Wedding Portrait
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| Jan Van Eyck, Wedding Portrait, 1434 |
Distinctly Northern Renaissance, Jan Van Eyck's Wedding Portrait, or sometimes referred to as Arnolfini Portrait, is well known its enormous amount of symbolism. Though Wedding Portrait is still far from reaching the intensity of some of Brueghel's paintings, there's apparently more symbols than one can count with two hands.
However, my dirt with this painting, or perhaps the entire Wedding Portrait fandom is their interpretation of the objects inside the painting. (I sometimes have this issue with book symbolism, too.)
For example, let's start with the discarded shoes on the bottom left. According to the high and mighty artsy people, those pair of shoes drawn in the corner mean sanctity. Perhaps they were standing on holy ground. They were getting married. But what if the man tossed those shoes to the side because they're uncomfortable, not to mention unsightly? I mean, look at the acute angle shape of the slipper. It wouldn't be comfortable even if the shoe were made of downy feathers.
What about the dog in the bottom foreground? It can be understood as a symbol of fidelity and perhaps wealth (due to the rare breed of the dog). But I wonder, what if, the dog was just a beloved pet the couple wanted in the photo with them?
There’s also the hanging chandelier. Clearly, the chandelier wasn’t meant for light when the sun falls behind the mountains and darkness creeps up. It’s a symbol for the unity of a marriage because that’s what all chandeliers are created for.
But perhaps the interpretation that most irks me is that faded, slightly hidden orange on the windowsill in the back. Does it really represent the purity and innocence before Adam and Eve, or is it really just an orange the couple forgot to hide in a pantry because the painter came in too soon? I would rather prefer the latter. It’s an orange, and nothing but an orange. The Bible doesn’t even specify what fruit Eve picked in the first place, so naming that isolated orange in the background as a symbol of innocence before the fall of Adam and Eve stretches the interpretation by a few miles.
But despite the (in my opinion) wacky interpretations of the painting, I don't doubt the skill and cleverness behind the paintbrush. Van Eyck's oil painting is almost the epitome of a Northern Renaissance painting, with attention to detail, humanism, and lack of ornate decor. You see, a shoe can sometimes just be a shoe.
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