Girl in a Green Gown by Carola Hicks

Author:Carola Hicks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446485903
Publisher: Random House

The Mirror

BEYOND THE WINDOW, in the sunny world outside, we can just make out a cherry tree in fruit, which suggests it is early summer. The artist has squeezed details of the tree into a space barely 5 millimetres wide, in the narrow angle between the central mullion and the brick outer frame of the window, turning them into a lively pattern of leaves and fruit, made sharp and clear by dozens of tiny brushstrokes. Placing something in the distance, beyond the neatly confined interior, was van Eyck’s way of challenging the beholder’s eye, making it refocus and master a different perspective.

He repeats this trick in a more dazzling way with the mirror on the back wall, a feature that has fascinated viewers down the ages. ‘Almost nothing is more11 wonderful than the mirror painted in the picture, in which you see whatever is represented as in a real mirror,’ wrote the Italian Bartolomeo Fazio, who eulogised van Eyck’s work within a generation of the master’s death. However, he was not referring to the mirror in the Arnolfini room but to a different example, in one of those titillating bathing scenes that were in such demand. This suggests that a mirror was one of van Eyck’s hallmarks, just the kind of classy touch a discriminating patron like Arnolfini would want included. Five hundred years after Fazio The Times asked, ‘The most notable mirrors12 in the wide wide world? The answer is easy enough … First the mirror in which are reflected the calm features of Velázquez’s Venus, and second – even more marvellous – the mirror hanging on the wall in the van Eyck Arnolfini portrait.’

The mirror is like a great eye in the centre of the work. It reflects the reverse of the painted images – the backs of the man and the woman – but supplies a new subject, the frontal view of two more people entering the room through a door in the opposite wall. This creates the most confusing sense of three-dimensionality, further compounded by the fact that the glass reveals more of the room than the ‘real’ painting does. It is truly a looking-glass world. The mirror is like a picture within a picture, and the ultimate stroke of van Eyck’s trickery is the introduction of two characters who only exist in their painted reflection, as if excluded from the ‘actual’ room they are apparently entering. By inviting the painting’s viewers to question the scope of their own vision, van Eyck was proving effortlessly that he was the master painter of the day.

The mirror carries even more meanings than the other aspects of the room. It was, of course, another status symbol, as rare a domestic item as window glass. Mirrors were uncommon, expensive and reserved for the elite: the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy had a mirror in their palace at Hesdin, while the duchess kept another in her chamber. Those few privileged owners were able to see their own faces – whereas ordinary people never could – and realise the impact of headdress or hairstyle, jewellery and clothes.

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