing camps: followers of his methodology have continued to propose symbolic interpretations that are increasingly complex; others have reacted with growing skepticism and even dismay.24

What is most unusual about the London double portrait provides a point of departure for a more credible understanding of the picture. The mutual affection of husband and wife in a happy marriage has often been visually expressed in a general way—in ancient funerary monuments (Fig. 2); in medieval effigy tombs (Fig. 3); in the rich seventeenth-century Netherlandish tradition exemplified by Rubens's famous self-portrait with his first wife, Isabella Brant (Fig. 4); and, more recently, in a characteristic wedding photograph of the late nineteenth century (Fig. 5). The Arnolfini double portrait is altogether different from such generalized images of matrimonial attachment because the ceremonial gestures

Figure 4.
Peter Paul Rubens,  Self-Portrait with Isabella
Brant , c. 1609–10. Munich, Alte Pinakothek.

Figure 5.
Wedding photograph of Mary Melbinger and
Ulrich Anderson, c. 1895. Private collection.

of the couple memorialize the circumstances of a particular event.25 These gestures, problematic even for Panofsky, have subsequently been much discussed, usually in an effort to fit them somehow into the presumed wedding context of the painting.26 But if allowed to speak again for themselves in the framework of the fifteenth century, they can still fulfill their original function and explain for us what Van Eyck's celebrated and enigmatic couple are actually doing.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck's Double Portrait by Edwin Hall Copyright © 1997 by Edwin Hall. Excerpted by permission.
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