Richard Aubrey:

Good question and a good answer.
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… in 1425 [Van Eyck] moved to Bruges and came to the attention of Philip the Good [Duke of Burgundy]. [Van Eycks] emergence as a collectable painter generally follows his appointment to Philip’s court… He served as court artist and diplomat, and was a senior member of the Tournai painters’ guild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_van_Eyck#Court_painter
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Van Eyck was one of the top painters of his time. So he wasn’t a starving artist. He had an income, a reputation, and the freedom to take oil painting to the limits. Which he did.

The Arnolfinis weren’t nobility but if you could afford to commission a van Eyck, you weren’t just getting a beautiful painting, you were buying some serious status.

‘Twas ever thus in the art world.

https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/08/mark-levin-joins-hugh-to-talk-about-his.html

https://x.com/ElephantSignal/status/1957596957133656262
crunchy irony, with peanut butter,
https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1957810716955508949

Good points. I wonder if Arnolfini noticed. If noticed, objected. None of the “details” seem to contradict the subject of marriage. But was he paying for extras he didn’t need? Perhaps that was a declaration of his own wealth as well.
van Eyck can do anything he wants with his brush and I can do anything I want with my purse.
Yeah, the reverse perspective in the mirror is hard to beat.

https://youtu.be/n6mBdpPYDDQ?si=Da4TlNoUR67akalE

There’s always an arms race in art. Clearly this portrait goes far beyond a marriage and the painter’s commission. I argue it’s also van Eyck’s challenge to his contemporaries: “Eat my dust.”

What pushed classical European painting to its heights was competition. Consider all the incredible detail in this painting especially the insanity of the convex mirror behind the couple. Van Eyck: “I can paint whatever you can, only from behind, in converse perspective, in a three-inch circle.”

That’s Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar behind his back or with his teeth.

And if van Eyck threw in a lot of fancy symbolism to make people wonder for centuries what he meant? All the better. James Joyce boasted that all the riddles, allusions, and devices in his writing would keep scholars arguing for centuries.

The painting is signed, inscribed and dated on the wall above the mirror: “Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434” (“Jan van Eyck was here 1434”). That’s not a simple signature. That’s a declaration.

That’s van Eyck as King Kong beating his chest.

A suggested film to include: Burnt by the Sun (Nikita Mikhalkov 1994): https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0111579/