Diane Wolfthal's book on the bed, the bath, and the dressing area in late medieval and early modern Art History, In and Out of the Marriage Bed (2010, Yale), has a kind of fascinating idea about van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. Because the subject was a banker and merchant, and because bankers and merchants made material that from which was immaterial, they were often compared to sodomites--and so the portrait, could perhaps be considered Arnolfini's way of fronting--of saying look at me, with the bed and the dog and the oranges and the wife--all of this finery--it isn't dead matter out of dead matter, this isn't sodomy--this is fertility. She doesn't sayt this directly, but I wonder if the portrait becomes a mark in how the idea of money changed hands--from the immaterial and infertile, to the material and fertile?