Whether a portrait veers towards likeness or type, all portraits engage
in some way with the identity of the sitter represented. The concept of
identity has a complex history. The twenty-first-century notion of
identity as those aspects of character, gender, race, and sexual orienta-
tion unique to an individual is the legacy of the seventeenth century,
when the idea of ‘the self ’ began to be explored philosophically.
Previ-ously identity was seen to be rooted in those external attributes,
conveyed through the body, face, and deportment, that distinguished
one individual from another.
This earlier notion of identity is crucial
to the history of portraiture. The idea that portraits should communi-
cate something about the sitter’s psychological state or personality is a
concept that evolved gradually and became common only after nine-
teenth-century Romanticism fuelled the idea of a personality cult, that
is, a fascination with the particular qualities, idiosyncrasies, and actions
of a celebrated individual. Portraits represent the external features of a
unique individual, and they also place their subjects within conventions
of behaviour, dress, and deportment. All of these are fundamental com-
ponents of individual identity. Portraits are filled with the external signs
of a person’s socialized self, what Erving Goffman referred to as the
‘front’ of an individual.
These external signals have been remarkably
persistent in portraiture, even after ideas of character and personality
were well developed. A good example of this is the series of portraits of
English Grand Tourists in Rome painted by the Italian eighteenth-
century artist Pompeo Batoni, such as George Gordon, Lord Haddo . Batoni’s portrait shows the young aristocrat standing in a cross-legged pose that was a conventional posture of politeness. He is
surrounded by the signs of Roman artistic greatness in the form of
an antique statue, a Renaissance frieze, and a crumbling column. The
Roman countryside is visible in the background. A very English
hunting dog sitting at his feet reinforces these signals of Haddo’s social
status. As only landed men of a certain income could hunt or participate
in the Grand Tour, Haddo’s ‘front’ is represented as that of a high-born
gentleman. Although Batoni attempted to convey something of the
character of Haddo in his portrait, the viewer is directed to read more
generic signs of status through such external attributes.
Despite the persistence of this emphasis on the external, most por-
traitists engage with individual identity in ways other than reproducing
such social signs as physical appearance, dress, and deportment. One of
the great challenges of portraiture for the artist is probing the sitter’s
character, personality, or individuality. Many portraits seem to do this,
but the messages they send to the viewer, and the way those clues are
interpreted, can vary from one period to another. There is also the
problem that viewers tend to respond to the faces in portraits as they
would to faces in real life, and therefore any reading of character or per-
sonality in a portrait tends to be highly subjective.
The problematic relationship between the communication of exter-
nal and internal aspects of identity in portraiture can be demonstrated
by comparing two sixteenth-century portraits by the Italian artists
Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Lorenzo Lotto . Arcimboldo’s
depiction of Fire has the format of profile portraits common to both
ancient Rome and the Italian Renaissance. However, he has composed
this portrait-like head from candles, kindling, embers, cannon-mouths,
flints, and lamps. The viewer sees a face-like object, but is constantly
forced to correct this impression by lingering over the still life. Such
a work stresses the external aspects of portraiture: the viewer sees a
face but not a personality. In contrast, Lotto’s portrait of a young
man can suggest many different things to an observer. Although the
portrait is conventional in its half-length format and in the focused
expression of the sitter, Lotto’s emphasis on the sitter’s distant gaze,
slightly downward-curving mouth, and youthful features conveys a
sense of either arrogance or melancholy, depending on how you wish to
read it. However, Lotto himself was presenting us not with a clear view
of the sitter’s personality but a series of riddles about the young man’s
inner life. As Norbert Schneider has shown, the curtain in the back-
ground is a common emblem of concealment, and reveals a glimpse of
a small oil lamp behind it. While the lamp in Arcimboldo’s Fire
becomes a physical feature, the lamp in Lotto’s portrait seems to be a
symbol of this individual’s spiritual state, as it may allude to the passage
in the Gospels which refers to ‘light shining in darkness’.
In Lotto’s
work, we see the beginnings of what might be considered a psycho-
logical view of portraiture, but here it is a matter of symbol, suggestion,
and riddle, rather than revelation of the character or personality of the
sitter. That emphasis would come only much later.
Although it is possible to trace a gradual shift from portraits that
stress identity through external signs to those that focus on character or
personality, it is important to note that attempts to reconcile the inner
life with the outer appearance were common from the Renaissance
onwards. The mechanism for making this reconciliation was the revival
of ancient treatises on physiognomy, which claimed that the face could
be an index of the mind. Writings on physiognomy attributed to Aris-
totle became the basis for discussions of the face’s meaning by authors
such as Giacomo della Porta in the sixteenth century.
The best known proponent of physiognomic theory was the eigh-
teenth-century Swiss writer Johann Caspar Lavater, whose massive
three-volume Physiognomische Fragmente(Fragments on Physiognomy)of
1775 –8 was translated into several languages [15]. Lavater’s work argued
that each facial feature could reveal something significant about the
character of the person represented. Using a huge array of illustra-
tions—many of which were portraits—Lavater demonstrated the
subtle differences between tilt of nose, size of forehead, and shape of
mouth that could convey specific aspects of personality. Lavater’s work
also fuelled a popular fashion for the silhouette portrait, which reduced
the individual likeness to a black profile outline. According to Lavater,
this abstracted view of the face could reveal the attributes of individual
character in its most basic form. Although Lavater’s work was popular
with artists and writers, it proved to be ultimately too reductionist to be
of use in portraiture.
Of more benefit to portrait painters in employing the signs of the
face and body to reveal the soul were theories of deportment and ex-
pression. As with physiognomy, ideas of gesture and disposition of the
body were ultimately drawn from ancient texts. Sixteenth-century
Italian examples, such as that of Castiglione’s The Courtier ( 1528 ), fol-
lowed the tradition of the ancient Roman orator Quintilian’s ideas of
rhetorical gesture. The Courtierinstructed gentlemen on how they
should deport themselves in society. Conduct manuals throughout
Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were similarly con-
cerned with the revelatory qualities of contrived gestures. As mentioned
earlier, these ideas came to portrait painting through a series of conven-
tions of posing which could, but did not always, reflect social practice.
Theories of facial expression were also implicated in the body/soul
duality of portraiture. Expression was distinguished from physi-
ognomy: the former was about the temporary effects of the emotions on
the face; the latter concerned those permanent facial features that
revealed character. In the seventeenth century the French Royal Acad-
emician, Charles Le Brun, codified expressions of the passions, or
emotions, such as fear, anger, and joy in his Méthode pour apprendre à
dessiner les passions( A Method to Learn to Draw the Passions), published
posthumously in 1698 .
Le Brun’s ideas were popularly adopted by
history painters who were able to employ his more extreme expressions
in paintings depicting war, death, and acts of heroism. For portrait
painters Le Brun’s taxonomies of expression were more problematic. It
was uncommon for portraits to show any extreme expression, as neutral
and studied features gave sitters an air of dignified repose or concentra-
tion. Most sitters preferred to be represented in this way, as any facial
expression in a portrait could appear ugly or unnatural. As expression
also could be a means of conveying character, this absence of decisive
expression from much portraiture may have served a social need,
but it removed a tool of communication from the artist’s repertoire.
Occasionally portraitists would show the sitter smiling or laughing, but
this emphasized the awkwardness of an expression that could seem
grotesque when shown static. Before the twentieth century, examples of
extreme facial expression in portraits are rare. For example, the Austrian
sculptor Franz Xavier Messerschmidt exploited the grotesque aspects of
exaggerated expression in portraiture when he used Le Brun’s formula
in a series of self-portrait heads, but these were supposedly produced
when he was succumbing to insanity.
In the twentieth century the power of facial expression to convey the
inner life of sitters was exploited by Expressionist artists whose main
goal was to convey the substance of the inner life. Richard Gerstl’s
Laughing Self-portrait , like his fellow Austrian Messerschmidt’s
outré heads, has a disturbing ambience. Laughter, usually a sign of joy,
here seems to be a mark of mania or despair. This kind of exaggeration
was important to Expressionists in both Germany and Austria, who
used a wider range of human emotion in their work as a means of
tapping the spirit, soul, or psychology of their subjects.
But such decisive expression was uncommon, even in twentieth-
century portraiture. While expression in portraiture could give the
sitter an appearance of madness or ugliness, it was also associated with
the less exalted art of caricature. From the Italian caricare , meaning to
overload, caricature involved an exaggeration of feature, and the first
examples of it can be found in the sixteenth century. Leonardo da Vinci
drew caricatural heads, and Annibale Carracci reportedly justified
the practice of caricature by claiming that ideal ugliness was no less
outré heads, has a disturbing ambience. Laughter, usually a sign of joy,
here seems to be a mark of mania or despair. This kind of exaggeration
was important to Expressionists in both Germany and Austria, who
used a wider range of human emotion in their work as a means of
tapping the spirit, soul, or psychology of their subjects.
But such decisive expression was uncommon, even in twentieth-
century portraiture. While expression in portraiture could give the
sitter an appearance of madness or ugliness, it was also associated with
the less exalted art of caricature. From the Italian caricare , meaning to
overload, caricature involved an exaggeration of feature, and the first
examples of it can be found in the sixteenth century. Leonardo da Vinci
drew caricatural heads, and Annibale Carracci reportedly justified
the practice of caricature by claiming that ideal ugliness was no less
important a goal for artists than ideal beauty. Caricatural portraits in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, Germany, and France
were often intended to satirize—through distortion of expression and
feature—individuals who were politically or socially notorious. To an
extent caricaturists acted as portraitists, inasmuch as they studied the
distinctive features of their sitters and used them as a stamp of identifi-
cation. But while the portraitist might reproduce a large nose in a way
that suggests the authority or dignity of the sitter, a caricaturist would
make the nose predominant to the point of being laughable. The
humorous side of facial distortion, and the eventual association of this
with caricature, is one of the many reasons why portraitists have gener-
ally avoided using extreme expression as a means of conveying the
sitter’s personality.
Portraiture is thus about both body and soul. It represents the ‘front’
of a person—their gesture, expression, and manner—in such a way as to
convey their distinct identity as well as to link him or her to a particular
social milieu. Such external signs have remained crucial to portraitists,
but from the sixteenth century onwards, artists found new means of
probing the inner life of their sitters: explicitly, by employing theories of
physiognomy, deportment, or expression; or more frequently implicitly,
with unstable or ambiguous clues laid in the face, gesture, or accou-
trements contained in the portraits. Portraits seem to present us with
an individual personality, but it is important to remember that ideas
of character, personality, and psychology have evolved through time.
Attempts to read all portraits as embodying more than the mere ex-
ternals of the sitter can be anachronistic, but by the very nature of
their mimetic function, portraits give the viewer an impression of the
inner life.
in some way with the identity of the sitter represented. The concept of
identity has a complex history. The twenty-first-century notion of
identity as those aspects of character, gender, race, and sexual orienta-
tion unique to an individual is the legacy of the seventeenth century,
when the idea of ‘the self ’ began to be explored philosophically.
Previ-ously identity was seen to be rooted in those external attributes,
conveyed through the body, face, and deportment, that distinguished
one individual from another.
This earlier notion of identity is crucial
to the history of portraiture. The idea that portraits should communi-
cate something about the sitter’s psychological state or personality is a
concept that evolved gradually and became common only after nine-
teenth-century Romanticism fuelled the idea of a personality cult, that
is, a fascination with the particular qualities, idiosyncrasies, and actions
of a celebrated individual. Portraits represent the external features of a
unique individual, and they also place their subjects within conventions
of behaviour, dress, and deportment. All of these are fundamental com-
ponents of individual identity. Portraits are filled with the external signs
of a person’s socialized self, what Erving Goffman referred to as the
‘front’ of an individual.
These external signals have been remarkably
persistent in portraiture, even after ideas of character and personality
were well developed. A good example of this is the series of portraits of
English Grand Tourists in Rome painted by the Italian eighteenth-
century artist Pompeo Batoni, such as George Gordon, Lord Haddo . Batoni’s portrait shows the young aristocrat standing in a cross-legged pose that was a conventional posture of politeness. He is
surrounded by the signs of Roman artistic greatness in the form of
an antique statue, a Renaissance frieze, and a crumbling column. The
Roman countryside is visible in the background. A very English
hunting dog sitting at his feet reinforces these signals of Haddo’s social
status. As only landed men of a certain income could hunt or participate
in the Grand Tour, Haddo’s ‘front’ is represented as that of a high-born
gentleman. Although Batoni attempted to convey something of the
character of Haddo in his portrait, the viewer is directed to read more
generic signs of status through such external attributes.
Despite the persistence of this emphasis on the external, most por-
traitists engage with individual identity in ways other than reproducing
such social signs as physical appearance, dress, and deportment. One of
the great challenges of portraiture for the artist is probing the sitter’s
character, personality, or individuality. Many portraits seem to do this,
but the messages they send to the viewer, and the way those clues are
interpreted, can vary from one period to another. There is also the
problem that viewers tend to respond to the faces in portraits as they
would to faces in real life, and therefore any reading of character or per-
sonality in a portrait tends to be highly subjective.
The problematic relationship between the communication of exter-
nal and internal aspects of identity in portraiture can be demonstrated
by comparing two sixteenth-century portraits by the Italian artists
Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Lorenzo Lotto . Arcimboldo’s
depiction of Fire has the format of profile portraits common to both
ancient Rome and the Italian Renaissance. However, he has composed
this portrait-like head from candles, kindling, embers, cannon-mouths,
flints, and lamps. The viewer sees a face-like object, but is constantly
forced to correct this impression by lingering over the still life. Such
a work stresses the external aspects of portraiture: the viewer sees a
face but not a personality. In contrast, Lotto’s portrait of a young
man can suggest many different things to an observer. Although the
portrait is conventional in its half-length format and in the focused
expression of the sitter, Lotto’s emphasis on the sitter’s distant gaze,
slightly downward-curving mouth, and youthful features conveys a
sense of either arrogance or melancholy, depending on how you wish to
read it. However, Lotto himself was presenting us not with a clear view
of the sitter’s personality but a series of riddles about the young man’s
inner life. As Norbert Schneider has shown, the curtain in the back-
ground is a common emblem of concealment, and reveals a glimpse of
a small oil lamp behind it. While the lamp in Arcimboldo’s Fire
becomes a physical feature, the lamp in Lotto’s portrait seems to be a
symbol of this individual’s spiritual state, as it may allude to the passage
in the Gospels which refers to ‘light shining in darkness’.
In Lotto’s
work, we see the beginnings of what might be considered a psycho-
logical view of portraiture, but here it is a matter of symbol, suggestion,
and riddle, rather than revelation of the character or personality of the
sitter. That emphasis would come only much later.
Although it is possible to trace a gradual shift from portraits that
stress identity through external signs to those that focus on character or
personality, it is important to note that attempts to reconcile the inner
life with the outer appearance were common from the Renaissance
onwards. The mechanism for making this reconciliation was the revival
of ancient treatises on physiognomy, which claimed that the face could
be an index of the mind. Writings on physiognomy attributed to Aris-
totle became the basis for discussions of the face’s meaning by authors
such as Giacomo della Porta in the sixteenth century.
The best known proponent of physiognomic theory was the eigh-
teenth-century Swiss writer Johann Caspar Lavater, whose massive
three-volume Physiognomische Fragmente(Fragments on Physiognomy)of
1775 –8 was translated into several languages [15]. Lavater’s work argued
that each facial feature could reveal something significant about the
character of the person represented. Using a huge array of illustra-
tions—many of which were portraits—Lavater demonstrated the
subtle differences between tilt of nose, size of forehead, and shape of
mouth that could convey specific aspects of personality. Lavater’s work
also fuelled a popular fashion for the silhouette portrait, which reduced
the individual likeness to a black profile outline. According to Lavater,
this abstracted view of the face could reveal the attributes of individual
character in its most basic form. Although Lavater’s work was popular
with artists and writers, it proved to be ultimately too reductionist to be
of use in portraiture.
Of more benefit to portrait painters in employing the signs of the
face and body to reveal the soul were theories of deportment and ex-
pression. As with physiognomy, ideas of gesture and disposition of the
body were ultimately drawn from ancient texts. Sixteenth-century
Italian examples, such as that of Castiglione’s The Courtier ( 1528 ), fol-
lowed the tradition of the ancient Roman orator Quintilian’s ideas of
rhetorical gesture. The Courtierinstructed gentlemen on how they
should deport themselves in society. Conduct manuals throughout
Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were similarly con-
cerned with the revelatory qualities of contrived gestures. As mentioned
earlier, these ideas came to portrait painting through a series of conven-
tions of posing which could, but did not always, reflect social practice.
Theories of facial expression were also implicated in the body/soul
duality of portraiture. Expression was distinguished from physi-
ognomy: the former was about the temporary effects of the emotions on
the face; the latter concerned those permanent facial features that
revealed character. In the seventeenth century the French Royal Acad-
emician, Charles Le Brun, codified expressions of the passions, or
emotions, such as fear, anger, and joy in his Méthode pour apprendre à
dessiner les passions( A Method to Learn to Draw the Passions), published
posthumously in 1698 .
Le Brun’s ideas were popularly adopted by
history painters who were able to employ his more extreme expressions
in paintings depicting war, death, and acts of heroism. For portrait
painters Le Brun’s taxonomies of expression were more problematic. It
was uncommon for portraits to show any extreme expression, as neutral
and studied features gave sitters an air of dignified repose or concentra-
tion. Most sitters preferred to be represented in this way, as any facial
expression in a portrait could appear ugly or unnatural. As expression
also could be a means of conveying character, this absence of decisive
expression from much portraiture may have served a social need,
but it removed a tool of communication from the artist’s repertoire.
Occasionally portraitists would show the sitter smiling or laughing, but
this emphasized the awkwardness of an expression that could seem
grotesque when shown static. Before the twentieth century, examples of
extreme facial expression in portraits are rare. For example, the Austrian
sculptor Franz Xavier Messerschmidt exploited the grotesque aspects of
exaggerated expression in portraiture when he used Le Brun’s formula
in a series of self-portrait heads, but these were supposedly produced
when he was succumbing to insanity.
In the twentieth century the power of facial expression to convey the
inner life of sitters was exploited by Expressionist artists whose main
goal was to convey the substance of the inner life. Richard Gerstl’s
Laughing Self-portrait , like his fellow Austrian Messerschmidt’s
outré heads, has a disturbing ambience. Laughter, usually a sign of joy,
here seems to be a mark of mania or despair. This kind of exaggeration
was important to Expressionists in both Germany and Austria, who
used a wider range of human emotion in their work as a means of
tapping the spirit, soul, or psychology of their subjects.
But such decisive expression was uncommon, even in twentieth-
century portraiture. While expression in portraiture could give the
sitter an appearance of madness or ugliness, it was also associated with
the less exalted art of caricature. From the Italian caricare , meaning to
overload, caricature involved an exaggeration of feature, and the first
examples of it can be found in the sixteenth century. Leonardo da Vinci
drew caricatural heads, and Annibale Carracci reportedly justified
the practice of caricature by claiming that ideal ugliness was no less
outré heads, has a disturbing ambience. Laughter, usually a sign of joy,
here seems to be a mark of mania or despair. This kind of exaggeration
was important to Expressionists in both Germany and Austria, who
used a wider range of human emotion in their work as a means of
tapping the spirit, soul, or psychology of their subjects.
But such decisive expression was uncommon, even in twentieth-
century portraiture. While expression in portraiture could give the
sitter an appearance of madness or ugliness, it was also associated with
the less exalted art of caricature. From the Italian caricare , meaning to
overload, caricature involved an exaggeration of feature, and the first
examples of it can be found in the sixteenth century. Leonardo da Vinci
drew caricatural heads, and Annibale Carracci reportedly justified
the practice of caricature by claiming that ideal ugliness was no less
important a goal for artists than ideal beauty. Caricatural portraits in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, Germany, and France
were often intended to satirize—through distortion of expression and
feature—individuals who were politically or socially notorious. To an
extent caricaturists acted as portraitists, inasmuch as they studied the
distinctive features of their sitters and used them as a stamp of identifi-
cation. But while the portraitist might reproduce a large nose in a way
that suggests the authority or dignity of the sitter, a caricaturist would
make the nose predominant to the point of being laughable. The
humorous side of facial distortion, and the eventual association of this
with caricature, is one of the many reasons why portraitists have gener-
ally avoided using extreme expression as a means of conveying the
sitter’s personality.
Portraiture is thus about both body and soul. It represents the ‘front’
of a person—their gesture, expression, and manner—in such a way as to
convey their distinct identity as well as to link him or her to a particular
social milieu. Such external signs have remained crucial to portraitists,
but from the sixteenth century onwards, artists found new means of
probing the inner life of their sitters: explicitly, by employing theories of
physiognomy, deportment, or expression; or more frequently implicitly,
with unstable or ambiguous clues laid in the face, gesture, or accou-
trements contained in the portraits. Portraits seem to present us with
an individual personality, but it is important to remember that ideas
of character, personality, and psychology have evolved through time.
Attempts to read all portraits as embodying more than the mere ex-
ternals of the sitter can be anachronistic, but by the very nature of
their mimetic function, portraits give the viewer an impression of the
inner life.
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий