Giovanni Arnolfini

Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini (c. 1400 – after 1452) was an Italian merchant from Lucca, a city in Tuscany, Italy. He spent most of his life in Flanders, then part of the Duchy of Burgundy, probably always based in Bruges, a wealthy trading city and one of the main towns of the Burgundian court. The Arnolfini were a powerful family in Lucca, involved in the politics and trade of the small but wealthy city, which specialised (like Florence) in weaving expensive cloth.

Life

Giovanni, known as di Nicolao or "son of Nicolao" to distinguish him from his cousin Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini (see below), moved to Bruges in Flanders at an early age to work in the family business and lived there for the rest of his life. He became wealthy trading in silk and other fabrics, tapestries and other precious objects, although in later years he seems to have suffered business reverses, and to have retired from trading. His fame arises because he is the most likely candidate, out of a number of male Arnolfinis, to have been the subject of two portraits by Jan van Eyck, the famous Flemish painter. These are The Arnolfini Portrait of Giovanni and his wife, dated 1434 and now in London; and another portrait, evidently of the same sitter when slightly older, now in Berlin (below).

He was presumably born in Lucca, where his parents lived, but neither the place nor the date are documented. He was sent to Bruges while still technically a child, as the first record of him is a letter from his father Nicolao in Lucca to his agent in Bruges in 1419 empowering the agent to "emancipate" Giovanni – that is, to declare him adult. Since there was no fixed age for this, it gives no real clue as to his date of birth.