Oh, have we discovered a delightful rabbit hole. We were continuing the theme of Women’s Head Coverings, this time focusing on Catholic traditions.
But this led us to head coverings in medieval paintings, which led us to the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck.
WLBOTT: G, are there medieval or renaissance paintings that feature women’s head coverings?
Elder G: Yes, many medieval and Renaissance paintings prominently feature women’s head coverings, providing a visual record of the styles and cultural norms of the time. These paintings offer insight into the variety of head coverings worn across different regions, classes, and stages of life. Here are a few examples:
1. The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1434): In this famous Renaissance painting, the woman wears a veil over a headdress with a fashionable layered look. This painting captures the richness of fabric and style that a wealthy woman would wear, including a fine veil indicating her married status
….
And away we go….Enough BLOTT ideas to last months….
[note: lighting enhancements were applied to most of the images below of The Arnolfini Portrait. The details were extracted from the high res image available on Wikipedia.]
Details
The details are rich in artistic mastery, symbols of wealth, intimacy, religious beliefs, and a cute puppy.
The various links and videos in today’s BLOTT go into a fascinating study of the symbols.
Smart History
There is so much going on in this painting. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker provide an excellent analysis in their Smart History article. Oranges in Belgium in the 15th century? Dragons? Puppies? Mirrors?
Although married Renaissance women spent the majority of their premenopausal lives with child, pregnancy itself was rarely represented.
Artists working across a myriad of media shied away from depicting pregnancy, most likely because the condition was thought to be indecorous.
During the Renaissance, when a woman entered into her third trimester, she generally remained at home in a ritual called confinement. Further, depicting pregnancy admitted a direct link to human sexuality. Though procreative intercourse between heterosexual married couples was the only church-sanctioned form of sexuality in the Renaissance, to portray a married woman pregnant was generally seen as improper.
Smart History
The professors talk about the painting here….
It is considered one of the most original and complex paintings in Western art, because of its beauty, complex iconography, geometric orthogonal perspective, and expansion of the picture space with the use of a mirror.
Wikipedia
The Wikipedia image of this painting is 64mb, with a jpg compression of 98%. This is a wonderful feature of Wikipedia, that they can provide hi-res versions of these masterpieces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnolfini_Portrait#/media/File:The_Arnolfini_portrait_(1434).jpg
The Wikipedia article offers an interesting analysis of the symbolism embedded in the painting, as well as the amazing 600 year provenance.
Some Modern Attempts
Because we can leave no turn unstoned, we bring you some of the WLBOTT fine art collection, inspired by the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck.
Medieval WLBOTT
We present evidence of the WLBOTT Influence in Jan van Eyck’s work.
