It has been argued that the only reason anyone ever imagines these little men in red turbans might be Van Eyck is because of another painting by him known as Man in Red Turban.6 Or at least that was its title until very recently when visual evidence was finally allowed to outweigh academic caution just a fraction and scholars relabelled it Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?).7 In fact, there is a faint long-nosed resemblance between this man and the courtier with his rod that has nothing to do with turbans; and turbans are in any case off the point.
Van Eyck stares piercingly out of the picture, a tight-lipped man with fine silver stubble. His look is shrewd, imperturbable, serious. The eyes are a little watery, as if strained by too much close looking, and there is a palpable melancholy to the picture. Look closer, as Van Eyck’s art irresistibly proposes, and you notice something else – that the eyes are not in equal focus. The left eye is painted in perfect register and so clearly that the Northern light from the window glints minutely in the wet of it – the world reflected; but the other is slightly blurred, you might say impressionistic. These eyes are trying to see themselves, have the look of trying to see themselves in some kind of mirror. ‘Jan Van Eyck Made Me’ is written below the image. Along the top runs the inscription ‘Als ich kan’ – ‘As I can’, and punningly ‘As Eyck can’.
Van Eyck painted the ‘Als ich kan’ motto on the frames of other portraits too but it is far more emphatically displayed here to create the illusion that it has been carved into the gilded wood itself. It also appears where he normally names the sitter. But more than that, its play upon the first and third person epitomizes the I-He grammar of self-portraiture to perfection. Here I am, gravely scrutinizing my face in the mirror, and the picture; there he is, the man in the painting.
I am here. He was here. ‘Jan Van Eyck fuit hic’ is written in an exquisite chancery hand on the back wall of The Arnolfini Portrait. Ever since Kilroy was here and everywhere in the twentieth century the phrase has epitomized graffiti, which is, in its elegant way, exactly how Van Eyck uses it.
Everyone knows the Arnolfini – the rich couple with the dog, the oranges, the mirror and the shoes, touching hands in an expensively decorated bedroom. But nobody knows quite what they are doing there, in a bedroom of all places, an intimacy unheard of in Flemish portraiture. This joining of hands, is it the moment of betrothal, the marriage itself, the party afterwards, or nothing to do with a wedding? The bed awaits with its heavy scarlet drapes, the dog hovers, the texture of its fur exquisitely summoned all the way from coarse to whisper-soft. Perhaps he is an emblem of fidelity; perhaps this is a merger between two Italian families trading in luxury goods, as lately suggested, but all interpretations are necessarily reductive for none can fully account for the strange complexities of the painting. Even if one knew precisely why Giovanni Arnolfini was raising his right hand as if to testify he would still be a peculiarly disturbing presence, with his reptilian mask and lashless eyes, dwarfed beneath a cauldron of a hat. He touches, but does not look at the woman. She struggles to hold up the copious yardage of a dress that nobody could possibly walk in. Behind them is that writing on the wall that makes so much of the historic moment, and beneath that is the legendary mirror in which Van Eyck is reflected (in blue), entering into the scene.
Jan Van Eyck was here. It is not strictly accurate in terms of tense, of course, for Van Eyck has to be here right now as he paints his story on the wall. He sends a message to the future about the past, but it is written in the present moment; the paradox is its own little joke, as for every Kilroy. But the mirror also tinkers with the tense of the picture. Without it, you would simply be looking at an image of the past, a time-stopped world of wooden shoes, abundant robes and a sign-language too archaic to decode. But things are still happening in the mirror, a man is on the verge of entering, life continues on our side – the painter’s side – of this room. For Van Eyck invented something else too, not just a new way of painting but the whole idea of an open-ended picture that extends into our world and vice versa. Just as his reflection passes over the threshold to enter the room where the Arnolfini stand, so he creates the illusion that we may accompany him there as well. The tiny self-portrait is the key to the door. Art need not be closed.
Detail of The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434 Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441)
The inscription in The Arnolfini Portrait announces the artist’s role as witness and narrator – I was here, this was the occasion – though the self-portrait says something more about the reality depicted. The liquid highlights in the eyes, the pucker of orange peel, the flecked coat of the dog, the embrasure of clear light, reflected again in the brass-framed mirror: the whole powerfully real illusion was contrived by Jan Van Eyck, transforming what he saw into what you now see here. He is there in the picture connecting our world to theirs, a pioneer breaking down frontiers.
As usual, the painter makes no spectacle of himself. Van Eyck’s self-portraits are conceivably the smallest in art, certainly the most discreet, yet their scale is in inverse ratio to their metaphysical range. The visible world appears to be outside us, viewed through the windows of the eyes, and yet it contains us all.
‘There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.’
G. K. Chesterton
Detail of The Adoration Of the Magi, 1475 Sandra Botticelli (c. 1445–1510)
It would be hard to think of a more unnerving stare in Renaissance art than that of Sandro Botticelli, a painter better known for his dreamy visions of peace and love than for undertones of menace and coercion. Botticelli looks back at you, what is more, from a scene that ought to be all hushed and hallowed joy, the arrival of the wise men at Christ’s nativity. But even without his presence there is a sense of threat, for the miraculous birth has taken place in a derelict outhouse of yawning rafters and broken masonry that looks on the brink of collapse.
Between the viewer and the Holy Family, hoisted high for maximum visibility, mills a large crowd showing very varying degrees of respect, all played by members and attendants of the Florentine Medici. Botticelli includes two of his current patrons, Lorenzo and Giuliano, but also Piero the Gouty and Cosimo the Elder, both of whom were already dead at the time of painting. At the far right of this hubbub, in which at least two of the posse seem more adoring of their bosses than the Christ child, stands the artist himself. Stock still, full length, perfectly self-contained, he is the only figure set apart from the scene, muffled in his mustard-yellow robes like an assassin in a crowd, a Banquo’s ghost of a presence apparently visible only to us. The face is sullen, disdainful, unrelentingly forceful, the eyes trained upon you with a stare as cold as Malcolm McDowell’s in the poster for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. A face, incidentally, that runs counter to the comfortable dog-and-owner theory of self-portraiture that artists tend to look right for their art – Van Gogh a fiery redhead with startling blue eyes, Rembrandt a rich ruin of a face – for it has no affinity with the sensuous rhythms of his work. The artist stands out not because he stands apart, but because of the look he gives the viewer. With a single glance, Botticelli turns the biblical scene into a confrontation.
Why is he here? What occasions his presence? Self-portraits often raise the question of their own existence. You might ask what could possibly justify the casting of the Medici as worshipful Magi, the rich miming the faithful, but this is obviously commemoration in the form of ostentatious prayer.