Art historians have always argued about whether or not to see the woman in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding as pregnant. Pastoureau has little doubt that we should, and points for evidence to her green dress—the same shade that had so drawn me in Washington. Green had been the color of hope from late antiquity on, when “newborns were sometimes swaddled” in it for luck, and in the Middle Ages it was often worn by marriageable young women. Hope can take many forms, however, and some miniatures put the color on pregnant women as well, conveying a sense of growth and expectancy that in this case at least doubtless does derive from the physical world.

Jan Van Eyck: The Arnolfini Wedding, circa 1435