Portraiture and Critical Reflections on Being

Euripides Altintzoglou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429016707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book analyzes the philosophical origins of dualism in portraiture in Western culture during the Classical period, through to contemporary modes of portraiture. Dualism – the separation of mind from body - plays a central part in portraiture, given that it supplies the fundamental framework for portraiture's determining problem and justification: the visual construction of the subjectivity of the sitter, which is invariably accounted for as ineffable entity or spirit, that the artist magically captures. Every artist that has engaged with portraiture has had to deal with these issues and, therefore, with the question of being and identity.

1
Narcissus’s Legacy

The Origins of the Western Portrait and the Emergence of Dualism

There are certain myths about the origins of portraiture that we should first take into account in our narrative, since they reflect common (dualist) conceptions of portraiture. Firstly: the well-known myth of Narcissus. In classical Hellenic mythology, Narcissus, born at Thespiae, in Boeotia, is loved by Apollo and is counted among the most handsome of young men. According to some he was the son of the river god Cephisus and the nymph Liriope, or according to others, the son of Endymion and Selene (Moon). One day, the nymph Echo saw Narcissus hunting on the mountains. She instantly fell in love with him and followed his footsteps. Driven by rejection and despair of failure to attract him, Echo prayed to Nemesis, the goddess of Rhamnus, that Narcissus would similarly experience no return of affection from the one he hoped to love. Nemesis heard and fulfilled Echo’s prayer. On yet another day of hunting, Narcissus came to a pool tired and thirsty. As he knelt down to drink he noticed his own image in the water. He admired the facial characteristics of what he thought was the image of a beautiful spirit living in the fountain. When he later realised that he was looking at his own image, he fell in love with himself. But, incapable of parting with the reflected beauty, he perished by the same pool. It is said that Narcissus still keeps gazing on his image in the waters of the river Styx in the underworld kingdom of Aides.¹

Another myth tells of the Corinthian maid Dibutade, who was the daughter of Butade, a potter of Skyon. Her lover was about to embark on a dangerous journey to foreign lands. About to be separated from her lover, she realised that she could preserve his likeness by tracing the outline of his shadow cast on a wall. Butade used the drawing to model a clay relief, which he baked in his kiln to create a ceramic memorial, in order to comfort his lonely daughter—Pliny uses the story to illustrate the origins of clay modelling.² By the eighteenth century, the myth became popular, as artists such as Joseph Wright of Derby, Joseph-Benoît Suvée, and Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson depicted it as the origin of painting and of portraiture.³

In the Bible, when Christ fell on his way to the Golgotha, Veronica, one of the holy women who accompanied Christ to Calvary, came running to him, holding in her hands a wet towel. She compassionately pressed the cloth on Jesus’s face and wiped his sweat and blood, leaving an imprint of his face on the wet cloth. She then went to Rome, bringing with her this image of Christ, which was then exposed to public veneration.

Christian legend relates that St Luke, a Hellene physician from Antioch, the compiler of the third Gospel, the Acts of Apostles, and Paul’s companion, was the first Christian painter, after he painted a number of icons of the Virgin Mary holding the Child Jesus from life, after having experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary. As a consequence of his religious painting he was given the status of the painter par excellence, and became the patron saint of painters, and the patron saint of painting guilds in many towns and cities before and during the Renaissance—from Candia (Crete), Florence, and Rome to Antwerp and Bruges. St Luke’s icons are said to be of the full ‘oδηγήτρια’ (hodegetria) type, which means that the icon is a ‘guide’ or ‘indicator of the way’. Even though there is only one copy saved today of the original three, many churches all over the world later copied the ‘οδηγήτρια’ style, which has become one of the prominent compositional styles of the Byzantine iconographic tradition.⁴

The reason that I mention these myths is to draw out significant aspects and models of portraiture, and not to simply trace the alternative historic origins of this genre. The reference to Narcissus, for instance, points out the vain desire of human subjects to be included in the ‘restricted pantheon’ of portraiture. In doing so, and in conjunction with the myth, subjects consider themselves in possession of bodily attributes worthy of commemoration. What is significant about this swift misplacement of attention is that the ‘right’ to be portrayed is dependent upon bodily attributes, and not intellectual excellence or other moral values. By portraying Narcissus as an awkward character, the story places emphasis on the fact that portraiture constitutes a synthesis of both external appearance and internal characteristics. Consequently, this story of the first self-portrait addresses one of the two important prerequisites that underline the dual identity of this genre: vanity and pride can often be regarded as perilous virtues of a personality, but nevertheless can act as the driving force behind a commission.

Resolving problems of re-presentation, making present a subject that is absent, is also located at the core of naturalistic portraiture. It is within the intellectual quest for resolving such problems that Aristotle treats portraiture as the absolute model of representation, since it does exactly what it sets out to do, by making present again the depicted person. For him our pleasure in viewing a portrait does not lie in the artistic style of the creator, but in his/her ability to employ technical skills in order to assist the viewer in recognising the depicted person:

The instinct of imitation is implanted in humans from childhood, in this we differ from animals, that is, humans are the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learn the earliest lessons. This is justifiable according to real experiences, where while we view certain objects with sorrow, we are delighted to view images reproduced with minute fidelity, such as forms of ignoble animals and dead bodies.⁵

(My translation)

Portraiture was the paradigm of representation in Aristotle’s discussion of literary genres of poetry and drama, which in turn informed his thinking about pictures:

Since Tragedy is a representation of better people from those of our times, one should imitate good portrait painters, who, while rendering the distinctive form and achieving a likeness, yet paint people better than they are. So too the poet should ennoble the representation of people who are irascible or have other similar defects of character; just like Homer portrays Achilles as a noble, yet also as an example of brutal strength.⁶

(My translation)

If we look closely at these myths, we can see that they cover almost every generic aspect of portraiture: self-portraiture (as in the cases of Narcissus and St Veronica); portraiture in its conventional form, where it incorporates an artist and a sitter (as with Dibutade and St Luke); and the honorific, which emphasises notions of divine inspiration.

The Honorific and Exemplary in Egyptian, Hellenic, Roman, and Christian Portraiture

Painted or sculpted figurative or genre types of artworks have been evident since the first days of human creativity. However, the first portrait—that is, a visually identified representation of a human being—emerged in ancient Egypt. Here emerges also the honorific function of the portrait, albeit an extremely self-restricted process. It might not be quite obvious today, but until modernism, portraiture was interrelated with religious systems at a very high level. In ancient Egypt, for example, where naturalistic portraiture⁷ initially emerged, those worthy of commemoration were either gods, semi-gods, or sons of gods—in other words, only individuals of a divine origin. Only pharaohs were eligible for such an honour since they were thought of as divine beings. On their departure from earth they would ascend to the gods, where it was believed they came from. This was exactly the purpose that the pyramids where built for—not a demonstration of the power of the rulers or manifestation of their riches but as a means for making the ascendance of the pharaohs easier.⁸ At the very least these robust and immensely fortified memorials would help preserve the body, which was an essential prerequisite in order for the soul to transcend to the beyond. That was why Egyptians were so keen on preventing the corpse from decaying by applying the delicate and detailed processes of preservation, which have become known as mummification. In an effort to secure the eternal existence of pharaohs they believed that an exact preservation of their likeness should be achieved too. The means by which such a representation was to take place was through this process of mummification, in which the painted sculptural sarcophagus, acting as the immediate host of the corpse, was perceived as adding symbolic value to the ascendance of the body. In addition, they ordered sculptors to execute accurate busts of the kings’ heads, out of extremely durable materials, such as granite. The fact that these were placed inside the tomb, where no one could view them, leaves no doubt that these busts were created in order to retain the soul in the afterlife—hence the practical function of the portrait during the Egyptian era. As Ernst Gombrich informs us, one Egyptian word for sculptor was actually ‘He-who-keeps-alive’.⁹ At this point it is very crucial to clarify that despite the deification of the pharaohs, the sculptors were not concerned with flattering their subjects; they left every lesser detail out, dealing only with what they thought of as essentials.

Flattery was not sought after in classical antique portraiture either, since Platonic tendencies of pure representation dominated the arts. In contrast with the criteria of the Egyptian ruling class, though, the Hellenes broaden the scope of inclusion to the ‘pantheon’ of immortality. This was a result of portraiture’s social function in the early Hellenic democratic society, which can be defined as exemplary. This exemplary function of art is also evident in the popular treatment of figurative works—which stretch beyond the genre of portraiture, as they are not attributed to specific individuals—that stood as examples for the ideal athlete, soldier, or even young man and woman (Gr. kouros and kore). This time eligibility for inclusion in the pantheon of portraiture was granted not only to gods and divinities but also to individuals whose intellectual ability was considered advanced, and who developed this intellectual ability for the purposes of civic humanist values. This ability could be defined on the grounds of either promoting and enhancing democracy or contributing to philosophic and scientific practices. Such portraits were sculpted out of marble, and treated their subjects in full and life-size formats. Upon their completion, they were installed in public spaces, such as squares and stadiums, to act as leading demonstrations of exemplary heroic or civic virtue. The origin of these various heroic or intellectual abilities was thought of as divine, but certainly not of a hereditary nature, as in the case of the Egyptians. This model encouraged self-development in citizens and reinforced pragmatic criteria of judging an individual according to his or her social contribution.

A great desire for individuality is noticeable in the portraits of military generals, state and civic administrators, and, of course, in those of scientists, writers, and philosophers. The diversity of these portraits also signifies the multiplicity of the orders of the Hellenic world, through a type of portraiture that has been described as “a successful balancing act”.¹⁰ Its structure is understood as the articulated expression of character through natural norms, which “become artistic forms only when they consolidate the codified structure of such temperament”. Finally, this “balance was established, on the one hand, by the urge to depict nature and, on the other, by the no less driving need to immortalise the individual temperament, the individual character.”¹¹ Even though this view suggests that the treatment of the ‘natural norms’ is subservient to that of the “individual character”, the balance between them is justified by the intention to do equal justice to both. In other words, the visualisation of “temperament” is not reified at the expense of “nature”. This balance was reinforced b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Narcissus’s Legacy: The Origins of the Western Portrait and the Emergence of Dualism
• 2 Rembrandt’s Dilemma: The Introduction of Cartesianism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraiture
• 3 Picasso’s Solution: The Crisis of the Honorific and the Clash of Subjectivities
• 4 The Turning of a Blind (Third) Eye: The Critique of the Honorific in Radical Forms of Contemporary Portraiture
• 5 Epilogue: Vicious Circles
• Bibliography
• Index