Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife

In a Bruges bedchamber a richly dressed couple - probably the Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife - join hands in a quiet, ceremonious moment. Jan van Eyck loads the room with detail that may be symbolic: a single lit candle, a little dog (often read as fidelity), shoes slipped off as if on holy ground, and a convex mirror on the back wall reflecting the whole room - including two visitors in the doorway, one perhaps the painter. Above it he signed, in flourishing script, 'Jan van Eyck was here,' like a witness. Scholars still debate whether the picture records a wedding, a betrothal, or simply a marriage's prosperity; what is certain is its revolution in oil-painted realism.