The Arnolfini double portrait: a simple solution

Apollo, Sept, 2003 by Margaret L. Koster

A visitor from Leipzig in 1599, Jacob Quelviz, saw the picture in the Spanish royal collection and described it as follows: 'an image where a young man and a young woman are joining hands as if they are promising future marriage: there is much writing and also this: Promissas fallito quid enim promittere laedit/Pollicitis diues quilibet esse potest.' (11) The Latin quotation is from Ovid's Ars amatoria, and this document represents the earliest known reference to an inscription including these lines on the now lost frame. Nevertheless, the possibility that the couplet, as well as the frame itself, had always been part of Van Eyck's picture should hot be ruled out.

An inventory from about 1700 of paintings belonging to King Charles II of Spain gives the only other reference to the inscription. This entry demonstrates the way in which a text written on a frame can actually increase confusion regarding a work's subject-matter: 'a picture on panel with two doors that close with its wooden frame gilded with unburnished gold, some verses from Ovid written on the frame of the picture, which is of a pregnant German woman dressed in green giving her hand to a youth and it appears that they are getting married by night and the verses declare how they are deceiving each other and the doors are of wood painted with marbling, valued at 16 doubloons.' (12)

An inventory from 1794 offers little in terms of the subject of the picture, but reiterates a common misconception from Vasari concerning the painter's technical originality: 'one vara high by three quarters of a vara wide, a man and a woman holding hands, Juan de Encinas, inventor of off painting, 6000 reals.' (13) During the Peninsular War, Van Eyck's painting was transferred to England, before entering the collection of the National Gallery in 1842. (14)

The frame with the Ovidian inscription was lost at some time between 1700 and 1842. Most extant portraits by Jan van Eyck include some kind of identifying inscription on the frame, often featuring the sitter's name, painted illusionistically as if chiselled into stone or carved into wood (Fig. 2, 3 and 4). In the case of the Double portrait, the inventories eventually stopped mentioning the names of the persons depicted--either because the sitters had passed out of memory and their inscribed names were not considered worth mentioning, or because there was no inscription by the time a given inventory was made. Perhaps the names were cleverly encoded, as on Van Eyck's Portrait of Jan de Leeuw, in which the date is represented in the form of a chronogram (Fig. 3).

[FIGURES 2-4 OMITTED]

The first two inventories do, however, state the identity of the man depicted. The name 'Hernoul le Fin', mentioned in Margaret of Austria's inventory, depended either on an inscription or on documentation from Don Diego. (15) Presumably a discerning former owner would have left any inscription on the frame, especially one painted by a master of Van Eyck's prestige. Edwin Hall claims that the different vernacular spellings of the surname demonstrate that the name's appearance in the inventories depends ultimately on oral--rather than written--history (as we have seen, the 1523-24 inventory calls him 'Arnoult Fin' and that of 1516 'Hernoul le Fin'). (16) However, Hall fails to mention that the painter's name is translated into the vernacular in some inventories as well ('done by Juanes de Hec, in the year 1434'; 'Juan de Encinas, inventor of oil painting'), despite his signature's prominent position in the middle of the painting itself ('Johannes de Eyck fuit hic 1434'). Furthermore, the 1516 inventory reads: 'a large picture which is called Hernoul le Fin with his wife in a chamber'. If it was 'called' something, then there was likely in be an inscription on the frame; assigning titles was not common in this period and seem most likely in have been derived from words inscribed by the painter himself.