Above the prominently positioned mirror, there is an inscription minutely worked, yet free of any pedantry. The handwriting visibly lacks individuality, or to be more accurate, it seems as if the hand holding the quill were guided by a solid world creating similar expectations and effects in everyone. When people write like that, the writing has a singular task: the world about which something is being communicated means exactly the same to everyone, and therefore it is hard for anything at all to be written down that, potentially, could not become anyone’s experience or message. The mode of writing relates to a closed, confined culture that represents the universe for its bearers and so seems definitive. To cross its borders can seem a worthwhile idea only in the eyes of posterity. The sentence written there nevertheless creates uncertainty: “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic 1434,” it says—“Jan van Eyck was here in 1434.” But if the painter really did pass by there, where did he set down his mark? On the wall? Or on the painting depicting the wall? With the stroke of his pen, the painter hit on an insoluble dilemma, one highly reminiscent of the paradoxical situation of melancholics of the Renaissance. To what specifically does the writing refer? To the actual situation of the Arnolfinis’ espousal, or to the painting made to mark it? In all likelihood, to both: van Eyck was concerned both with the objective content and with the picture as an independent creation. If he had painted an allegory, the “role” of the writing would have been unambiguous, but the picture is quite obviously not allegorical, so this gesture reveals that the painter stumbled, even if unwittingly, onto one of the paradoxes of painting in the modern age: the nature of the relationship between the reality of the painting and so-called external reality. The handwriting, with its reference to a closed culture, confronts a way of looking at things that is fraught with tensions. Of course, glancing at the picture one would almost certainly spot the handwriting only later on. The most prominent subjects in the picture are the married couple; one starts to discover their surroundings — the room and its objects — only after the two people have become familiar to us: the objects become important primarily through their relationship to the couple. In the picture, of course, there are no primary or secondary factors: everything is equally important.
The painter has caught the moment of betrothal, placing it in a strictly secular, domestic environment. On the other hand, the intimate ardor has not been transformed into a worldly one, but — primarily by showing the faces and the gestures — he has preserved the inner enigma, which was always mediated by religiosity even if later it lost its religious aspect. The glances, the complexions, the hands, the covered-over hair: all are etherealized, and the painter chose the points that, like “sensory” bridges, always lead one to the personal in other persons, to their individuality. The persons of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenani have not lost their sensuality but, in retaining it, have been transfigured; the features continue to belong to flesh-and-blood persons, but their refinement lifts them out of the tangible world, like the figures of contemporary Italian portraits. One can see that they live in this world, but one also senses that it leaves them untouched. They are solitary people — inwardly, they have so little to do with the world that is home to them that their attachment to each other is also external. They do not exchange glances; indeed, their glances have no object: they both turn melancholically inward. Their refinement and selectness, however, do not prevent them from regarding the world as their own. What was inconceivable for refinement from the nineteenth century onward was still obvious for them: they were able to live in harmony with the surrounding world. Van Eyck accomplished that primarily by attuning various shades of sensuality to one another — and one may exceptionally disregard the iconographic significations of the individual elements. The path leads from the ethereal-unsensual sensuality of the two people through the chandelier, which is provided with just a single candle, to the red slippers, almost erotically red compared with the looks of the figures. Apart from the individual objects, the mass of colors, the refined interplay of red and green as well as brown, makes the created world almost sultry without becoming excessive. Everything in their surroundings evokes the atmosphere of a decent burgher home, and that tames the concentrated sensuality (aroused notably by the red furniture and the green and blue of the woman’s dress), which is transfigured, without losing any of its strength, in the persons of the two individuals. By creating a harmony of a refinement at home in a prosaic and ordinary setting that lends itself to being transfigured, van Eyck created a homogeneous world. This, however, forms a fragile unity and is prone to fall to pieces at any moment. The multiplicity of the world on display and the relatively large number of objects point to an arbitrariness that lurks in everything and to the fact that this world is not definitive: the fruits placed on the table and the windowsill will not stay like that for long; the scattered slippers were still on the feet a little while ago and will soon be worn again; the folds of the green dress will come down before long; more candles will be lit in the chandelier; the hands will touch things again, and the object of the glances will be more practical than inwardly felt. We only know all this because the painter has recorded an exceptional moment for our viewing. But he could not do away with the contradiction inherent in his subject: just as the window is cunningly opened so that we can both see out of it and yet cannot, and we are forced to notice that the room is not the sole existing space, so the objects in the room are not detachable from day-to-day experience. This painting, characteristically modern in its mode of portrayal, can no longer claim to create an all-exclusive and per se definitive universe of the type characteristic of medieval or early Renaissance paintings. Indeed, perspectival representation itself makes its appearance differently here than earlier: in the intimate space, the arbitrary position of the viewer (and the painter) becomes more obvious. They hardly need to move for everything to appear in another projection; the facial features and hands would be different, the pieces of furniture would be located in different places, the slippers would end up farther away. This problem was also present in the perspectival representations of the Uccello style, but it had not as yet emerged as a possibility: neither the subject matter of the pictures nor the relationship of a work of art to the “outside world” afforded the opportunity. Retreating ever further from God, man became both more careless and more exposed than he was in earlier times, falling into the trap (often not spotted even in retrospect) and making numerous Renaissance individuals melancholic. There arose a possibility for the insight that this world made distrustful all who wished to avail themselves of the autonomy on offer. In consequence of this melancholic bewilderment, the exclusivity of the given perspective becomes questionable in Jan van Eyck’s painting. At the same time, however, the balance created within the picture also becomes problematic. A duality too can be detected in this picture: on the one hand, a harmony of the sensual and the intellectual, of the prosaic and the refined has been realized, which is possible only in exceptional moments; on the other hand, the environment, the space in which this has come to pass, suggests the momentariness of this moment, its time-boundedness. Medieval painting, which was unaware of the paradox of spatial representation, had unlimited power over time; in exchange for the acquisition of space, however, it had to submit itself to time. And that imperceptibly corroded faith in the reliability of space.