Greatest Paintings: Dawn of the Dutch Golden Age - The Arnolfini Portrait

Hello everyone, Tom Holland here and I am joined by the great Laura Cumming and we are looking at painting in history, four paintings that reflect a particular period in history. We'll be looking at the history of the painting itself, the life of the artist and teasing out the mysteries that shadow all four paintings. And today we are looking at the Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck early 15th century and here is a short extract from that episode and you can access the entire thing by going to therestishistory.com and signing up to the club there and it will be waiting for you enjoy hello everybody and welcome to another series of bonuses for you our beloved COVID Club members. And this time we're going to be doing four episodes, each one on a famous painting. And we're going to be situating it in the context of the age, looking at what it's all about, who the painter was. And generally, with a lot of the paintings, there is a sense of mystery. There's a puzzle. And we have the perfect person to tease out the possible solutions to these puzzles because my guest today is the great laura cumming she's the art critic of the observer she was on the show a while back talking about william notman the scottish canadian photographer and laura a lot of your books resolve around a kind of mystery and a puzzle don't they and uh you kind of offer up solutions and that essentially what you going to be doing today and in our next three episodes So welcome back Thank you And what painting are we looking at today We are looking at the first of our paintings and it is the Arnolfini Portrait otherwise known as the Arnolfini Betrothal or the Arnolfini Marriage. And in my lifetime, it's been called all three. And that gives some idea of how often versions of the interpretation of this painting have changed. it's a very small painting people think it's going to be enormous because it's so famous but in fact it's it's not not big I could about a foot and a half by two feet it hangs in the National Gallery in London where people go in droves to look at it and I think it is for the National Gallery in London about as mysterious a painting as the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre not yet nicked we noticed and the the reason the painting i think is so famous is that it has a wild combination of amazing hyper realism jan van eyck the painter is credited possibly slight exaggeration here but he's credited with inventing oil paint and he uses it to describe the shining surfaces and the exact proportions of every object in the world so brilliantly. And yet, despite all this hyper-realism, the painting's a total riddle. I think it's the earliest riddle in art. And so we're going to talk about that. And so what is it showing us? Lots of you will be presumably watching this on video. Some of you, if you're listening on your phone and you're able to stop and bring it up on your phone to have a look at it. But I appreciate that some of you may be driving on motorways or whatever, and it would be dangerous for you to try and actually look at the picture. So describe it for those who can't see it. Well, if anyone who's listening now remembers Desperate Housewives, they will probably remember this from the credit sequence because it was used to represent marriages gone wrong along with Cranach paintings and so on So what we looking at is a couple standing in a room in Bruges 15th century In the background is a red bed and a red couch The couple are holding hands. Or are they holding hands? We'll come to that. He has his left hand out. She has her left hand out. Her palm is in his palm. He is dressed, most famously, in a massive black cauldron of a hat. He really looks quite Halloween. He's got a very, very white face. And also he looks a little bit like Vladimir Putin. He does. And I'm afraid that there's no getting away from it. He really looks like Putin. So picture Putin in a colossal cauldron of black. In fact, it's black straw. And people in those days would have known that it was a very, very expensive hat. For us now, it's quite evident how wealthy he is because he's wearing this enormous, long black fur coat. And indeed, he's wearing velvet underneath it. He has one hand raised and his other hand raised towards the woman we take to be his wife. Is she his wife? Is she his mistress? Are they yet married? Who is she? We'll come to that. What's going on? And he's raising his hand. And I always think it looks like Jesus blessing the multitudes, though many interpretations of what that gesture means. But anyone listening can picture that. So imagine Christ and he's giving a blessing, two fingers raised kind of thing. On the right hand side of the painting in this voluminous dress, I mean, she's wearing yards and yards of fabric, is a woman who appears to be younger and smaller. She's got the cloth raised up to just above her waist, reams of train raised up. And people have always thought she looked pregnant. And indeed, there's a whole theory about how she's actually pregnant. But she's not. We'll come to that in a minute too. And she's wearing a white head cloth. She looks remarkably like, if you know any portraits by Jan van Eyck, she looks very like the women in those portraits. So quite sort of low countries again very pale slightly reddish hair And she looking not at him and he is looking not quite at her We come to that in a moment On the floor are the beginning of a whole sequence of details There are wooden patterns Those are those shoes that you put on over your shoes to go out in the mud. They're his and they still have a little mud on them. There's a dog right at the front of the painting, a bristly, merry little dog. Kind of, nobody knows quite what breed it is. It's got a very wet little nose. looks mischievous it's very mischievous there's a whole theory about this painting related to the dog looks like he's just chewed up a slipper or something he certainly doesn't look like a solemn dog does he and there are three oranges and one above on a window ledge the shutters of the window have been very carefully opened on the left hand side so you can see into a garden some art historians have spent forever trying to work out if this is an upper room because you can only see the top of what might be a tree or a lower room because it's a bush we can't really tell right at the very back of the painting on the wall is the most clinching detail if you can call it a detail because in fact it's the advent of a whole new way of painting it is a convex mirror anyone listening to this can think of convex mirrors of the sort you see in your aunt's house or you might see in a junk shop somewhere and reflected in that mirror are two little figures. We'll come back to them. And above them, finally, is this immense, beautiful, very complex, very, very expensive chandelier with one candle alight. We'll come back to that in a moment. Thank you for listening. Subscribe to The Rest Is History Club at therestishistory.com for the entire episode. Laura and I will be back next week when we will be talking about Las Meninas by Diego de Válezquez. So unbelievable value. Rush away and sign up.