The Arnolfini Marriage Critique

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can believe it, and I arrived on the same day at Zaventem airport in Brussels Belgium at around 9.00pm. (You can get the best rates on www.geographia.com--check them out! The flight cost around $700 and for meals and lodging it cost me around $250.
Upon my arrival, the weather was warm but soggy. I checked into the hotel, bought an umbrella, and begin my artistic pilgrimage.
I was particularly interested in this piece not because Jan Van Eyck was the most famous and innovative Flemish painter of the 15th century but because he is thought to have come from the village of Maaseyk in Limburg-and I have always been very fond of Limburg cheese. However, no record of the artist's birth date survives. It is believed to have been about 1390. His career, though, is well documented. He was employed (1422-1424) at the court of John Bavaria, at The Hague. In 1425 he was made court painter to Duke Phillip the Good of Burgundy. (As opposed to Duke Phillip the Bad, I wonder) Van Eyck ...

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his wife and beyond then, two other figures, one man in a red turban who is probably the artist himself. The bride's green dress, at traditional color for weddings was meant to suggest her natural fertility. Her swelling stomach was a convention of female beauty at the time, not that she was pregnant during the time of the marriage. The groom's removal of his shoes represents the ground of Holy Union and the dog is associated with faithfulness and love. Van Eyck's Latin signature in the Gothic calligraphy used for legal documents reads 'Jan Van Eyck was present' and has been interpreted by some as an indication that the artist himself was present and further adds to the sense of the work's ...

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