The Self-Portrait

A Cultural History

James Hall

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773147
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In this highly illustrated survey, art historian and critic James Hall brilliantly maps the history of self-portraiture, from the earliest myths of Narcissus to the prolific self-image-making of contemporary artists.
This intelligent and vivid account shows how artists' depictions of themselves have been part of a continuing tradition that reaches back for centuries. It reveals the importance of the medieval 'mirror craze'; the explosion of the genre during the Renaissance; the confessional self-portraits of Titian and Michelangelo; the role of biography for serial self-portraitists such as Courbet and van Gogh; themes of sex and genius in works by Munch, Bonnard and Modersohn-Becker; and the latest developments of the genre in the era of globalization.
'There is never a dull passage in this book: the detail is crisply imparted; the content richly arcane at times, but more usually profoundly human; the ideas come freshly coined.' - The Guardian

1.

MEDIEVAL ORIGINS

Father Rufillus of Weissenau, Self-Portrait Illuminating the Initial ‘R’, c. 1170–1200 (detail), see page 26

BOOKS ON SELF-PORTRAITURE tend to give the Middle Ages short shrift, pausing only to observe that during this thousand-year-long ‘dark age’ beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire, the genre of independent, naturalistic self-portraiture did not exist – that development had to wait until the ‘Renaissance’ of the fifteenth century. It is widely assumed that medieval artists were content to be anonymous dogsbodies, at worst slavishly following time-honoured conventions; at best subservient conduits for God’s will – painting, as it were, by divine numbers. They would thereby conform to the strictures of the Rule of St Benedict (c. 480–547), the standard guide for monastic communities, which urged monastic craftsmen to ‘pursue their crafts with all humility’.1 Yet it is in the Christian Middle Ages – preoccupied with personal salvation and self-scrutiny – that we see the start of a coherent tradition of self-portraiture.

The neglect of medieval self-portraiture is usually part of a larger argument that naturalistic portraiture did not exist during the Middle Ages. It is certainly true that in late antiquity the classical belief in the ‘science’ of physiognomy, whereby character can be read off from a person’s face, had been challenged by the Neoplatonic and Christian belief that the imperishable, invisible soul rather than the corruptible visible body is the true measure of man. In art, people are often identified more by attributes, scale, position and gesture rather than facial particularities (bigwigs generally being bigger, central and full frontal). You don’t, as it were, put a name to a medieval face; rather, you put a name to a crown, heraldic symbol, iconographic prop or inscription.2 Yet the artist’s face is not necessarily the most interesting part of a self-portrait. The brilliance of Velázquez’s Las Meninas (see Chapter 6) does not lie in the depiction of the painter’s face (which is blankly impassive) but in the interplay of full-length figures, setting and props. The same is true of medieval self-portraits, where the mise-en-scène is often crucial.

The loss of so much medieval art, and the accidents of survival, make it hard to generalize. But it comes as quite a shock to discover just how many medieval self-portraits do survive, and to see how imaginative, intelligent, varied and even witty they can be. The first significant clusters date from the tenth century. The faces may not be especially naturalistic, but that does not prevent the images in their entirety being informative, idiosyncratic and particularized.

It is Plotinus (AD 204–70), the last great philosopher of antiquity and the first to treat aesthetics as a distinct field of enquiry, who sets the scene for the medieval self-portrait, and its emergence as a significant genre. A Greek-speaking native of Egypt, Plotinus studied in Alexandria before moving to Rome, where his circle included the emperor Gallienus (r. 260–8).3 His mystical reworking of Plato, which has led to him being called the founder of the Neoplatonist school, had a huge influence on the early Christian thinkers Origen (who studied with him in Alexandria) and St Augustine, and on Renaissance philosophy.

Plotinus demurred from Plato’s denigration of art for imitating nature, for he believed that nature itself works by imitating the fundamental form or idea, which he called ‘the One’. Thus the artist partakes in a universal principle, and is a ‘holder of Beauty’ who actually improves on nature: ‘Phidias produced his Zeus according to nothing visible, but he made him such as Zeus would appear should he wish to reveal himself to our eyes’.4

Plotinus still tried to insist that the artefacts produced by the artist are inferior to the universal idea, and that the beauty in the artist’s mind cannot be translated fully into brute matter. His editor and biographer, Porphyry, said that Plotinus ‘seemed ashamed of being in a body’, and he refused to sit for a portrait lest he leave ‘an image of an image’ to posterity. The story of Narcissus, the boy who fell in love with his reflection in a pool, epitomized for him the dangers of human intoxication with shadowy material beauty.5

But more often than not – as in his reference to Phidias – Plotinus still believed that the work of art transcends material reality. An image reflected in water or a mirror, or formed by a shadow, is simply the material body of that object, and cannot exist apart from it. But this is not so with an image produced by an artist, even if it is a self-portrait. A self-portrait is not simply produced by the artist’s material body (whether reflected or seen directly) but by the image dwelling in the artist’s soul, which mirrors the divine.

Plotinus expresses the relative autonomy of the self-portrait in relation to nature by saying that the image ‘is due to the effective laying on of the colours’.6 In Egypt, Plotinus must have come across those painted bust-length portraits attached to the front of mummy cases, so they look like faces peering through a window, uncannily alive. Those painted in encaustic often have vibrant visible brushwork and expressive colour contrasts. Little is known about these painters or whether they made their own mummy portraits, or, indeed, about artists in the Roman world. But there is a reference in an epigram of the poetess Nossis of Locri (c. 300 BC) to the encaustic self-portrait, dedicated to Aphrodite, of a courtesan named Kallo.7 This was before mummy portraits, which seem to have appeared around the time of Christ, but votive portraits were displayed in the precincts of sacred shrines, and why wouldn’t artists have offered their own self-portraits?

For Plotinus, the self-portrait is produced not by looking out at a mirror, but by withdrawing into the self. Here he uses a sculptural metaphor that would be resuscitated in the Renaissance:

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.8

This visionary, process-based idea of the self-portrait, in which we sense the artist’s ceaseless pursuit of perfection, both for himself and for his internalized artwork, is characteristic of the Middle Ages. A portrait in a herbal of AD 512 of the famous physician, artist and herbalist Krateuas (first century BC) shows him seated at an easel painting a mandrake, a specimen of which is held up for him by a female personification of Contemplation. She is surely a Plotinian presence, encouraging him to look within as well as without.

In the sixth century, a story appears in the Byzantine East in which Christ is posited as a notional self-portraitist.9 King Abgar of Edessa asked Christ to come and cure him of a disease, but due to pressure of work Christ sent his disciple Thaddeus with a linen cloth against which he had pressed his face, leaving its imprint. Thaddeus held it up before his own face and Abgar was cured. The piece of linen, which became known as the Holy Mandylion of Edessa (from the Arabic mandit meaning ‘small cloth’), showed a frontal image of Christ’s face and hair. In the tenth century it was moved from Edessa to the palace chapel in Constantinople, but all trace of it was lost after the sack of the city in 1204. The second ‘self-portrait’, which supplanted the Mandylion in the West, is the Veronica (‘true icon’). This was the cloth – or sudarium (from the Latin for handkerchief or towel) – which St Veronica gave Christ to wipe his face on the way to Calvary. Its origins are extremely complex but it is first mentioned in Rome in the eleventh century.10 Both stories had variants in which a painter initially goes to Christ to paint his portrait, whereupon he makes his own self-portrait on cloth.

Master of St Veronica, St Veronica with the Sudarium, c. 1420, oil on walnut

The Holy Mandylion, and to a lesser extent the sudarium, was used to justify the use of images against the arguments of iconoclasts, and although Christ usurps the role of the painter, the legends may have stimulated interest in the idea of self-portraiture. The appearance of the sudarium in Rome has been credited with stimulating a revival of interest in the face as a bearer of particular meanings about the individual, and it also coincides with renewed interest in physiognomic treatises.11 Nonetheless, no self-portrait in similarly hieratic format is known until Dürer’s self-portrait of 1500 – which was itself a one-off – and only in around 1600, with the arrival in Turin of the full-length Turin Shroud, did such images enter the art theoretical literature, with the Holy Shroud being seen as the primordial painting.12

Most surviving early medieval self-portraits are found in illuminated books, preserved down the centuries in libraries. Until the thirteenth century, when lay professional artisans with their own workshops in towns start to dominate, these de luxe books were usually created in the scriptorium of a monastery, and they contained a Christian and/or didactic text. They were made by monks, nuns and secular clergy, and tended to be a collaborative enterprise between scribes and painters, with the monk scribes usually being low status because they tended to be illiterate, copying without understanding. Scribal signatures are much more common than those of artists, but even here the situation is complicated by the fact that until the late Middle Ages it was common for the scribe and artist to be the same person. With calligraphy playing such a central role in book production, there was no hard and fast division between word and image. Painters probably gained in stature by their intimate involvement with picture and text, and were aggrandized by the association: hence, in part, their right to be depicted.

The social status of some medieval artists was extremely high – higher than at any time before or since. Several came from the very highest echelons of society. The English church reformer, statesman, scholar and teacher St Dunstan (909–88) became Abbot of Glastonbury (c. 943–57) and Archbishop of Canterbury (959–88), as well as being chief minister to several English kings. Wealthy and blue-blooded, he was the most popular English saint before the canonization of St Thomas à Becket. He is described by his eleventh-century biographer Osbern as a prodigy ‘skilled in making a picture and forming letters’ from childhood. Dunstan also practised metalwork, and became a patron saint of English goldsmiths. Goldsmiths were the wealthi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other Titles of Interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prelude: Self-Portraiture in Antiquity
• 1. Medieval Origins
• 2. A Craze for Mirrors
• 3. The Artist in Society
• 4. The Renaissance Artist as Hero
• 5. Mock-Heroic Self-Portraits
• 6. The Artist’s Studio
• 7. At the Crossroads
• 8. Coming Home: into the Nineteenth Century
• 9. Sex and Genius
• 10. Beyond the Face: Modern and Contemporary Self-Portraits
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Picture Credits
• Index
• Copyright