1. Brooke, 281-84; Brundage, caption to pl. 6; see also Brucker, 126-27.

2. See for example David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing, University Park, Pa., 1991, 7. Carrier thinks "a good interpretation must be true to the facts, plausible and original" and is much concerned about the problem of conflicting interpretations of the same work. At one point (92-93) he rejects Panofsky's criterion of common sense (attributing it mistakenly to Julius Held) as "an ahistorical notion," substituting for it the consensus of "serious" art historians or scholars (6, 36). These views can be compared with those of E. de Jongh about sense, nonsense, and consensus; see "Some Notes on Interpretation," in Art in History: History in Art, ed. David Freedberg and Jan de Vries, Santa Monica, 1991, 119-36, esp. 122-23. The crux of the problem, as I see it, for those who would deny the validity of any historical approach, is that the only way to determine whether an interpretation of something like a fifteenth-century painting is, in Carrier's words, "true to the facts" is careful historical analysis. Other useful recent discussions of methodological problems include the essays in the Peter Burke volume cited below in n. 11 and Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History, Baltimore, 1992.

3. Roskill, 62.

4. Seidel, 1989, 78.

5. Brooke, 286.

6. Panofsky set forth his methodology in a well-known passage in Early Netherlandish Painting (Panofsky, 1953, 1:142-43). His criteria for determining whether a still-life object had symbolic meaning included asking if "the symbolical significance of a given motif is a matter of established representational tradition" and if "a symbolical interpretation can be justified by definite texts or agrees with ideas demonstrably alive in the period and presumably familiar to its artists." Ironically, by these standards no symbolic reading advanced by Panofsky for the double portrait was adequately documented.

7. See for example Baldass, 72-73, whose formal analysis of the painting is based on this premise.

8. Campbell, 135; Harbison, 1990, 265.

9. Alistair Smith, "The Arnolfini Marriage by Jan van Eyck," Painting in Focus, no. 8, unpaginated, National Gallery, London, 1977.

10. The author justifies his transition to an ahistorical mode of exposition by historical argument. Van Eyck, he says, first dated his pictures to the day as early as 1432 and continued with this habit "to the end of his life," thus "precisely indicating the moment which the painting pretends to reproduce" when a work was so inscribed. The claim is then advanced that because the inscription on the double portrait gives only the year, the subject matter depicted "does not therefore refer to one precise day, nor to a specific event taking place at one moment." In fact, however, only three of the painter's surviving works are dated to the day—one each in the years 1432, 1433, and 1439—and in the first and last instances, the inscription explains the date, implying that the picture was actually finished on that particular day. During the intervening period 1433-39, five of Van Eyck's extant pictures, including the double portrait, are dated: in each case the year alone is given. Thus all that can reasonably be inferred from the available evidence is that the dating of the Arnolfini portrait fully conforms to Van Eyck's customary practice at the time the picture was painted.

11. See Giovanni Levi, "On Microhistory," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, Cambridge, 1991, 91-113, esp. 97. My own views about methodology in the study of iconography are similar to those expressed by Carlo Ginzberg, The Enigma of Piero, London, 1985, 11-13.

12. E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, Oxford, 1972, 21.

1. For a detailed discussion of the painting with technical data, documents, and references to earlier bibliography, see Davies, 1954, 117-28, and Davies, 1968, 49-52. For additional bibliography through 1974, see the English edition of Friedländer, "Supplements," 2 (published with vol. 14). More recent studies are discussed in Chapter 4.

2. Of Van Eyck's signed pieces, only this and the double portrait are signed directly on the pictorial surface, in both instances with a cursive script that differs markedly from the carefully lettered inscriptions on the original frames surviving for other works. For the notarial use of the actum formula the painter employed when dating the Timotheos portrait, see Boüard, 1:295-96.

3. Davies, 1954, 125.

4. For a document two years later than the double portrait, see Inventaire sommaire des archives départementales antérieures à 1790, Nord, série B, 4 (Lille, 1881), 176: "Jean Arnoulphin, marchand de Lucques, demeurant à Bruges"; see also Mirot and Lazzareschi, 86. For additional citations from the Lille archives by Léon de Laborde and others, see Schabacker, 390 n. 4. Despite much speculation to the contrary, circumstantial evidence makes an original frame inscription unlikely. The inventories of 1516 and 1523/24 both correctly transcribe the Latin form of the painter's name (Johannes) from the signature on the pictorial surface; thus presumably whoever wrote these entries would not have been confounded by a simple Latin phrase such as "Johannes Arnolfini et coniux eius Johanna Cenami" on the frame. Had the hypothetical inscription been in the vernacular (which seems unlikely, since all of Jan's inscriptions are in Latin, save for the Dutch text on the Jan de Leeuw portrait and the French motto on the "Timotheos" panel), surely Van Eyck, who also painted the male sitter of the London panel a second time in the portrait now in Berlin, would have been familiar enough with the common local name of so important a man not to have used either of the inventories' variant forms in one of his meticulously crafted frame inscriptions. See also n. 9 below.

5. J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, Lives of the Early Flemish Painters, 3d ed., London, 1879, 100. The first edition was published in 1857.

6. Mirot and Lazzareschi, 84-87, 93-101.

7. Davies, 1954, 126-27.

8. For the relevant passages from Van Vaernewyck and Van Mander, see ibid. and Weale, lxxxv. For these two authors' accounts of the painting, see also Panofsky, 1934, 117-18. I examine Van Vaernewyck's description of the picture more fully in Chapter 3 at n. 35.

9. Davies, 1954, 126-27. It should be noted that while the phrase "cómo se engañan el uno al otro" has sometimes been mistranslated (e.g., Dhanens, 197), the meaning of the Spanish verb engañar is not in any sense ambiguous. Derived from the medieval Latin ingannare —"to deceive, trick, or swindle"—the word passed from the vulgar Latin directly into most Romance languages, preserving in each instance the connotation of the Latin root; see, for example, J. Corominas and J. A. Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 2 (Madrid, 1980): 618. Because so many of Van Eyck's works have marbleized frames, the statement in the inventory of 1700 that the double portrait's wooden shutters (also mentioned in the inventories of 1516, 1523/24, and 1556) were marbled ("jaspeado") suggests that these shutters (and presumably also the frame) may have been an integral part of the picture's Eyckian mounting. But if the verses from Ovid really implied what the redactor of the inventory assumed, their inappropriately satirical character seems to exclude the possibility that they were part of an original frame inscription.

10. Davies, 1954, 121, 127. Gallery archive: 6 February 1843 Board meeting minutes.

11. A Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, London, 1843, 48, no. 186.

12. Louis Viardot, Les musées d'Angleterre, de Belgique, de Hollande et de Russie, 2d ed., Paris, 1855, 29-30.

13. Léon de Laborde, La renaissance des arts à la cour de France, Paris, 1850-55; reprint, New York, 1965, 1:601-4.

14. Crowe and Cavalcaselle (as in n. 5 above), 100-101.

15. Ralph N. Wornum, Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, revised by C. L. Eastlake, London, 1847, 76-77.

16. The Quarterly Review 82 (1848): 394; the remark appears in a long review by Ruskin of Eastlake's Materials for a History of Oil-Painting .

17. Laborde (as in n. 13 above), 1:603.

18. Gustav Friedrich Waagen, The Treasures of Art in Great Britain, London, 1854, 1:348.

19. For this controversy, see nos. 21-24, 26-28, 39 in the bibliography of Davies, 1954, 124-25.

20. Weale, 72.

21. Friedländer, 1934-37, 1:57 (the first volume was originally issued in 1924). Fierens-Gevaert, in his posthumous history of early Flemish painting (1:92) of 1927 (the author died in the preceding year), also correctly understood the inscription as meaning "Jean van Eyck fut ici" and recognized the painter as one of the figures seen reflected in the mirror.

22. Panofsky, 1934, 117-27; Panofsky, 1953, 1:201-3.

23. For example Jean Lejeune, "La péiode liègeoise des Van Eyck," Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 17 (1955):66-67, presents valid arguments that the picture does not represent a clandestine marriage to justify his own theory that the artist and his wife are portrayed in the picture, not as they appeared in 1434 when the work was executed, but as they looked years earlier, at the beginning of their marriage. For Lejeune's further elaboration of this theory (a sculptural model of the London Man in a Red Turban was prepared and then photographed in a convex mirror to approximate the "distorted" features seen in Van Eyck's two Arnolfini portraits), see his "A propos de Jean et Marguerite Van Eyck et du 'Roman des Arnolfini,'" Bulletin monumental 134 (1976): 239-44. More recently, Bedaux, 29, who argued against the ceremony's being clandestine, still believed the picture depicts a marriage. Those who have questioned Panofsky's view only in passing include M. Nédoncelle, "La structure esthétique du 'Portrait des Arnolfini' de Jan van Eyck," Revue d'd'esthétique 10 (1957): 147 n. 2; and Kelly, 174 n. 40.

24. The iconographic interpretations in Lotte Brand Philip, The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan van Eyck, Princeton, N.J., 1971, and some of the reactions to the book conveniently epitomize the two points of view as they had developed by the 1970s; see e.g., the reviews cited in "Supplements" (as in n. 1 above), 1. Negative reactions in print have often been presented in muted tones, but see the more general remarks of Marrow, 151-52, relative to the long-held private opinion of a famous art historian. Leo van Puyvelde's early and unequivocal rejection of Panofsky's symbolic reading of the double portrait is noteworthy: "In order to understand this painting there is no need to look for complicated explanations of the individual symbols, as Dr. Erwin Panofsky has attempted to do" ( Flemish Painting from the Van Eycks to Metsys, New York, 1970, 55; the original French edition appeared in Brussels in 1968).

25. Campbell, 53-54, 115, 135-36, discusses some of the problems of the London double portrait briefly and with much common sense. I basically agree with his position, but take exception to the idea that it is "inadvisable" to see in the painting, as in a photograph, the "record of a significant moment" in a specific ceremony. I do not claim that everything in the London panel is as in a photographic image, for clearly this is not the case: a pentimento, for example, shows that Van Eyck changed the shape of the frame of the mirror, which may well not even have been in the room where the commemorated event took place; see Davies, 1954, 118. But this commemorative intent on the part of the artist, underscored by the mirror image and inscription and the couple's stylized gestures distinguishes the London panel from images like Figs. 2-5 as well as from other fifteenth-century double portraits cited by Campbell, such as Joos van Ghent's painting of Federico da Montefeltro and his son Guidobaldo. Contemporary presentation miniatures (see Plate 11; Fig. 53) are analogous to the London double portrait in that living persons are portrayed in full-length figure compositions that apparently memorialize a specific historical event, but because these illuminations appear in the very manuscripts intended for subsequent presentation, they anticipate rather than record what is represented and thus constitute a different genre.

26. Two examples will suffice. In a well-known study of 1972, Schabacker, while not otherwise challenging Panofsky's basic assumptions (see especially 376), sought to explain the linking of the couple's left and right hands by arguing that the panel depicted a morganatic marriage. Earlier, just prior to Panofsky's definitive presentation in Early Netherlandish Painting, Baldass (73-74) accepted the idea that the painting depicted the specific "action" of a marriage but confronted the problematic gestures with the untenable suggestion that the man is about to place his raised right hand in the woman's hand "as a symbol of his binding vow of fidelity."

1. For the general recognition of civil marriage in the early modern period and the development of jurisdiction by civil courts over matrimonial cases based on a distinction between marriage as a civil contract and marriage as a sacrament of the church, see Esmein, 2:35-59.

2. Digest 50.17.30.

3. Adolf Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law, Philadelphia, 1953, s.vv. "Affectio maritalis," "Divortium." See also Brundage, 33, 35, 41-42; and John T. Noonan, Jr., "Marital Affection in the Canonists," Studia Gratiana 12 (1967): 481-509.

4. De bono conjugali, 32; Patrologia latina, 40:394. For Augustine's views on marriage, see in particular Emil Schmitt, Le mariage chrétien dans l'oeuvre de S. Augustin, Paris, 1983.

5. A constitution issued in 428 by Theodosius II and Valentinian III ( Codex 5.4.22 or Theodosian Code 3.7.3) recognized the validity of a marriage even without written betrothal instruments or any marriage rites or ceremonies, provided the parties were of equal rank and their consent was confirmed by the testimony of friends.

6. Digest 23.1.1, and 23.1.2.

7. Ritzer, 71-73, 77-79, 128, 291.

8. See Theodosian Code 3.5.1-3.6.1. The constitution of Constantine is 3.5.6, later codified in the Justinian corpus as Codex 5.3.16.

9. Leclercq, cols. 1891-92.

10. Lex Burgundionum, 34.1; Pactus Legis Salicae, 20.

11. Rouche, 837-43; Gaudemet, 34-39, 164-66.

12. See for example F. L. Ganshof, "Le statut de la femme dans la monarchie franque," Société Jean Bodin, Recueils 12 (1962): 5-58, especially 26-29. See also Ritzer, 270-72.

13. Gaudemet, 351-52; Diane Owen Hughes, "From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe," Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 262-96, especially 265-68.

14. The classic study is A. Lemaire, "Origine de la [règle, 'Nullum sine dote fiat conjugium,'" Mélanges Paul Fournier, Paris, 1929, 415-24.

15. Decretum C. 30 q. 5 c. 6.

16. Patrologia latina, 119:979-80. Passages from this letter were later codified in Gratian's Decretum C. 27 q. 2 c. 2 and C. 30 q. 5 c. 3.

17. Ritzer, 229-32, 276-77.

18. B. Kötting, "Dextrarum iunctio," Reallexikon für Antike und Christenrum, 3 (Stuttgart, 1957): 881-88. See also n. 23 below.

19. Harold Mattingly, Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, London, 1968, 4:198-99, no. 1237, pl. 28.

20. Reekmans, 31-37, has convincingly argued that the personified figure represents Concordia rather than Juno Pronuba as has been commonly held since the seventeenth century. For the two reliefs illustrated, see ibid., 40, 48.

21. See Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian, Oxford, 1991, 149-51, 164-65, 251-53. As this author makes clear, there is little evidence besides two obscure passages in Tertullian that the ritual of joining hands was actually performed.

22. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, "On the Golden Marriage Belt and the Marriage Rings of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 14 (1960): 3-16. See also Carola Reinsberg, "Concordia: Die Darstellung von Hochzeit und ehelicher Eintracht in der Spätantike," Spätantike und frühes Christentum: Katalog zur Austellung im Liebighaus in Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt, 1983, 312-17. For these matters the most important discussion is still that of Reekmans, especially 76-85.

23. Joining right hands to seal a conspiracy is mentioned in a capitulary of Charlemagne; see Capitularia, 1:124: "Si vero per dextras aliqua conspiratio firmata fuerit." Tertullian, in the texts cited by Treggiari (as in n. 21 above), also uses "per dexteras" to describe what is now called the dextrarum iunctio . These examples conform to classical usage where per dexteram commonly means hands clasped as a sign of agreement; see Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. "dext(e)ra."

24. "Fides autem consensus est, quando, etsi non stringit manum, corde tamen et ore consentit ducere, et mutuo se concedunt unus alii, et mutuo se suscipiunt." The text appears twice in medieval canon law, once in the Decretum as a palea, or addition to Gratian's original compilation (C. 27 q. 2 c. 51) and again in Decretales 4.4.1. For its spurious character, already noted in sixteenth-century editions of the Decretum, see Friedberg, 1:1077. Although of obscure origin, this text provides useful evidence that the dextrarum iunctio had fallen into disuse in a matrimonial context, for the text itself was well known at least as early as the twelfth century, that is to say before the joining of right hands reappears as a European marriage gesture. See also nn. 60 and 65 below.

25. Ritzer, 273-79. The Bobbio missal, the only surviving Gallican liturgical manuscript of this early period to contain a marriage blessing, has two prayers for the blessing of the couple in the nuptial chamber, one for first and another for second marriages.

26. Capitularia, 1:98. To discourage incestuous marriages, this legislation of Charlemagne envisioned an investigation of possible consanguinity by local clergy and elders before the couple were "joined together with a blessing." Granted that law and practice are often far apart, there is still a striking disparity between the capitulary, which presumes the nuptial blessing for everyone, and a comment of approximately the same date by Jonas of Orleans ( De institutione laicali, 2.2, Patrologia latina, 106:170) that a marriage is only rarely blessed at mass because most couples are already "corrupted" by the time of their marriage. Jonas is clearly referring to the Roman marriage rite that the Carolingians took over with the Roman liturgical books, whereas the capitulary may refer instead to the blessing of the marriage in the nuptial chamber, since that form of blessing survived in France for centuries (see Molin and Mutembe, 255-69) as an adjunct to the church ceremony and from an early date, as evidenced by the Bobbio missal, did not require the virginity of the spouses. According to Ritzer, 389-90, the Merovingian benedictio in thalamo was supplanted in the Frankish kingdom by the introduction of the Roman marriage rite, but there does not seem to be any firm evidence to support this claim.

27. Ritzer, 334-45; for the "nights of Tobias," ibid., 281-82. For developing notions about consanguinity and spiritual affinity, see Rouche, 857-67.

28. Molin and Mutembe, 32-37. See also Martène's ordo II and ordo III (ibid., 284-87) and Martène, 2:355-57. Martène's ordo II from a Rennes missal of the twelfth century is perhaps the earliest extant text of the new marriage service at the church door.

29. See the marriage rites cited in the preceding note for references to the venue of the ceremony. The expression in facie ecclesiae, which has survived in the Book of Common Prayer as "in the face of this congregation," was already used in the second half of the twelfth century by Alexander III in a decretal later codified as Decretales 4.16.2.

30. For references to early synodal statutes that insist on marriage at the church door so as to discourage clandestine marriage, see Molin and Mutembe, 37.

31. "Ut omnes homines laici publicas nuptias faciant tam nobiles quam innobiles" ( Capitularia , 1:36).

32. These texts, respectively known as the decretals of the pseudo-Evaristus and pseudo-Hormisdas, are Decretum C. 30 q. 5 c. 1 and c. 2.

33. Decretum C. 30 q. 5 c. 6 and c. 8. For the distinction between marriage that is ratum et legitimum and clandestine marriage as ratum et non legitimum, see C. 28 q. 1 c. 17. From the thirteenth century, this distinction is found in almost any discussion of clandestine marriage, whether in academic treatises, such as the Summa of Hostiensis (ed. 1537, fol. 198r), or in popular handbooks for ordinary priests, as for example the fourteenth-century Manipulus curatorum of Guido de Monte Rochen, one of the most often printed and widely disseminated books of the fifteenth century, which notes (fol. g5r) that matrimony contracted between marriageable Christians "without the accustomed solemnities" is "ratum et non legitimum."

34. For the Roman law, see Digest, 23.2.2; in general, and for the canon law in particular, see the important study of Donahue, esp. 254, 259, 271-73.

35. Dauvillier, 17-59, 76-101; Le Bras (1968), 197-98.

36. Hefele and Leclercq, 5:1373-74. The canon was codified as the decretal Cum inhibitio, Decretales 4.3.3. A further provision of this canon suspends from priestly functions for three years any priest who participates in a clandestine marriage. Cum inhibitio was the classic place for the discussion of clandestine marriage by medieval canonists; the glossa ordinaria, ad v. clandestina, enumerates the three basic conditions that made a marriage clandestine: the absence of witnesses; the omission of the requisite formalities as in Decretum C. 30 q. 5 c. 1, in particular the priest's blessing; and failure to publish the bans prior to the marriage ceremony. Hostiensis, Summa (ed. 1537, fol. 200v), added to this several other circumstances that made a marriage clandestine because the canon law had been infringed (e.g. a marriage without prior episcopal sanction where one of the spouses had previously been betrothed to a third party), and this expanded list is commonly cited thereafter, as in Antoninus, Summa, Pars tertia, t. 1 c. 16 (ed. 1740, 3:62).

37. Dauvillier, 105-16.

38. Mansi, 25:93; for the correct date of this council, see Hefele and Leclercq, 6:466. For a recent study of excommunication as a disciplinary action for clandestine marriage in the neighboring diocese of Utrecht prior to the Council of Trent, see A. G. Weiler, "De ontwikkeling van de middeleeuwse kerkelijke rechtspraak in het bisdom Utrecht inzake excommunicatie belopen wegens clandestine huwelijken tot aan het Concilie van Trente," Archief voor de Geschiedenis van de Katholieke Kerk in Nederland 29 (1987): 149-65.

39. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Supplementum, Q. 45 a. 5; Antoninus, Summa, Pars tertia, t. 1 c. 16 (ed. 1740, 3:59).

40. Martène, 2:343.

41. Brooke, 57, 141-42, has expressed a similar view.

42. For some representative cases, see Calendar of the Papal Registers, 4:413; 5:261; 7:41, 567; 8:165.

43. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, parts 1 and 2, Oxford, 1971-76, nos. 203, 245, 332, 861. Bennett, 42-46, refers loosely to the exchange of promises between them as a betrothal, but the couple clearly considered they had been married clandestinely: Calle (no. 861) speaks of the "great bond of matrimony that is made betwixt us" and refers to Margery as his "before God very true wife." When examined by the bishop (no. 203) to determine from the tense of the words of consent "whether it made matrimony or not," Margery replied that "if the words made it not sure . . . that she would make it sure before she went thence." For another case, see Donahue, 269-70.

44. Lexikon des Mittelalters, Munich, 1 (1980): 1980-81.

45. Decretales 4.3.2 established the procedure for "publicizing" a clandestine marriage by repeating the ceremony in facie ecclesiae; see also the glossa ordinaria, ad v. a principio .

46. Summa theologiae, Supplementum, Q. 46 a. 2.

47. Antoninus, Summa, Pars tertia, t. 1 c. 24 (ed. 1740, 3:114), denounces precisely what Mozart's Don Giovanni attempts: to propose marriage "not intending to contract marriage, but rather to deceive, so as to extort sexual intercourse."

48. Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek, 43-50, 61.

49. See n. 33 above.

50. Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek, 62-63.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 64-65. For other studies of local records concerning litigation involving clandestine marriage, see Sheehan and Donahue. Beatrice Gottlieb, "The Meaning of Clandestine Marriage," in Family and Sexuality in French History, ed. Robert Wheaton and Tamara K. Hareven, Philadelphia, 1980, 49-83, an analysis of officiality records from the dioceses of Troyes and Châlons-sur-Marne for the second half of the fifteenth century, is unfortunately seriously flawed; see Brundage, 501. For additional bibliography and some important general observations, see Charles Donahue, Jr., "The Canon Law on the Formation of Marriage and Social Practice in the Later Middle Ages," Journal of Family History 8 (1983): 144-58. A consensus is developing that clandestine marriage, while relatively common in the fourteenth century, became far less so in the fifteenth century. See also R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England, Cambridge, 1974, 128-29, 166-67. Particularly significant for understanding the double portrait are the different consequences of clandestine marriage for different social classes. Like dying intestate, clandestine marriage caused far greater problems for the wealthy than for the poor.

53. For twelfth-century discussion about the formation of the sacramental marriage bond, see Gérard Fransen, "La formation du lien matrimonial au moyen âge," Revue de droit canonique 21 (1971): 106-26.

54. Le Bras (1968), 193-94.

55. Le Bras (1927), 2196-219; Dauvillier, 12-13; see also Seamus P. Heany, The Development of the Sacramentality of Marriage from Anselm of Laon to Thomas Aquinas, Washington, 1963.

56. Ritzer, 384-85.

57. This idea of mutual traditio seems to have been first developed by Vacarius in the second half of the twelfth century; see F. W. Maitland, "Magistri Vacarii Summa de Matrimonio," Law Quarterly Review 13 (1897): 133-43, 270-87, especially 274 for the passage quoted below. Traditio as the transfer of property in Roman law is Vacarius's point of departure, but on the basis of the spurious Augustinian text discussed above in n. 24 Vacarius relates this to a mutual traditio of the spouses to each other: "Quod autem corporalis etiam traditionis et quasi possessionis sit coniunctio matrimonii probatur in uerbo decreti [i.e. the spurious Augustinian text].... Ergo re, id est, mutua susceptione contrahitur coniugium."

58. Dauvillier, 77-84; Le Bras (1927), 2184-86; Molin and Mutembe, 102. For a succinct statement by Aquinas, see Summa theologiae, Supplementum, Q. 45 a. 2. Scholarship on the Arnolfini double portrait has been characterized by considerable confusion about how the marriage bond was constituted. Although the consummation of a marriage remained of great importance in popular custom—see e.g. Le Bras (1927), 2186—from the early thirteenth century on, as far as canon law was concerned, the indissoluble sacramental marriage bond was formed solely by the consent of the parties in the present tense, and consummation added nothing but an "accidental perfection" to the marriage. The only possible exception was that an unconsummated marriage under certain conditions could be dissolved if one or both parties wished to enter a religious order; for a summary, see Donahue (1976), 252 n. 2. See also Chapter 3, n. 4.

59. Le Bras (1927), 2204; Dauvillier, 99.

60. The common assumption of modern writers (e.g. Molin and Mutembe, 89) that from the beginning the marriage rite "in the face of the church" was characterized by a joining of right hands is at variance with the evidence. None of the early marriage ordines from northern France published by Molin and Mutembe (II-V as well as VIII and XIV) mention a joining of right hands. The woman is simply given ("datur") or turned over ("tradat") to her husband, first by relatives or friends, and then by the priest. In ordo III the husband holds his wife by the right hand ("per manum dexteram teneat eam") after the traditio, and in ordo V the one who is to give the bride takes her by the right hand to effect the traditio, but these texts make no reference to a joining of hands, nor do they mention which hand the groom is to use in receiving the bride. Since the same ambiguity is reflected in depictions of marriage well into the fourteenth century, where left and right hands of the bride and groom are used variously to effect the traditio / consent gesture (see Fig. 16 and n. 65 below), evidently a fixed usage had not yet been established. The earliest specific reference in the Molin and Mutembe ordines to a joining of right hands by the priest is found in ordo XI, a ritual of the second half of the thirteenth century from the Paris region, where the gesture accompanies a betrothal rather than a marriage and symbolizes the giving of fides as a promise of future marriage. Ordo XIII, a Parisian ritual of the early fourteenth century, is the earliest example I have found where the priest actually joins the right hands in a marriage rite "as they do who bind themselves by a solemn promise"—"sicut faciunt qui fide se obligant" (Molin and Mutembe offer two very different translations of this passage; that on 101 is correct, whereas that on 85 and 92 is not). During the fourteenth century the joining of right hands became the standard marriage gesture almost everywhere in northern Europe, and its widespread adoption is reflected in marriage iconography of the fifteenth century. Use of the wedding ring was never standardized, however, and thus even in the twentieth century, as in the fifteenth, it is placed on either the right hand or the left according to regional custom.

61. A Rouen missal said to be of the fourteenth century, first published by Martène ( ordo VII) and now lost, has both the closing formula and the blessing; the same text is ordo XIV in Molin and Mutembe, 303-5.

62. For this panel, see Elfriede Baum, Katalog des Museums mittelalterlicher österreichischer Kunst, Vienna, 1971, 76-78.

63. Conversely, when an Austrian painter worked in northern Italy, he also depicted the ring ceremony rather than the hand-joining gesture; see ibid., 180 and fig. 169, for a Marriage of the Virgin painted in Bolzano c. 1450-60 by Lienhard Scherhauff. In the 1470s a Florentine miniaturist depicting the Marriage of Hosea in the Bible of Federico da Montefeltro (Vatican Library ms. Urb. lat. 2, fol. 151v) did show the high priest about to join the couple's right hands; see Annarosa Garzelli, Miniatura fiorentina del rinascimento 1440-1525, Florence, 1985, fig. 467. Presumably his intent, under the influence of humanistic ideas, was an "authentic" representation of a biblical marriage, based on the Vulgate text of Tobit 7:15, rather than the depiction of a contemporary Italian ceremony as in the other examples cited here.

64. Max Sander, Le livre à figures italien depuis 1467 jusqu'à 1530, Milan, 1942; reprint Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1969, nos. 1215, 3263, 3281.

65. The earliest isolated examples appear in northern Europe toward the end of the thirteenth century. Cf. also the investigations of Andrzej Grzybkowski, "Die Dextrarum iunctio auf dem Grabmal in Löwenberg," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 47 (1984): 59-69. In Byzantine art too the dextrarum iunctio disappears after the sixth century and is replaced by an entirely different matrimonial gesture; see Reekmans, 88. That the linking of right hands had not yet definitively established itself as the characteristic northern European marriage gesture would seem to provide the best explanation for early fourteenth-century miniatures that indifferently depict the linking of the spouses' left and right hands; e.g. Melnikas, 3:986, fig. 32; 1040, fig. 17; 1041, fig. 18; 1156, figs. 19-20; 1157, fig. 21. Molin, 357 n. 16, lists other examples but in some cases mistakes the Italian ring ceremony for a linking of hands. Bedaux's supposed examples of right/left-handed marriages in the fifteenth century (24-25) are generally based on a misunderstanding; e.g. his fig. 3, a miniature from British Library ms. Add. 10043, illustrates chapter 8 of the Book of Tobit and does not relate to the marriage of Tobias and Sarah (see fig. 4 of the original publication in Simiolus 16 [1986]: 9, where the text has not been cropped); see n. 73 below for an Oxford Bible moralisée illumination. See also the two notes (both concerning miniatures of the fourteenth century) of Lucy Freeman Sandler in Art Bulletin 66 (1984): 488-91, and 68 (1986): 326; the latter is particularly interesting, but it illustrates the marriage of a centaur to Vain Glory and is thus not really comparable to what might be presumed normal practice.

66. Frugoni, 926-27, 932-33.

67. The gesture is described in a well-known passage in Galbert of Bruges (see F. L. Ganshof, Feudalism, London, 1952, 65-67) in which a new count of Flanders received the hommage of his vassals in 1127. See also ibid., 26-28; and Jacques Le Goff, Pour un autre moyen âge, Paris, 1977, 351.

68. Although written in Italy, Vat. lat. 1370 was illuminated in France, probably in Paris; see Kuttner, 1:146-47.

69. Panofsky, 1934, 125; Panofsky, 1953, 1:438.

70. For the date of Vat. lat. 2491, see Kuttner 2:60-61. Molin, 356 n. 15, cites other thirteenth-and fourteenth-century miniatures of this type and, like Panofsky, attempts to relate the gesture to the swearing of an oath, but his only supporting evidence is drawn from rituals of the sixteenth century. For further discussion of this mistaken idea, see below, Chapter 3, n. 37. It is well to bear in mind that fourteenth-century miniaturists still had great difficulty knowing what to do with hands, and consequently what may appear a meaningful gesture is often no more than the result of the artist's failure to resolve this technical problem; for many examples, see Melnikas.

71. On this manuscript and its uncertain date (which is in any event no earlier than c. 1260), see Nigel Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts (II), 1250-1285, London, 1988, cat. no. 119. I know of no other example before the very end of the century. The service book held by the acolyte in the Hereford miniature is inscribed with the opening words ("Deus Abraham, Deus ...") of an oration known (because it was taken from the Vulgate text of Tobit 7:15) as the "blessing of Tobit": "The God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob be with you, and may he join you together, and fulfill his blessing in you." This blessing of the spouses often concluded the church-door ceremony in the earliest rituals for marriage "in the face of the church" (e.g. in Martène's ordines II-IV; Martène, 2:356-57, 360). As previously mentioned, however, these rituals make as yet no reference to the joining of right hands. The Hereford miniature is thus of great interest as perhaps the earliest known instance where this blessing is associated with the joining of right hands.

72. Goff A-1122.

73. The iconography of the marriage of Adam and Eve as studied by Adelheid Heimann, "Die Hochzeit von Adam und Eva im Paradies nebst einigen anderen Hochzeitsbildern," Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 37 (1975): 11-40, follows a similar evolution. The subject first appears in a series of related Bible moralisée illuminations of the thirteenth century, the best known of which is the often reproduced imagery of Bodleian Library ms. Bodl. 270b, fol. 6r (see e.g. Bedaux, Simiolus 16 (1986): 8, fig. 2). The accompanying text identifies the image as the "matrimonium" of Adam and Eve, seen as a prototype for the marriage of Christ to the Church. In the Adam and Eve medallion God takes each by both of their hands to bring them together (the text for this reads: "adduxit eam [i.e. the woman] ad Adam"); the same two-handed deductio of Eve to Adam is repeated in British Library ms. Add. 18719, fol. 7v, of around 1300. The iconography then changes abruptly (although Heimann does not note the change) and remains constant thereafter in Heimann's many examples, with the Creator instead joining the right hands of Adam and Eve in what had become the conventional northern European marriage gesture by the fourteenth century, as in Plate 5, where the marriage of Adam and Eve, no longer a foreshadowing of the marriage of Christ to Ecclesia, is rather the Old Testament archetype for the sacrament of matrimony.

74. On this rituale, which is Martène's ordo XIII (2:382-84), see Aimé-Georges Martimort, La documentation liturgique de Dom Edmond Martène, Studi e testi, 279, Vatican City, 1978, no. 252, 179-80.

75. For this rituale and missal (Ville Cod. 13), one of the few manuscripts saved from a fire that destroyed the Bibliothèque centrale of Tournai in 1940, see Paul Faider and Pierre Van Sint Jan, Catalogue des manuscrits conservés à Tournai, Gembloux, 1950, 42-44.

76. Ghent rituale of 1576 and Manuale pastorum per diocesim Tornacensem, Louvain and Tournai, 1591. Under the heading "Ordo celebrandi Sacramentum Matrimonii," this passage in the 1576 rituale (54-57) reads: "coniunctis dextris ambarum, eas stola inuoluet." The words of consent follow, after which the priest says: "Et ego tanquam Ecclesie minister vos coniungo in Matrimonium, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen." The stole is then removed, and the ring ceremony ensues. Efforts to find an earlier Flemish marriage ordo have been unsuccessful; e.g. an incunabulum missal for the diocese of Tournai, the Missale Tornacense of Johannes Higman, Paris, 1498 (Goff M-727), has the nuptial mass and blessing but no ordo for the marriage service itself, and a fifteenth-century rituale in the Stedelijke Openbare Bibliotheek of Bruges (ms. 316) also lacks a marriage service.

77. The numerous other representations of this stole-binding rite in Netherlandish works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries indicate that regionally it was considered the proto-typical marriage gesture.

78. Panofsky, 1934, 125, and Panofsky, 1953, 1:439 nn. 3, where reference is made to H. Rosenau, "Some English Influences on Jan van Eyck, with Special Reference to the Arnolfini Portrait," Apollo 36 (1942):125-28, for tomb slabs with the "somewhat unorthodox" linking of left and right hands. All of Rosenau's English tomb effigies, however, as she herself notes, depict the dextrarum iunctio, nor is there any example of the linking of left and right hands among the nearly 450 plates in Monumental Brasses: The Portfolio Plates of the Monumental Brass Society, 1894-1984, London, 1988.

79. Panofsky, 1953, 1:536; for rituals where left and right hands are joined, see Molin and Mutembe, 97, 246-47.

80. Panofsky, 1953, I:202. Friedländer, 1967-76, 1:41, Weale, 71.

81. Davies, 1954, 125. Panofsky, 1934, 117, refers to this inventory description of the gesture as "joining hands."

82. Ibid., 117-18.

1. Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., Oxford, 1989, 5:396. Cf. the definition s.v. "espouse" in John Kersey, Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, London, 1708: "to Betroth, Wed, or take in Marriage."

2. Panofsky, 1934, 123. The confusion stems from nineteenth-century works cited by Panofsky that were based largely on twelfth-century sources. These authors in turn naturally reflect the controversies of their own time rather than the more fully developed medieval ideas about marriage found in writers of the thirteenth century and later.

3. From the thirteenth century on, legal treatises analyze whether the tense is present or future in sample expressions of consent; see for example Durantis, Speculum iudiciale, 4.4.1 (ed. 1574, 2:438-39). In 1310 the bishop of Cambrai amended the marriage legislation of the provincial council of 1304 (see text of Chapter 2 at n. 38), prescribing for his diocese specific words of future consent "in sponsalibus seu fidedationibus" to avoid possible confusion among simple persons, whether clergy or laity; Edmond Martène and Ursin Durand, Veterum scriptorum et monumentorum amplissima collectio, Paris, 1724-33; reprint, New York, 1968, 7:1338.

4. Decretum C. 27 q. 2 c. 34; see also Gaudemet, 379-91, and Brundage, 235-36. Later writers, particularly from the time of Hostiensis, adjusted Gratian's terminology to suit the consensualist position; Antoninus provides a convenient fifteenth-century example. The contracting of matrimony, he says, is initiated by "sponsalia with words of the future," ratified "by words of the present or other signs expressing consent" and consummated by sexual union. Noting that this sequence of actions constitutes common practice, he adds it is not necessary that "sponsalia" precede, because matrimony can be "immediately contracted by words of the present," or that sexual union follow, since (and this was the standard reason) the marriage of Mary and Joseph was perfect with respect to the "essence" of matrimony; Summa, Pars tertia, t. 1 c. 18 (ed. 1740, 3:64-65). It should be noted that neither here nor elsewhere does Antoninus refer to "verba de praesenti" as sponsalia . See also n. 13 below.

5. Ives of Chartres is said (see Ritzer, 374) to have been the first to distinguish between fides pactionis and fides consensus; the same distinction is also found in the writings of his contemporary Anselm of Laon; see Le Bras (1927), 2142. These ideas continued to be advanced by twelfth-century theologians in Paris, including Hugh of St. Victor and Peter Lombard. See also Esmein, 1:134-36, and Gaudemet, 40-41. For the spurious Augustinian text in the canon law that similarly juxtaposes the two terms, see above, Chapter 2, n. 24. The fundamentally important distinction between future and present consent was based on this difference between betrothal and matrimonial fides .

6. Raymond of Peñafort's usage is typical of that found from the thirteenth century on, as for example in the following passage (the omissions are various illustrations of future and present consent): "Quoniam matrimonium sponsalia praecedere consueverunt, ideo primo loco de sponsalibus est agendum. . . . et ista sunt vera sponsalia, quando sic per verba de futuro contrahuntur; si vero per verba praesentis temporis contrahuntur. . . . talia dicuntur sponsalia de praesenti, sed improprie, quia vere est matrimonum" ( Summa 4. t. I [ed. 1725, 739-41]).

7. On this Italian marriage rite, see Klapisch-Zuber, 178-212, and the collected studies of Brandileone, which are particularly useful for the documents included.

8. Altieri, 49-53, 67-69 (see also Brandileone, 291-307).

9. As for example in the Rituale romanum, Bologna, 1487 (Goff R-201, fols. 10v-14v.

10. Brandileone, 102-3.

11. The Formularium diversorum contractum secundum stilum et modum florentinum containing the text of this marriage ritual was printed a number of times in the fifteenth century, beginning with Florentine editions of c. 1487 and 1488; see Goff F-249-F-252. The full text from the earliest printed edition is given in the Appendix. As the short form of the notarial instrument stresses, the consent was symbolized by the mutual giving and receiving of the ring; Klapisch-Zuber's interpretation of the ring (39) is not compatible with this text.

12. There may be a simple explanation for the omission of the religious ceremony in Florence. By the second half of the fifteenth century upper-class Florentine marriages were often consummated in the house of the groom's father-in-law the day the marriage was contracted by the subarrhatio anuli ceremony, or shortly thereafter. The reason for this practice was that many Florentine dowries were financed through a state dowry fund known as the Monte delle doti, whose regulations stipulated that the marriage must be consummated before the dowry could be paid (see below, Chapter 4 at n. 23, and Klapisch-Zuber, 189-91). Because the bride was thus no longer a virgin when conducted to her husband's house, there could be no nuptial blessing in a religious service, which elsewhere was normally part of the nozze . The great emphasis Altieri places on the virginity of the bride when she was taken to her husband's house underscores a major difference between marriage customs in Rome and Florence.

13. Antoninus, Confessionale, says (lois. 60v-61r) that "questo sacramento del matrimonio quanto a la essentia sua, allhora e perfecto quando . . . secondo che comunemente si usa il notaio . . . domanda l'huomo se vuole tale donna per mogliera, et lui risponde si, dippoi domanda la donna se vuole tale huomo per suo legitimo sponso, similmente risponde de si, con parole, o altri segni sufficienti a dichiarare loro consentimento. . . . Et tale matrimonio cosi contratto per parole de presenti in caso nessuno si puo dissoluere." As for the religious ceremony, he says (fols. 61v-62r): "see primo matrimonio da l'una parte et dal'altra non debbe menare la moglie se prima non ode la messa del coniugio et faccendo il contrario dove che e la consuetudine di udire tale messa, et di aspettare la benedittione del prete avanti la consumatione del matrimonio peccherebbe mortalmente. Ma quando da l'una parte et l'altra fusse secondo matrimonio, non debbono udire tale messa et il sacerdote che benedice le seconde nozze, pecca mortalmente et dale leggi canonice e punito."

14. For this miniature, see Medieval and Renaissance Miniatures from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1975, 50-52. A closely related miniature from another manuscript (which unfortunately is not identified) is reproduced in Studia Gratiana 12 (1967): pl. IV.

15. Castiglione alludes to this practice of holding a falcon in book 2 of Il Cortegiano, noting that it was formerly acceptable to carry a sparrow hawk on the wrist for no other reason than to cut a good figure.

16. For an example of a marriage conducted in the street before the bride's house, see Brandileone, 108, and for a sponsalia instrument in which the groom agrees to pay an additional sum "for the honor of the first kiss" at the marriage, ibid., III.

17. The considerable confusion in recent scholarship seems to stem from Brandileone's frequent antithetical juxtaposition (e.g., 302-3) of what be anachronistically calls the "cerimonia civile" (i.e. the ring ceremony before the notary) and the "cerimonia ecclesiastica" (i.e. the nuptial blessing as part of the nozze ). From a theological or canonical perspective the former, and not the latter, created the matrimonial bond and constituted the sacrament of matrimony, and thus it was certainly not a "civil ceremony" in the sense that term has had since marriage rites were secularized in modern times. Klapisch-Zuber, 185-87, 195-96, understands that notaries and canonists refer to the ring ceremony as matrimonium, but there is a certain ambiguity about her presentation that leads Brundage, 497, citing these pages of Klapisch-Zuber, to conclude erroneously that the ring ceremony was "a formal betrothal . . . during which they [the couple] exchanged future consent." Elsewhere Klapisch-Zuber refers to the ring ceremony before the notary as "the preliminary exchange of consent" (190-91), but it was in fact the sacramental consent; see also n. II above. There is similar confusion in the attempt of Brucia Witthoft, "Marriage Rituals and Marriage Chests in Quattrocento Florence," Artibus et historiae 5 (1982): 56 n. 27, to differentiate between "actual marriage ceremonies" (i.e. the ring giving before a notary) and "pictures of the sacrament of marriage" (i.e. works like Raphael's Sposalizio ); actually they are the same. In n. 26 Witthoft confuses betrothal and marriage rites and on 45 conflates northern and southern marriage ceremonies to introduce a spurious hand-joining rite into the Italian ring ceremony before a notary.

18. Altieri, 51.

19. Martin Davies, revised by Dillian Gordon, The Early Italian Schools before 1400, London, 1988, 86-88. For a similar example, see the "Marriage of Anna and Joachim" miniature in the Visconti Hours; Millard Meiss and Edith Kirsch, The Visconti Hours, New York, 1972, BR fol. 1r.

20. For a short introduction to these matters, see C. R. Cheney, Notaries Public in England, Oxford, 1972, 1-11. See also Boüard, 2:216-17, as well as pl. 39 in the accompanying album of illustrations. For Flemish notaries by papal and imperial commission, see Murray, 158-59.

21. For the full text of Alexander III's letter, codified in abbreviated form as Decretales 4.4.3, see Friedberg 2:681: "praesente scilicet sacerdote aut etiam notario, sicut etiam in quibusdam locis adhuc observatur." The notary as witness to matrimonial consent has been studied in detail by Peter Leisching, "Eheschliessungen vor dem Notar im 13. Jahrhundert," Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonische Abteilung, 94 (1977): 20-46.

22. Mansi 35:247.

23. Brucker, 16.

24. For a poor girl whose ring ceremony was witnessed by the clergy of Santa Trinità in Florence, see Klapisch-Zuber, 196 n. 65. In those parts of Italy where the present consent was exchanged before a priest in facie ecclesiae, the consent was also commonly recorded in a public instrument drawn up by a notary; see Brandileone, 111-12.

25. This is a reasonable assumption based on the presence of the ring ceremony (it follows immediately after the binding of the joined hands with the priest's stole) both in Martène's ordo XIII and in the Ghent rituale of 1576 (see Chapter 2, nn. 74 and 76).

26. Digest 23.1.1. and Institutes 1.9.1, the latter sometimes conflated with Digest 23.2.1. From the thirteenth century these definitions are standard in canon law commentaries; see for example Hostiensis, Summa (ed. 1537, fols. 193r, 194v).

27. These various ways to dissolve a betrothal constitute a conventional list found in popular handbooks on the sacraments like the Manipulus curatorum of Guido de Monte Rochen or the Confessionale of Antoninus as well as in academic works such as the Summa of Hostiensis (ed. 1537, fol. 194r). See also Antoninus, Summa, Pars tertia, t. 1. c. 18 (ed. 1740, 3:67-68). Although modern writers on late medieval marriage often state that sponsalia were binding, they were not as far as canon law was concerned. According to the acts of a Florentine provincial council in 1517 (Mansi, 35:247), for instance, "sponsalia de futuro . . . si possono dissolvere di consentimento delle parti" with the bishop's approval. Even when other approaches failed, it was still possible to break a betrothal promise by exchanging verba de praesenti with a third party, for when such cases came before ecclesiastical courts, words of present consent almost invariably took precedence over sponsalia . Important persons nonetheless often sought to have sponsalia that did not lead to marriage formally dissolved by the pope to ensure there would be no complications if other matrimonial arrangements were made later; see Calendar of Papal Registers 12: 150-51 for a case where a countess claimed to have feigned betrothal to a knight to secure protection for herself during the Wars of the Roses; see Bennett, 37-39, for another example.

28. See W. L. Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts, 4 (Leipzig, 1927): 125, no. 1991, where the inscription is transcribed.

29. The four ways to contract sponsalia are a commonplace, found in virtually any discussion of marriage during this period, whether that of theologians like Aquinas and Antoninus, canonists like Hostiensis and Durantis, or popular handbooks like those mentioned in n. 27 above. In the early 1240s Goffredus de Trano ( Summa, ed. 1519, fol. 175r) distinguished the matrimonial subarrhatio anuli (both in its Italian and northern European "in the face of the church" form) from the betrothal subarrhatio anuli on the basis of the tense of the words accompanying the giving of the ring. For Hostiensis's use of fides to mean a betrothal oath, see Summa, ed. 1537, fol. 193r: "alia fide interposita seu iuramento quod idem est." For Antoninus (actually quoting Richardus de Mediavilla) on fides as a unilateral betrothal oath, see Summa, Pars tertia, t. 1 c. 18 (ed. 1740, 3:69): "quando datur fides ab alterutro, quod pertinere videtur ad juramentum." For a similar usage equating a betrothal oath with fides, again in the context of the four ways to contract sponsalia, see the Dialogus de septem sacramentis, probably by Guillelmus Parisiensis, a pastoral manual for priests written about 1300 and often reprinted in the fifteenth century, e.g. the Mainz edition c. 1492 (Goff G-720), fol. 54r: "Primo nuda promissione, ut dicendo accipiam te. Secundo datis arris sponsaliciis, sicut pecunia vel aliquo alio. Tercio anuli subarratione. Quarto iuramento interueniente vel fide."

30. Molin and Mutembe, ordo XI, 298-99.

31. Martène, ordo IX, 2:372.

32. Ghent rituale of 1576, 52-53. The essential formula of this "rite for solemnly celebrating sponsalia " is given in both Latin and the vernacular: "promitto me daturum fidem meam tibi N. quam hic manu teneo" becomes in the Dutch "mijn trauwe te gheuen . . . die ic haude metter handt." Conversely, in the "order for celebrating the sacrament of matrimony" (ibid., 54-55) the Latin form is "do tibi N. fidem meam maritalem," which becomes in the vernacular "mijn mannelicke trauwe" for the groom and "mijn vrauwelicke trauwe" for the bride.

33. Martène, ordo IX, 2:372.

34. Molin and Mutembe, 53.

35. Davies, 1954, 126; cf. also the text as given by Weale, lxxxv.

36. It is noteworthy, for example, that the Ghent rituale (see n. 32 above), published only eight years later, uses "trauwe" without further qualification for the fides of betrothal.

37. To justify fides levata as "the forearm raised in confirmation of the matrimonial oath," Panofsky cites only a text in Du Cange (3:490) that refers to the giving of fides by raising a finger in a context unrelated to marriage (see also Kelly, 174 n. 40). The assertion that "the dextrarum iunctio was called fides manualis " rests on a passage in Leclercq, 1895, where that author (not realizing that the pseudo-Augustinian text cited in the following note was spurious) specifically declined to equate the matrimonial dextrarum iunctio of antiquity with fides manualis as the medieval practice of agreeing to a contract by a handclasp. All modern references to fides manualis in the context of medieval marriage stem either from Leclercq or Panofsky (see for example Molin, 355, where Leclercq is quoted verbatim without acknowledgment). Molin and Mutembe (100, 117) have further complicated the issue by calling attention to the marriage service in late rituals from Thérouanne (1557) and Arras (1600) where the priest, while the couple's right hands are joined, tells them to "Levez la main aux saints" (obviously this could only be done with the left hand). These rituals are then used to explain miniatures like Figures 16 and 17, which are two to three centuries earlier (see also Molin, 356 n. 15). Although betrothal oaths are commonplace, these sixteenth-century "marriage oaths" are highly unusual—"tout à fait extravagant," as Molin and Mutembe (117) themselves note—and without medieval precedent; because of their rarity as well as their late date, they have no bearing either on the London double portrait or on miniatures of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Furthermore, "Levez la main aux saints" has reference to a corporal oath (discussed later in this chapter) and not to an oath of the type seen in the double portrait; see Du Cange, 4:456, for several examples of oaths where the oath taker "leva sa main" toward the relics of saints. In a few late rituals (e.g., Martène, ordo IX, which Molin and Mutembe, 12, date to the fifteenth or sixteenth century) the words of consent are followed by a promise of fidelity linked with forms of iurare, but according to canonists, the use of iurare alone, without specific reference to God or the touching action of a corporal oath, did not constitute an oath; see Ferraris, s.v. "juramentum," art. I, 39-42 (ed. 1782, 5:187). Cf. the usage in Martène, ordo X, where "jurez" is used synonymously with "promettez," and "fianciez."

38. Decretales, 4.4.1, gloss ad v. pactionis et consensus: "Hoc est dicere, una est fides desponsationis de futuro, et altera consensus de praesenti."

39. For example, in Molin and Mutembe, ordo X (a thirteenth-century pontifical from Arras), "date invicem fidem" refers to matrimonial consent, but in ordo XI (a thirteenth-century missal from Paris), "fidem super hoc ad invicem prebentibus" refers to the betrothal promise.

40. See Oxford Latin Dictionary, 697-98; and Niermeyer, 424-25.

41. For this document, see The Secular Spirit: Life and Art at the End of the Middle Ages, New York, 1975, cat. no. 249. It was not uncommon in Flanders for a notary to be also a priest; see Murray, 161.

42. Besides the ordines cited in nn. 30-33 above, the right hands are joined by the priest in the betrothal ceremonies of Martène's ordines XI-XIV, but some of these are later than the double portrait.

43. Bartholomaeus Caepolla, Consilia ad diversas materias, Venice, 1575, consilium VI, fols. 25v-27r. Maria, Sempronius, and Titius are conventional fictitious names used in legal literature of the time to designate the bride, her father or guardian, and the groom. At issue was whether Maria's actions constituted de praesenti consent; Caepolla concluded that it did not, making this a "sponsalia de futuro" and not a "matrimonium."

44. Altieri, 51; after a kiss the two men touch hands: "dunandose lo baso della bocca col toccar-sece la mano." See also Klapisch-Zuber, 183. In modern Italian toccamano has come to mean a handclasp or handshake, but as the etymology of the word (from toccare, "to touch") indicates, this was not originally the case; in general, and for the definition quoted, see Dizionario delle lingue italiana e inglese, ed. Vladimiro Macchi, 2d ed., Parte prima, Florence, 1985, 1365.

45. See for example Oscar Bloch and Walther yon Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française, Paris, 1968, 640.

46. Gloss ad v. percussit to Digest 50.15.1: "vel dicitur pactum a percussione palmarum."

47. Larivey's La Constance is reprinted in Emmanuel Louis Nicolas Viollet-le-Duc's Ancien théâtre français, Paris, 1854-57, 6:195-302; for the passage cited (act 1, scene 2), 212.

48. For the text of Bernger's poem, "Wie solte ich armer der swaere getrûwen," see Hugo Moser and Helmut Tervooren, eds., Des Minnesangs Frühling, Stuttgart, 1977, 1:227-28; for the Codex Manesse, ibid., 2:44-47.

49. See the facsimile version edited by Ingo F. Walther, Sämtliche Miniaturen der Manesse-Liederhandschrifs, Aachen, 1981, fols. 146r, 251r, 371r, 407r, 413v. This book is a good illustration of Panofsky's pervasive influence: the author of the entry on the Von Horheim miniature (text to fol. 178r) speculates that it may, like the Arnolfini double portrait, represent a "secular" marriage. The right-hand gesture of the miniature is described as the "conjunctio per fidem manualem"; the requisite "fides levata" is noted as missing, but the hand on the sword is suggested as a substitute gesture; and the dog on the woman's arm is said to be a "Symbol der Treue." All these comments are made without specific reference to Panofsky.

50. Raymond of Peñafort, Summa 4. t. 1, gloss ad v. ilia respondet (ed. 1725, 740). The description of the gesture reads as follows: "Quid si quis injecta manu, vel innexa manu mulieris dicat, do tibi fidem de te accipienda in uxorem."

51. Antoninus, Summa, Pars tertia, t. 1 c. 18 (ed. 1740, 3:65): "Unde si ante fidem sic datam tractabatur de sponsalibus vel matrimonio inter eos, et ipsa requisita sponte manum dedit ad fidem recipiendam et hujusmodi; tunc essent contracta sponsalia."

52. Ferraris, s.v. "sponsalia," 44 (ed. 1782, 8:463): "per porrectionem manus ab uno factam, et ab altera sine renitentia, et contradictione acceptatam censentur, et praesumuntur contracta sponsalia."

53. For the Arsenal and Vatican Decameron manuscripts, see the Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition catalogue Boccace en France: De l'humanisme à l'l'érotisme, Paris, 1975, 58-60; Dogaer, 14, 33, 43; Meiss (1967), 56-61; and Eberhard König, Boccaccio Decameron, Stuttgart, 1989, which illustrates all the Vatican Palatinus miniatures in color.

54. Boccaccio's usage, consistent throughout the Decameron, is exemplified by the tale of Alessandro and the "abbot" in 2.3. The couple's clandestine marriage takes place in the "abbot's" bed, before an image of Christ, as Alessandro places a ring on the woman's hand and "gli si fece sposare." Later, when relating to the pope what happened, the "abbot" refers to that episode as "il contratto matrimonio" between herself and Alessandro, made "solamente nella presenza di Dio." Because the first marriage was clandestine, the ceremony had to be repeated in the pope's presence ("e quivi da capo fece solennemente le sponsalizie celebrare") and was followed by the nozze, or marriage festivities. In 10.10, Griselda—wearing a bridal crown—exchanges words of present consent with Gualtieri, who thus "in presenza di tutti la sposò"; the bride then mounts the traditional palfrey for the deductio to her husband's house, where the "nozze belle e grandi" were worthy of a daughter of the king of France. Modern critics have sometimes misunderstood Boccaccio's terminology; see for example Vittore Branca's edition of the Decameron, Florence, 1965, 156 n. 1, 626 n. 1, 656 n. 1. Contemporary French usage is illustrated by Martène's ordo IX, which begins with a formal betrothal rite in the presence of a priest. A rubric then introduces the marriage ceremony proper, which follows at some later date: "On the day of the nuptials [i.e. the noces ] when the couple are before the entrance of the church the priest says, 'Bonnes gens, nous sommes icy assemblez pour faire le mariage de N. & N. '"

55. Laurent de Premierfait, Le livre cameron, Paris, 1521, fol. 135r.

56. Besides the three miniatures discussed here, further examples of betrothal gestures illustrate 5.4 and 10.6.

57. Significantly, in all the other Decameron betrothal miniatures the two right hands are used for the characteristic sponsalia gesture.

58. For this manuscript, see Le siècle d'or de la minature flamande: Le mécènat de Philippe le Bon, Brussels, 1959, 132-34.

59. Joseph Kervyn de Lettenhove, ed., Oeuvres de Froissart—Chroniques, 1867-77; reprint, [Osnabrück, 1967, 15:237, 302-6. This marriage was highly unusual in that canon law prohibited marriage before puberty (reckoned at twelve years for females and fourteen for males); Decretales 4.2.2 made an exception on grounds of urgent necessity "pro bono pacis" to foster peace and prevent war, which was in fact why this Anglo-French marriage was arranged.

60. That the miniature in Fig. 33 is a composite can be confirmed by comparing it with the corresponding miniature in the famous Breslau Froissart (Arthur Linder, Der Breslauer Froissart, Berlin, 1912, pl. 47), which depicts in several scenes the events of the two-day encampment as described by the author. The illuminator of the Paris manuscript has conflated two of these scenes into one image: the initial meeting of the two kings between flanks of kneeling soldiers, which was the inaugural ceremony of the first day, with the delivery of Isabelle to Richard, the final event of the second day.

61. These details are from an eyewitness account of the Burgundian embassy, which included Van Eyck, that was dispatched to Portugal in 1428-29; for the two ceremonies, see Weale, lxii, lxxi-lxxii. The bride arrived on Christmas day, and the private ceremony took place on 7 January, i.e. immediately after Twelfth Night and the end of the Christmas festivities.

62. Ferraris, s.v. "juramentum," art. I, 5 (ed. 1782, 5:180); see also N. Iung, "Serment," Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, 14 (1939): 1940-56, especially 1943; and Bernard Guindon, Le serment: Son histoire, son caractère sacré, Ottawa, 1957, 126-29. When verbal formulas were combined with gestures, the oath was termed "mixed."

63. Pelbartus of Themeswar, Aureum sacrae theologiae rosarium iuxta quattuor sententiarum libros quadripartitum, Venice, 1586, 3:178v. Aquinas makes the same point in Summa theologiae, 2a-2ae, q. 89, a. 6.

64. See for example Brandileone, 105, 107.

65. Antoninus, Summa, Pars secunda, t. 10 c. 5 (ed. 1740, 2:1076). Canon law required physical contact with the Gospels; see the gloss ad v. tacta to Constitutiones Clementinae 5.3.1.

66. The window is illustrated in Prevenier and Blockmans, fig. 128.

67. For examples of oaths sworn in this fashion, see Du Cange, 4:456-57, in one instance with specific reference to the biblical text: "Extendamus dexteras nostras ad justum judicium Dei, et tunc manus dextras uterque ad coelum extendat."

68. The authenticity of the picture's representation of two forms of the solemn oath is verified by Johan Cools's eyewitness account of the ceremony, which notes that the Spaniards swore by placing their right hands on the Gospels and then kissing a crucifix, while the Dutch swore by raising their right hands; see the National Gallery exhibition catalogue, Art in Seventeenth Century Holland, London, 1976, 24.

69. For other modern survivals, see Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 19:940. A French clerical canon law handbook of the nineteenth century notes simply that the laity swear by raising the right hand: "en levant la main droite comme font les séculiers"; see Michel André, Cours alphabétique et méthodique de droit canon, 2 vols., Paris, 1844, 2:1064.

70. For further examples of both forms, see Frederick van der Meer, Apocalypse: Visions from the Book of Revelation in Western Art, London, 1978, figs. 59, 106, 147. The open-hand gesture also appears in the Angers Apocalypse tapestries, woven in Paris in the 1370s for Louis of Anjou, the brother of Jean de Berry and Philip the Bold of Burgundy.

71. It should be further noted that in the Ghent rituale of 1576 (see n. 32 above), printed less than a decade after Van Vaernewyck's description, "trauwe," used without further qualification, refers to the betrothal promise and not the matrimonial consent, and since Van Vaernewyck capitalizes other common nouns, it is not necessarily significant, as Panofsky argued, that he used a majuscule for fides .

72. Derived from Panofsky, these ideas were elaborated by others—for example Baldass, 74, who linked the supposed nuptial chamber with the mistaken idea that consummation was necessary "to complete the validity of the marriage," and those who anachronistically read sexual symbolism into the bed; see the cautionary remarks in Mercer, 63 and 74. See also Chapter 2, n. 58.

73. Eames (reprinting as an appendix a lengthy extract of Aliénor's Les honneurs de la cour from La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Mémoires sur l'ancienne chevalerie, Paris, 1759), 260. Because of the obvious incongruity between the object and its setting, the Boucicaut Master's use of the hung bed is particularly striking, for twice in the Boucicaut Hours an elaborately hung bed is introduced into the otherwise rustic surroundings of the Nativity stable: first it serves as a lit de repos for the Child, and then, in the Adoration of the Magi miniature, it becomes a thronelike seat of estate for the Virgin and Child; see Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Boucicaut Master, London, 1968, pls. 31 and 33.

74. Eames, 75-78, 85-86, 181, 198, 240-42; for the chair, 258: "une grande chaise à hault dos par derriere, comme ces grandes chaises du temps passé."

75. For this picture, sometimes attributed to Petrus Christus, see C. Aru and Et. de Geradon, La Galerie Sabauda de Turin ( Les Primitifs Flamands, I.2), Antwerp, 1952, 1-5.

76. Many other early Netherlandish works document this location for the hung bed, for example the left wing of Rogier's Saint John the Baptist Altarpiece or the Annunciation panel in the Berlin altar wing of Petrus Christus. Van Eyck has apparently given a simplified representation of the chamber in the double portrait, limiting himself to the portion of the room that is reflected in the mirror. A comparison with other contemporary depictions of Flemish interiors suggests that a room with so much furniture for sitting disposed along the back wall, as well as such an elaborate chandelier, probably also had a fireplace.

77. Eames, 86.

78. Altieri, 50-51; Klapisch-Zuber, 184-85; see also Brandileone, 105, 107.

79. Léon Mirot, "Etudes Lucquoises," Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes, 88 (1927): 78-80, 83-86; 91 (1930): 103-14.

80. C. A. J. Armstrong, "La politique matrimoniale des ducs de Bourgogne de la maison de Valois," Annales de Bourgogne 40 (1968): 5-58, 89-142, especially 42-43. Sample forms for such documents are given by Durantis, Speculum iudiciale, 4.4.1 and 4.4.19 (ed. 1574, 2:440, 471). For a short summary of fifteenth-century law on both the dowry and the dower, see Antoninus, Summa, Pars tertia t. 1 c. 23 (ed. 1740, 3:111-14).

81. The couple portrayed in the Dessau panel are commonly identified, on the basis of a copy made c. 1550, as Berthold Tucher and Christiana Schmidtmayerin, but for various reasons (e.g. Christina was born only in 1465) this identification requires rejection of the 1475 date on the panel; see Ernst Buchner, Das deutsche Bildnis der Spätgotik und der frühen Dürerzeit, Berlin, 1953, 176-78, 219-20, where there are numerous mistakes in transcribing the text on the copy. It is surely more plausible to accept the date on the panel as correct and to question instead the sitters' identity, which rests only on the testimony of the much later copy. For the Fürstenberg panel, see ibid., 170.

82. The standard work on German marriage rituals is Basilius Binder, Geschichte des feierlichen Ehesegens, Abtei Metten, 1938; the material discussed here is summarized by Kenneth Stevenson, Nuptial Blessing: A Study of Christian Marriage Rites, New York, 1983, 88-91.

83. Conversely, in the iconography of the mystic marriage of Saint Catherine in both northern and southern Europe the ring is placed on the saint's finger by the Child.

84. Altieri, 51.

85. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, 226-28.

86. Mirot and Lazzareschi, 84-85.

87. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, 210-11, 226-28; Brucker, 78.

1. Disguised symbolism and Panofsky's views about iconography / iconology are now part of the much larger issue of Panofsky himself; see for example the papers of the Paris symposium, Erwin Panofsky: Cahiers pour un temps, ed. Jacques Bonnet, Paris, 1983; Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, Ithaca, N.Y., 1984, with reference to earlier criticism; Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce, New Haven, Conn., 1989, and the works cited by Bedaux, 19 n. 1. Anecdotes circulate that Panofsky was at times distressed by applications of his theory of disguised symbolism (see Holly, 164; Bedaux, 14).

2. Because the English edition renders these and other passages rather freely (e.g. the reference to the picture as "a kind of snapshot" is not justified by the German text), see Friedländer (1934-37), 1 (originally published Berlin, 1924), 56: "Stimmung sakramentaler Symbolik" and 1:57: "Auch dem geringsten Dinge wird . . . Bedeutung und Wert eines Kultgegenstandes verliehen." For a similar instance of the eclectic genesis of Panofsky's iconographic ideas, see Lubomír Konecny * , "On the Track of Panofsky," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1974): 29-34.

3. Panofsky, 1934, 126.

4. Ibid.

5. Panofsky, 1953, 1:203, 180.

6. Ibid., 142.

7. For example, among the Romanesque capitals of Saint-Pierre in Chauvigny, one that depicts Saint Michael weighing a soul in a balance has inscriptions identifying the two main figures: "Micael Arcangelus" and "Hic est diabolus." Across the top of another portraying the Adoration of the Magi on its principal surface the artist has inscribed his name, "Gofridus me fecit," in letters that are clearly legible from the nave and choir. Both by content and grammatical construction, these simple inscriptions closely parallel those found on Van Eyck's works.

8. Panofsky, 1953, 1:137, 143.

9. This interpretation of the towel has become a commonplace, but see, for instance, Dhanens, 93; and Albert Châelet, Van Eyck, New York, 1980, 22 and pl. 21.

10. Joannes Molanus, De historia ss. imaginum et picturarum, ed. Joannes Paquot, Louvain, 1771, 274-75.

11. See Chapter 1, nn. 23-24; the works cited in n. 1 above; and the review of Holly (cited in n. 1) by Paul Crowther in American Historical Review 91 (1986): 87: "The question of criteria for determining the validity of iconological interpretations is not given adequate consideration. Without such criteria, the way is clear for an empiricist scepticism toward the worth of iconology as such."

12. Dhanens, 198, 203.

13. Brooke, 282.

14. Myriam Greilsammer, L'envers du tableau: Mariage et maternité en Flandre médiévale, Paris, 1990, 46-49.

15. Robert Baldwin, "Marriage as a Sacramental Reflection of the Passion: The Mirror in Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding," Oud Holland 98 (1984): 57-75.

16. Jan Baptist Bedaux, "The Reality of Symbols: The Question of Disguised Symbolism in Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait," Simiolus 16 (1986): 5-26 (for the passage referred to, 13), now reprinted in Bedaux, 21-67. There is some confusion and ambiguity in Bedaux about the theory and practice of medieval marriage. For example, he misunderstands arrha (29), and his use of expressions like "to contract a marriage" are ambiguous in the context of the fifteenth century, for, as I have tried to explain, without further qualification it is not clear whether the reference is to a betrothal contract of future marriage or a marriage contract of present consent. Consequently, Bedaux is misunderstood by other writers, e.g. Harbison, 1990, 252 n. 7, and Roskill, 65, who both think he is writing about the picture as a betrothal. In his book, however, Bedaux is quite specific: his doubts about disguised symbolism, he says, developed "as it became increasingly clear that [the London panel] was fairly easy to interpret within the context of the contemporary marriage ceremony. In fact, it became more and more apparent that the Arnolfini portrait was an accurate depiction of a specific wedding" (11). In Bedaux's view, the ceremony depicted in the double portrait follows what he terms, on the basis of a lecture he attended, "the ancient codification of secular law," which, he says, did not preclude an ecclesiastical rite. He further suggests the ceremony was not clandestine and that Arnolfini likely "would have had his marriage consecrated afterward" (25, 29). Bedaux then proceeds to accommodate "the left-handed gesture" of the double portrait to what he presumes would have happened at such a ceremony by misreading various manuscript miniatures, including the Froissart illumination that is my Fig. 33 (see also the comments above in Chapter 2, n. 65). Although he does not say so explicitly and apparently is not fully aware of what he implies, Bedaux seems to interpret the picture as an instance of the Italian rite before a notary. If such is indeed the case, he misunderstands that by the twelfth century this was the equivalent of the northern ceremony in facie ecclesiae and constituted the sacramental rite that created the matrimonial bond. The only major difference between the two ceremonies in this regard was that in the north what Bedaux calls the "consecration" (i.e. the nuptial blessing of the old Roman liturgy) followed immediately inside the church, whereas in Italy the church rite, deferred to another day, remained part of the nozze and might even be omitted. And as I have explained, the gesture used in the wedding ceremony before the notary was not a joining of hands at all but rather the placing of a wedding ring on the bride's finger by the groom.

17. See for example Barbara G. Lane, "Sacred versus Profane in Early Netherlandish Painting," Simiolus 18 (1988): 106-15; and the reply of Craig Harbison in 19 (1989): 198-205.

18. For the passages quoted or cited, see Harbison, 1991, 16, 17, 36, 44; and Harbison, 1990, 261-64.

19. Harbison, 1990, 288; and Harbison, 1991, 46.

20. To suggest an analogy with the evolution of language, the interpretation of paintings, like the meaning of words, can change with the passage of time. For example, egregious was long used in English with both good and bad connotations ("prominent," "remarkable" / "gross," "flagrant"). Although the Latin root and the modern Italian egregio have only positive connotations, in modern English the historical or etymologically correct meaning has been completely displaced, and only the antithetical negative meaning is now current. One can say therefore that the meaning of the word has changed, but surely no one would insist on applying the inverted English meaning to a Latin or Italian context or the etymologically correct usage to a modern English context.

21. Seidel, 1989, esp. 57-58, 78; and Seidel, 1991, esp. 26.

22. Seidel then moves on to new speculations that are better pursued in her own exposition. But the gist of the argument is that Giovanna might not have been of marriageable age when the picture was painted, and thus "the imminence of consummation . . . enshrined in the panel" was something hoped for in the future rather than realized in the present. The dowry might then have been advanced to Arnolfini as a disguised, and in some way irregular, loan for his commercial activities during the interval between "Ring Day" and the much later consummation of the marriage, in which case the panel, "as the clever commission of a shrewd banker," would become "a financial transaction that is enacted as a marriage ceremony." For the passages quoted and cited, see Seidel, 1989, 66-73, 77, 79; and Seidel, 1991, 34. As disguised loans were a commonplace of contemporary Italian mercantile practice, had the two men wished to negotiate such a contract, they could have done it with a simple notarial instrument; it is thus inconceivable that they would have indulged in the complex and legally invalid ruse Seidel suggests.

23. See Julius Kirshner and Anthony Molho, "The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence," Journal of Modern History 50 (1978): 403-38. See also Klapisch-Zuber, 191-92.

24. Retaining Panofsky's notion that the panel was intended as a legal document, Seidel (1989, 68-69)—arguing that the mirror, "a seal-like object," functions as Van Eyck's seal—misappropriates information about the Flemish institution of the erfachtige liede, which required that a document, to be authenticated, be witnessed by two urban landowners (to own a house was not sufficient); (see Murray, 162). The document cited (Weale, xxxviii) to establish Van Eyck as a landowner concerns the annual redditus, or rent, he paid the Church of Saint Donatian in Bruges for a house. Van Eyck is believed to have owned this house, but the land on which it was built evidently belonged to the church; this explains both the rent and the amount of the redditus, which is too small for a year's house rent (cf. Weale, xxxvi, for the earlier rental of Van Eyck's house in Lille). Thus what evidence there is suggests than Van Eyck did not own land in Bruges. Seidel also conflates the two medieval ways to authenticate a document, by signature and by seal; normally the use of one precluded the use of the other by the same individual. A mirror, moreover, is not a seal, Van Eyck was unqualified to authenticate a document in either way, and Italian merchants like the Arnolfini and Cenami, accustomed to notarial instruments for centuries, would hardly have considered the London panel an appropriate substitute.

For the latest version of Seidel's ideas, see her Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon, Cambridge 1993. Since the publication of this book coincided with the typesetting of mine, I can add only one further comment on her methodology. Seidel notes at one point (255 n. 17) that she has "knowingly nudged the evidence" in her concern for "the plausible rather than the probable." One instance of such nudging exemplifies her approach. Arguing that the "intertwined design with crosses immediately above" Van Eyck's name in the signature inscription (i.e. the ornamental flourish of the inital letter) is Jan's sign as a notary, Seidel continues (132-33): "Shaped like a chandelier and furnished with a lighted candle, the sign additionally alludes to the contemporary adjudication of claims by fire, known in contemporary parlance as 'la chandelle éteinte,' the extinguished candle." Two documents are cited in support of this assertion from archival materials in Bruges published by Gilliodts-van Severen. At first it appears that Seidel has discovered more satisfactory evidence for an earlier interpretation of the lighted candle proposed by Dhanens (199) and Bedaux (60 n. 14). But what these documents refer to is "adjudication à la chandelle [éteinte," a form of auction (as the editor explains in a footnote on one of the pages Seidel cites) common in northern Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century: at such an auction bidding continued until a short piece of lighted candle went out, with the successful bid being the last made before the candle extinguished itself. For further reference to this practice, see Antoine Furetière, Dictionaire universel, The Hague, 1690, s.vv. "chandelle" and "adjudication"; and Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 5 (Leizpig, 1873), 617; Samuel Pepys describes two sales of ships "by an inch of candle" (see his Diary for 6 November 1660 and 3 September 1662). Seidel's reference to "adjudication" by "la chandelle éteinte" is thus irrelevant to the double portrait, unless one wishes to argue that the woman is being auctioned by the man and the mirror reflects the images of two bidders. This example epitomizes what I see as a continuing methodological problem in the application of historical evidence to iconographic scholarship: the uncritical symbolic reading of something commonplace (taking a calligraphic flourish for a chandelier with a lighted candle); the application of that reading to circumstances that are historically untenable (the argument that Van Eyck was a notary and the painting a legal document); and the attempt to justify the argument by irrelevant historical documentation (the contextually meaningless reference to auction sales "by the candle"). It should also be noted that the jeweled pendant in Boston that Seidel (104-5) relates to the gesture in the double portrait is a nineteenth-century imitation; see Hanns Swarzenski and Nancy Netzer, Catalogue of Medieval Objects in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Enamels and Glass, Boston, 1986, 152.

25. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, Princeton, N.J., 1972, 317-21, sees this "curve of the stomach" as a characteristic of the International Gothic style. An often reproduced miniature from Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale ms. 9296 (Prevenier and Blockmans, fig. 98), depicts Margaret of York performing the seven corporal works mercy. Although in each scene the duchess wears the same gown, her appearance resembles that of the woman in the double portrait and the Dresden Saint Barbara only in the scene where the front of the gown has been drawn up to the waist and held with one hand.

26. Christine de Pizan, Le livre des trois vertus, ed. Charity Cannon Willard, Paris, 1989, 157-59. This chapter (11) is entitled "Ci devise de celles qui sont oultrageuses en leurs abiz, atours et abillemens."

27. An amusing reflection of these conceits is found in the Vienna Girart de Roussillon, ms. 2549, fol. 164r (Thoss, pl. 46), which illustrates the simultaneous building of several churches. The stone carvers assert their rank at the top of the hierarchy of workers depicted in the miniature by their fashionable clothing, including hats with feathers and poulaines with long points whose awkwardness they overcome by sitting down while working. By contrast, the footgear of the lowly assistant who mixes mortar is so worn as to reveal his bare heel and toes. For a similar miniature by the same master, see Dogaer, pl. 5, where the length of the shoes is inversely proportional to the mobility required by the work being done.

28. Panofsky, 1934, 126; Panofsky, 1953, 1:203.

29. Joseph continues to be portrayed wearing clogs in the Marriage of the Virgin until the end of the fifteenth century, as in a painting by the Master of the Tiburtine Sibyl in Philadelphia and in a number of anonymous panel paintings; for the latter, see the exhibition catalogue Primitifs Flamands anonymes, Bruges, 1969, nos. 55-56.

30. For the Vatican prototype without the pattens, cf. Meiss, 1967, figs. 7 and 10; all seven Arsenal miniatures depicting figures with pattens are by the Guillebert de Mets Master, who is known to have been a Fleming. Both the stylish straw hats and the selective use of these very elongated clogs by the duke himself and those closely associated with him can also be seen in the Eyckian painting in Versailles of some festivity at the court of Philip the Good; on this painting, see Anne van Buren Hagopian, "Un jardin d'amour de Philippe le Bon au parc de Hesdin," Le Revue du Louvre 35 (1985): 185-92.

31. Commission royale d'histoire, Recueil des chroniques de Flandre: Corpus chronicorum flandriae, ed. J.-J. De Smet, Brussels, 1837-65, 4:57; exactly what Philip did with the pattens is somewhat obscure from the chronicler's description: "à mettre sus et clouer pattins."

32. Philip wears pattens while seated in a canopied chair of state in the presentation miniature of the Vienna Girart de Roussilon (see Thoss, pl. 1) as well as in Brussels ms. 9095 (see Winlder, pl. 30); for other examples, see Georges Dogaer and Marguerite Debae, La librarie de Philippe le Bon, Brussels, 1967, pls. 42, 43, 47, 49.

33. Meyer Schapiro, Late Antique, Early Christian, and Medieval Art, New York, 1979, 1-19.

34. See for example Chapter 3, n. 49, and R.-A. d'Hulst, Jacob Jordaens, London, 1982, 280.

35. Panofsky, 1953, 1:203; Panofsky, 1934, 126, 118 n. 10, 125 n. 27.

36. Mâle, 426-27. Panofsky's citation of Barbier de Montault's Traité d'iconographie chrétienne leads to no more than a statement that the dog, as the most faithful of animals, is fittingly "le symbol vivant de la fidélité" because fidelis is derived from fides . Panofsky also cites Ripa's Iconologia, where the dog and lighted candle are attributes of the personified theological virtue Fides, but since the lighted candle does not appear as an attribute of Fides in this sense before about 1470 (see Mâle, 311-12) and the dog apparently not before the seventeenth century, Ripa's symbols are irrelevant to a picture painted in 1434. Eventually (though Panofsky makes no mention of it) the dog does appear as an emblem of wifely fidelity in Alciati's Emblemata (Emblem 191: "In fidem uxoriam," as in the Lyons edition of 1550, 205), while in a drawing by Maerten de Vos, Fidelitas is personified with a dog as an attribute (see E. de Jongh, Portretten van echt en trouw: Huwelijk en gezin in de Nederlandse kunst van de zeventiende eeuw door, Zwolle and Haarlem, 1986, 232, pls. 28c and 52c). But it would be impossible to infer the intended meaning of the dog in either case without the accompanying captions, and the imagery, because of its late date, is as anachronistic as Ripa for interpreting a work from the fifteenth century. Even when a dog appears in seventeenth-century double portraits, a symbolic reading based on Alciati is dubious because this emblem imagery also refers textually—and usually visually as well—to apples as the fruit of Venus (the couple often sit under an apple tree). Thus if a painter had really been inspired by Alciati, it seems likely that both aspects of the emblem imagery would have been incorporated into a picture.

37. Meiss, 1969, 31-32; see ibid., figs. 34 and 114, for representations of the duke, accompanied by small dogs, kneeling in prayer before the Virgin. See also Mercer, 21.

38. See for example Winkler, pls. 8, 12, 16, 18, 25, 27, 36, 38, 40, 43-45, 50, 52; and Dogaer, figs. 32, 33, 44, 47, 61, 63, 64, 67, 81.

39. Guennol volume, fol. 142v; John Plummer, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, New York, n.d., pl. 77.

40. Eileen Power, Medieval People, New York, 1963, 90-91; see also the same author's Medieval English Nunneries, Cambridge, 1922, 305-7, 588, 662.

41. Panofsky, 1934, 126; or in Panofsky, 1953, 1:202: "symbol of the all-seeing Christ." Panofsky gives no documentation whatsoever for the candle as a symbol of God, and none of the sources he cites provides acceptable evidence linking the candle either to marriage customs or to fifteenth-century practice in swearing oaths. The much later custom of swearing an oath before a crucifix with lighted candles on either side is hardly analogous to what is seen in the double portrait. And since the phrase "iurare super candelam" can only refer to a corporal oath, this too is inapplicable to the London panel, for the male figure does not touch the candle; moreover, since the expression comes from the satirical tale of the roguish fox, Reinke de Vos, "to swear on a candle" was apparently intended as a joke, which explains why the lexicographers of medieval Latin make no mention of such an oath (cf. Du Cange, 4:451-63). Bedaux, 60 n. 14, summarizes other suggestions, all very casually documented, none of which specifically concern marriage contracts. And although it seems plausible to relate the lighted candle to the swearing of a promissory oath, neither contemporary visual documentation (cf. Figs. 32-35 and Plate 10) nor any fifteenth-century texts known to me provide evidence for the use of a lighted candle in such a context. See also n. 24 above.

42. See for example the exhibition catalogue Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, Philadelphia, 1984, pls. 52, 55, 71, 110, 122; a single candle in a chandelier is seen in the central panel of an eighteenth-century copy in the Rijksmuseum of a famous lost triptych of Gerard Dou (ibid., 186; for a better illustration, see Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France, and Holland, New Haven, Conn., 1983, pl. 268).

43. Bennett, 67, 96.

44. For reference to the chronicler who mentions the sale of the melted-down wax, see Robert L. Mode, "San Bernardino in Glory," Art Bulletin 55 (1973): 62-64.

45. Mirot and Lazzareschi, 99.

46. Panofsky, 1953, 1:203, also linking the "crystal beads" with the mirror, both of which are said to be (although without any justification) "well-known symbols of Marian purity."

47. Heinrich Schwarz, "The Mirror in Art," Art Quarterly 15 (1952): 96-118; idem, "The Mirror of the Artist and the Mirror of the Devout," in Studies in the History of Art Dedicated to William E. Suida on His Eightieth Birthday, London, 1959, 90-105, especially 99-100 and 104. For early criticism of this tendency (but not with respect to Van Eyck's double portrait), see Peter Schabacker, "Petrus Christus' Saint Eloy: Problems of Provenance, Sources, and Meaning," Art Quarterly 35 (1972): 103-4.

48. Panofsky, 1953, 1:148.

49. Bernardinus de Busti, Mariale, Strasbourg, 1496 (Goff B-1334), fols. f7r-g6v. Elsewhere (fol. rr1r) in this massive compendium of Marian theology drawn from patristic and scholastic sources, Busti says that the Virgin is the "speculum dei" because God's image, that is, Christ, shines forth from her, and he goes on to explain that just as a mirror receives into itself the image of its maker, "so the blessed Virgin received into her womb him who created her" ("Sicut autem speculum recipit in se figuram eius qui fecit illum, ita beata virgo in suo utero recepit eum qui creavit ipsam").

50. The Immaculate Conception is actually the central theme of this iconography, for a figure of Christ at the top of the composition is invariably accompanied by the text, "Tota pulchra est . . . et macula non est in te," taken from the Song of Songs. For the Grimani Breviary miniature, see Carol J. Purtle, The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck, Princeton, N.J., 1982, pl. 81. This imagery is found in various printed Parisian Heures for about two decades, beginning in 1505, after which it disappears. Other early examples include a polychrome wood relief in the cathedral of Bayeux and a Tournai tapestry at Reims cathedral. It is found again, with the emblems still labeled, in a work of the Jesuit scholar Petrus Canisius, De Maria virgine incomparabili, et Dei genetrice sacrosancta, Ingolstadt, 1577, but later, as in paintings of this subject by Ribera, the identifying texts are omitted.

51. Ritzer, 251-52; Molin and Mutembe, 212-13, esp. 213 n. 14.

52. For this miniature, see Thoss, 177, and pl. 47.

53. For other examples of the moralizing use of mirrors, see Marrow, 162-64; and Ilja M. Veldman, "Lessons for Ladies: A Selection of Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prints," Simiolus 16 (1986): 113-14.

54. For example a miniature by the Master of the Saint Bertin Altarpiece in the British Library's Trésor des histories (Cotton ms. Augustus V., fol. 334v) depicts an interior with a motto written on the rear wall and the painted inscription "Ave Maria" on the fireplace canopy. Similar wall inscriptions, sometimes with dates, are so characteristic of another Flemish miniaturist active about 1480 that he is known as the Master with White Inscriptions; see Dogaer, 124-25.

55. See Andrew Martindale, The Rise of the Artist in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, London, 1972; and John Larner, Culture and Society in Italy, 1290-1420, New York, 1971, 264-84. For the Paris inscription, see Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XI ^e au XVI ^e siècle, Paris, 1854-68, 1:111.

56. A nineteenth-century survival, this forced and implausible chronographic reading requires the arbitrary suppression of one of three D 's in the first part of the inscription, that W be read as 10, and that J, I, and Y all count as 1. And because both dates are already given in Arabic numerals, the supposed chronograms would in any event be pointless. Panofsky's claim that "Leeuw," if written out, would have added an L, V, and W, thus destroying the chronographic reading, is taken from Weale, 87; Panofsky, 1953, 1:198.

57. The thirteenth edition consists of three supplementary volumes to the twelfth edition of 1922; the biography of Freud is found in 2:116.

58. See for example Susan Koslow, "The Curtain-Sack: A Newly Discovered Incarnation Motif in Rogier van der Weyden's Columba Annunciation," Artibus et historiae 7 (1986): 9-33. What the author calls a "curtain sack," i.e. the drapery panel of a hung bed rolled up for convenience' sake when not in use (the fabric of a hung canopy for a chair of estate was also sometimes folded up in exactly the same way; see Fig. 39), is interpreted symbolically on the basis of visual similarities with a curd sack and the shape of the womb.

59. See in particular Panofsky, 1953, 1:179-80.

60. Weale, xlii-xliii; see also lix for the description of Van Eyck as an "excellent maistre en art de painture" by the author of the eyewitness account of the Burgundian embassy that made the arrangements for the duke's marriage to Isabel of Portugal.

61. For the Latin text of Fazio's De viris illustribus, see Baxandall, 103.

62. Fazio's characterization of Van Eyck ("litterarum nonnihil doctus. geometriae praesertim et earum artium quae ad picturae ornamentum accederent") seems no more than a reminiscence of Pliny's comment on Pamphilus ("primus in pictura omnibus litteris eruditus, praecipue arithmetica et geometria, sine quibus negabat artem perfici posse"; Historia naturalis 35-76), with the important difference, however, that Pliny makes explicit his point about the learning of Pamphilus, whereas Fazio, writing of Van Eyck, does not.

63. Panofsky, 1953, 1:2, 179-80. Panofsky's translation of Fazio is unduly free so as to support his point of view; it should be compared with that of Baxandall, 102.

64. L. Bril and E. Lejour, "Les oranges dans nos provinces au XIV ^e et au XV ^e siècles," Archives, bibliothèques et musées de Belgique 26 (1955): 56-59.

65. On such carpets as symbols of status and the evidence that some at least were of European manufacture in the fifteenth century, see Walter B. Denny, "Rugs and Carpets," Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 10 (New York, 1988): 546-52.

66. Baldass, 76.

67. See for example Meiss, 1969, 31-32.

68. Marrow, 161.

69. Despite controversy about the details, there is general agreement that Van Eyck achieved his spatial constructions empirically rather than geometrically. For the recent literature, see James Elkins, "On the Arnolfini Portrait and the Lucca Madonna: Did Jan van Eyck Have a Perspectival System?" Art Bulletin 73 (1991): 53-62.

70. As is well known, Petrus Christus was the first northern painter to employ a single vanishing point, but he was also Jan's principal follower in the use of objects rationally disposed to create the illusion of pictorial space (see Fig. 40). Elements of the same technique are readily apparent in the anonymous Turin Virgin and Child (see Plate 12).

71. See for example, Bosshard (as in the following note), 10.

72. Emil Bosshard, "Revealing van Eyck: The Examination of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Annunciation," Apollo 136 (1992): 4-11. For references to other examples of alterations by Van Eyck to enhance the three-dimensional quality of his works, see ibid., 11 n. 15.

73. Pliny, Historia naturalis 35.81-83.

74. Baxandall, 102-3.