The Rest Is History - The Arnolfini Portrait, with Laura Cumming

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Why is Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait perceived as one of the greatest mysteries of the arts? What elements and symbolisms provoke debates about its identity and meaning? And, what do we know about its provenance, its travels through European royal courts, and its influence on Diego Velázquez?  In this new The Rest Is History Club series, Tom is joined by art critic and author Laura Cumming to discuss the histories behind famous paintings and put them in their historical contexts.  To hear the full episode, and all the other exclusive new episodes from Laura and Tom's paintings  series, coming out every Wednesday for the next four weeks, join The Rest is History Club at therestishistory.com FUTURE EPISODES.... Feb 11th: Las Meninas - Diego Velázquez Feb 18th: The Skating Minister - Henry Raeburn Feb 25th: The Angelus - Jean-François Millet  _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek + Harry Swan Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With Amex Platinum, you have access to over 1,400 airport lounges worldwide. So your experience before takeoff is a taste of what's to come. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. Hello, everyone. Tom Holland here, and I am joined by the great Laura coming, and we are looking at painting in history, four paintings that reflect a particular period in history. We'll be looking at the history of the pastyield. painting itself, the life of the artist, and teasing out the mysteries that shadow all four

paintings. And today we are looking at the Arnolfini portrait by Jan Van Eyck, early 15th century. And here is a short extract from that episode and you can access the entire thing by going to the rest is history.com and signing up to the club there. And it will be waiting for you. Enjoy. Hello everybody and welcome to another series of bonuses for you, our beloved club members. And this time we're going to be doing four episodes, each one, on a famous painting. And we're going to be situating it in the context of the age, looking at what it's all about, who the painter was. And generally, with a lot of the paintings, there is a sense of mystery. there's a puzzle and we have the perfect person to tease out the possible solutions to these puzzles

because my guest today is the great Laura coming. She's the art critic of the observer. She was on the show a while back talking about William Notman, the Scottish Canadian photographer. And Laura, a lot of your books resolve around a kind of mystery and a puzzle, don't they? And you kind of offer up solutions. And that's essentially what you're going to be doing today and in our next three episodes. So, welcome back. Thank you. And what painting are we looking at today? We are looking at the first of our paintings, and it is the Arnolfini portrait, otherwise known as the Arnolfini betrothal, or the Arnolfini marriage. And in my lifetime, it's been called all three. And that gives some idea of how often versions of the interpretation of this painting have changed. And

It's a very small painting. People think it's going to be enormous because it's so famous. But in fact, it's not big. I could, about a foot and a half by two feet. It hangs in the National Gallery in London, where people go in droves to look at it. And I think it is for the National Gallery in London about as mysterious a painting as the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre.

Not yet nicked, we noticed. And the reason the painting, I think, think is so famous, is that it has a wild combination of amazing hyper-realism. Jan Van Eyck, the painter, is credited possibly slight exaggeration here, but he's credited with inventing oil paint. And he uses it to describe the shining surfaces and the exact proportions of every object in the world so brilliantly. And yet, despite all this hyper-realism, the paintings are total riddle. I think it's the earliest riddle in art,

and so we're going to talk about that. And so what is it showing us? Lots of you will be presumably watching this on video. Some of you, if you're listening on your phone and you're able to stop and bring it up on your phone to have a look at it, but I appreciate that some of you may be driving on motorways or whatever,

and it would be dangerous for you to try and actually look at the picture. So describe it for those who can't see it. Well, if anyone who's listening now remembers Desperate Housewives, They will probably remember this from the credit sequence because it was used to represent marriages gone wrong along with Kranak paintings and so on. So what we're looking at is a couple standing in a room in Bruges.

15th century. In the background is a red bed and a red couch. The couple are holding hands. Or are they holding hands? We'll come to that. He has his left hand out. She has her left hand out. Her palm is in his palm.

He is dressed most famously in a massive black cauldron of a hat. He really looks quite Halloween. He's got a very, very white face. And also he looks a little bit like Vladimir Putin. He does, and I'm afraid that there's no getting away from it. He really looks like Putin. So picture Putin in a colossal cauldron of black. In fact, it's black straw.

And people in those days would have known that it was a very, very expensive hat. For us now, it's quite evident how wealthy he is because he's wearing this enormous long. black fur coat and indeed he's wearing velvet underneath it. He has one hand raised and his other hand raised towards the woman we take to be his wife. Is she his wife? Is she his mistress? Are they yet married? Who is she? We'll come to that. What's going on? And he's raising his hand and I always think it looks like Jesus blessing the multitudes, though many interpretations of what that gesture means. But anyone listening can picture that. So imagine Christ and he's giving a blessing two fingers raised kind of thing. On the right hand side of the painting in this voluminous dress,

I mean, she's wearing yards and yards of fabric is a woman who appears to be younger and smaller. She's got the cloth raised up to just above her waist, reams of train raised up. And people have always thought she looked pregnant. And indeed, there's a whole theory about how she's actually pregnant. But she's not. We'll come to that in a minute too. And she's wearing a white head cloth. She looks remarkably like if you know any portraits by Jan Van Eyck, she looks very like the women in those portraits. So quite sort of low countries, again very pale, slightly reddish hair. And she's looking not at him. And he is looking not quite at her. We'll come to that in a moment. On the floor are the beginning of a whole sequence of details. There are wooden patterns. Those are

those shoes that you put on over your shoes to go out in the mud. They're his. And they still have a little mud on them. There's a dog right at the front of the painting, a bristly, merry little dog. Kind of, nobody knows quite what breed it is. It's got a very wet little nose. It's mischievous, it's very mischievous. There's a whole theory about this painting related to the dog. Looks like he's just chewed up a slipper or something. He certainly doesn't look like a solemn dog to see. And there are three oranges and one above on a window ledge. The shutters of the window have been very carefully opened on the left-hand side so you can see into a garden. Some are art historians have spent forever trying to work out if this is an upper room because you can only

see the top of what might be a tree or a lower room because it's a bush. We can't really tell. Right at the very back of the painting on the wall is the most clinching detail, if you can call it a detail, because in fact it's the advent of a whole new way of painting. It is a convex mirror. Anyone listening to this can think of convex mirrors of the sort you see in your aunt's house or you might see in a junk shop somewhere and reflected in that mirror a two little figures will come back to them. And above them,

finally, is this immense, beautiful, very complex, very, very expensive chandelier with one candle a light. We'll come back to that in a moment. Thank you for listening. Subscribe to The Restless History Club at the Restless History.com

for the entire episode. Laura and I will be back next week when we will be talking about Las Meninas by Diego de Vallevkev. So unbelievable value. Rush away and sign up. Hi there, everybody. It's Dominic Sambrick here from The Rest is History. And Gordon Carrera from The Rest is classified. Now, over the last month or so, the regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been pushed to the edge, having seen the largest protests for a generation ripping across the country. Tens of thousands of people have been killed by the Ayatollah's forces

since the uprising began. And a lot of people outside Iran are asking, is this the beginning of the next Iranian revolution? And goalhanger is covering every element of this. On the rest is classified, David and I have looked at the role of intelligence agencies in this conflict with the internet blackouts and so much unknown. We've been looking at whether spies are best place to judge whether the regime is truly at risk of falling.

Now, on the rest is history. We have been looking at the origins of the Iranian regime. at the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which saw the fall of the last Shah and his replacement by the rule of the Ayatollah. Now, given that the last Shah's son is being touted abroad as the man who might just might save Iran, you can't understand what is happening now without understanding what happened back then at the end of the 1970s. But it's not just our own two podcasts that are covering Iran. If you want to know whether Donald Trump's military buildup in the region means it's likely he's going to be. He's

going to wade in and force regime change. Here, Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart cover the latest developments in The Rest is politics. And our dear friends that the rest is money have been looking at the economic collapse, the corruption and the impact of the sanctions that have been eating away its social cohesion in Iran over recent years and have pushed so many people onto the streets. And on Empire, they've been looking at the similarities and differences between in 1979 and today, how is it that a country that less than 50 years ago forced the Shah out of power is now seeing crowds chanting, long live the Shah? So whatever happens next to the people of Iran and to all those brave souls who've turned

it on the streets to protest, stay tuned to goalhanger for all the context and the answers and the analysis that you need. Find the rest is history, the rest is classified, empire, the rest is politics and the rest is money. wherever you get your podcasts.