The Arnolfini Portrait
Jan van Eyck, 1434
One of the defining works of the Northern Renaissance — oil on oak panel, 82.2 × 60 cm, now in National Gallery, London.
The Arnolfini Portrait is Jan van Eyck's extraordinary double portrait, dated 1434 and signed on the back wall of its interior in a formal script: "Johannes de Eyck fuit hic" — Jan van Eyck was here. It depicts a man and woman in an intimate domestic interior; the man is generally identified as Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, a wealthy Italian merchant resident in Bruges.
The painting is the supreme demonstration of van Eyck's microscopic descriptive power. Every surface in the room has been observed and rendered with a precision that remains astonishing: the pile of the man's fur-trimmed robe, the texture of the orange skin on the windowsill, the reflective surface of the brass chandelier, the convex mirror on the back wall in which the room and its occupants are reflected — and in which, barely visible, two further figures appear to stand in the doorway. The mirror is the painting's central conceptual device: it opens the picture plane backward into the room behind the viewer, converting the two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional meditation on representation itself.
The painting is a founding document of the Northern Renaissance tradition and of the independent portrait as a form.