The Arnolfini Portrait

Oil on panel by Jan van Eyck, painted in 1434, 82 × 60 cm, kept at the National Gallery in London. It probably shows the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini with a woman in a room in Bruges. For a long time it was read as a wedding ceremony, though the identity of the couple and the exact purpose of the portrait are still argued over. The candle, the oranges, the clogs, the dog and the mirror have all been given endless symbolic readings.

A bridge card between Gothic and Renaissance. It is Gothic in its Flemish precision, the solemn stillness, the slightly elongated proportions and the possible symbolic weight of every object. It announces the Renaissance by making two ordinary people and their house the subject: the light, the textures, and a mirror that reflects even whoever walks in through the door. Italian mathematical perspective is not there yet. The interest in ordinary people and their things already is.