Tea with the Arnolfini Family

There is something magical about the portrait of the Arnolfini family. It's impossible not to stare at it, not to look at the two people who are its subject, and at the richness of detail surrounding them. I first experienced this feeling quite some time ago, in black and white reproductions, and then in colour ones. 

But nothing prepared me for the face-to-face meeting with the two Arnolfinis, in a smaller, almost intimate room at the National Gallery in London. First of all, I always thought the painting would be quite big, in any case bigger than its (approx) 80 x 60 cm. The depth of detail, probably because of the size, is even richer in real life than in reproductions. It stands surrounded by other masterpieces of the Flemish school, an ethereal presence which is, in the same time, very much of this earth, showing a couple in their house, surrounded by their expensive possessions. 

Even with so many studies written from the mid-19th century on, the meaning of this painting is a mystery. Does it show a civil wedding ceremony? Is the woman pregnant? Does the painting really show Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife Giovanna Cenami? 

One of the interpretations I enjoyed is that brought by Erwin Panofsky in 1934 in a study published in Burlington Magazine (later on included in the volume Early Netherlandish Painting - which is sadly out of print in English but available in French). Panofsky argued that the painting represents a visual marriage contract. In those days, the presence of a sacerdote to legalise the union was not yet compulsory, and there existed a less formal civil ceremony that did not involve the signing of a contract but the utterance of a formula and the joining of hands. However, it seems that people who married this way, and especially those with properties and fortunes, were open to the threat of legal action from dissatisfied family members, especially if any of the parents objected to the match. As such, Panofsky saw the painting both a very expensive status symbol and a countersigned document, certified by the inscription "Johannes de Eyck fuit hic 1434" (Jan van Eyck was here). 

A longer analysis, informed not only by a profound love for the painting but also by thorough learning and the advances in research and conservation technology, is provided by Carola Hicks's Girl in the Green Gown. Van Eyck's work and the context in which it appeared are analysed in depth, from the use of colours and the economic life of 15th century Bruges, to the meaning of objects, as well as an overview of the fashions and mores of the Burgundian court. Carola Hicks also traced the most probable road travelled by the painting during the centuries, from Bruges to Spain and from Spain to London, surviving perilous sea travel in the 16th century and travels by coach and cart during the Napoleonic Wars. And another journey by sea to England in the baggage of a Scottish soldier, Colonel James Hay, who sold it to the National Gallery in 1842. 

On the advice of a good friend, I bought Ciaran Carson's Shamrock Tea, which is connected to the Arnolfini portrait in mysterious ways. I have just begun reading it, but I already like it well. The writer - also a very appreciated Irish poet - is very inventive, putting together short colour-coded stories that veer between memories, the lives of the saints and reality-bending experiences. The synopsis on the back of my second-hand paperback edition states that "Shamrock Tea, the magical substance that allows people to experience the world with visionary clarity, can only be found by passing through the great van Eyck painting into another world..." Curiouser and curiouser, as a character in the book says.

What Can be Learned from Books

You may say that from books you can learn compassion, love, hate, justice, economics and many, many other things. And you would be right: all that would be true. 

I like books from which you can learn something. I like books that teach without preaching, that do not drum learning into your head, nor have the express desire to do so, and that do not give out strict recipes for learning. 

Every story has the power to teach, but what it teaches is down both to the author and the reader. Catechism is good for getting right the shape of things, but not so for their meaning. When I was a kid in school, there was this phrase which was used with liberality by our teachers:  What did the author want to say? (Ce-a vrut să spună autorul?). Of course, it was the teachers who gave you the right answer right away - as with any cathechism - telling  you exactly what it was that the poor man (generally a poet) had wanted to say. And we learned all that by heart, so when we had to write term papers we would then lay down on paper the words of our teachers. But those words were theirs only seldon, having generally come from big books of commentaries and literary analysis. 

Poet X might have meant to wax lyrical according to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, but the commentators who had became authorities in the field of poetry had decided the precise meaning of his every comma and every metaphor. 

I too learned these things, that was the way we were taught. But as I grew up and started reading and judging things on my own, I discovered that some of the hallowed classics had been explained to death by those who wanted to fix their meanings in a mould. I also noticed that some interpretations of, say, 100 years, or 40 years ago had become a law onto themselves, and in some cases they were defended by followers who were as fierce as Cerberus. And if it were only about this, things would still be right. But what if the interpretations that had been dictated by injust, illiberal, anti-intellectual, political reasons? What if these have been handed down the generations, to this very day, making many youngsters sound like Stalin's own politruks, reciting the same set text they parents had learnt in school?

It would be hard for me to write down everything I learned from books, and from whose books in particular. Nevertheless, for the flavour of it all, I will try to be give some short examples. 

From people like Caragiale, Bulgakov, Hašek, Čapek, O' Brien and Twain I learned how mordant humour which can be so absurd as to be close to nonsense can unmask hypocrites and make you question the ways the world is run. And they did this while keeping me in stitches with laughter. From people like Erwin Panofsky and Umberto Eco I learned about the importance of being objective, of keeping an open mind, and knowing what you talk about (not that I manage to do these all the time).

And there is something really important I learned from Hemingway, too. 

In his For Whom the Bell Tolls, a book considered by critics and readers alike to be one of his finest, Hemingway speaks about impending death from beginning to end. He talks about ordinary people, brought together by war, the harshest of conditions, who now have to act in less than ordinary ways. I began to grasp the cost of such a tragedy as the Spanish Civil War, and the next book I read after this was George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. I recommend to anyone interested to read them in this order. 

Pilar, the matriarch ruling the roost in Hemingway's book, is a fascinating character of great depth, and her observations are almost always poignant and of consequence. There is something very down-to-earth that I learned from Pilar and from her descriptions of life before the war. I now know that a glass of chilled Manzanilla is amazingly good: it's bone dry almost to the point of bitterness, but it blesses you with all the sweet bouquet specific to sherries and leaves an aftertaste comparable (and this is only a guess) to ambrosia and nectar.