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How Did We Miss This for 587 Years

art-y

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Everyone will tell you the secret of the Arnolfini Portrait is the mirror on the back wall. The convex glass, the ten tiny Passion scenes around its rim, the two men reflected in it standing exactly where you are standing. It isn't the mirror. A few years ago a computer scientist pointed an algorithm at the floor of this room, and found four things that could not be there by accident. For a hundred years this painting had been called a beautiful failure at geometry. It may be the opposite. It may be the fingerprint of an instrument Jan van Eyck built himself, half a century before Leonardo drew a simpler one, and that nobody has ever found.

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⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 - The Mirror Everyone Points At
01:04 - Jan van Eyck Was Here
02:14 - The Floor That Does Not Add Up
04:04 - Would This Man Get It Wrong?
05:38 - A Competition He Was Losing
07:29 - Four Points In A Line
10:30 - The Instrument Nobody Has Found

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📚 IF YOU WANT TO GO FURTHER

The research itself, free. Gilles Simon, "Jan van Eyck's Perspectival System Elucidated Through Computer Vision", 2021. Full preprint, no paywall: https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-0328... . He also wrote a plain-English version for a general audience, search The Conversation van Eyck optical device.

The underdrawing, also free. Rachel Billinge and Lorne Campbell, "The Infra-red Reflectograms of Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and his Wife", National Gallery Technical Bulletin volume 16, 1995. This is where the moved feet, the eight-sided mirror and the undrawn dog come from. The Gallery publishes it as a PDF.

Carola Hicks, "Girl in a Green Gown: The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait". A whole book about this one painting, written for people who are not art historians. Start here if you only read one.
https://amzn.to/4xC7v3I

Linda Seidel, "Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon". The serious one. Reads the painting as social record, legal document, object and fiction, all at once, and never pretends any single answer is settled.
https://amzn.to/4zMfigS

Craig Harbison, "Jan van Eyck: The Play of Realism". On what realism was actually for in the fifteenth century, which turns out not to be what we assume.
https://amzn.to/4i5CD6W

Till-Holger Borchert, "Van Eyck". Cheap, enormous reproductions. If you want to go hunting in the paint yourself, this is the one to have open on the table.
https://amzn.to/4qPN5la

David Hockney, "Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters". The other optical theory, and the one people keep asking me about. Hockney's mirror projects an image to trace. Simon's device has no projection at all. Both still argued over, and this is the better-written of the two arguments.
https://amzn.to/4qPMYpK

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It costs you nothing extra and it pays for the next one.

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Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976:
allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research.

20 Comments

@the-art-y Creator 1 month ago Pinned

If he really did build it, six hundred years is a long time for something that big to sit in plain sight. What else is still there, waiting for somebody to walk up with the right question?

@thor-952 2 weeks ago

As an aside, the woman is not pregnant, the couple never had a child. She is simply holding up the folds of her gown. This is a memorial painting, painted after her death.

@MrToryhere 4 weeks ago

David Hockney suggested that the Flemish artists of this period used concave mirrors to reflect an image which they then traced. Because of the small field of vision that the available mirrors gave, the artist would move the mirror, with the result that each thing in the picture would be seen straight on

@arthurswart4436 2 weeks ago

I recall this painting being a tribute to a dead wife. That is why only his side of the chandelier has a burning candle and all pictures on her side of the mirror are scenes where Christ is dead. The statue of the saint on the bed post is of a saint protecting women during delivery, the wife probably died while giving birth. There was something about the rings on their fingers as well, but I'm not sure what that was.

@amosluyk 3 weeks ago

Anyone interested in this should watch the documentary 'Tim's Vermeer'. If you're into this, you will absolutely love that :)

@Andy-o5f1b 3 weeks ago

This picture has never seemed right to me , but every time I go to the national gallery
I have to look at it it's puzzling.

@umberis 4 weeks ago

Part of me almost hopes they never find the device. There’s something more interesting about the same mystery turning up in five paintings and still not knowing exactly how Van Eyck did it.

@sba8710 3 weeks ago

In art history we learned that each object has meaning known to the people of the time that we may not know now. Like one burning candle representing the fragility and shortness of life.

@lindabenny4454 4 weeks ago

My best friend had to study this portrait for her A level back in the 1970's. I remember both of us studying it so hard as I always tried to help her with her art. Mostly by being her model ! It's sad that she drew me so many times, as did a lot of other A level candidates.
But I now have none of those. I wish I had kept a few. Over years of moving & having to get rid of things, they have all disappeared.

@pauldoherty5679 2 weeks ago

No house , ancient or modern would have ceiling beams and floor boards lined up . Floor joists would mirror their overall permitted distance on both floors but not the actual surface material . The floor boards are wider for a start and the gaps between the beams would most likely be a foot wide , meaning the painter wouldn’t purposely use the lower and upper surfaces to denote the perspective . If some kind of camera obscura was employed , the artist would go with what’s being projected upside onto their canvas to mark out but the convex mirror image would not projected itself and still lots of actual drawing and painting to be done to end up with such a beautifully rendered piece of art.

@rsvy91368 3 weeks ago

I read a composition about the Arnolfini portrait that spoke of the genealogical background of the two subjects. He travelled from the Netherlands region in the import trade. That's why the clothing was more for wealthier classes.

@37BopCity 3 weeks ago

Extremely interesting. But perspective is less of an issue for me than the question about how Van Eyck accomplished such incredibly fine detail throughout the painting. What were his tools and his colors and his method for creating such amazing complexity? Everywhere you look it's endlessly fascinating.

@11Kralle 2 weeks ago

I remember from my musicology studies the following: it was remarked more than often, that master artists in the late medieval and early modern period used to cultivate their professional secrets as such, thus aiming to keep alive he miraculous about their work. Publication of one's methods was some kind betrayal of actual trade secrets – they should be riddles for later generations. A universal genius like Leonardo da Vinci wasn't bothered too much with secrecy, but curious for the methods per se. Publication of an artists method might be counterproductive to being an artist.

@marksutton5540 4 weeks ago

I love this painting. I can't say I truly understand all you say, but I sense you love it too.

@helenamcginty4920 3 weeks ago (edited)

Back in the late 1960s in my pre degree year at my local art school in England, a fellow student, for her thesis, took copies of this painting to a junior school and showed it to 3 separate classes. Then asked them to draw it from memory.
The younger children drew the dog and the mirror. Only the older children showed any interest in the couple but still more in the dog, the mirror and the chandelier.
We forget that we used to see the world very differently.

@Grimarch 3 weeks ago

After all, it's art and everyone has their own style.

@JimAllder11 3 weeks ago

I can concede the initial sketch was managed with the help of such a process. But they're finding math the artist did not use or intend because they don't understand how these things are actually painted: in marathon sessions. And when the artist returned for another round of work, he simply altered his vanishing point based upon either the sun being in his eye, or over his shoulder. Both eccentricities in the process can be possible. Also, mirrors of such size were rare, but they did exist during the Renaissance era. You can simply google that.

@thepeanutbutterandjellyshow 4 weeks ago

The perspective in this painting has always pulled me in. It feels as if we’re standing right there in that small room with them. When I first saw it as a teenager, it gave me an uncanny feeling, almost otherworldly or futuristic and I remember wondering why everyone was crowded into such a tight space with the artist positioned only a few feet away.

I’m fascinated by the idea of using a strange device to create pieces that fit together almost perfectly. It adds a modern quality to the work, which is something I’ve always felt about this painting: it doesn’t seem as old as it actually is. The scientific method behind its creation gives it a futuristic edge, and maybe that’s why it has always carried that unusual, slightly eerie feeling for me.