Léal Souvenir

Jan van Eyck dated this to the day, the 10th of October 1432, and carved his French motto into the painted stone ledge, Leal Souvenir, loyal remembrance. Above the man's shoulder, in Greek letters, sits an odd word that reads roughly as then God. Those inscriptions, and the plain parapet he leans on, are why the panel is usually read as a memorial to someone already dead, in the manner of a Roman tombstone where the deceased appears behind a carved slab. Van Eyck may have seen such stones travelling in France. The face is too specific to be an invented ideal, the sagging eye, the stubble, the papery skin, yet no one has ever established whose it was. He holds a rolled document that has never been explained either.