CHAPTER 1 Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and Copies after His Woman and Her Toilette: Recollections of the Alhambra’s Constellation Halls, the Hamman, and Alchemy

Barbara von Barghahn

In October 1428 Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390–1441) was sent to Lisbon as a member of a delegation charged with the mission of negotiating a marriage between Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and King João I of Portugal’s only daugh- ter, Isabella.1 The account of his diplomatic visit (Brussels, Archives Générales du Royaume, CC 132, folios 157–166) relates Van Eyck dispatched two realistic portraits of the Portuguese princess to Bruges in February 1429. The Flemish embassy then made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and visited Juan II of Castile before traveling south to Granada. At the magnificent Nasrid castle and citadel of the Alhambra they had an audience with Sultan Muhammad VIII (r. 1417–19; 1427–30) and journeyed to some “distant lands” before returning to Portugal by July of 1429.2 In October Van Eyck and the Flemish delegation sailed for Flanders with Isabella’s fleet. In 1433, a few years after the ducal wedding festivities in Bruges, Van Eyck purchased a house on Goudenstraat, near the dock where foreign merchants maintained their grand residences and conducted business. One merchant the artist knew well was Giovanni Arnolfini, originally from Lucca. No visitor to the Alhambra remains unaffected by allure of the Nasrid “red castle”.3 This essay addresses the ways in which Van Eyck’s diplomatic visit

1 Monique Sommé, Isabelle de Portugal, duchesse de Bourgogne. Une femme au pouvoir au xve siècle. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1998; Aline S. Taylor, Isabel of Burgundy. The Duchess Who Played Politics in the Age of Joan of Arc, 1397–1471. Madison Books, 2001. 2 Jean-Gabriel Lemoyne, “Autour du voyage de Jean van Eyck au Portugal in 1428.” Cahiers de Bordeaux / Journees Internationales d’Etudes d’Art, 1954, pp. 17–26; Charles Sterling, “Jan van Eyck avant 1432.” Revue de l’Art, 33, 1976, pp. 7–82, 33–7; Barbara von Barghahn, Jan van Eyck and Portugal’s “Illustrious Generation,” Pindar Press, 2013–14, 2 vols. 3 Robert Irwin, The Alhambra. Harvard University Press, 2004; María Jesús Viguera Molíns, et al., editors, El reino nazarí de Granada (1232–1492) política, instituciones. Espacio y economía. Historia de España Menéndez Pidal. Espasa-Calpe, 2000.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004379596_003 22 von Barghahn to Granada affected his art—especially the influence of Islamic allegory, as- tronomy, and alchemy. The Arnolfini Portrait (1434, London, National Gallery) remains one of the most engaging works by the Northern Renaissance master, yet it continues to perplex scholars. This essay does not discard previous or current scholarly opinions. Rather, the author presents a new interpretation that considers Van Eyck’s visit to the Alhambra and the relationship of The Arnolfini Portrait to another ubiquitous Van Eyck painting. Upon his return to Flanders, Van Eyck is believed to have painted a few “harem” subjects. Although these works have not survived, two copies exist of Woman at Her Toilette. One is an image within Willem van Haecht’s larger painting of 1628 showing the Van Eyck original painting in the collection of Cornelis van der Geest (d. 1638), and the other is a workshop replica. This essay revisits the notion Julius Held first proposed—that Van Eyck conceived Woman at Her Toilette as a pendant, or iconographical compliment, to The Arnolfini Portrait. Pivotal to this new interpretation is the persistence of Van Eyck’s memory of Islamic imagery— specifically, the parietal epigraphy and the starry ceiling decoration in the chambers forming the Alhambra’s Courtyard of the Lions, particularly the Two Sisters Hall. Philip the Good’s commercial interests would have prompted the Burgun­ dian delegation’s excursion to Granada—probably to parley with the Sultan about trading arrangements in such luxury commodities as carpets, silks, ivory caskets, inlaid wooden objects, tooled leather, and spices. The Nasrid strong- hold of the Alhambra crowns Granada’s lofty Sabīkah plateau. Passing through the southwest outer Gate of Justice, an archway situated on the preferred route taken by foreign embassies,4 the Flemish ambassadors would have progressed to the administrative sector (qadi) to wait in the Golden Hall Courtyard (Fig. 1.1). The stuccoed south wall of the patio refers to “a gate where [roads] bifurcate and through [which] the West envies the East.”5 Oriented on a north-south axis, the Sultan’s Palace (Qaşr al-Sultan; Comares Palace) was planned by Ismail I (r. 1309–33), initiated by his son Yusuf I (r. 1333– 54), and completed in about 1370 under Muhammad V (r. 1354–55; 1362–91) (Fig. 1.2). In 1429 the massive Comares Tower functioned as a diwān, a spacious gallery reserved for state occasions, such as the reception of envoys. Passing through a double-arched entrance to this hall, Van Eyck would have beheld Muhammad VIII seated on a short-legged, elevated throne that was draped with a silk canopy and located in the central niche of the tower’s north wall.6

4 Oleg Grabar, The Alhambra. Allen Lane, 1978, 43. 5 Ivi, 54–7. 6 Todd Willmert, “Alhambra Palace Architecture: An Environmental Consideration of its Inhabitation.” Muqarnas, 27, 2010, pp. 157–88, 160–7; James Dickie, and Yaqub Zaki, “The