Jan van Eyck’s 1434 Arnolfini Portrait looks simple: a man and a woman holding hands in a bedroom. But nearly every detail misleads the modern eye. The woman who appears pregnant almost certainly isn’t; the couple wears heavy fur while a cherry tree bears summer fruit outside; and a flourishing Latin inscription on the wall may be a legal witness signature. This episode decodes the painting’s revolutionary oil-glazing technique, its geometric perspective, and the calculated display of wealth in every orange, carpet, and lap dog.

We trace the scholarly upheaval after a 1997 archival discovery shattered the century-old identification of the sitters, explore Margaret Koster’s theory that this is a memorial portrait of a deceased wife, and weigh Erwin Panofsky’s marriage-contract reading against Margaret Carroll’s power-of-attorney interpretation and the skeptics who say a broom is just a broom. Finally, we follow the panel’s astonishing provenance from the Habsburg court to a Madrid palace fire, Napoleonic plunder, and a suspiciously convenient discovery by a wounded Scottish colonel before it reached London’s National Gallery in 1842.

• How van Eyck’s wet-in-wet oil glazes and single-point perspective created unprecedented realism
• Why the green dress signals a fabric budget, not a pregnancy, and what St. Margaret on the bedpost means
• The snuffed candle, the mirror medallions, and the case for a memorial portrait
• Competing readings of the signature, the joined hands, and the raised right hand
• The painting’s survival through fire, war, and looting on its way to the National Gallery