page_title: Arnolfini Portrait
section_title: Identity of subjects
hierarchical_section_title: Arnolfini Portrait / Identity of subjects
context_page_description: The Arnolfini Portrait is a 1434 oil painting on oak panel by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck. It forms a full-length double portrait, believed to depict the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife, presumably in their residence at the Flemish city of Bruges.
  It is considered one of the most original and complex paintings in Western art, because of its beauty, complex iconography, geometric orthogonal perspective, and expansion of the picture space with the use of a mirror. According to Ernst Gombrich "in its own way it was as new and revolutionary as Donatello's or Masaccio's work in Italy. A simple corner of the real world had suddenly been fixed on to a panel as if by magic ... For the first time in history the artist became the perfect eye-witness in the truest sense of the term". The portrait has been considered by Erwin Panofsky and some other art historians as a unique form of marriage contract, recorded as a painting. Signed and dated by van Eyck in 1434, it is, with the Ghent Altarpiece by the same artist and his brother Hubert, the oldest very famous panel painting to have been executed in oils rather than in tempera.
context_section_description: In their book published in 1857, Crowe and Cavalcaselle were the first to link the double portrait with the early 16th century inventories of Margaret of Austria. They suggested that the painting showed portraits of Giovanni [di Arrigo] Arnolfini and his wife. Four years later James Weale published a book in which he agreed with this analysis and identified Giovanni's wife as Jeanne (or Giovanna) Cenami. For the next century most art historians accepted that the painting was a double portrait of Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini and his wife Jeanne Cenami but a chance discovery in 1997 established that they were married in 1447, thirteen years after the date on the painting and six years after van Eyck's death.
  It is now believed that the subject is either Giovanni di Arrigo or his cousin, Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, and a wife of either one of them. This is either an undocumented first wife of Giovanni di Arrigo or a second wife of Giovanni di Nicolao, or, according to a recent proposal, Giovanni di Nicolao's first wife Costanza Trenta, who had died perhaps in childbirth by February 1433.  In the latter case, this would make the painting partly an unusual memorial portrait, showing one living and one dead person.  Details such as the snuffed candle above the woman, the scenes after Christ's death on her side of the background roundel, and the black garb of the man, support this view.  Both Giovanni di Arrigo and Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini were  Italian merchants, originally from Lucca, but resident in Bruges since at least 1419. The man in this painting  is the subject of a further portrait by van Eyck in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, leading to speculation he was a friend of the artist.
caption: Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
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