The Arnolfini Portrait

Painted in Bruges in 1434 and signed boldly above the mirror (Johannes de Eyck fuit hic, "Jan van Eyck was here") this work arrived at a pivotal moment in van Eyck's career, when he was serving as court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and producing the masterworks that would define Early Netherlandish painting for centuries. The double portrait format was itself novel in Northern Europe, and van Eyck's decision to encode the interior with layered symbolism (the single candle evoking the presence of God, the mirror edged with scenes from the Passion, the dog suggesting fidelity) transformed a merchant commission into one of art history's most debated iconographic programs. The painting entered the Spanish royal collection and was later acquired by the National Gallery, London in 1842, where it has remained one of the most studied works in the Western canon; scholars including Erwin Panofsky famously argued it functioned as a legal document of marriage, a reading that has since been refined but never fully displaced.