Sa Arnolfini portrettom (1434) van Eyckova the strategy acquires the paradigmatic character of imaginary identification and presentation: in a carefully chosen constellation that, due to its strength and adequacy, takes on a universal consequence, the image always brings - the expression, the refraction - of the author in the mirror. In the newly established perspectival space in which reality functions as an illusion and vice versa, the mirror is located in the depth of the image, so that the vanishing point becomes the point of emergence, the place where the lines meet becomes the birthplace from which the lines were launched: in the background of a real event or real person, the author legally stands at the moment of technical realization, as the ultimate guarantee of the credibility of what is depicted. The author is not only the creator, he is also the witness who verifies the authenticity of the representation with his presence: the painter and literally confirms Johannes de Eyck was here in 1434. (Jan van Eyck was here in 1434), before and above all as imago, as a reflection in a convex mirror that will serve as the most appropriate, symptomatic, and accurate portrait.
While numerous commentators have persistently searched the archives to find out who the historical actors in the painting are, in the most obvious place, all the while signaling both visually and textually, found the author who - with his double, because the Doppelgänger is the inevitable consequence of any specularization - embodies the true mystery of transferring reality from life to the canvas that serves as the basis for projection. (This, then, entails a complete change in the procedure for deciphering figures within the proscenium: the ultimate 'solution' of the scene does not lie in discovering, for example, the physical-historical identity of the depicted married couple, where the image and its structure of symbols are 'read' from the collected biographical data, which would trivialize the enigma at the very least, but in the constant re-iteration of the elusive figure of the author who is in an unstoppable process of specular and speculative rearrangements, precisely in order to fruitfully renew the semantic component of the text, since the placed objects reflect and maintain the author's attitude and style.) A special, crucial imaginary trajectory is at work where the painter is caught in a mise-en-abîme ecstasy: in a work arbitrarily called Portrait of Arnolfini, van Eyck spectacularly shows that, in fact, the author stands at the very beginning, that is, at the entrance to the picture, as well as at its end, that is, at its exit. The author is thus both the source and the consequence of the picture, a double originator, someone who is, simultaneously and infinitely, a recorder and a participant, a protagonist around whom the meaning of the text and the meaning in the text are to be organized, around whom the melodramatic narrative sequence 'revolves'. On Chancellor Rollin's Madonna (around 1453), again in the background, again with his unknown companion, we meet a man with a red turban in front of whom a view of the landscape opens up: even though he seems like a random 'passerby' of secondary importance, the author makes every story told, regardless of the subject, ultimately be about him, which is the basis for the systematization of art history since Vasari Life, the inaugural catalogue of Western painting.
And on the third level, in an interesting twist, van Eyck brings the author into the domain of real, intervening with a materialistic signifier into the very sacred space of presumed direct transcription, perfect depiction, complete transposition. Namely, two of his Holy Faces (1438 and 1440) which are now preserved only in copies, take on the form or convention of acheiropoietona ('made without human hands'), faith icone (Veronica's Scarf) where the image of God - in an impossible act where the Real (as a traumatic fact, but also an announcement of the power of salvation) is inscribed on a physical surface - is 'rewritten' without a residue, as much as is achievable in mimetic reality when God's 'emanation' is transferred to a two-dimensional surface. What van Eyck insists on is precisely the denial of the illusion of divine copying for the sake of the factography of the author's indexing itself, a repetition that becomes an immanent rule: in the first picture it is written Johannes de Eyck made me, and on the other Johannes de Eyck, Inventor, followed by the definitive dates, 31 January 1438 and 30 January 1440. Instead of a vision of eternity, a concrete temporal specification is obtained (van Eyck insists again and again on the 'petty' respect for the calendar), instead of a supernatural inscription, the evidence of the chosen signatory: instead of the transcendental Real, what is marked is, in fact, the reality(s) of the author's presence and his invention. In this new economy, the icon - as object and vision - also takes on a new voice: the author pronounces himself differently. This implies that the crucial statement He made me (he made me) - which is obsessively repeated in van Eyck's works - is now pronounced by the image itself, announcing its author as the bearer of meaning, because whatever scene is chosen for representation, the author is imprinted in it: the image inevitably draws traces of its own production, so craft, technique and personalized enunciation become the intersecting points around which a semantic and hermeneutic network develops. On this realistic settings, Last could have - under the obvious influence Holy Face - to make God and the author, on Self-portrait at 28, swap their positions in modeling intertextual universe.
With that in mind, we can now briefly address one detail with Ghent Altarpieces, more precisely from the Adam panel, where van Eyck shows the repercussions of the transition from the transcendental to the human vision, where the constitutive illusion is translated into the field of sexual difference that is only imaginary constructed: the human body seeks new mappings. This is van Eyck's most perfect optical illusion, a founding deception or lure that transforms anatomy into a phantasmatic staging, operating at a subliminal level, even though the complex depicted cannot be automatically perceived, which is why it remains, in a sense, hidden in the most visible place: while the delusion of Adam's foot that seems to be coming out of the frame refers to van Eyck's inclusion in comparison discussion, thereby confirming that the two-dimensional seduction of painting is nobler than the merely obligatory three-dimensionality of sculpture (the human body is always more alive as a painting than as a statue), while the author's mise-en-scène on the most problematic topos - as an initiation for a new, dominant topic - instead of a pure view of neutral observation, introduces a hallucinatory optic that is the fruit of an investment or injection of desire and trauma.
Namely, van Eyck depicts the crotch of the First Parent - the original corporeality - as a significant confusion that inevitably leads to a false trail: the fig leaf stalk (as a means of censorship) is positioned in such a way that, at first glance, before the image is 'sharpened', and even after understanding overcomes the impression, it looks as if a vaginal line has been cut through Adam's pubic hair! Since the reading of the image constantly takes place in an interpretive back-and-forth movement of approaching to better see the detail and moving away to encompass the context, which implies that one constantly sees more than one would like and less than one would like, van Eyck's completely unexpected staging - which inverts the standardized Freudian etiology in advance - phantasmagorically inscribes the vulva instead of the phallus on the original male body, which is why, in the hermeneutic distance from trauma, the necessity of fetishistic redescription in the re-establishment of the phallic signifier that has been annulled in the primal frame emerges. If van Eyck is the father of the northern renaissance, he must be defined as such in the traumatic dimension itself: the penis that is not (enough).
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