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 interpretati ...