The Arnolfini Portrait, with Laura Cumming

Hello, everyone. Tom Holland here, and I am joined by the great Laura Cumming. And we are looking at painting in history, four paintings that reflect a particular period in history. We'll be looking at the history of the painting itself, the life of the artist, and teasing out the mysteries that shadow all four paintings. And today we are looking at the Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck, early fifteenth century. And here is a short extract from that episode and you can access the entire thing by going to the restis history.com and signing up to the club there. And it will be waiting for you. Enjoy. Hello everybody, and welcome to another series of bonuses for you, our beloved club members. And this time we're gonna be doing four episodes, each one on a famous painting, and we're going to be situating it in the context of the age, looking at what it's all about, who the painter was, and generally, with a lot of the paintings, there is a sense of mystery. There's a puzzle. And we have the perfect person to tease out the possible solutions to these puzzles, Because my guest today is the great Laura Cumming. She's the art critic of The Observer. She was on the show a while back talking about William Notman, the, Scottish Canadian photographer. And Laura, a lot of your books resolve around a kind of mystery and a puzzle, don't they? And, you kind of offer up solutions. And that's essentially what you're going to be doing today and in our next three episodes. So welcome back. Thank you. And what painting are we looking at today? We are looking at the first of our paintings, and it is the Arnolfini portrait, otherwise known as the Arnolfini Betrothal or the Arnolfini Marriage. And in my lifetime, it's been called all three. And that gives some idea of how often versions of the interpretation of this painting have changed. It's a very small painting. People think it's gonna be enormous because it's so famous. But in fact, it's it's not not big. I could about a foot and a half by two feet. It hangs in the National Gallery in London, where people go in droves to look at it. And I think it is for the National Gallery in London about as mysterious a painting as the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre. Not yet nicked, we noticed. And the the reason the painting I think is so famous is that it has a wild combination of amazing hyper realism. Jan van Eyck, the painter, is credited, possibly slightly exaggeration here, but he's credited with inventing oil paint. And he uses it to describe the shining surfaces and the exact proportions of every object in the world so brilliantly. And yet, despite all this hyper realism, the painting's a total riddle. I think it's the earliest riddle in art. And so we're going to talk about that. …