Who painted the Arnolfini Portrait?

Jan van Eyck, in 1434, and it is one of the most examined paintings in Europe because it is full of things that look like clues. A single candle burning in daylight, a dog, discarded shoes, oranges on the sill, a convex mirror on the back wall, and above it an inscription in elaborate script reading Jan van Eyck was here.

The mirror is the trick. It reflects the backs of the two figures and two more people standing where the viewer stands, one of them presumably the painter - so the picture contains its own witness, and the inscription reads like a legal attestation rather than a signature. That prompted the influential theory that it documents a marriage, with the painter as witness.

That reading has been substantially undermined and nothing has replaced it. The woman is not pregnant - she is holding heavy fabric in a fashionable pose - and evidence emerged that the couple identified in the traditional account married thirteen years after the painting was made and that one of them may have been dead. What it actually commemorates is unknown, which leaves a picture assembled entirely out of significant-looking details and no agreed meaning. Van Eyck also did not invent oil painting, as Vasari claimed; he was extraordinarily good at it.