There are elements for which certain works of art generate special attention, prolonged in time. Symbols with a broad spectrum and a certain secrecy, together with a high level of formal perfection and beauty, are among them. That is why paintings like The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein continue to give rise to countless speculations, as does one with which it shares a location in the National Gallery in London: The Arnolfini Marriage by Jan Van Eyck, painted around 1434.
There is little biographical information about Van Eyck, although it is known that he was a protégé of Duke Felipe de Borgoña, at that time the most sophisticated court and one of the most prosperous in Europe. The double portrait of him -originally known as “Hernoul-le-Fin”- had as its first known owner Ambassador Diego de Guevara, who gave it to Margarita of Austria; it passed to the collection of MarÃa de HungrÃa and later to Felipe II of Spain; it remained in the royal collections until the War of Independence; it reappeared in Belgium in 1815 and since 1843 it has been in the National Gallery.
The Arnolfini marriage has generated numerous questions, which specialists in art and other disciplines have endeavored to answer. Who are the protagonists? Do your figures really correspond to a merchant of Italian origin and his wife, or are they other people? Why is their scale disproportionate to the room that welcomes them? Is she pregnant or is the thickness of her belly consistent with period clothing, as it appears in other portraits by the same artist and his colleagues? Does it constitute an apology for conjugal love, as has often been pointed out, or does it have different objectives? Why does the inscription at the top read “Jan Van Eyck was here”, and he did not “paint this picture”? Who are the two figures that appear on the lintel of the door, reflected in the mirror just as, in a larger dimension, the monarchs appeared reflected in that of the Velázquez Meninas? What does the dog at the feet of the couple symbolize and why is he not reflected in the mirror? And the stilts? And the red slippers? And the oranges on a sideboard? AND….?
In recent decades, different scholars have approached the work with a Holmesian spirit. Some have not been translated. In Le portrait de Van Eick (Hermann Editeurs, 1997) the medievalist Pierre-Michel Bertrand concludes that the portrait is not of the Arnolfini but of the painter himself and his wife Marguerite. I would not want a praise of marriage, but of motherhood; all allusions would revolve around the child on the way.
British art historian Carol Hicks has nearly finished her Girl in a Green Gown. The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini portrait, which she edited posthumously Chatto
Acantilado now publishes The Arnolfini affair by Jean-Philippe Postel, published in France in 2016. It offers the most daring and curious hypothesis. For Postel, a doctor by profession, the paleness of the woman, the disappearance of the dog in the mirror, the strange placement of the hands or a consumed candle point to a supernatural hypothesis.
Since this is an essay and not a crime novel, you will allow me to reveal the outcome. She would be the first wife of Van Eyck, who died in childbirth, to appear to the painter when he is going to have a child by his new wife -according to the arrangement of the furniture and other details-, to ask him -demand him?- not to I forgot her. She is a ghost. Hence his strange and alienated face.
Postel contributes speculation where the documentation ends and cannot be said to be entirely convincing. But, se non è vero, at least his is a rather suggestive fable.
