Portraits and Philosophy

Hans Maes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429581250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte

Portraits are everywhere. One finds them not only in museums and galleries, but also in newspapers and magazines, in the homes of people and in the boardrooms of companies, on stamps and coins, on millions of cell phones and computers. Despite its huge popularity, however, portraiture hasn't received much philosophical attention. While there are countless art historical studies of portraiture, contemporary philosophy has largely remained silent on the subject. This book aims to address that lacuna. It brings together philosophers (and philosophically minded historians) with different areas of expertise to discuss this enduring and continuously fascinating genre.

The chapters in this collection are ranged under five broad themes. Part I examines the general nature of portraiture and what makes it distinctive as a genre. Part II looks at some of the subgenres of portraiture, such as double portraiture, and at some special cases, such as sport card portraits and portraits of people not present. How emotions are expressed and evoked by portraits is the central focus of Part III, while Part IV explores the relation between portraiture, fiction, and depiction more generally. Finally, in Part V, some of the ethical issues surrounding portraiture are addressed. The book closes with an epilogue about portraits of philosophers.

Portraits and Philosophy tangles with deep questions about the nature and effects of portraiture in ways that will substantially advance the scholarly discussion of the genre. It will be of interest to scholars and students working in philosophy of art, history of art, and the visual arts.

Part I

The Nature of Portraiture

1 Portraiture Portrayed

Ivan Gaskell

I’m tryin’ to read your portrait, but, I’m helpless, like a rich man’s child.

– Bob Dylan

What is a portrait? Ideally, I should like to consider whether this is a good question. Like Nelson Goodman (1978, pp. 57–70) considering whether “What is art?” is a good question, I have serious doubts. But for now, I am going to assume that it is not an unreasonable question.

Many people think of a portrait as a likeness of a person that is recognizable as such. People habituated to the European tradition can tell that a representation is a likeness – and therefore a depiction – from personal knowledge of the person represented. Yet portraiture is far from confined to the European tradition. It occurs in a wide range of societies at various times. Beyond Europe and its diaspora, one might point to examples from sub-Saharan West Africa, China, India, and pre-contact South America.¹ Further, portraits can be in any number of media and techniques: sculpted, drawn, painted, embroidered, or woven. This chapter, though, focuses on the European tradition, though I am well aware that this is a severe limitation.

Peter Paul Rubens was not only one of the greatest artists in the European tradition, he was also a fine scholar. Those who believe that profound thinking must be expressed in words alone are likely blind to the pictorial expression of his intelligence, though he valued and used words, too. In 1611–12 he painted himself in the company of his scholar brother, Philips, and Jan van der Wouwer, attending their mentor, the neo-Stoic philosopher Joost Lips (Justus Lipsius) beneath a bust then thought to depict Seneca, owned by Rubens. The painting is not lightly known as The Four Philosophers (Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence). It is scarcely a stretch to describe Rubens as a philosopher. In 1629, Rubens’s long-time correspondent, the Provençal scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, sent him a portrait of himself. In his letter of thanks, Rubens explicitly made two of the points that subsequent theorists have striven to make about portraiture, while implying a third: the first concerns physical resemblance and recognizability; the second, the capture of character; and the third, the response of the artist to the sitter to be inferred from the portrait.

The portrait of your lordship has given the greatest pleasure to me and to those gentlemen who have seen it and who are entirely satisfied with the resemblance. I confess, however, that I do not see shining in this face that indefinable spiritedness and a certain vigor of expression which seem to me to belong to the genius of your lordship, but which it is not easy for anyone to capture in a picture.

(Rooses and Ruelens 1907, p. 312)²

Genius (Genio) here is a seventeenth-century mixture of inspiration, creative capacity, and character. Rubens suggests that one purpose of portraiture is to enable the viewer to, as Shakespeare’s King Duncan puts it in Macbeth, “find the mind’s construction in the face” (Macbeth, I, iv). A portrait is a depiction of an individual, not an exemplary representation of a type.

Mimetic resemblance stands a particularly good chance of achieving this purpose and has been a criterion of portraiture in the European tradition from classical antiquity to the present. Regard for this property could be taken to rhetorical extremes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1558, the Netherlandish painter Antonis Mor van Dashorst painted a portrait of himself (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; Woodall 2007, pp. 9–43). In place of a painting within a painting on the easel before him, he depicted a poem on a sheet of paper, pinned to the panel. The poem, in Greek, is by his friend, the humanist scholar Dominic Lampson. Lampson concludes by stating that the self-portrait – Mor as depicted – is so faithful to reality that at times it can speak. The speaking likeness is an old conceit that represents the ultimate sanction of a portrait as being indistinguishable from actuality. This example raises the question of the teleology of portraits, notably the aspect of portraits investigated so memorably by art historian and philosopher Edgar Wind in his discussion of the portrait of Albrecht von Brandenburg as St. Erasmus (Wind 1937, pp. 142–162, 1983, pp. 58–76). Albrecht, elevated to the archbishopric of Halle in 1514, introduced the cult of the patron saint of his family, Bishop Erasmus of Antioch, to Halle, the patron saint of which was St. Maurice. In 1520, or shortly thereafter, he commissioned a painting of the two saints meeting from Matthias Grünewald (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Grünewald’s St. Erasmus has the facial features of Albrecht. This is an example of what Wind analyzes in terms of the magical properties of the portrait historié, appealing to the concept of empathy (Einfühlung) as developed by the philosophers Robert Visscher and his father, Friedrich Theodor Visscher (Gaskell 1985, pp. 79–81). In such works, the Visschers propose a “connection with reservations” whereby the sitter and artist invite viewers not to believe literally that Archbishop Albrecht is identical to St. Erasmus, but that there is a compelling connection between them.

One might see this conflation of patron and saint as a development of identification of the one with the other that emerged from the inclusion of likenesses of patrons in devotional images representing their heavenly protectors. There is no more sophisticated (or better known) example than the Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele (Groeningemuseum, Bruges), painted in 1434–36 by Jan van Eyck, in which the canon’s patron saint, St. George, presents his protégé to the Christ Child seated on the Virgin’s lap. The shadow of the saint’s left hand falls on the canon’s surplice indicating a longed-for juncture of worlds. The portrait, then, can be a proxy presence, whether, in this case, ideal presence in the face of God, the Virgin, and the saints, or for a wide variety of other purposes.

What might the other purposes of a portrait be? These purposes include, but are not limited to, the proxy presence of a family member, whether subsequently deceased or still alive; of the beloved; and of the members of a corporate body, as in the case of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century group portraits from the Netherlands.³ That proxy presence is not only about addressing the emotions attendant on separation, temporary or permanent, but can concern the projection of power. That projection of power can be actual – as in the case of the multiple portraits of Napoléon Bonaparte distributed throughout the French Empire and its client states (Munhall 1960, pp. 3–20) – or aspirational, as in the case of photographs of Abraham Lincoln prior to his election to the US presidency in 1860.⁴ This projection of power can readily shade into an implied demand for obedience to, and adulation of, the person depicted. Joseph Stalin is an obvious recent example. Commercial institutions can contrive to project power on the part of portrait subjects, seeking to evoke adoration in, for example, the entertainment and fashion industries, as any number of press and publicity photographs of musicians, actors, and models attest. Such images are reminiscent of those of the saints, mentioned above, whose adoration and power projection has long been contrived by religious institutions.

Most early representations of saints could not and did not depend on verisimilitude of depiction, but from at least the middle of the fifteenth century, this practice became an occasional option. An example is St. Bernardino of Siena, who was canonized in 1450, just six years after his death, by which time print technology had been established. He may well have been portrayed directly, as well as by means of his death mask, which artists copied to produce prints. This means that St. Bernardino was one of the first Christian saints to be represented with a recognizably consistent physical appearance: that of an elderly man with gaunt facial features and a somewhat sunken mouth, as can be seen in paintings dating from the mid-1440s to the mid-1450s by artists including Jacopo Bellini, Pietro di Giovanni d’Ambrogio, and Sano di Pietro.

Criteria other than resemblance had informed the representation of saints earlier in European practice, and re-emerged in portraiture early in the twentieth century when Pablo Picasso and others in Paris developed a new mode of representation, analytical cubism. The resultant displacement of then familiar realistic depiction can be seen in Picasso’s 1910 portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Art Institute of Chicago), discussed by Michael Baxandall (1985, pp. 41–73). In this portrait, representation by means of multiple facets displaced mimetic depiction. Picasso’s German contemporary, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, took portrait representation in a different direction – Expressionism – in such works as his 1911 portrait of Gerda Schilling (St. Louis Art Museum) in which the figure with schematic facial features is delineated with planes of non-naturalistic hues. Both Picasso and Kirchner lent such emphasis to Rubens’s second criterion – the capture of the sitter’s character – that they developed modes of doing so at the expense, some might say, of readily recognizable resemblance. Further, these artists imbued their renditions with a personal response to the sitter to be inferred from the portrait; that is, an expressiveness of their own.

In spite of the supersession of mimetic resemblance in such works by Picasso and Kirchner, we might nonetheless account them portraits. Picasso knew the art dealer Kahnweiler very well at first-hand. Kirchner knew the dancer Gerda Schilling just as well, for she was the elder sister of his partner. For a portraitist to know what a portrait subject looks like – perhaps first-hand – would seem to be a desideratum of portraiture. There are many examples. Gian Lorenzo Bernini certainly knew what King Louis XIV of France looked like. As part of a diplomatic exchange with the Papacy, the Roman sculptor and architect went to Paris to redesign the Louvre Palace, but he was also commissioned to sculpt a portrait bust of the king, now in the Musée national du Château de Versailles. Courtier and art collector Paul Fréart de Chantelou, charged by the king with looking after Bernini, recorded the entire three-month process in a journal. Bernini and Louis spent many hours together in 1665 while the sculptor sketched the king, made clay models of his bust, and carved the marble with the aid of a specialist assistant. The finishing alone took thirteen one-hour sittings (Fréart de Chantelou 1885, p. 125). Bernini certainly knew what the king looked like across the room, even if we do not – unless we trust his rendition, making allowance for its bravado baroque character. In contrast, neither Bernini nor anyone else had or has any idea of what Aeneas, founder of Rome, or his father or son looked like as they escaped the destruction of Troy. Indeed, we cannot even be sure that they exist outside of mythology and poetry. The rendition of them in marble that Bernini made in about 1618–19, Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius (Galleria Borghese, Rome), therefore, is anything but a portrait.

Things seem pretty straightforward so far. Most people considering portraiture from within the European tradition think they know a portrait when they see one. Portraits, following Rubens’s observation, resemble the sitter, capture the character of the sitter, and express the artist’s vision of that character. The latter two criteria at times seemingly overwhelm the first so that mimetic resemblance – as exemplified by Mor and Lampson’s speaking likeness – disappears. Yet most people soon admit that there are cases when a decision as to whether a representation is a portrait might not be available from the internal evidence of the item in question.

Focusing in a little, artists and art historians in the European tradition have a set of tacitly assumed working definitions concerning what is and what is not a portrait, even when the distinction may not be quite so clear cut as that between Bernini’s Louis XIV and his Aeneas group. These assumptions are a matter of convention, not of conceptual definition. One such convention, already touched on, is that in order for a thing to be a portrait, there must be some kind of recognizable resemblance between that thing and the person or persons it depicts. A second, already briefly discussed, is that there has to have been some kind of contact, whether directly or through an identifiable intermediary, between the maker and whoever the maker has depicted. For instance, Rubens painted King Philip IV of Spain while he was visiting Madrid on diplomatic business between 1628 and 1629. The result is a portrait in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. On the other hand, the sequence of renderings of the king of Spain’s Habsburg ancestors that Rubens had painted some ten years earlier are not portraits according to most art historians. For instance, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, whom Rubens had represented (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), had died a hundred years before he made the painting. There was no contact between them.

These considerations so far concern working definitions used by art historians of what is and what is not a portrait as matters of convention. Now I want to spend a moment looking a little more closely at the question of internal evidence. After all, we cannot check the degree of resemblance of most ostensible portraits against the actual people they purportedly portray. In consequence, in some instances doubts may arise in the viewer’s mind. Given that the recognition of portraits usually depends on the facial features of the person depicted, a plethora of depictions permitting comparisons can sometimes allay those doubts....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Portraits and Philosophy
• Part I The Nature of Portraiture
• Part II Subgenres and Special Cases
• Part III Portraiture, Empathy, and Emotion
• Part IV Portraiture, Fiction, and Depiction
• Contributors
• Index