CRAIG HARBISON
The more you look at the painting, the more you realise how calculated it is - the whole central, what I think of is a kind of magical circle, of the composition. The way the arms fold around a series of objects becomes incredibly calculated composed, charged by the artist.

Jan Van Eyck was here in the sense that he is the storyteller. He is the manipulator of reality. It's only by Van Eyck's art that we're there. And he wants us to remember that.

NARRATOR
But what story is Van Eyck telling? If the man took a step sideways his hat would be knocked off by the chandelier. And if the woman wanted to look at her reflection she would have to bend down to a mirror which is far too low.

But if the painting isn't meant to be a direct reproduction of reality, then what is it?

Who are these people? Why did the artist paint them in such a unique way? And how did the lives of all three overlap in the world of Renaissance Europe?

To get inside the painting CRAIG HARBISON travelled to Bruges where the fifteenth century can still be sensed in streets that have remained almost unchanged since the days of Van Eyck.

CRAIG HARBISON
When Van Eyck painted this painting, he was living in Bruges, the most important trading centre of Northern Europe in the fifteenth century - a centre which had various foreign residents, diplomats, traders, merchants, especially Italians. There was a large Italian colony in Bruges.

And we know that Van Eyck had some contact with these Italians as well as with other middle class functionaries, bureaucrats, courtiers. He was a court painter for the Duke of Burgundy at the same time.

So when we look at this painting, what we see is not actually nobility, not aristocracy but something of the middle class or, upper middle class. The merchant class.

EVELYN WELCH
Most art in this period is produced on commission. The Buyer if you like finds the artist through a variety of means and comes with a set of specifications. I want to look like X,Y and Z. I want the following saints, etc. in my image. And usually some sort of legal document might be drawn up to make sure that the artist provides specifically what the patron required.

With this picture, we have no contract, we have no document, which actually tells us what the relationship is between the person ordering it. And the person providing it.

NARRATOR
But one early record was known - a description written in the early sixteenth century. And there was a suggestion of an original owner.

CRAIG HARBISON
The first reference that we have to this painting, about seventy-five years after it was created, gives the name of the man in the work as Arnolfini.

The Arnolfini family was an incredibly important merchant trading family from Luca. And the most successful, the most powerful member of that family was a man by the name of Giovanni Arnolfini who came here in his youth, and then lived all of his life - almost sixty years in Bruges - became fabulously wealthy.

He traded in costly fabrics, tapestries, precious objects of all sorts that would have been available in this court - that would have been for sale throughout the city.

NARRATOR
This is where Giovanni Arnolfini plied his trade. In the courtyard of the old cloth market in Bruges he would have competed with other merchants as, day by day, he made his fortune.

CRAIG HARBISON
More than fifteen nations were represented in Bruges during this period - Russia, the Orient, Spain, Portugal. Precious materials, fruits, spices, herbs of all sorts came into the port. At one point in the mid-fifteenth century they reported more than a hundred and fifty large galleons docked in the port of Bruges.

Arnolfini represents for us the birth of a new kind of international trader who within a short period of time - a decade or so - can go from relative insignificance to powerful enough to buy paintings, to buy goods, from all over the world in fact at that time.

NARRATOR
So here we see Giovanni Arnolfini - a self-made man, a mobile European, a renaissance high flyer. And with him his wife, Giovanna Cenami, a follower of fashion, comfortably dressed in lace and jewels, owner of a fine pair of slippers and an expensive eastern rug.

But this is more than a simple portrait of a rich man in Bruges who could afford to commission a super artist from the court.

CRAIG HARBISON
Feeling that we can put a name on the man, that we can call him Giovanni Arnolfini is however, just scratching the surface - just beginning to look carefully at the painting.

Because once you feel that you know who is there. Then you want to know why they're there. What they're doing? Why all these other objects have been brought together in this room? In this way? Why this web of details that weaves back and forth across the painting up and down? Everything seems then to come alive and to ask a question to say: what is going on?

NARRATOR
For hundreds of years the objects in the painting had been described in terms of Van Eyck's extraordinary ability. In short he was showing off, portraying as many different materials as he could - from brass to bees-wax, from floorboards to fur.

But in 1934 a German émigré called Erwin Panofsky declared that he had analysed the painting and discovered a secret.

CRAIG HARBISON
Panofsky didn't just see this painting as a portrait of a married couple. He saw it as a marriage certificate. Jan Van Eyck, signed it above the mirror: "Jan Van Eyck was here fourteen thirty-four", in very, as Panofsky said, flourishing legal script. It looks like a document. Like there's some sort of witnessing of this event

And what he did then was to find in the painting details which reinforced this, sort of quasi-legal statement that he felt the painting was making.

Two people are coming in to the room reflected in the mirror. These are then the witnesses to this union, to this marriage. A single candle burns in the chandelier, the all seeing eye of God. The whole painting then becomes a sort of symphony of symbols, which re-enforce the sacramental, the serious solemn sacramental nature of this union. And the particular moment at which it is, I would say almost blessed both by God and by man.

NARRATOR
Panofsky saw the signature and mirror as evidence of Van Eyck's role as witness to a ceremony - a secret marriage taking place in a private house.

By the 1950s he'd refined his ideas into a detailed theory, where the same techniques could be used to decode any Medieval or Renaissance painting. Art history had entered a new age of objectivity, and scientific method.

For Craig Harbison, growing up in the 1960s, the lure of Panofsky was irresistible.

In 1966 he went to Princeton to study at one of the world's leading art history departments where he would be taught by Panofsky himself.

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Content last updated: 24/03/2005

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