TRANSFIGURED REALTY
Vincent de Luise M.D.
Transfigured Reality
The Marriage of the Arnolfini
Jan (Johannes) van Eyck 1434
NGA London
The Marriage of the Arnolfini
Jan (Johannes) van Eyck 1434
NGA London
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| The Arnolfini Portrait Jan van Eyck, 1434 National Gallery of Art, London |
Most art historians of a certain vintage grew up reading the illuminating texts of Erwin Panofsky, Professor of Art in Germany and also at the IFA at NYU, whose crystalline and deeply thought-out exegeses of pictorial art brought together multiple domains of connoisseurship and enlightened generations. Today, his art historical works are sadly not as well known, but his ideas, Kantian as well as Hegelian, remain seminal.
In the famous painting we are gazing upon, The Marriage of the Arnolfini, a painting which revolutionized western Art, Panofsky asks us this question:
Do mirrors reveal the invisible, or do they distort the visible?
At first, we see (or we think we see) a Marriage of two people. HE is probably Giovanni Nicolai di Arnolfini (or maybe his cousin, Giovannni di Arrigo, no one knows for sure ) and SHE is likely Costanza Trenta (or perhaps she is Giovanna Cenami, no one knows for sure).
HE is lifting up his right hand almost in benediction, about to place it on HER right hand as an act of FEDES (Latin for Fidelity).
But then there is the symbology: there is the pair of shoes in the lower left (why did HE take his shoes off?), the oranges (very rare in the cold climate of Bruges) on the side table and the window sill ( one needs to be rich to obtain oranges in Flanders), the perfectly rendered chandelier (did JvE use a Camera Obscura to paint this masterpiece? It is a topic I discuss in detail in my Visual Perception Lectures, and also, why is the Dog not in the mirror?), there is only one lit candle in the chandelier (vide infra), and all the other iconography that makes for such delicious fodder to use in term papers, PhD theses and such.
So, this is a painting of a marriage, attested to by the painter himself, in this case Jan van Eyck, who paints himself in the painting ! ( see in the comments below the magnified image of the convex mirror in the background - the perfect, optically upright and minified image in the mirror, with a tiny JvE in it, one of the first, if not the first, western painting to use a mirror).
In the famous painting we are gazing upon, The Marriage of the Arnolfini, a painting which revolutionized western Art, Panofsky asks us this question:
Do mirrors reveal the invisible, or do they distort the visible?
At first, we see (or we think we see) a Marriage of two people. HE is probably Giovanni Nicolai di Arnolfini (or maybe his cousin, Giovannni di Arrigo, no one knows for sure ) and SHE is likely Costanza Trenta (or perhaps she is Giovanna Cenami, no one knows for sure).
HE is lifting up his right hand almost in benediction, about to place it on HER right hand as an act of FEDES (Latin for Fidelity).
But then there is the symbology: there is the pair of shoes in the lower left (why did HE take his shoes off?), the oranges (very rare in the cold climate of Bruges) on the side table and the window sill ( one needs to be rich to obtain oranges in Flanders), the perfectly rendered chandelier (did JvE use a Camera Obscura to paint this masterpiece? It is a topic I discuss in detail in my Visual Perception Lectures, and also, why is the Dog not in the mirror?), there is only one lit candle in the chandelier (vide infra), and all the other iconography that makes for such delicious fodder to use in term papers, PhD theses and such.
So, this is a painting of a marriage, attested to by the painter himself, in this case Jan van Eyck, who paints himself in the painting ! ( see in the comments below the magnified image of the convex mirror in the background - the perfect, optically upright and minified image in the mirror, with a tiny JvE in it, one of the first, if not the first, western painting to use a mirror).
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| Detail of the background of the painting, showing a convex mirror, and van Eyck's signature "Johannes van Eyck fuit hic" The convex mirror is optically correct - showing an upright, virtual, minified image, which includes the painter himself |
Indeed we read on the back wall “Johannes van Eyck fuit hic 1434- “Jan van Eyck was here” and the date of 1434. So, is this painting a “contratto visivo,” a visible contract, of a man and his soon-to-be wife.
Or is it ?
Panofsky discusses the term “Transfigured Reality” to point out that the iconography of a painting can reveal things quite the opposite of what the viewer is seeing.
In this case, HER head covering is that of someone already married. Is SHE pregnant or is that just a flouncy dress style of the era? What’s that dog doing there (is it to remind us of FEDES again?), the bright red fourposter bed on the right, and what about that one lit candle? One lit candle, hovering over HIs head, but not over HERS?
Is this painting then not a contratto visivo, but rather, a memento mori, a painting to honor and memorialize a deceased HER?
Hmmmmm. The paradoxes never cease.....
