Arnolfini Portrait

Rare card · No. 40889

The Arnolfini Portrait (or The Arnolfini Wedding, The Arnolfini Marriage, the Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife, or other titles) is an oil painting on oak panel by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck, dated 1434 and now in the National Gallery, London. It is a full-length double portrait, believed to depict the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife, presumably in their residence at the Flemish city of Bruges. It is considered one of the most original and complex paintings in Western art, because of its beauty, complex iconography, geometric orthogonal perspective, and expansion of the picture space with the use of a mirror. According to Ernst Gombrich: In its own way it was as new and revolutionary as Donatello's or Masaccio's work in Italy. A simple corner of the real world had suddenly been fixed on to a panel as if by magic [...] For the first time in history the artist became the perfect eye-witness in the truest sense of the term. The portrait...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Jan van Eyck, Public domain