The Arnolfini double portrait: a simple solution

Apollo, Sept, 2003 by Margaret L. Koster

The Arnolfini of Lucca, who spent their adult lives al the court of Burgundy, would have been very well aware of all this. As Huizinga reminds us, 'the history of culture has just as much to do with dreams of beauty and the illusions of a noble life as with population figures and statistics.' (50) A kind of tunnel vision may have affected interpretations of Van Eyck's Double portrait. Scholars have debated whether it is a portrait laden with Christian symbolism or something devoid of symbolism altogether, but rarely, if ever, have interpretations taken into account the courtly context of Bruges in 1434. 'The strict cultivation of the beautiful life in the form of a heroic ideal is the characteristic that ties French knightly culture after the twelfth century to the Renaissance.' (51) The forms of life assumed by the nobility were avidly imitated by those members of the third estate who could afford to do so. (52)

Later painters borrowed from the composition of the Double portrait, both for sacred and for secular subjects. These borrowings include an altarpiece wing panel in the Prado by a follower of Campin, and the Kansas City Holy Family by Petrus Christus (Fig. 6). In contrast to these images, manuscript illuminations by Loyset Liedet that depend on Van Fyek's portrait--both in terms of their composition and their details, are secular. (53) A painting on loan to Bonn from Bad Godesberg of 1470 was very closely modelled on the London panel--it shows a man and woman holding hands in an interior with a mirror on the wall behind them (Fig. 7). (54) This dependence is well known, but it has not been mentioned in this context that the picture in question has corpses painted on the reverse (Fig. 8). Other versions of the Eyckian original feature similarly overt references to death. Corpses are depicted on the reverse of a panel of c. 1470-80 by an anonymous Ulm painter (Figs. 10-11). (55) One striking example of a living sitter juxtaposed with a corpse is a diptych painted by the Basel Master of 1487, in which a young man in the left wing is paired with a decayed female cadaver in the right (Fig. 12).

[FIGURES 6-8, 10-12 OMITTED]

Double portraits (or images of an idealised couple) with a pair of cadaverous counterparts on the reverse began to appear in the mid 1450s. Essentially, these were an admonition to lead a virtuous life. The contrast between the peak of one's physical self (at a time such as marriage) and the deterioration of one's body after death contributed to this message. (57) These portraits are linked visually and symbolically to tombs representing the dead in the early stages of decomposition, (58) so-called transi tombs, which predate the Double portrait by a few decades and continued to be common for centuries to come. (59) The most common inscription on such tombs is a form of: 'I was like you, and you will be like me.' (60)

In his book on tomb sculpture, none other than Panofsky discussed an English tomb brass depicting a married couple (Fig. 9). Reporting that they are shown at the moment of their wedding, he finds this treatment both curious and provincial: