This guide follows how painters have shown the human body, in seven parts: portraits, self portraits, painted women, hands, feet, figures seen from behind, and painters who hid their own faces in other people's pictures. Each part names the paintings that matter and links to the full article on the site.
Jan van Eyck opens this guide and comes back near its end, and the first of his pictures to turn up has a pun painted on its own frame.
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The Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban was painted in 1433, and its frame is painted to look carved. At the bottom, in Latin, the lettering says that Jan van Eyck made the picture on 21 October 1433, with the letters for October squeezed in so tightly that the full stop was left out. Across the top, in Greek letters, runs a motto, Als Ich Can, which means "as I can" and puns on his name, since Ich sounds like Eyck.
The National Gallery in London, which owns the panel, calls the man almost certainly the painter himself, and it says why the identification stops short of certain. No other portrait of van Eyck survives to compare, so the case rests on the character of the picture. The gallery also notes that the blue eyes gaze in slightly different directions, as if the artist were concentrating on each in turn.
So a picture that looks like a commission is probably the painter's own face, signed with a pun. Van Eyck turns up once more further down this page, and there the evidence is a reflection in a convex mirror.
What You'll Discover
The Van Gogh portrait that vanished.
The pose Dürer took for himself.
Who the stern woman really is.
The gap between two fingers.
Why a dirty foot shocked Rome.
Who painted his face on a flayed skin.