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Sexuality and Social Standing in Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Double Portrait*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Craig Harbison
Craig Harbison*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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Extract

In its Visual Acuity, the Arnolfini double portrait (fig. 1) is so beguiling that few have been able to resist its spell: "a simple corner of the real world has suddenly been fixed on to a panel as by magic." But in what ways can we speak of this portrait as a realistic image? How closely, for instance, does it portray a single moment or specific event in these people's lives? Was it meant to be viewed as a marriage document or contract? The Arnolfini double portrait is unique. It is the only fifteenth–century Northern panel to survive showing presumably identifiable contemporaries engaged in some sort of dialogue in a carefully rendered contemporary interior

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , Summer 1990 , pp. 249 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1990

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Footnotes

*

Colleagues and students have greatly aided me as this project progressed: Professors James Mundy and Mark Roskill helped me sharpen my thinking in the early stages; they as well as the following people, read or heard an earlier version of this study and made helpful comments: Robert Baldwin, Anne van Buren, Miriam Chrisman, Jane Goldsmith, Dana Goodgal, Sherrill Harbison, Ann Jones, Robert A. Koch, Marilyn Lavin, Gary Niswonger, Stephen Philbrick, Peter Stallybrass, Leo Steinberg, Margaret Sullivan, Charles Talbot, Richard Trexler, and Joel Upton. Of course, all errors of judgment or fact are my own. Iris Cheney, Julia Bailey, and W. L. Wegener gave bibliographic help, as did the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office (especially Edla Holm) at the University of Massachusetts. A graduate seminar at the University of Massachusetts in the spring of 1984 first listened to my ideas and then contributed many interesting ones of their own. All of them deserve my thanks: Michelle Alien, Christy Anderson, Maura Donohue, Catherine Egenberger, Hilary Fairbanks, Elizabeth Janus, and Karen Koehler. Julie Trudeau, another former graduate student at the university, first made helpful suggestions about the relationship of van Eyck and the court of Burgundy. Photographs were purchased with the help of a grant from the Research Council, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This article was accepted for publication in May, 1988. A final draft of the text was sent to the editor in September, 1989. Since that time two further interpretations of the Arnolfini painting have come to my attention. One by Linda Seidel, " 'Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait': Business as Usual?", appeared in Critical Inquiry 16 (1989): 55-86; to my mind, it repeats the anachronistic mistake of several authors by attributing specific documentary significance to the image. At the Historians of Netherlandish Art conference, Cleveland, 29 October, 1989, Margaret D. Carroll gave a talk entitled "Speculum Mercatorum: Jan van Eyck's Marriage of Arnolfini"; I have great sympathy with Carroll's reading of the multi-faceted nature of the image's meaning.

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