Focus on this artwork and discuss the Description.
The man is shown in three-quarters view with his face dramatically lit by light falling from the left. This device provides striking contrasts of light and shadow and draws the viewer's attention on to the man's face. He has brown eyes, and while his expression is impassive there are traces of melancholy, especially in the down-turn of his mouth. He is obviously a member of the nobility, being very well dressed in a fur lined brown jacket over a black undervest. His headdress, a chaperon, contains two wings which hang down over the man's shoulders and extend to his chest. The edges of the cloth are given a shredded look at the edges of their trains. The hood is brightly and dramatically coloured using a pigment, ultramarine, extracted from the expensive lapis lazuli gemstone to give it its bright, intense hue. The headdress is of a similar but less extravagant type to that seen in van Eyck's c. 1433 Portrait of a Man, and worn by a figure in the distance in his c. 1435 Madonna of Chancellor Rolin. This type of headdress was to go out of fashion by the mid-1430s, conveniently and definitively dating the painting as having been completed before then.It is not known if the ring held in his right hand is intended to indicate that the sitter was a jeweller or goldsmith – as had been previously thought until Erwin Panofsky's analysis in the mid century – or that the painting was commissioned as a betrothal portrait to mark a proposal of marriage intended for an unseen bride and her family. This latter theory is supported by the panel's near miniature dimensions; such a small size would have been easily packed and transported to the intended's family.He has a light beard of one or two days' growth, a common feature in other of van Eyck's male portraits, where the sitter is often either unshaven, or according to Lorne Campbell of the National Gallery, London, "rather inefficiently shaved". Art historian Till-Holger Borchert praises van Eyck's recording of the man's stubble "with painstaking precision; nothing is idealised." Yet it is interesting to consider such an idealised portrait in the context of a betrothal portrait, where the intended bride's family most likely had not met the man and are dependent solely on the portrait for an indication of his means and character. Carol Richardson observes that the unidealised representation would have been a significant novelty and shock at the time, and that, complete with the evident skill of the painter, the verisimilitude would have given the sitter weight and creditability.
The panel contains two illusionistic passages; the ring and his right hand appear to project out of the painting, while the minutely described fingers of his left hand seem to lie on a parapet positioned on what would have been the lower border of the original—but now lost—frame.
betrothal Till-Holger Borchert panel Portrait of a Man Lorne Campbell parapet ultramarine left Madonna of Chancellor Rolin chaperon illusionistic Erwin Panofsky National Gallery lapis lazuli