The Long Disputed Meaning Of Van Eyck's Painting (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] [Music] if you want to find stolen paintings don't go looking in the houses of robbers and burglars go to a museum here at the national gallery in london for instance there's a very very famous painting that shouldn't really be here because to put it bluntly it was nicked [Music] the national gallery acquired the so-called arnolfini marriage in 1842 from a scottish soldier who'd fought in the peninsula war in spain before the peninsula war the painting belonged to the spanish royal family after the peninsula war it belonged to the scottish soldier you work it out [Music] this is war booty and if i were a member of the spanish royal family i'd be on the phone every day asking for it back because not only is this one of the world's most famous pictures it's also one of the most gloriously mysterious [Music] what exactly is it that yan van ike has painted here something meaningful is obviously going on but what can it be art historians have tied themselves into knots trying to unravel the mystery round and round and round they go there have been hundreds of interpretations but so successfully has this masterpiece of puzzlement confused its interpreters that the most fashionable theory currently doing the rounds is that there is no mystery to it that it's just the portrait of mr and mrs arnold feeny and that's it that's what it says here the national gallery's own catalogue no secret setup no mystery no hidden meaning but that has to be wrong the arnolfini marriage must have a hidden meaning the pictures packed with symbolism and frankly you'd have to be blind not to notice it look for instance at this fruit here on the windowsill it says in the catalogue that the fruit is only here to indicate that the man in the picture is wealthy he's a rich merchant and rich merchants flaunt their wealth by leaving oranges which were expensive scattered casually about the room what poppycock all you have to do to see that this fruit must have some deeper symbolic meaning is to look at other pictures by jan van ike look what's on the windowsill of this madonna and child from frankfurt is she trying to show how rich she is [Music] look at the window sill of the inc's hall madonna why would this virgin mary be flaunting her wealth she isn't in vanites madonnas the fruit arranged so pointedly on the windowsill is a deliberate reminder of those notorious biblical events in the garden of eden that led to us being thrown out of paradise when adam took a bite out of the fruit being proffered to him by eve he committed the first sin and ensured the fall of man the fruit on the windowsills of vanik's madonnas reminds us of the consequences of our inability to resist temptation [Music] there's also a tree full of cherries visible through the window of the arnolfini's room and that isn't accidental either cherries were the traditional fruits of paradise they represented what we've lost what we could have had that's why the infant jesus is brandishing handfuls of cherries at us enthusiastically in the recently rediscovered madonna of the cherries by use van cleave the baby jesus has come down to earth to atone for our sins by dying for us and because of his ultimate sacrifice it'll be cherries all round for us again in heaven my point is that these cherries in the arnold feeney's garden and the fruit arranged so pointedly on the arnold finney's windowsill is there for a reason everything in this busy painting is there for a reason so let's be braver than the cataloguers of the national gallery let's take the difficult path not the easy one and have another go at cracking the code of the arnolfini marriage not much is known about the painter jan van ike we know that he worked for the dukes of burgundy in the 1420s travelled here and there and ended up in bruges as the city's greatest artist bruce today is the premier tourist destination in belgium and one of the best preserved medieval cities in europe but in van ike's time here the 1430s this delightfully preserved chocolate box town was the most important trading port in northern europe bruges was international busy and very very rich [Music] in the 1430s bruges must have been a very cosmopolitan place goods were transported from all over europe and uh found their way here from the baltic region and further out east came for instance furs and all sorts of animal skins from the mediterranean came things like spices exotic foods but also textile and textile was the main business of bruges among all these precious stuffs being exported from bruges all around europe perhaps the most valuable of all in the long run was oil paints which was said to have been invented here by van ike himself it wasn't true of course all painting developed gradually in various places but it is true that van ike was the first great master of the new medium and this made him internationally famous [Music] it's said that this is his self-portrait and i believe it this is a man who knows what he wants [Music] the thing about oil paints is that they could achieve amazingly convincing illusionistic effects painters could paint things with them that looked miraculously real and no one was better at this than jan van ike one of the reasons this stubbornly mysterious picture has proved so enduringly fascinating is because van ike involves you in the action so cunningly at the front of the picture the mysterious couple seem to be greeting you as if you've just entered the room and they've been waiting for you at the back of the picture the famous wall mirror so perfectly painted not only shows the back of the couple as you'd expect but also two more figures entering the room it's been said that the first of these is van ike himself but surely it must also represent whoever's looking at the picture whoever's just stepped into the room in other words you [Music] we can confidently identify the two people in the painting as mr and mrs arnold feeney their names appear in a couple of early documents misspelt but still recognizable the arnold feeney were a family of italian merchants from lucca in tuscany who settled in bruges and traded in precious materials fabrics silks and gold van ike painted the distinctive man in the picture twice and for a long time he was thought to be giovanni di arrigo arnolfini but recent research has suggested it may actually have been his cousin giovanni de nicolau arnolfini who arrived in bruges in 1419. we know that this giovanni de nicolau was married we also know that his wife died [Music] giovanni was conspicuously prosperous and in bruges in the 1430s a huge proportion of a man's wealth was tied up in his clothes well he's wearing a fairlined velvet garment at the time as a hulk and it seems to be made of purple crimson velvet which would make it extraordinarily expensive but her dress the white fur if indeed as has been suspected that the fur is the fart of the squirrel then it's only the belly fur and you're talking literally hundreds if not thousands of animals going into one of those gowns alone and they were environmental disaster areas from our point of view and by the end of the 15th century the fur trade in europe seems to more or less have wiped out the local wildlife and they were very lucky to find the new world to go and exploit so the arnold feeneys are dressed up to the nines in their finest finery why would that be it was an art historian called erwin panovsky who came up with a theory in the 1930s that what van ike is actually showing us is the arnold feeney's marriage panosky claimed that van ike himself and the other chap you see reflected miraculously in the mirror were the two witnesses at the wedding and that the picture was actually intended as a legal document which is why it sports that huge rumpold of the bayley signature at its center jan van ike was here [Music] unfortunately to arrive at this fabulous theory panovsky needed to twist around some of the evidence and in a couple of instances actually make stuff up and i reckon that today's fashion for insisting that the painting is nothing more than a portrait of a rich flemish merchant and his wife is an embarrassed reaction by modern art historians to panovsky's creative tinkering with the facts but in dismissing all of panovsky's theories about the arnolfini marriage are we perhaps chucking out the baby with the bathwater indeed isn't the issue of the baby the first thing that needs to be considered here and don't tell me that there isn't a [Music] baby [Music] it says here that mrs arnold femi isn't pregnant it says here that this lovely bulge in her stomach is just the way her dress was cut the fashion of the times well i don't buy that and i don't believe that anyone looking at her with genuinely open eyes can miss this protective gesture of hers she's pregnant all right and this pregnancy is the key to the picture's meaning [Music] pregnancy is such a critical and ubiquitous human condition that you'd have expected art to be packed with images of pregnant women after all what could be a more important family event to celebrate and record than the expected arrival of a new baby and indeed there are lots of pregnant women in art rather amazingly however they tend to get overlooked [Music] i don't think i've puzzled over any picture as much as i've puzzled over the so-called arnold feeney marriage it's a maddening thing it sends you all over the place looking for clues and one day by chance it sent me here to the huge and grand metropolitan museum in new york i was walking through this room and i saw this you want evidence of pregnancy this is evidence of pregnancy it's by us van cleave who worked in antwerp so close to bruges this is vancleave's annunciation the angel gabriel has come to tell mary that she's about to become the mother of jesus christ what a big moment isn't this space familiar isn't the bed familiar aren't those candles familiar isn't the window familiar isn't the mood familiar this enunciation bear such an obvious and tangible resemblance to the honor feeney marriage that it might almost be the same setup you encounter the same arrangement in other heartfelt enunciations by artists who followed van ike a similar room a similar bed a similar atmosphere of a proclaimed baby [Music] now of course the iron ore feeling marriage doesn't show the angel gabriel coming down to the virgin mary and telling her she's about to have jesus but look at this it's just too similar to be a coincidence van ike's masterpiece is trying to plunge us into atmospheres exactly like these the warm and holy atmospheres of an impending birth so i've come up with a blunt and honest and no-nonsense title for van ike's oh-so-complicated masterpiece let's get to the point here we should call this the arnold feeney pregnancy [Music] this is a selection of portraits by marcus garrett's the younger who worked in england in the late 1500s but whose father was an immigrant from bruges it's only recently been noticed that all the women in these portraits are pregnant why was marcus garrett's the younger commissioned to paint all these pregnant women because birth in garrett's day was an event brimming over with fatal significance pregnancy was something not only to be celebrated but also to be feared there was a perception that the mortality rate in childbirth was much higher and women approached childbirth some with a lot of anxiety you know you would it would be a period pregnancy would be a period in which you would do spiritual exercises you would be thinking about the possible strong possibility of dying in childbirth so it made me think that that might be an aspect of the of the portraits if the woman died in childbirth there would be a record an image of her it would take its place in the family portrait gallery thus life and death are intertwined in the pregnancy portraits of marcus garrett's as they must somehow be intertwined in the arnold feeny marriage a brave free-thinking art historian thinks she's found the answer many people challenge the suggestion that the woman is actually pregnant because of a painting by the nike which showed saint catherine of alexandria who's obviously a virgin saint in a similar dress and pose and therefore it was argued that it was impossible that a person could be shown in that uh same pose and dress and necessarily be pregnant on the other hand saint catherine of alexandria was mystically married to christ and so therefore um it does actually make sense that they could if not literally pregnant perhaps a suggestion of pregnancy is intended [Music] there was a discovery in the archives in florence which is a letter from mrs arnolfini's mother and in this letter she mentions and it's dated 1433 the year before this picture is dated she mentions that her daughter costanza had died i decided that it might be possible to think of it another way which is that this woman in the picture was actually portrayed posthumously that is to say that she's actually dead by the time the painting is is completed and at first it seems very far-fetched but in fact when looking at a lot of the details in the painting i think that it's very convincing that this was in fact the case [Music] so i would argue that it's very likely mrs arnolfini died in childbirth and there are other reasons to think that behind her over her right shoulder you can see the back of a chair which has the image of a saint margaret praying behind the dragon which is her attribute st margaret was the patron saint of pregnant women [Music] the scenes around the convex mirror are illustrations of the passion which seems very interesting in terms of the division of mr onofina and mrs arnolfini that is the dead scenes on her side the living scenes on his similarly if you look at the chandelier up above there is again a contrast of the lit candle still on the left side where on arnolfini is and on the right his wife stands underneath a candle that's gone out i would argue that in light of this idea that she this is a posthumous image of mrs arnolfini certain aspects of the painting that were mysterious seem much more straightforward so mrs arnolfini may have died in childbirth and mr arnold feeney may have chosen to memorialize her in this poignant masterpiece by jan van eyck [Music] arnolfini presents his wife to us with that touching gesture of his as if she was still alive why does he do that because i think the painting is trying to understand her death and the baby's death in intensely religious terms by comparing their sacrifice with the ultimate sacrifice of jesus christ crucified on the cross up here in the mirror right in the middle of the picture the fruit in the window reminds us of those regrettable events in the garden of eden that brought death into the world and robbed us all of eternal life and see these funny shoes patterns they're called they're for wearing outdoors you slip them over your other shoes well mr arnold feeney has discarded his so very pointedly despite what's happened to him he has no plans to wander further he's promising his fidelity to his wife and to his faith and van ike because he was a genius manages to indicate all this with oodles of clever symbolism but he also captures the haunting self-absorption and all that repressed sadness and even anger in the face of mr arnold feeney [Music] there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them

Channel: Perspective

Views: 73,708

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, jan van eyck, art history, van eyck, arnolfini portrait, the arnolfini portrait, arnolfini wedding, northern renaissance, early renaissance, reflections and van eyck, medieval art, national gallery reflections, fine art, jan van eyck documentary, waldemar januszczak, waldemar januszczak documentary, waldemar, art history documentary

Id: iZNvYvxetoo

Length: 23min 14sec (1394 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020