The tie that binds:Arnolfini's Weddingand ideology

Abstract

In 1434 Jan van Eyck painted a now famous wedding portrait (Figure I). Two of the standard observations made about this painting involve the unusual nature of the artist's signature on the back wall, ‘Johannes de Eyck fuit hie, 1434’, and the mirror below that signature, which reflects not only the couple but two witnesses, one of whom is probably van Eyck himself. Exactly five hundred years later, in 1934, Erwin Panofsky published, in The Burlington Magazine, a seminal study of the painting. And five years before Panofsky's study, the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte completed the first version of a painting incorporating a conceit he would use numerous times throughout his career, a visual image of a pipe conjoined with a verbal inscription that seems to contradict that image.