Episode 41: Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434)
[00:42]
VOICE 1: Tell me when to go
TAMAR: Go ahead.
VOICE 1: Okay.
VOICE 2: A man and a women, and a dog.
VOICE 3: On the left side is a guy who looks a bit like uh, Willy Wonka’s shady brother. [laughs]
VOICE 4: It’s a long face, it looks severe.
VOICE 5: Guy looks a little bit like… Vladimir Putin?
TAMAR: [laughs]
VOICE 5: Does he not? Is it just me? Maybe it’s just me. Ummm…
TAMAR: It’s not just you.
VOICE 5: Oh okay good. [laughs]
VOICE 3: So uh, he’s got a, hat with a kind of a, furry texture.
VOICE 6: But, you know, the hand that he’s holding out to her is gentle, so it’s sort of in contrast with the severity of his face. The woman looks like she’s pregnant
VOICE 7: Uh, she looks to be pregnant.
[01:27]
VOICE 3: And she looks heavily pregnant.
VOICE 6: She has so much material, this, this beautiful green material gathered around her waist. And she has this lovely white, lace, trimmed veil over her beautiful, round face.
VOICE 3: They, they don’t look particularly happy.
VOICE 5: Oh yeah, they look miserable.
VOICE 3: She’s just sort of staring very respectfully in front of her, um, whereas the man is looking at her, so, it seems to suggest that he is uh the boss in this relationship. Even though neither of them are wearing trousers.
[02:05]
VOICE 8: It really does not appear to be particularly intimate. But, the entire setting and surrounding kind of suggests that it should be and that it is.
TAMAR: Mmhmm.
VOICE 9: Around the room, you see a lot of fineries. Shoes in the corner. The dog front and center. It looks to be a better sofa. It’s draped with what looks like heavy cloth. There’s a chandelier with a single candle lit. Um, but again, the chandelier looks very nice, like it’s made very well. Uh, in the background, there are some oranges.
VOICE 5: And there is a mirror that kind of looks like uh, one of the mirrors that you see on the street. If there’s a coroner so you can see if there’s cars coming from the other side. And that’s hung in the background, and you can see the reflection of the room in the mirror, and you could see yourself if you would be in that room, in this mirror.
[03:00]
VOICE 1: And the colors are rich, rich, rich greens, rich reds, rich browns, it’s a very richly colored painting. With lots of detail.
[03:14]
OPENING CREDITS
[03:52]
When my beloved Grandma died, ten years ago this month, my mom took on the heroic task of packing up her beautifully appointed apartment, which included her kitchen, which included her cookbooks. When I got the boxes that had been allocated to me, one of the first ones I opened contained her copy of the Silver Palate, which I rushed to leaf through, knowing that I’d soon be the beneficiary of her penciled-in commentary that she’d always add after she’d tried a recipe. Less salt next time, she’d write in her flawless cursive. Freezes beautifully. And my personal favorite, one time only: too much patchke patchke.
[04:33]
For those of you who didn’t grow up in a culturally Jewish household, and therefore might not be familiar with casually thrown-off Yiddish, patchke patchke describes the actions of someone who can only be described as a fineschmecker, that is, a type-A perfectionist. Patchke is the verb, the act of fineschmecking, the highly-detail-oriented, inordinately fastidious work. My grandma certainly had a streak of fineschmecker in her – I mean, she was the kind of person who alphabetized her spices – but even she would hit her patchke limit with certain recipes. And I think that’s why I appreciated that annotation so much. A genuine love of patchke patchke belongs to a particularly rare breed of fineschmeker, someone whose attention to detail it so precise that they use a paintbrush with a single hair. And what we have here, the Arnolfini Portrait from 1434, is patchke patchke of the highest order, and the product of one of the most skilled fineschmekers the western canon had ever seen: the Northern Renaissance master Jan van Eyck.
[05:48]
And Van Eyck really is considered the master of the Northern Renaissance style. The Northern Renaissance is exactly what it sounds like: a flourishing period of art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium, which ran concurrent with the Italian Renaissance which was happening further south. And as a reminder, when we talk about the Renaissance, we’re describing a very specific time in Western art, the rebirth of antiquity, that is, ancient Greece, the last time the art prioritized looking like the thing it was depicting. The Renaissance was about illusionism, about creating art as though you’re looking out of a window onto the world: capturing bodies as realistically as possible, and locating them in a space that’s as perspectivally-accurate as possible. True, there aren’t many of us who actually look like ancient Greek sculptures, but the human body ideally can, which is what separates the ancient Greco-Roman art and the Renaissance that revived it from the expressive Medieval art that it was bookending – which was art that was much more about expressive creative license than capturing reality. We talked about all of this in episode 30 when we looked at Donatello’s Madonna of the Clouds, and, of course, we talked about the Renaissance when we looked at Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in episode 25. The main takeaway here is that the Renaissance was about the human scale, about realism. And what becomes clear when we compare the Northern and Italian Renaissance is that there are multiple ways to make a painting appear realistic. You can, as the Italians did, focus on perspectival accuracy, on spaces and figures receding into the horizon with calculated precision, as thought they existed on a grid inside a mathematical proof. Look no further than Perugino’s “Delivery of the Keys” from 1481 to see the perspectival lines and perfect vanishing point, basically the Italian Renaissance equivalent of Homer being trapped in the third dimension. That’s one way of capturing reality, of real life as it was being lived. Another is to be a total fineschmecker with the details.
[08:11]
The details of this painting, the Arnolfini portrait, are insane. It starts simple enough, we’re looking at something relatively straightforward: a man in a big black hat and a woman veritably swaddled in emerald green fabric are holding hands across the canvas, almost like Adam and God in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that wouldn’t painted for another century. And from these two figures, your eye starts to explore, starts to take in their cramped surroundings, and all the sumptuous material objects cluttering the scene with, it would seem, the sole purpose of being symbolically significant. This room isn’t perspectivally accurate, and these figures aren’t even anatomically accurate, I mean, look at their hands compared to their bodies. But the objects? The objects are precise AF: the wooden grain in the kicked-off shoes in the lower left hand corner, the rich fabric of the red canopy bed, the cute little dog at the woman’s feet, the oranges under the window, the exquisitely delicate chandelier above them, in which a single lit candle sits, and, maybe most magnificent detail, the mirror on the back wall that floats like a ten-pronged orb above their hands, each of the ten roundels around the mirror illustrating a different scene from the passions of the Christ. And that small little mirror manages to compress and expand the scene back to us, in a convex bubble, adding two additional people to the room, one in blue, one in red, maybe the artist, maybe us.
[10:07]
And from there, you start to notice the textures of each of these objects, and how gorgeously specific they are, how freakishly detailed: the dog’s hair as compared to the fur cuffs of the clothing, the stiff, crisp lace in her headdress, the cool metal sheen of the chandelier, the warm, pockmarked orange peel, as exact and tactile as a fifteenth-century Flemish Pat the Bunny, and, to our curious fingers, no less inviting.
And from there, we need to remind ourselves how small this painting is. It’s only 32 by 23 inches, that is, not much bigger than two and a half Macbook Pro screens stacked on top of each other. Those detailed scenes from the passions are smaller than M&Ms. This is the kind of detail work that required that single-haired paintbrush, this is the kind of patchke patchke we’re talking about. Look at those tassels on the rosary on the wall. Look at that Persian rug under the bed. Maybe your eye isn’t grabbed in quite the same way looking at it from here, from the present, having lived for a long time in a world where photorealism is a thing, but remember that this is essentially photorealism four hundred years before the development of the camera.
[11:33]
From a technical perspective, though, there was oil paint. As a comparison, consider the tempera being used by the Italians, which isn’t that dissimilar from watercolor, and was painted on top of absorbent plaster frescos that dried quickly and were mercilessly unforgiving. The oil paint used by the Northern masters, meanwhile, was flexible, slow to dry, easy to correct, and could be applied in thin, translucent glazes that hid your brushstrokes and result in brilliantly rich, luminous color. Tempera could never hope to create those deep tones, those true blacks, and the tremendous subtlety achieved as you’re moving from light to shadow, across faces and fur and furniture. In other words, if you’re Caravaggio in another 200 years, or Rembrandt in another 300 years, it’s the Northern Renaissance paintings that you’re salivating over, that you’re learning from, that you’re trying to recreate. And Jan van Eyck is your guru.
[12:38]
So let’s talk a bit about Van Eyck. People basically think he invented oil paint, that’s how superlative his skills were. They’re on full display in his self-portrait, “Man in Red Turban” from 1433, when he was around 40 years old. And, this is the painting I want to talk about first, before we talk about Arnolfini. Because this painting is painted with almost the same fanatical attention to realistic detail as the Arnolfini canvas, from the crow’s feet to the five o’clock shadow to the soft fabric of the turban to the reflections of the studio windows in his tired eyes. But this painting is teaching us something about the Northern Renaissance artist. Those eyes are looking right into ours, another convention that we’re so used to today we don’t even notice it, but at the time was pretty revolutionary, especially for a portrait. His confidence, both in meeting our gaze and in the spectacular technical sophistication on display, speaks to this new kind of artist, what the Northern Renaissance art historian Craig Harbison calls “the self-conscious, pragmatic artist.” Like we’ll soon see playing out in the Italian Renaissance as well – again, listen back to the episode on the Mona Lisa – Northern Renaissance artists had a remarkable sense of self-awareness in their role as both being present in the moment and capturing it – they were “the perfect eye-witness in the truest sense of the word,” according to the art historian Ernst Gombrich. They bring presence, perspective, and creative vision, and both recognize and value their own worth. It’s of course a little ironic, then, that he should have signed the painting in Greek, “as I can,” that is, “the best I am capable of doing” – ironic since this is clearly some of the best that can be done. And though you’d be hard pressed to find a fineschmecker who is ever truly satisfied, I think we can chalk this inscription up to false modesty. But it speaks to something important here. This is an artist who is exceedingly self-aware of the value of his own role here, both in his self-portraiture and, if we look back on Arnolfini portrait, in the fact that one of the figures reflected back in the Arnolfini mirror is wearing a red turban, a fun little Easter Egg, and, more explicitly, in the fact that he signed the wall above the mirror, Kilroy-style, “Johannes Van Eyck fuit hic”: Jan van Eyck was here.
[15:28]
So why should we care that Jan Van Eyck was there? Why do we care that he signed his name? Besides what we’ve just talked about – how his presence in the painting speaks to the new, more confident and self-aware role of the artist – the inscription is a key point of entry into what’s going on in this painting. You might have noticed that almost the entire analysis of this painting thus far is through adjectives that material objects. We’ve been hung up on what this painting is of. But what does it mean? And that is indeed the question of the day, and, the question of the last several hundred years. Because the fact of the matter, the fly in the ointment of it all is that for all the exquisite, excessive fussiness on display here, all the patchke energy that’s been put into making these material objects as precise and straightforward as possible, art historians have been utterly stymied in terms of what it all adds up to. This painting that is so full of objects so realistic you could reach out and touch them but it’s totally stonewalling us, stubbornly withholding any answers as to why they’re all there in the first place.
[16:47]
But if you think impenetrability ever tried to stop an art historian, you’ve clearly never met one. Which is why, in the 1930s, the famed art historian Erwin Panofsky – who had made a name for himself by establishing the theoretical framework he called “iconology,” that is, how we derive meaning from the objects we see in paintings – decided that the evidence here was too overwhelming to ignore: this was the Arnolfini Marriage Portrait, we’re seeing a wedding taking place, and Van Eyck’s signature, therefore, was proof of the witness signing the marriage contract. Panofsky’s theory was widely accepted, I mean, even now, Wikipedia lists alternate titles for this painting as the “Arnolfini Marriage Portrait.” And furthermore, it made every perfectly-rendered material object support the theory. The little dog became a symbol of fidelity. The single lit candle in the chandelier was the presence of God, adding a religious element to the union. The cast-aside clogs in the lower left corner indicated the holiness of the bedroom. The carved figure on the bedpost is most likely Saint Margaret, the patron saint of pregnancy and childbirth, while the oranges were symbols of fertility, which, combined with the fact that the female figure is holding a swath of fabric over her belly, was then construed to be clear cut evidence of her pregnancy. And all of sudden, we’ve run down the field, we’ve got the Arnolfini Shotgun Marriage Portrait. Which, though not in so many words, is how it was taught to me, fifteen years ago, at an accredited, even prestigious university, by an expert in the field who was grading me, and whom I had no reason not to believe.
[18:42]
And I get why Panofsky enjoyed playing detective. There’s a natural impulse to create a larger meaning from material clues. And this is hardly something only art historians do. But the trouble is that when they do, they end up shaping an entire narrative, one that the general public is already intimidated by. Art already makes us feel kind of dumb, and when art historians say that something means something, we believe them. But what happens when they, as Panofsky was, are totally wrong? Because it turns out this painting probably isn’t a marriage portrait at all. It isn’t really understood to be specifically anything. Further digging into the records of these figures explode a multitude of potential narratives like toy snakes from a can of nuts. We could be looking at a betrothal, or a signing over a power of attorney, or a memorial. Maybe we’re looking at Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife, Giovanna Cenami, who were actually married in 1447, thirteen years after this painting was painted and six years after Van Eyck’s death. Or maybe it’s a cousin of Giovanni and his wife Costanza Trenta, who were married in 1426 but were childless when Costanza died in 1433, a year before it was painted. Which, if we’re going to go down this path, would actually make this a Sixth Sense memorial painting where only the husband is actually alive and there are a host of clues proving that she isn’t. After all, the candle above her head is snuffed out. Christ’s death scenes in the passions are on her side of the painting, I mean, that should mean something, right?
[20:38]
But it doesn’t. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, at least nothing that I’d feel comfortable offering definitively. The truth is, the only thing that we know for sure is that this mirror is one of the most exquisitely rendered objects in Western art, and that the Arnolfinis were really, really rich Italian merchant family. And ironically, their wealth roots these material objects in actual reality. No amount of layered-on symbolism will make that chandelier, that Persian rug, or those fur-lined clothes any less the obscene signals of wealth and status that they actually were. Sure, oranges could be a sign of fertility, but they also would have been absurdly expensive, and apparently part of Arnolfini’s business. Sometimes people just like showing off their fancy stuff.
[21:35]
And that’s kind of a bummer. It clearly would have been a bummer for Panofsky too. But all isn’t lost. Maybe instead of asking this painting to play a round of Blue’s Clues with us, we consider that something more interesting is happening here, which is that this lack of fixed narratives draws our attention to the fact that art history as a discipline has been evolving. Because these days, it’s less about the Panofskys of the world, the concrete answers, the bullish certainty of mid-20th century academics, and more about multitudes: multitudes of meanings, multitudes of perspectives, and the innumerable ways we’re forced to come to terms with a lack of certainty, both in art and in the lives of the artists. The art historian-turned-comedian Hannah Gadsby famously declared that academic certainty that made her decide to leave academia, and that this is one of her favorite paintings simply because it’s unknowable. Because for every seemingly well-rendered thing this painting could mean, it just might, and unapologetically so, mean nothing.
[22:55]
And that’s unsatisfying, all that patchke with no payoff. My grandma wouldn’t have made it twice. But it’s also remarkably true to what it’s like to paint on the human scale, to paint actual lives being lived. People do exist in a three-dimensional world full of textured material objects. But the world they each experience is as wonderfully subjective and individual as their own perspectives. And I think if we’re going to look out the window onto this world, we need to understand this, we need to embrace it, and we need to appreciate that when it comes to all the ways reality can be captured, the Renaissance really did get it right.
[24:00]
CREDITS:
Special thanks to Nick Roberts, Anna Saldinger, and the intrepid museumgoers at the National Gallery in London. For more information and past episodes, go to theLonelyPalette.com, or you can follow us on Twitter @lonelypalette, or follow us on Instagram @thelonelypalette, or like us on facebook, and if you want more people to discover the show, if only so you can say you listened, like, before it was cool, please a rating and review on Apple podcasts.And again, if you want to really help support the show and get more episodes sooner, consider becoming a patron on Patreon at www.patreon.com/lonelypalette.
[24:55]
And I wanted to take a moment to give a shout out to the PRX Podcast Garage and the entire Boston Sonic Soiree community, because I’m celebrating my last three weeks with both of them before my family and I track out to Cleveland Ohio so that, among other things, I can start my life as a full-time arts audio freelancer. This community has been crucial in the creation of this show, and in myself as an audio producer. And I am so, so grateful for each and everyone of its members.
[25:31]
Speaking of which, The Lonely Palette is a proud, founding member of Hub and Spoke, a collective of Boston-centric — even from Cleveland — idea driven podcasts. And I’m so excited to report that Hub and Spoke has been growing like gangbusters during my hiatus, with a whole trove of new shows for your listening pleasure, including the most recent episode, of the most recently launched podcast “Subtitle,” a new podcast about people and languages from veteran audio producers Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay. If there are certain words that give you word rage, that nails on a chalkboard feeling that happens when someone says words like moist or dollop, then check out their most recent episode at subtiblepod.com or listen directly off our site, hubspokeaudio.org.
[26:16]