The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 4

The Merchant’s Mirror: The Arnolfini Portrait.

One of the most famous convex mirrors to appear in a surviving renaissance painting is the large one at the back of the Arnolfini couple in Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait. Interpretations of this painting, let alone its mirror, abound; but one interesting avenue of approach will be pursued here, namely the concept of the mirror as the “merchant’s mirror.”¹ According to Margaret Carroll, Van Eyck’s mirror should be read in the context of the preacher Bernardino of Siena’s lectures on how merchants and businessmen can accumulate wealth whilst avoiding damnation, a connection seemingly providing an interpretative key to the Arnolfini Portrait. This would make Arnolfini “Bernardino’s ideal type: the mirror of a just and wealthy merchant, pleasing to God and celebrated amongst men.”² Another way of linking the Arnolfini Portrait with mercantile culture would be the notarial signature of the painter which is thought to have been inspired by Loyset Liedet’s painting, Charles the Bold surprising David Aubert, Histoire de Charles Martel which shows the workshop of the calligrapher which includes a large cursive signature above a convex mirror.³ Within both images, it might be argued that the mirror functions as a notarial document since both contain a signature near a mirror, and the second has two figures in a mirror witnessing a contractual agreement, two witnesses needed to validate a marriage.⁴ In this connection, it may be significant that mirrors appear frequently in paintings of merchants and tradesmen, for example Petrus Christus’ St Eligius in His Workshop (1449) which shows the goldsmith in his shop and a mirror reflecting a smart young couple in the street outside. To take another example, there is Quentin Massys’s The Moneylender and his Wife (1514) which brings us back to the self-portrait as it shows the painter himself reflected in a large convex mirror silvered like the mirror in the Arnolfini Portrait.⁵

1What follows owes much to Margaret D. Carroll, “In the Name of God and Profit: Jan van Eyck’s Arnofini Portrait” in Representations, No. 44, (Autumn 1993), 96-132.

2Ibid, 96. Amusingly, long before his presidential days, Carroll reproduces a photograph of the Trumps with a similar handclasp as the Arnofini, two power couples of different epochs!

3Craig Harbison, “Sexuality and Social Standing in Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Double Portrait,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), 249-291, 277f.

4On turning the portrayal into a document, Alpers, The Art of Describing, 178-179.

5Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, 15.