How to Read a Painting

Most of us walk through museums reading the little labels and nodding. Name, date, oil on canvas. This is the rest of it: the eight questions art historians actually ask, asked out loud on the paintings everyone knows. A museum label gives you a name, a date, and the words oil on canvas. It doesn’t mention that the couple’s shoes are off, or that two extra people are hiding in the mirror. That information exists. It sits in catalogues and monographs written for people who already have the degree. So most of us stand in front of a famous painting for about a minute, nod, and move on. This is the back wall of the Arnolfini Portrait, 1434. The whole room repeats in the convex mirror, and two people stand in its doorway who appear nowhere else in the painting. They’re standing roughly where you are. Above the mirror the painter wrote Johannes de eyck fuit hic. Jan van Eyck was here. Painters normally wrote made this. He signed it like a witness. Nobody spots the doorway people unaided. Everyone sees them once they’re pointed at. That’s the whole product. They work on a Bruegel and they work on a postcard. The order matters: look first, interpret later. Start anywhere. Each read takes about three minutes, the camera does the pointing, and the painting is yours to explore at the end. More are on the way. 881 open-access paintings in one room, searchable, uncropped. Open any of them and read it yourself. The eight questions ride along.