Wedding portrait: don’t take it from me.

Wedding portrait: don’t take it from me. Take it from the Great Master, Jan van Eyck

Many photographers photograph weddings. But the wedding portrait was not invented with photography, it was centuries older than that. Check this link  out, this is a masterpiece that we all can learn from. In 1434 Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami got married. These were wealthy people who could afford to hire the best painter of the time to do their wedding portrait. They chose Jan van Eyck. The couple were Italians, but they lived in Ghent, in what is now Belgium. Jan van Eyck himself was witness to the marriage as we can see from his beautiful graffiti on the wall behind the couple: “Jan de Eyck fuit hic” Jan van Eyck was here in 1434. First you’d think it is a realistic rendering of a couple who just got married. By the way: the artists in those days had just learnt to do perspective this realistically, because they had cameras. Only: they had no film to make a photograph, they put paper on the ground glass and traced the lines. That’s how they discovered perspective, and started to do very realistic anatomy. Check how the painter rendered the texture of the cloth, the fur the wood, the skin. All of it is lifelike, like a photograph. See how the light flows from a window on the left, how the shadows give shape to every object in the painting. The light diminishes to the back. He used a relatively new technique of oil paint, that enabled this.

There is much more going on than just a realistic rendering of the couple, though. Behind the couple, there is a mirror, showing two people. (link) They are the witnesses to the marriage, one of them possibly the painter himself. With the walls behind and to the sides, this is an intimate family scene.

On top of this, there is a lot of symbolism happening here, symbolism was very common in paintings of this period. The dog stands for fidelity, the apples on the left behind the couple refer to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Around the mirror (link) there are ten miniature paintings of the life of Jesus, his passion, his death, the salvation of people. The broom next to the mirror refers to domestic care, the domain of the wife. The little statue above the chair just above the brides hand is of St Margaret, patron of pregnant women and mothers. The brides other hand is on her belly, signifying the power of motherhood. The single lighted candle in the chandelier above signifies either the single all seeing eye of God, or the unity of marriage.

A lot of planning goes into this type of portrait, all of us photographers, we can learn from the Great Masters of the past.