Transcription
[Music] [Music] if you want to find stolen paintings don't go looking in the houses of robbers and burglars. go to a museum. here at the national gallery in london, for instance, there's a very, very famous painting that shouldn't really be here because, to put it bluntly, it was nicked.
[Music] the national gallery acquired the so-called Arnolfini Marriage in 1842 from a Scottish soldier who'd fought in the Peninsula War in Spain. before the Peninsula War, the painting belonged to the Spanish royal family. after the Peninsula War, it belonged to the Scottish soldier. you work it out.
[Music] this is war booty. and if I were a member of the Spanish royal family, I'd be on the phone every day asking for it back because not only is this one of the world's most famous pictures, it's also one of the most gloriously mysterious.
[Music] what exactly is it that Jan van Eyck has painted here? something meaningful is obviously going on, but what can it be? art historians have tied themselves into knots trying to unravel the mystery. round and round and round they go. there have been hundreds of interpretations, but so successfully has this masterpiece of puzzlement confused its interpreters that the most fashionable theory currently doing the rounds is that there is no mystery to it. that it's just the portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Arnolfini, and that's it. that's what it says here, the National Gallery's own catalogue. no secret setup, no mystery, no hidden meaning. but that has to be wrong. the Arnolfini Marriage must have a hidden meaning. the picture's packed with symbolism, and frankly, you'd have to be blind not to notice it. look, for instance, at this fruit here on the windowsill. it says in the catalogue that the fruit is only here to indicate that the man in the picture is wealthy. he's a rich merchant, and rich merchants flaunt their wealth by leaving oranges, which were expensive, scattered casually about the room. what poppycock! all you have to do to see that this fruit must have some deeper symbolic meaning is to look at other pictures by Jan van Eyck. look what's on the windowsill of this Madonna and Child from Frankfurt. is she trying to show how rich she is?
[Music] look at the windowsill of the Ince's Hall Madonna. why would this Virgin Mary be flaunting her wealth? she isn't. in Van Eyck's Madonnas, the fruit arranged so pointedly on the windowsill is a deliberate reminder of those notorious biblical events in the Garden of Eden that led to us being thrown out of paradise. when Adam took a bite out of the fruit being proffered to him by Eve, he committed the first sin and ensured the fall of man. the fruit on the windowsills of Van Eyck's Madonnas reminds us of the consequences of our inability to resist temptation.
[Music] there's also a tree full of cherries visible through the window of the Arnolfini's room, and that isn't accidental either. cherries were the traditional fruits of paradise. they represented what we've lost, what we could have had. that's why the infant Jesus is brandishing handfuls of cherries at us enthusiastically in the recently rediscovered Madonna of the Cherries by Hugo van der Goes. the baby Jesus has come down to earth to atone for our sins by dying for us, and because of his ultimate sacrifice, it'll be cherries all round for us again in heaven. my point is that these cherries in the Arnolfini's garden, and the fruit arranged so pointedly on the Arnolfini's windowsill, is there for a reason. everything in this busy painting is there for a reason. so let's be braver than the cataloguers of the National Gallery. let's take the difficult path, not the easy one, and have another go at cracking the code of the Arnolfini Marriage. not much is known about the painter Jan van Eyck. we know that he worked for the Dukes of Burgundy in the 1420s, travelled here and there, and ended up in Bruges as the city's greatest artist. Bruges today is the premier tourist destination in Belgium and one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe. but in Van Eyck's time here, the 1430s, this delightfully preserved chocolate box town was the most important trading port in Northern Europe. Bruges was international, busy, and very, very rich.
[Music] in the 1430s, Bruges must have been a very cosmopolitan place. goods were transported from all over Europe and uh found their way here. from the Baltic region and further out east came, for instance, furs and all sorts of animal skins. from the Mediterranean came things like spices, exotic foods, but also textiles. and textiles was the main business of Bruges. among all these precious stuffs being exported from Bruges all around Europe, perhaps the most valuable of all in the long run was oil paints, which was said to have been invented here by Van Eyck himself. it wasn't true, of course. all painting developed gradually in various places, but it is true that Van Eyck was the first great master of the new medium, and this made him internationally famous.
[Music] it's said that this is his self-portrait, and I believe it. this is a man who knows what he wants.
[Music] the thing about oil paints is that they could achieve amazingly convincing illusionistic effects. painters could paint things with them that looked miraculously real, and no one was better at this than Jan van Eyck. one of the reasons this stubbornly mysterious picture has proved so enduringly fascinating is because Van Eyck involves you in the action so cunningly. at the front of the picture, the mysterious couple seem to be greeting you, as if you've just entered the room and they've been waiting for you. at the back of the picture, the famous wall mirror, so perfectly painted, not only shows the back of the couple, as you'd expect, but also two more figures entering the room. it's been said that the first of these is Van Eyck himself, but surely it must also represent whoever's looking at the picture, whoever's just stepped into the room. in other words, you.
[Music] we can confidently identify the two people in the painting as Mr. and Mrs. Arnolfini. their names appear in a couple of early documents, misspelt but still recognizable. the Arnolfini were a family of Italian merchants from Lucca in Tuscany who settled in Bruges and traded in precious materials, fabrics, silks, and gold. Van Eyck painted the distinctive man in the picture twice, and for a long time, he was thought to be Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini. but recent research has suggested it may actually have been his cousin, Giovanni de Nicolau Arnolfini, who arrived in Bruges in 1419. we know that this Giovanni de Nicolau was married. we also know that his wife died.
[Music] Giovanni was conspicuously prosperous, and in Bruges in the 1430s, a huge proportion of a man's wealth was tied up in his clothes. well, he's wearing a fur-lined velvet garment at the time, a houppelande, and it seems to be made of purple crimson velvet, which would make it extraordinarily expensive. but her dress, the white fur, if indeed, as has been suspected, that the fur is the fur of the squirrel, then it's only the belly fur, and you're talking literally hundreds, if not thousands, of animals going into one of those gowns alone. and they were environmental disaster areas from our point of view, and by the end of the 15th century, the fur trade in Europe seems to more or less have wiped out the local wildlife, and they were very lucky to find the New World to go and exploit. so the Arnolfinis are dressed up to the nines in their finest finery. why would that be? it was an art historian called Erwin Panofsky who came up with a theory in the 1930s that what Van Eyck is actually showing us is the Arnolfini's marriage. Panofsky claimed that Van Eyck himself and the other chap you see reflected miraculously in the mirror were the two witnesses at the wedding, and that the picture was actually intended as a legal document, which is why it sports that huge, bold inscription at its center: "Jan van Eyck was here."
[Music] unfortunately, to arrive at this fabulous theory, Panofsky needed to twist around some of the evidence and, in a couple of instances, actually make stuff up. and I reckon that today's fashion for insisting that the painting is nothing more than a portrait of a rich Flemish merchant and his wife is an embarrassed reaction by modern art historians to Panofsky's creative tinkering with the facts. but in dismissing all of Panofsky's theories about the Arnolfini Marriage, are we perhaps chucking out the baby with the bathwater? indeed, isn't the issue of the baby the first thing that needs to be considered here? and don't tell me that there isn't a
[Music] baby.
[Music] it says here that Mrs. Arnolfini isn't pregnant. it says here that this lovely bulge in her stomach is just the way her dress was cut, the fashion of the times. well, I don't buy that, and I don't believe that anyone looking at her with genuinely open eyes can miss this protective gesture of hers. she's pregnant, all right, and this pregnancy is the key to the picture's meaning.
[Music] pregnancy is such a critical and ubiquitous human condition that you'd have expected art to be packed with images of pregnant women. after all, what could be a more important family event to celebrate and record than the expected arrival of a new baby? and indeed, there are lots of pregnant women in art. rather amazingly, however, they tend to get overlooked.
[Music] I don't think I've puzzled over any picture as much as I've puzzled over the so-called Arnolfini Marriage. it's a maddening thing. it sends you all over the place looking for clues, and one day, by chance, it sent me here to the huge and grand Metropolitan Museum in New York. I was walking through this room, and I saw this. you want evidence of pregnancy? this is evidence of pregnancy. it's by Hugo van der Goes, who worked in Antwerp, so close to Bruges. this is Van der Goes' Annunciation. the Angel Gabriel has come to tell Mary that she's about to become the mother of Jesus Christ. what a big moment! isn't this space familiar? isn't the bed familiar? aren't those candles familiar? isn't the window familiar? isn't the mood familiar? this Annunciation bears such an obvious and tangible resemblance to the Arnolfini Marriage that it might almost be the same setup. you encounter the same arrangement in other heartfelt Annunciations by artists who followed Van Eyck. a similar room, a similar bed, a similar atmosphere of a proclaimed baby.
[Music] now, of course, the Arnolfini Marriage doesn't show the Angel Gabriel coming down to the Virgin Mary and telling her she's about to have Jesus, but look at this. it's just too similar to be a coincidence. Van Eyck's masterpiece is trying to plunge us into atmospheres exactly like these, the warm and holy atmospheres of an impending birth. so I've come up with a blunt and honest and no-nonsense title for Van Eyck's oh-so-complicated masterpiece. let's get to the point here. we should call this the Arnolfini Pregnancy.
[Music] this is a selection of portraits by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, who worked in England in the late 1500s, but whose father was an immigrant from Bruges. it's only recently been noticed that all the women in these portraits are pregnant. why was Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger commissioned to paint all these pregnant women? because birth in Gheeraerts' day was an event brimming over with fatal significance. pregnancy was something not only to be celebrated, but also to be feared. there was a perception that the mortality rate in childbirth was much higher, and women approached childbirth, some with a lot of anxiety. you know, you would, it would be a period, pregnancy would be a period in which you would do spiritual exercises. you would be thinking about the possible strong possibility of dying in childbirth. so it made me think that that might be an aspect of the of the portraits. if the woman died in childbirth, there would be a record, an image of her. it would take its place in the family portrait gallery. thus, life and death are intertwined in the pregnancy portraits of Marcus Gheeraerts, as they must somehow be intertwined in the Arnolfini Marriage. a brave, free-thinking art historian thinks she's found the answer. many people challenge the suggestion that the woman is actually pregnant because of a painting by Van Eyck which showed Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who's obviously a virgin saint, in a similar dress and pose, and therefore it was argued that it was impossible that a person could be shown in that uh same pose and dress and necessarily be pregnant. on the other hand, Saint Catherine of Alexandria was mystically married to Christ, and so therefore, um, it does actually make sense that they could, if not literally pregnant, perhaps a suggestion of pregnancy is intended.
[Music] there was a discovery in the archives in Florence, which is a letter from Mrs. Arnolfini's mother, and in this letter she mentions, and it's dated 1433, the year before this picture is dated, she mentions that her daughter Costanza had died. I decided that it might be possible to think of it another way, which is that this woman in the picture was actually portrayed posthumously. that is to say, that she's actually dead by the time the painting is is completed. and at first, it seems very far-fetched, but in fact, when looking at a lot of the details in the painting, I think that it's very convincing that this was in fact the case.
[Music] so I would argue that it's very likely Mrs. Arnolfini died in childbirth, and there are other reasons to think that behind her, over her right shoulder, you can see the back of a chair which has the image of Saint Margaret praying behind the dragon, which is her attribute. Saint Margaret was the patron saint of pregnant women.
the scenes around the convex mirror are illustrations of the Passion, which seems very interesting in terms of the division of Mr. Arnolfini and Mrs. Arnolfini, that is, the dead scenes on her side, the living scenes on his. similarly, if you look at the chandelier up above, there is again a contrast of the lit candle still on the left side where Arnolfini is, and on the right, his wife stands underneath a candle that's gone out. I would argue that in light of this idea that she, this is a posthumous image of Mrs. Arnolfini, certain aspects of the painting that were mysterious seem much more straightforward. so Mrs. Arnolfini may have died in childbirth, and Mr. Arnolfini may have chosen to memorialize her in this poignant masterpiece by Jan van Eyck.
[Music] Arnolfini presents his wife to us with that touching gesture of his, as if she was still alive. why does he do that? because I think the painting is trying to understand her death and the baby's death in intensely religious terms by comparing their sacrifice with the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ, crucified on the cross. up here in the mirror, right in the middle of the picture, the fruit in the window reminds us of those regrettable events in the Garden of Eden that brought death into the world and robbed us all of eternal life. and see these funny shoe patterns, they're called pattens. they're for wearing outdoors. you slip them over your other shoes. well, Mr. Arnolfini has discarded his, so very pointedly, despite what's happened to him, he has no plans to wander further. he's promising his fidelity to his wife and to his faith. and Van Eyck, because he was a genius, manages to indicate all this with oodles of clever symbolism, but he also captures the haunting self-absorption and all that repressed sadness and even anger in the face of Mr. Arnolfini.
there are a million stories in the world of art. this has been just one of them.