VISUAL ART: VERA RYANreviews
Girl in a Green Gown: The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini PortraitBy Carola Hicks
Chatto &Windus, 256pp. £16.99
CAROLA HICKS begins her examination of the famous Arnolfini Portrait by introducing the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck as he enters the Burgundian court of Philip the Good in 1425. It was a time when court artists were important in presenting the image of the court, gathering information and displaying its resources. Van Eyck's recording of fortifications and his mappa mundiindicate his legendary capacity for accuracy and conceptual understanding of space, skills as important as his pioneering use of oil painting.
In 1428 Van Eyck was part of the duke’s embassy to Portugal, where he painted two portraits of the 31-year-old virgin infanta whom Philip was to marry. The negotiations took 14 months, allowing time for observation of the sunny south. The oranges are one of many exquisite still-life components in the Arnolfini Portrait that Van Eyck painted six years later. Although known in Bruges, the artist probably saw them growing in Portugal.
This book is very successful in giving insight into the ways that court life and a burgeoning urban culture may have influenced Van Eyck’s painting. Bruges was then a city of 40,000 people, and up to 700 ships entered its port each day. It was an era of sumptuary legislation: in 1439 Philip’s ally the duke of Savoy drew up a statute defining the 39 social ranks and their appropriate clothing. Niceties in the articulation of status in the small portrait of the Lucchese cloth merchant and his lady standing in a room in Bruges are engagingly described by Hicks.
At the core of Hicks’s book are fascinating accounts of individual owners of the Arnolfini Portrait until it was sold to the National Gallery in London in 1842 for 600 guineas. Nicely woven in are suggestions on how these owners might have felt about the portrait.
Although there is no certainty about the specific identity of the couple, it is agreed that the painting involves marriage in any of its varied states of enactment. This is not because of the splendidly hung bed in the room, as in 1434 its presence was de rigueur in a well-appointed reception room. Nor is it because the girl is pregnant, as a protruding stomach did not then necessarily suggest pregnancy. It is because the couple holding hands seem to consent to marriage, and the primacy of consent has defined European marriage since the 11th century.
Perhaps more discussion of iconic images of the marriage of Joseph and Mary, and of religious iconography in general, would have deepened Hicks’s fine readings of this priestless, secular portrait.
The capacity of a good work of art to mean different things to different people is well argued by Hicks. Did it inspire its owner, the childless, widowed Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, to think of her own marriages? Did the tiny carving on the chair of her namesake St Margaret, patron saint of childbirth, remind her of the child she had lost? Just as the court of her grandfather Philip the Good is well evoked, so too is the court of her brother Archduke Philip, heir to Burgundian and Habsburg dynasties.
The book is excellent on the ownership of the Van Eyck by two female regents of the Netherlands but less insightful on later Habsburg ownership. The parallels between Van Eyck and Velázquez as court painters are not explored. Both painters served masters not many years their senior at an almost intimate level, and while the Van Eyck panel painting of a merchant couple contrasts in scale with Velázquez's Las Meninas(1656), the latter painting of the family and servants of Philip IV is often seen as a meditation on the former.
However, the later influence of the Van Eyck on English painting is interestingly discussed. One of the strongest parts of Hicks’s fluent book is the writing on the travails of the Arnolfini Portrait in Napoleonic Spain. A sympathetic reading of the attitudes of King Joseph, Napoleon’s brother, to the looting of art works there, as well as brilliant use of the diaries of Col Hay, who probably acquired the portrait as Joseph fled Spain, make for intriguing reading.
The roles of critics and scholars in identifying the subjects of the portrait are ably narrated. Skilful use of contemporary sources is a feature throughout what is in many ways a work of synthesis.
Excellent accounts of the owners of Van Eyck’s masterpiece are interspersed with shorter chapters focusing on different aspects of the painting itself – furniture, fabrics, the dog – so that readers’ eyes do not stray from close observation of it.
The title of Hicks's book perhaps echoes the bestselling Girl with a Pearl Earring, but while it is as pacy as a good novel, the book is not a novel, and context more than characterisation is its strength. We do not particularly ponder the destiny of the girl from Lucca in her voluminous gown, dressed, we are told, as expensively but a little less fashionably than Arnolfini.
Hicks tells a truly fascinating story about image and ownership, based on diligent, well-digested research.
Vera Ryan teaches art history at CIT Crawford College of Art and Design, in Cork, and is the author of Movers & Shapers 3: Conversations in the Irish Art World
