Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (1434)

Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (1434)

This article relates to The Original

In The Original by Nell Stevens, Grace Inderwick, who lives a privileged but dreary existence with her aunt in England at the turn of the 20th century, dreams of making an independent life for herself as an art forger. In her endeavors to do so, one of the paintings she copies is Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (1434). She views the work at the National Gallery before beginning her project, and finds it deeply affecting.

The painting is known for its photographic precision, as well as the mystery of the story behind it. The exact details of the portrait and what it depicts, in contrast to its sharply rendered visuals, are ambiguous. Is the man, purported to be Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini, really Arnolfini? A mirror hangs on the wall, and in it, rather than what would have been a true reflection of the artist at work, we see two figures entering the room. Grace observes, "the impression given by the scene in the mirror was of an interruption, of something that has not yet happened just beginning to happen, and the artist invisible, vanished from sight, like a copyist." What other details of the image might be fictionalized? Is the woman in the painting Arnolfini's wife? His fiancée? Is she pregnant, or is that just the way she's holding her gown? "[I]t seemed that she must be," Grace thinks, "and the more I looked the surer I felt, not convinced by the shape of her body so much as by her eyes, which looked past her husband rather than at him, and seemed so tired and wise that I could not believe there was anything she was ignorant about."

But who's to say, really? In a Guardian article, comedian Hannah Gadsby quips, "Not only did Van Eyck have a habit of painting women to look like they were with child even when they were without, but it was also fashionable at the time to look pregnant when you were not. Faking the harvest to attract the seed, so to speak."

Gadsby goes on to lambast art historian Erwin Panofsky's famous analysis of the Arnolfini portrait, in which he argued that the painting was not just a work of art but a legal document witnessing the marriage of Arnolfini and his wife Giovanna Cenami. But an actual legal document was later found that showed the couple's marriage took place in 1447, long after the portrait was painted and Van Eyck had died. "A man of his time," Gadsby writes of Panofsky, "he approached art from a fixed perspective – one that was only ever accessible to the white European elite of the male variety. To assume that a work of art has singular meaning is as arrogant as assuming that every person experiences the world in the same way as you."

At the time of viewing the painting, Grace has announced that she will marry a man who may be her cousin Charles, or who may be an imposter claiming to be Charles to inherit the family money. She feels pressured into this arrangement and desires freedom from it, in part because she is attracted to women and not to men; the man claiming to be Charles knows of her involvement with a woman but she is unclear on his expectations of their marriage. The Arnolfini portrait, therefore, in its portrayal of what appears to be a man and a woman who are at some stage of a traditional engagement or marriage but retain a mysterious aura, may seem to Grace to hold some hidden knowledge of heterosexual partnership, or of the possibilities that could lurk beneath the facade of it.

Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (1434), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Filed under Music and the Arts

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Original. It originally ran in July 2025 and has been updated for the July 2025 edition. Go to magazine.