Transcript of 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. Today, we are looking at the Arnold Fini Portrait by Jan van Eijk, early 15th century. Here is a short extract from that episode. You can access the entire thing by going to therestishistory. Com and signing up to the club there. It will be waiting for you. Enjoy.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another series of bonuses for you, our beloved 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. Laura, a lot of your books resolve around a mystery and a puzzle, don't they? You offer up solutions. That's essentially what you're going to be doing today and in our next three episodes. So welcome back. Thank you. What 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 Betrosal or the Arnolfini Marriage. In my lifetime, it's been called all three. 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 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. I think it is for the National Gallery in London, about as mysterious a painting as the Mona Lisa is in Louver. Not yet nicked, we noticed. The reason the painting, I think, is so famous is that it has a wild combination of amazing hyperrealism. Jan van Eijk, the painter, is credited, possibly slightly an exaggeration here, but he's credited with inventing oil paint. 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 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 marriage has gone wrong, along with Cranach paintings and so on. What we're looking at is a couple standing in a room in 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.

Also, he looks a little bit like Vladimir Putin.

He does. 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. 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? What's going on? 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. Imagine Christ, and he's giving a blessing dressing two fingers raised. 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.

People have always thought she looked pregnant. 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. She's wearing a white head cloth. She looks remarkably like if you know any portraits by Jan van Eijk, she looks very like the women in those portraits. So quite low countries, again, very pale, slightly redish hair. She's looking not at him, and he's looking not quite at her. We'll come to that in a On the floor are the beginning of a whole sequence of details. There are wooden patterns. Those are 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. Nobody knows quite what breed it is. It's got a very wet little nose. It's mischievous, doesn't it? It's very mischievous. There's a whole theory about this painting related to the dog.

It looks like he just chewed up a slipper or something.

He certainly doesn't look like a solem dog to see. 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 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. Reflected in that mirror are two little figures. We'll come back to them. Above them, finally, is this immense, beautiful, very complex, very, very expensive chandelier with one candle, a light. We'll come back to that in a moment.

Thank you for listening. Subscribe to the Restless History Club at therestlesshistory. Com for the entire episode. Laura and I will be back next week when we will be talking about Las Meninas by Diego de Valej. So unbelievable value. Rush away and sign up.

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