Jan van Eyck - The Arnolfini Portrait

In the 1400s, influencers couldn’t simply scout a location, arrange the perfect lighting and pull out their camera phone to snap dozens of pics testing different angles to find the perfect shot demonstrating how much better their curated life is than the lived experience of the rest of us plebeians. No back then, if someone wanted a picture to go along with their smug sense of superiority, they needed to hire a painter and in 1434, Jan van Eyck painted one of the greatest testaments to the enduring power of carefully constructing a casually posed portrait.

There is a lot of debate about the meaning and symbolism in the work, but a common interpretation is that this is a sort of wedding scene. The man is taking the hand of his wife. She is in the interior of the space near the bed reinforcing the gender roles of the time with the woman’s place being taking care of the home while he stands by the open window symbolizing his role in the outside world. The mirror in the background is said to represent the eye of God witnessing their union and the frame of the circular mirror has a dozen small scenes from the passion of Christ. The small dog could be seen as a symbol of fidelity, or some say simply it is another signifier of wealth as many wealthy women were given lap dogs as companions. The green of the dress symbolizes hope. Many speculate the hope of becoming a mother and while many viewers today believe the woman in the portrait appears to be pregnant, as we all know, one should never assume a woman is pregnant. Scholars say this was actually a fashionable look for the day. Clothing was very expensive. Their clothing was particularly expensive with fur lining etc. The idea back then was the more clothing, the more wealthy one must be, so no matter how ridiculous the silhouette may appear to contemporary audiences, in the 15th century, those strange bulges of fabric showed that this was a person who could afford to dress themselves. It was conspicuous consumption proving yet again that for as long as we have had a means to record what people looked like, those people have worked to dress themselves up and surround themselves with markers of their high status. While some see modern mass media as producing a more vain and shallow culture, I would argue van Eyck shows us people have always been feeding their egos and flaunting their privilege with material goods. At least now most people know better than to use animal fur to do it.

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