Color In Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait

hair. Colours are applied in full intensity with relatively little shadow, as exemplified by the blue background and the brown dress. Given her lack of vitality and vivacity, the idea we get is that this is an indifferent, maybe a slightly petulant woman with little sanguinity and a pale face in a cool-coloured setting. If we take the most familiar pigments of the Renaissance palette, it is possible to produce a tonal scale from yellow, the lightest, down through cinnabar (or vermillion), apple-green, turquoise, rose-red, to the darkest lapis lazuli. As we may notice, the colours are mostly in a cool tone and here the use of cool yellow plays a great role, which is to soften and mollify the portrait by lighting it up. By contrast, in Cecilia Gallerani we

However, in the Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, even the pet ermine held by the sitter was profusely cast in light, and the relationship of light and shadow in both the sitter and the ermine is consistent. This suggests that back in Jan’s time the use of chiaroscuro was more a way to achieve likeness and to overtly demonstrate this skill than a coherent and systematic technique. As for Leonardo, the systematic and accurate use of chiaroscuro was a procedure to generate form and to grant the sitter a naturalistic

He uses selective light —light restricted not only in the sense of sharpness, but one that seeks out compositionally and iconographically significant forms and ignores the rest. As the light in Cecilia Gallerani illuminates the ermine and the tilted head of Cecilia most directly, it also plays an important symbolic role.16 The importance of the ermine is supported by all three interpretations of its symbolic