THE SELF-PORTRAIT

About the Author

James Hall is an art historian, lecturer and broadcaster, and is a visiting
research fellow at the University of Southampton. He gained his MA at the
Courtauld Institute of Art in London and his PhD at the University of
Cambridge. Formerly chief art critic of the Sunday Correspondent and the
Guardian, he contributes to a number of publications, including The Times
Literary Supplement, Guardian, Wall Street Journal and Art Newspaper.
Hall is the author of four critically acclaimed books including The World as
Sculpture: The Changing Status of Sculpture from the Renaissance to the
Present Day and The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped
Western Art.
 Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:

The Drawings of Rembrandt: A New Study

Courbet
Van Gogh Paintings: The Masterpieces
Man With a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud
Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography
The Body in Contemporary Art

See our websites

www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
To Benjamin, Joshua and Alice Hall
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
Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1652 (detail)
INTRODUCTION

Michelangelo, on being asked why the painter had made the ox more lifelike
than the rest, said: ‘Any painter can make a good portrait of himself’.
GIORGIO VASARI, Lives of the Artists (1568)

The self-portrait is the one form of easel painting that resists being owned.
PHILIP FISHER, Making and Effacing Art (1991)

SELF-PORTRAITURE HAS BECOME the defining visual genre of our

confessional age: the sheer volume of contemporary self-portraits defies
enumeration. More of us, from more countries, are more interested in self-
portraiture than ever before. Self-portraits have migrated far beyond the
church, palace, studio, academy, museum, gallery, plinth and frame.
Nowadays photographic and filmed self-portraits flood the internet, and
school children are required to make them. It is widely assumed – and hoped
– that self-portraits give privileged access to the sitter’s soul, and thereby
overcome the alienation and anonymity experienced by so many in modern
urbanized societies.
In Europe, genuine (as well as mistaken and fake) self-portraits have
been collected and venerated since the sixteenth century. But past interest in
the genre is overshadowed by the obsession with self-portraiture during the
last forty years. Today in cities across the globe there are artists whose entire
careers are forged on self-portraiture.
Exhibitions of old and modern masters are routinely prefaced by a self-
portrait; or, in the case of artists who made several self-portraits, by a room
of self-portraits, as if these were the first pictures they painted. Rembrandt,
Reynolds, Courbet and Munch have had full exhibitions dedicated to their
self-portraits. And wherever an artist has inconsiderately failed to make any,
or sufficient, self-portraits, Freudian analysis fills the breech. So we find
subconscious, disguised and surrogate self-portraits: the Mona Lisa
becomes a Leonardo self-portrait in drag. Self-portraiture is the magical
Fifth Element, first among equals with the four traditional genres (histories,
portraits, landscapes and still lifes). Depending on who you talk to, it is an
inspiring symbol of artistic freedom or a symptom of what has been dubbed
‘the culture of narcissism’. Few are indifferent to self-portraits, and the
claims that are made for them.
The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History maps the genre from the Middle
Ages to the prolific self-image making of today’s contemporary artists. It is
divided into ten broadly chronological chapters, each focusing on key
themes. Within these thematic overviews are detailed discussions of
particular artists and works. But the aim is to create much more than a
‘greatest hits’ of familiar masterpieces. Instead this book looks at famous
self-portraits in a fresh way, drawing on ideas and anecdotes from the artists’
own times, while also exploring works that deserve to be better known.
Rather than over-emphasizing the artist’s pursuit of an accurate likeness, it
looks at the many competing motivations for making and shaping a self-
portrait.
Conventional wisdom has it that in around AD 1500 individualism was
born, and good quality crystal glass mirrors invented, thereby allowing
people to see themselves clearly for the first time. From this perfect cultural
storm came the irresistible rise of self-portraiture. There is undoubtedly an
element of truth to this: the 1490s were a crucial decade, and there was
growing interest in distinguishing the personality and style of individual
artists. But it ignores what came before in the medieval period, and smoothes
out what came after. Developments in mirror technology are largely
irrelevant, and this ‘mirror myth’ has clouded discussions of the genre. Good
mirrors of polished metal had existed since antiquity and continued to be
used well into the seventeenth century. So, too, convex mirrors, which were
still being used by Caravaggio – not least because their large field of vision
compensated for the generally small size of flat mirrors. It is only in the
eighteenth century that complaints start to be made about mirrors usurping
paintings as fashionable wall decoration.
This is the first history of self-portraiture to celebrate – unapologetically
– the Middle Ages. Portraiture may have been pioneered by the Egyptians,
Greeks and Romans, but in the Middle Ages self-portraiture becomes very
much a Christian concern, connected with personal salvation, honour and
love. The two medieval legends of St Veronica and King Abgar, in which
Christ presses his face to a piece of cloth, leaving an imprint, posited Christ
as a self-portraitist. No great self-portraitist is of higher status than St
Dunstan (909–88), prostrate on a mountain top, making himself both high and
low (see page 23); and no funnier self-portrait exists than that of 1136 of
Hildebertus, throwing a sponge at a mouse stealing his lunch (see page 28).
Like all the best jokes, it makes a profound point.
It is during the Middle Ages that mirrors become powerful cultural
symbols, metaphors for all kinds of knowledge, both of self and others. But
the Renaissance ‘mirror myth’ has obscured the contribution of the Middle
Ages and limited our appreciation of what a self-portrait can be. It has led us
to assume that self-portraits were almost exclusively concerned with giving
an accurate likeness. But the self-portrait – more so than a portrait – is
primarily a product of memory and imagination. If naturalism had been the
principal goal, it would make more sense to have a portrait painted or life
cast made. In the first philosophical discussion of self-portraiture, by the
influential Plotinus (AD third century), self-portraits are produced not by
looking out at a mirror, but by withdrawing into the self. During the
Renaissance, one of the main theories of self-portraiture was the catchphrase
‘every painter paints himself’: this meant that all artists unwittingly imbue all
the figures they make with something of themselves, so all bear a ‘family
resemblance’. Once again, mirrors are marginal.
One of the wonders of self-portraits is their capacity to induce unique
levels of uncertainty in the viewer. Is the artist looking at us with a view to
portraying or judging us? Is the artist looking at a mirror, with a view to
portraying or judging themselves? Is the artist creating a persona to serve
specific ends? Or have they delved into the book of memory, myth and
imagination to create a work personal in its meaning?
This book features bystander self-portraits, in which the artist appears as
a face in the crowd or as part of a multi-figure narrative; group self-portraits,
in which the artist appears with family, associates or even the Virgin Mary;
and independent self-portraits, discrete images depicting only the artist.
Whatever the type, the artist strives to find the perfect image, whether
profile, oblique or frontal. The first ‘independent’ self-portrait is a fine
example of this. It is a medal by the archetypal ‘Renaissance man’ Leon
Battista Alberti, in which he depicts himself in profile (see page 45).
Arranged either side of his head are several examples of his personal
symbol, a winged eye. It is with these shamanistic flying eyes that he sees the
whole world – and that includes the back of his head and neck, his knobbly
ear and severe haircut.
We tend to assume that post-1500, self-portraiture becomes a natural and
uncontroversial thing for an artist to do, almost like sketching. Yet one of the
most crucial aspects of the history of self-portraiture is understanding why
and when self-portraits are made – and not made. Not all artists are ‘fond’ of
making self-portraits, as the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne insouciantly put it
when writing about the vast Uffizi self-portrait collection in 1860. Neither do
they create them at any stage in their career. They rarely say, as the famous
New Yorker cartoon about Rembrandt had it: ‘Hendrickje, I feel another self-
portrait coming on. Bring in the funny hats’.
Rembrandt had in fact painted and etched more than half his eventual
output of self-portraits by the time he was thirty. He hardly made any in the
1640s. Titian only started making self-portraits when he was about sixty, and
his are the first ‘old age’ self-portraits. Prior to Titian, most artists made
self-portraits when they were young and/or in rude health (hence a section
devoted to ‘child prodigy’ self-portraits). Dürer’s three independent painted
self-portraits were all made before he was thirty. By the same token,
Leonardo never made a self-portrait (though the search is still on), and
neither did the great artist-autobiographer Benvenuto Cellini. Sculpted self-
portraits pretty much disappear from view between 1600 and 1770.
The history of self-portraiture is also the history of collecting, displaying,
publishing and faking self-portraits. So here the presentation of self-portraits
is explored – from their first appearance in artists’ homes and in private and
royal collections, through to their inclusion in museums, temporary
exhibitions, catalogues and even as public monuments.
Vasari has a central, and very creative, role here. The second edition of
his Lives of the Artists (1568) featured engraved self-portraits of the artists.
In most cases, self-portraits did not exist, so Vasari assumed that any person
looking out of a multi-figure artwork or who looked individualized must be
the artist. No self-portraits were credited to Giotto in the first edition; but in
the second edition he was credited with three. From the Romantic era
onwards, with its emphasis on art-as-autobiography, there has been a gold
rush of prospecting for self-portraits. More recently, there has been a
countervailing tendency to demote self-portraits to portraits ‘of an unknown
sitter’.
When discussing self-portraiture, the modern cult of the artist makes it
hard to avoid becoming overly reverential, speaking as if in hushed tones. As
a result, insufficient attention has been paid to the fascinating subject of
comic and caricatural self-portraits. This sub-genre takes off in the era of the
Renaissance superstar-artist. Just as kings demonstrate their majesty by
inviting the mockery of their fools, so an artist like Michelangelo can
alternate between heroic and mock-heroic self-portraits. When painting the
Sistine ceiling he drew the first ever caricatural self-portrait, depicting
himself in deformed action, daubing like a child. Artists were traditionally
ranked at courts with ‘entertainers’ such as buffoons, dwarfs, wits and fools.
This is how Velázquez still situates himself in his astonishing Las Meninas,
next to but distinct from other court entertainers – dwarves, jesters, dogs –
and a royal child.
Much of the best modern self-portraiture could be described as
exuberantly caricatural, and in order to be so has moved decisively away
from respectable head-and-shoulders self-portraiture. The body has become
more important than the face, in keeping with Nietzsche’s call, in The Birth
of Tragedy, for a ‘new world’ of symbols in which the ‘entire symbolism of
the body would be called into play, not the mere symbolism of the lips, face
and speech’. This, too, is why the history of self-portraiture has to begin
properly in the Middle Ages, with St Dunstan, prostrate on a mountain top,
and Hildebertus, chastising that mouse.
Calling this book a cultural history is not meant to give the impression
that self-portraits are passive reflections of their own societies. On the
contrary, they have often been in the vanguard of cultural developments,
influencing their own society’s sense of identity and selfhood. There is a
tendency for some scholars to assume that the history of self-portraiture
follows in the wake of literature, especially in relation to concepts such as
‘inwardness’ and ‘subjectivity’, which are often assumed to begin with
Montaigne’s semi-autobiographical essays and Descartes’s ‘I think therefore
I am’ – only later cropping up in the self-portraits of Rembrandt. Yet the
influence works the other way: Montaigne and Descartes continually had
recourse to metaphors taken from the visual arts to express ideas of the self
and the development of consciousness. In the preface to the Essays,
Montaigne tells us that he is ‘painting’ his own self, and later justifies his
enterprise by citing the example of the painter King René of Anjou (1409–
80):

I saw one day in Bar-Le-Duc King Francis II being presented with a

self-portrait by King René as a souvenir of him. Why is it not equally
permissible to portray yourself with your pen as he did with his
brush?

Montaigne believed – like so many since – that self-portraits are uniquely

direct, vivid, intimate and honest.
PRELUDE: SELF-PORTRAITURE IN
ANTIQUITY

Bak, Self-Portrait with His Wife Taheri, c. 1353–1336 BC, quartzite

ALTHOUGH WE CAN SEE ARTISANS hard at work in artefacts from ancient

Egypt, Greece and Rome, bona fide self-portraits from antiquity are few and
far between. The earliest to survive come from Egypt. The best are by Bak,
chief sculptor to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, whose reign (1353–1336
BC) saw the culmination of a short-lived naturalistic style with a wider range
of subject matter.
 In a self-portrait carved on a quartzite stela, Bak shows himself as a
successful courtier and family man. He stands to attention next to his wife
Taheri in a shallow niche. She is dressed, as befits convention, in a wig and
a body-hugging full-length dress. Bak wears court dress that opens to display
the naked distended belly and breasts of the prosperous well-fed.
Bak also appears in a relief with a broadly dynastic purpose. It shows
him and his sculptor father Men in a kind of diptych; each is depicted (though
at a much smaller scale) along with the pharaoh he served. Akhenaten is
making offerings to the sun god, whose rays end in hands – an iconographic
innovation of the period. An inscription states that Akhenaten taught Bak how
to make art, and this may be more than just praise for ‘inspiring’ patronage.
Akhenaten introduced religious reforms focusing on the radiant sun disc,
the Aten, the sole deity and creator of all things. His name can be translated
as ‘shining spirit of the Aten’, and he was the sole intermediary between god
and people, a revolutionary idea that did away with the need for priests.
Akhenaten may have emulated the Aten’s dextrous creative power by
becoming actively involved in art – and his example may have improved the
status of artists. With Akhenaten’s death, and the ascension to the throne of
Tutankhamun, possibly his son, the old gods and hierarchies regained their
power and Egyptian art reverted to its formulaic, hieratic style.

Classical antiquity represented an ideal to be emulated for many European

artists from around 1500 until the nineteenth century. But while Greece and
especially Rome offer plenty of stirring examples of portraiture – in coins,
medals and busts – self-portraiture is conspicuous by its near total absence.
Some self-portraits may have been produced in ancient Greece (artists’
signatures appear from the sixth century BC), but our only evidence is
references to self-portraits in texts written hundreds of years later.
In the sections on the visual arts in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (c.
AD 77–9) only two self-portraits are mentioned alongside countless portraits.
The architect and sculptor Theodorus (sixth century BC) made a miniature
bronze self-portrait statuette, whose most interesting feature was a tiny model
of a horse-drawn chariot, which the subject held by ‘three fingers of the left
hand’, and which had been stolen as a marvel of littleness. The thief,
however, left behind the self-portrait statuette (34: 83).
The second self-portrait mentioned by Pliny is by a woman artist, Iaia of
Cyzicus (first century BC). She ‘never married’ and chiefly painted ‘portraits
of women…and also a portrait of herself, done with a mirror’ (35: 147–8).
Her unrivalled skill brought her fame and money, but her pioneering attempt
at self-portraiture is given no greater importance than her virgin state
(perpetua virgo) and her decorous focus on female portraiture. This is the
first mention of a self-portrait being made with a mirror, and in antiquity
mirrors – usually of polished metal – were largely owned by women, and
used for cosmetic purposes. So there is a cultural inevitability about Iaia’s
mirror-assisted self-portrait that would not have been the case with a male
painter like Apelles.
Pliny’s contemporary Plutarch, in his Life of Pericles (AD 75), mentions a
more daring and controversial self-portrait from the fifth century BC. Plutarch
claims that the enemies of Pericles, the leading statesman of Athens, had his
architect and sculptor Phidias imprisoned for including his own self-portrait,
and a portrait of Pericles, in the decoration of the armed cult statue of Athena
in the Parthenon: ‘in making a relief of the battle of the Amazons on
[Athena’s] shield, he included a figure of himself as a bald old man lifting up
a stone with both hands’.1 Modern scholars doubt if the bald old man who
does seem to have been on the shield really was a self-portrait (a copy
survives in the British Museum), but the anecdote implies disdain for the
artist – and his appearance, as baldness was despised in antiquity. Plutarch
may well have made up the story of the shield; early on in his biography of
Pericles he showed his contempt for artists:

No gifted young man, upon seeing the Zeus of Phidias at Olympia,

ever wanted to be Phidias…. For it does not necessarily follow that,
if a work is delightful because of its gracefulness, the man who made
it is worthy of our serious regard.2

These prejudices against manual labour were widely held in antiquity, and it
explains why there is so little sustained theoretical discussion of the visual
arts, let alone histories of art and artists. Artists appear in the geological
section of Pliny’s Natural History, grouped according to the stones, metals
and pigments they used. That is not to say that patrons did not take an active
interest. Alexander the Great was reputed to have given his mistress to his
favourite court painter Apelles, and this era saw the development of an art
market, private collectors and even art tuition for the elite. However, there is
no reference to Apelles or the court sculptor Lysippos having made a self-
portrait.
The philosopher Plato staged the most elaborate and influential dismissal
of the visual arts in the tenth book of The Republic (c. 380 BC), and self-
portraiture is shot down in the process. For Plato, artworks are mere
imitations of the external world, which is itself a weak reflection of the
ultimate reality – the world of ‘ideas’ and ‘ideal forms’. Painters are
conjurers who trade in illusions and pretend they can make anything in
nature. Their trickery is little better than what you can achieve with a
revolving mirror: ‘by turning a mirror round and round you would soon
enough make the sun and the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other
animals and plants’ (602: c–d). This is the first literary allusion to the
possibility of making a self-portrait – yet Plato’s painter is an indiscriminate
transcriber of random visual phenomena and his self-portrait has no special
importance.
So while antiquity offers us a few self-portraits, it does not offer a
starting point for a coherent history of self-portraiture. For that we must
move on to the Middle Ages.
1.
MEDIEVAL ORIGINS

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

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 former – because they were
literate and thus had direct access to the Bible – having more status. 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 scribes and texts, 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 wealthiest craftsmen with the highest status because of their use of
expensive lustrous materials, which were greatly admired in the Middle
Ages; but almost all medieval metalwork has been melted down. By any
measure, Dunstan is the most high-ranking and politically powerful artist in
history. A folk song celebrates the time when Dunstan ‘pull’d the devil by the
nose / With red-hot tongs, which made him roar, / That he was heard three
miles or more’.
At Glastonbury, where Dunstan rebuilt the Abbey and reinstituted
monastic life under a strict moral code, he painted a famous and highly
influential frontispiece to a Latin grammar. A wiry outline drawing, it is a
pioneering example of a technique and style that would become a
distinguishing feature of Anglo-Saxon art in this period. Dunstan is prostrate
beside a giant standing figure of Christ. A four-line prayer is inscribed over
him, the prickly lines pressing down on his flattened back like a bundle of
faggots: ‘I ask, merciful Christ, that you may protect me, Dunstan, and that
you do not let the Taenerian storms drown me’. Taenarum was a storm-
lashed coastal mountain at whose foot lay the entrance to the classical
underworld.
Dunstan’s ‘storms’ signify the worldly temptations to sin. He is humbly
positioned to Christ’s left, where the damned are located in the Last
Judgment (the Latin for left is sinister). By touching Christ’s robes, Dunstan
is seeking absolution. But Christ looks the other way, to his right (as he does
in Crucifixion scenes) and the implication is that it will take many prayers
and good works before Christ looks favourably on him, and allows him to
pass over to that side. Yet Dunstan’s proximity to Christ suggests no lack of
belief in his intimacy with the redeemer, and in the likelihood of ultimate
success. His submissiveness is that of a courtier, for the profession of
humility and even of smallness was a courtly convention. From the time of
Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305) the etiquette of courtly submission and
inadequacy was followed by pagans and Christians alike – and went hand in
hand with extravagant exaltation of the secular ruler. Writers and orators
would frequently apologize for the crudeness and paltriness of what was to
follow, and their lack of talent. Self-disparagement formulae included
references to ‘my littleness, pettiness, smallness’.13 Conspicuous humility is
a standard trope in medieval self-portraiture: the English monk Matthew
Paris (d. 1257), who was a celebrated historian, metalworker and painter,
prostrates himself beneath the throne of the Virgin and child in the
frontispiece to the third volume of his Historia Anglorum. But his name is
prominently inscribed in large letters above his back.
Mount Taenarum had been thrillingly evoked in the first-century Roman
author Statius’s epic poem the Thebaid (2: 32ff). The summit is a relatively
calm place out of reach of the storm clouds and ‘the vapours of the lower
region’, and a resting place for ‘weary stars’. This is where Dunstan is
positioned, on a rocky outcrop, wearied after a long penitential climb.
Dunstan’s Christ must be rising above those same vapours and clouds, with
the wavy line marking their high point. Dunstan is not just covering his face
with his hand, he is wiping off the vapours that still cling to it, trying to turn it
– as advised by Plotinus – into a ‘lovely face’, radiant with light.

St Dunstan, Self-Portrait Worshipping Christ, c. 943–57, ink on parchment

So why is a medieval churchman not only executing religious pictures,

but also a self-portrait of great power and sophistication? A good indication
is given by the most important early medieval technical treatise on the visual
arts, Theophilus’s An Essay on Diverse Arts (c. 1125), perhaps written as a
riposte to attacks on artistic embellishment of churches made by Cistercian
abbot Bernard of Clairvaux. Theophilus, the pseudonym of a German
goldsmith, claims the ‘useful occupation’ of the hands avoids sloth and
distraction.14 It is sinful not to exercise a God-given talent for making
artefacts that praise the Lord, demonstrate the beauty of the divinely created
world, and enable church services to be performed – so long as it is pursued
for the love of God rather than for worldly fame or money. Theophilus (he
used a pseudonym – lover of God – because he did not want fame) asks his
readers to recompense him for his ‘labour of instruction’ by praying for him
every time they make good use of his book.
Dunstan would surely have agreed with all of this (apart from the use of a
pseudonym), and his inscribed self-portrait, prominently placed as a
frontispiece, is designed to bring himself forcibly to the attention of God and
to all future readers of the Latin grammar. But Dunstan is making a further
claim on our attention and respect. The heroic Lilliputian figure who has
created this giant image of Christ is within touching distance of the divine.
Thus his images and words have an unimpeachable authenticity. He is a
reliable eyewitness, seeing God through both his inner and outer eye.

Explicit assertions of the enormity and endlessness of the artist’s task occur
in the twelfth century, when illuminators incorporate miniaturized versions of
themselves at work into the picture. We see them holding up or putting the
finishing touches to an illuminated initial, or to some other important
structural component, which ingeniously frames them. Some artists depict
themselves in the margin, conscientiously pulling up by rope sections of text
that the scribe had missed out, as if it were a building block.15 These wry,
self-conscious allusions to the nitty-gritty of the artistic process would not be
rivalled until the seventeenth and especially twentieth centuries.
During the twelfth century favourable economic conditions had led to an
increased production of artworks, drawing on a wider range of subject
matter and showing a greater naturalism, albeit often confined to marginal
details such as plant decoration. The emergence of the Cathar heresy, which
posited two Gods, the ‘good’ God of spirit and the ‘evil’ God of matter, had
prompted the church to support study of the natural sciences, including
anatomy, and the translation of Aristotle’s scientific works. This was seen as
an effective way of proving that God’s creation is good in every way. The
philosopher Roger Bacon (c. 1214–92), in his studies of optics, insisted on
the fundamental role of sight in cognition and devotion.
The influential teacher Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141) took a more holistic
view of the ideal curriculum. Although he regarded the mechanical arts
(painting, sculpture, carpentry, agriculture, fishing, medicine, etc.) as inferior
to the speculative arts, he believed they helped mankind overcome physical
defects and deprivations experienced after the Fall. They should therefore be
studied and admired: ‘Want…has devised all that you see most excellent in
the occupations of men. From this the infinite varieties of painting, weaving,
carving, and founding have arisen, so that we look with wonder not at nature
alone but at the artificer as well’.16 Hugh’s explicit interest in and respect for
the individual maker is in direct contrast to the prevailing view inherited
from antiquity.
Artists’ exposure of the mechanics of making, and of themselves as
makers, belongs to this same trend – as does the writing down of
Theophilus’s technical manual, which itself shows awareness of Hugh’s
treatise. The most vibrant and intense of the self-portraits of the artist at work
appears in a Passionale (Lives of the Saints) of c. 1170–1200, detailing the
sufferings of various saints and martyrs. It was painted by Canon Rufillus of
Weissenau in the diocese of Constance (now Switzerland). A tonsured red
head with a long gaunt face, he sits on a trestle table placed underneath his
own initial letter ‘R’, finishing off the ‘tail’ of the letter. This marks the
beginning of the ‘sufferings’ of St Martin.
Rufillus’s ambience is carefully delineated. He holds up a pot of paint in
his left hand, propping his hand up on a mahlstick, and holds his paintbrush
horizontally in his right hand at eye level, as though it were a prosthetic,
stalk-like extension of his eyes. The role of eyesight, and of hand-eye
coordination, in art-making is emphasized as never before. His signature –
FR. RUFILLUS – is inscribed over his head, and runs all the way along his
paintbrush. The Latin word for red is ‘rufus’ so his name must derive from
his red hair, and Rufillus’s redness is proudly underscored by the fact that he
is currently using red paint (in 1624, Rubens would pun on his own name in a
self-portrait by including a red sky and red cheeks: in Latin, rubens means
‘reddening’).
 The ant-like ‘miniaturization’ of the artist suggests the subtlety and
control needed to paint all these incredibly intricate patterns and shapes. At
the same time, the initial is endowed with architectural scale and form, and
can be inhabited by the artist. The task at hand is made comparable to the
creation of churches and cathedrals, which were also extensively painted.
Yet only in the next century did master masons start to be honoured with
tombs and inscriptions in their own cathedrals.17 Whereas vast teams of
workers were required to create such buildings, this artist clearly works
alone. There is a powerful sense in this self-portrait initial that the individual
artist lives inside his own artwork, and is solely responsible for it. This R-
framed image of Rufillus is, by any measure, a self-contained self-portrait.

Father Rufillus of Weissenau, Self-Portrait Illuminating the Initial ‘R’, c. 1170–1200, ink and colour
on parchment
 The letter ‘R’ is constructed from a fantastic assemblage of disparate
decorative elements and mythical beasties. Rufillus is painting the ‘tail’ of
the letter, formed from a writhing serpent, with a different head at each end.
At the top end, just behind Rufillus, a snake-like creature with retractable
jaws bites the lower portion of the circular section of the ‘R’; the other end
of the snake terminates in a blue-bearded human head with a serpent’s tongue
and a dragon crest. Bluebeard stares at a sciapod – a naked one-legged
woman with long orange hair – who grabs the body of the snake with her
right arm while acrobatically pulling her leg up over her head with the other.
Rufillus is, of course, responsible for having created the monster, but we
still admire him for sticking resolutely to his task and not being unduly
concerned. St Martin, whose life this is, started out as a Roman soldier, and
his name was believed to derive from that of Mars, god of war, and Rufillus
claims a kind of martial prowess himself. He has subdued this evil snake and
incorporated it into his letter-house. St Bernard of Clairvaux had contrasted
the indecent contortions of acrobats and jugglers with the ‘decent, grave and
admirable’ deportment of monks, and the unerring Rufillus counts himself in
the latter category. Guidebooks for preachers wanted to revive the classical
practice of orators using a mirror to practise their gestures and expressions,
and there is a theatrical quality to Rufillus’s extended arm and focused
eyes.18

A different aspect of the working process is explored by the twelfth-century

Bohemian lay painter Hildebertus, of whom there are two surviving self-
portraits. In both he shows himself at work with his young assistant
Everwinus (each has an identifying inscription overhead). In a Sacramentary
(a compilation of texts recited for high or solemn mass) of 1136, they appear
beneath a busy full-page dedication miniature depicting Gregory the Great
surrounded by clerics. The other self-portrait is a celebrated full-page line
drawing in the midst of a copy of St Augustine’s Christian classic City of
God, in which the pagan and Christian world views are compared.
Hildebertus sits cross-legged before a lectern desk fancifully held up by the
front paws of a lion standing on its hind legs. An open book rests on the
lectern, but at this moment Hildebertus is not working on it. His right arm is
raised and seems to hold a rock, while he holds a quill in his lowered left
hand. At first sight, he could be St Jerome, who wrote the standard Latin
version of the Bible, healed a lion (which became his symbol), and beat his
breast in penance with a rock when assailed by erotic visions.
It turns out that although Hildebertus is no St Jerome, he is assailed by
something no less troublesome. He turns to his left and is about to throw a
sponge at a mouse scampering across his dinner table. The mouse has
knocked a roast chicken over the table’s edge, and is heading for what must
be a bread roll. They are old adversaries, as we know from a Latin text
inscribed in Hildebertus’s book: ‘Damn you, wretched mouse exasperating
me so often!’ It is a parody of the Last Judgment, where Christ banishes the
damned, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed...’ (Matthew 25: 41)
Two points need to be made here. Firstly, Hildebertus is keen to show he
is a master of words as well as images. To this end, in both self-portraits he
appears to be writing. There are words but no images in the book on the
lectern (it almost looks as though he is filling in the bits the scribe missed).
Secondly, he wants to show that he has prodigious powers of concentration
and stamina. The image was recently called ‘A Distracted Illuminator’,19 as
if it were an anecdotal genre scene in the Dutch seventeenth-century manner.
Yet it has a larger purpose. Hildebertus wants us to believe he is only
momentarily distracted, and that his ‘distraction’ brings enlightenment.
 Hildebertus, Self-Portrait with His Assistant Everwinus, c. 1150, ink on parchment

He is actually addressing an issue discussed at length by Augustine in his

spiritual autobiography, The Confessions, and one which would preoccupy
all subsequent preachers and theologians.20 In Book Ten, Augustine discusses
the daily temptations that distract us from our higher calling. They include all
manner of sensory beauty (especially women and works of art); ‘greed for
food and drink’; and curiosity:

What of the many times when I am sitting at home and my attention is

captured by a lizard catching flies or a spider enmeshing them as they
fly heedlessly into her nets?

And yet, rather than his thought being ‘blunted’,

 From these sights I press on to praise you, who have wondrously
created all things and set them in their due place.21

Hildebertus is ‘distracted’ by the mouse, but he would have us believe that,

like Augustine, he profits from the distraction. In his picture he shows
complete consciousness of a range of coexistent life forms – the lowest of
animal life (a mouse and a chicken) and the highest (a lion); he shows a
masterful man (himself) and a subservient boy (Everwinus); and he shows
words alongside images. He offers a section of the great chain of being. The
completed copy of St Augustine’s extremely long City of God, within which
this illustration is inserted, demonstrates that no amount of interruptions or
distractions could prevent the fulfilment of the task. Rather, they spur
Hildebertus on, by giving him a better feeling for the big picture – for the city
of man and of God.
Last but not least, it would seem to justify the making of self-portraits –
or at least, it can do so in the twelfth century (Augustine, as hostile to the arts
as Plato, is unlikely to have approved). We can imagine Hildebertus saying:

What of the many times when I am sitting in my workshop and my

attention is captured by the beautiful work that I am doing?

In this chapter, we have charted the development of a vigorous tradition of

self-portraiture during the Middle Ages, largely within a monastic context,
and culminating in the twelfth century. In the next chapter, we will look at a
crucial catalyst for the efflorescence of self-portraiture from the twelfth
century onwards – the pan-European craze for mirrors and mirror imagery.
For both writers and artists, mastery of mirrors and of mirror lore became a
key status symbol, and a claim to fame.
2.
A CRAZE FOR MIRRORS

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434 (detail), see full picture

THE ARTISTIC RENAISSANCE OF the fifteenth century was influenced,

especially in Italy, by renewed interest in classical texts and artefacts, and by
the Roman cult of individual fame and of magnificence – the perpetuation of
one’s good name through the commissioning of architecture and art. But the
Renaissance has also been assumed to involve a technological revolution
that far surpassed antiquity. Thus in Bruges in the 1430s, Jan van Eyck
‘invents’ oil paint, which allows him to depict light, texture and detail as
never before; while simultaneously south of the Alps in Florence, Filippo
Brunelleschi ‘invents’ single-point perspective, enabling artists to represent
bodies in measurable space. Oil paint had in fact been used for centuries, and
serviceable perspectival constructions had been devised by Giotto and his
Sienese contemporaries. So the fifteenth century saw a brilliant evolution of
existing techniques rather than a revolution.
The history of self-portraiture has been seen even more emphatically in
terms of a distinct technological revolution – and it still is. The story goes
that self-portraiture took off around 1500 thanks to the invention and
proliferation of flat, foil-backed glass mirrors, with the Venetians perfecting
the technology and then ruthlessly cornering the market.1 It is as if suddenly
western European artists could see themselves. Self-portraiture certainly
flourished during the Renaissance, and mirrors had a role to play, but the link
with advances in mirror technology is a dubious one.
For a start, the dates do not coincide, since whereas frontal, naturalistic
painted self-portraiture dates from the fifteenth century (a contender for the
first being van Eyck’s three-quarter view, discussed below), and sculpture
from even earlier, it was only in the late seventeenth century that flat, crystal
glass mirrors began to dominate, though they remained of modest proportions
and fiendishly expensive.2 Only in the eighteenth century do we hear
complaints that mirrors are replacing paintings as fashionable decoration.3
Most artists seem to have used small glass convex mirrors, with a metal
backing – a type dating back to antiquity and developed in the Middle Ages.4
The glass blower made a ball of glass and cut sections from it before
applying a backing made of lead, tin, pewter, silver or mercury – and
compounds of these.5 Clearer crystal glass was developed in Venice in
around 1460. The great biographer of Italian artists Giorgio Vasari (1511–
74), writing in the mid- to late sixteenth century, alternates between saying
that a self-portrait has been painted ‘alla sphera’ (with a convex mirror,
about the size of a saucer) and ‘allo specchio’ (either flat or convex, and
more likely to be metal than glass).6
The first depiction of an artist in the act of painting a self-portrait appears
in a French manuscript dated 1402 containing the Italian author Giovanni
Boccaccio’s series of biographies On Famous Women (1374). Unfortunately
the name of the illuminator is unknown. It shows the ancient Roman artist
‘Marcia’ sitting at a table in her luxuriously appointed workshop gazing at
the reflection of her head in a small convex mirror. Boccaccio probably
based her on Iaia, one of six women painters mentioned by Pliny: Iaia’s self-
portrait (discussed in the Prelude) is likely to have been painted using a
mirror made of polished metal. The circular image on Marcia’s mirror is
being scaled up into an over-life-size, flat, rectangular painting that includes
her neck and shoulders. The tip of her brush touches her painted red lips, as
if to suggest that her second self will speak at any moment.
The mise-en-scène insists emphatically that artists are perfectly capable
of amplifying and clarifying partial images derived from round and/or
convex mirrors, and adapting them to a different format. By the same token, it
demonstrates that a finished self-portrait tells us little about the visual
‘source’ for the likeness. Marcia’s self-portrait, which forces the artist to, as
it were, see distorted and fragmentary things whole, and to see their own
heads from another person’s point of view, is exactly contemporary with
Cennino Cennini’s A Treatise on Painting. It perfectly epitomizes Cennini’s
insistence that painters use their imagination (fantasia) to devise their figures
– something which allows painting to be ‘crowned’ with poetry. It could
well be that the illuminator was a woman, for many women painters, lay as
well as religious, are known from the medieval period.
Marcia Painting Her Self-Portrait, from a manuscript of Boccaccio’s On Famous Women, 1402, ink
and colour on parchment

This depiction of Marcia comes in the wake of huge interest in the

symbolism and science of mirrors. Mirror symbolism had been deployed in
antiquity, but it became ubiquitous to the point of cliché from the twelfth
century, and has never gone out of fashion since.7 The medieval craze for
mirror imagery must have greatly increased the demand for mirrors, as well
as interest in self-portraiture. The clearest manifestation of this mirror craze
was the use of the title ‘speculum’ – Latin for mirror, from specere ‘to see’ –
for books of moral and/or factual instruction: a mirror of virginity, mirror of
conscience, mirror of alchemy, mirror of magistrates, princes, etc.
 St Augustine had first devised the term ‘mirror of scripture’, meaning that
the Bible showed, as in a mirror, both the divine plan and what each
individual had to do to reform themselves. Every living thing, from the angels
to animals, was a mirror of the creator, reflecting his spirit, but the clarity of
each mirror declined as one descended the chain of being. Here on earth, as
St Paul had said, we see ‘through a glass, darkly’ (1 Corinthians 13: 12).
However the Virgin Mary, the rise of whose cult coincided with the mirror
craze, was believed to be a ‘spotless mirror’. In all these meditations on
mirrors, it is as though viewers see their moral selves reflected back and can
thus mentally do a ‘spot-the-difference’ competition between themselves and,
say, the Virgin. Looking into these mirrors is little different from reading a
bespoke moralizing text, and the self-portraits of Dunstan, Rufillus and
Hildebertus are indeed located within such texts. It is about recognizing
virtues and vices far more than physical attributes. This is somewhat
different from the view of antiquity where Seneca insisted (following
Socrates) that mirrors were invented so that man might know himself – a
knowledge that Seneca rooted in physical awareness. The young would be
reminded by their youthful features that youth is a time for learning while the
old would be reminded by their grey hair that this is the time for honourable
behaviour and thoughts of death. Here physical knowledge leads to moral
understanding.

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as in antiquity, mirrors continued

to be made from metal, which had to be polished before each use: when
Vasari refers to self-portraits made ‘allo specchio’, he must be referring to
mirrors made from steel, tin, bronze and copper more than from glass. Metal
mirrors could be made much larger than any existing glass mirrors: the first
full-length glass mirrors were only made in France in around 1700,
practically costing their weight in gold, liable to break in transit, and
composed in sections.8 Fra Sabba da Castiglione, the Milan-born Knight
Hospitaller who wrote a manual of proper conduct for knights in the early
sixteenth century, said he would prefer a mirror to any other item in his study,
and believed that the study of a ‘noble knight’ should be furnished not just
with books but with armour and a steel mirror – which implies that polished
metal was prized both for its reflective qualities and its martial
associations.9 Most metal mirrors in antiquity were concave or convex, and
measured between 12 and 20 cm in diameter (some 5 to 8 in.), though Seneca
railed against the full-length concave silver mirrors of imperial Rome used
for amusement. Hostius Quadra arranged things so that ‘when he was offering
himself to a man he might see in a mirror all the movements of his stallion
behind him and then take delight in the false size of his partner’s member’.10
Liquids, placed in basins or cups, or found in pools and streams, were and
still are another common source of mirror images. (Vasari describes a lost
picture of an undressed St George by Giorgione in which the warrior saint is
reflected from different angles by a mirror, a pool and his armour.) Polished
and oiled stone, especially obsidian, was also popular.
The convex form of many medieval mirrors meant that they showed
something of the viewer’s surroundings. When the pilgrim lover in the most
popular of medieval dream poems, The Romance of the Rose (thirteenth
century), looks into the well that snared Narcissus, he does not see himself at
all, but two submerged crystals – one for each eye – that reflect the
surrounding rose garden. As such, the medieval mirror is similar to the
mirrors used in scrying, a form of divining by staring into a reflective surface
of some kind.11 At its most banal and lucrative, scrying was used to find out
what one’s enemies were up to, and to solve or prevent crimes, or to answer
questions (‘mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is…’). Children, because of
their perceived purity and visual acuity, were often used as scryers – or
‘specularii’ – with an adult interpreting what they saw. Seeing one’s own
reflection ruined the effect, and may have aroused archetypal fears relating to
liquid reflections (the Greeks believed that a reflection in water could be
dragged down or swallowed up, leaving you soulless, and so doomed to die;
the Romans had the myth of Narcissus).12 The theologian John of Salisbury
(c. 1115–80) was interviewed for a scrying job as a child, but because he
could see only the reflection of his own face, was not taken on as an
apprentice. Like some churchmen, he suspected the practice was a form of
sorcery, and was appalled at how many children lost their sight as a result of
long hours spent staring into a reflective surface.
Nonetheless, the practice was still used in church services to
communicate with angels, a biblical precedent having been set by Joseph’s
silver cup, ‘in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth’
(Genesis 44: 5). This would have been a scrying cup filled with water, wine,
oil or blood. Mirrors were also used as miniature ‘cameras’, rather like
camera phones are today. Pilgrims held them aloft before sacred relics in
order to capture something of their sacred aura: in 1439 Johannes Gutenberg
manufactured polished metal mirrors to profit from a planned display of the
sacred relics in Aachen, but the venture failed when the display was
postponed. His ‘invention’ in the 1450s of printing using movable type –
with reverse ‘mirror images’ of the letters – proved more successful.
There is, thus, nothing especially new about Renaissance mirrors.
Mirrors are nonetheless crucial to the development of self-portraiture, but it
is more the idea of the mirror than the precise nature of the mirror image that
mattered. This is clear from the first post-classical literary reference to the
painting of a self-portrait by an artist using a mirror – or, in this case,
mirrors. The self-portrait is almost certainly fictitious, but the passage
demonstrates how important the possession of mirrors had become to the
credibility of the artist. It demonstrates their virtue and intellect, and ensures
their fame.
The self-portrait is by Giotto (c. 1266–1337) and is mentioned in Filippo
Villani’s On the Origin of the City of Florence and on Its Famous Citizens
(1381–2), which includes a pioneering chapter on painters.13 Villani was a
cultural pessimist who believed the present (post-Black Death) age to be
decadent, and he hoped to remind his contemporaries of the glories of an
earlier era – that of the great Florentine vernacular poet Dante (c. 1265 –
1321). There are chapters on famous poets, theologians, jurists, physicians,
orators, astrologers, musicians, painters, buffoons and soldiers.
Villani tells us that not only did Giotto emulate the ancient artists (Zeuxis,
Phidias, Apelles, etc.), he surpassed them in the rendering of nature. Further,
he was a prudent man ‘anxious for fame not gain’, and his skill as a painter
was based on wide knowledge, which made him a rival of the great poets. To
underscore Giotto’s status as both polymathic and literate, Villani says he
‘also painted with the help of mirrors himself and his coeval the poet Dante
Alighieri on a wall of the Palazzo del Podestà’.14 Circumstances make the
creation of such a double portrait doubtful. Dante had been exiled from
Florence in 1301 and condemned to the stake if he ever set foot there without
accepting draconian conditions. He never did return and is therefore unlikely
to have been depicted from life by Giotto inside Florence’s main government
building.15 It is unlikely their paths ever crossed.16
 The pairing of Dante and Giotto partly came about because Dante makes
a celebrated reference to Giotto in The Divine Comedy, in relation to the
transience of earthly fame: a Bolognese maker of illuminated manuscripts
observes that Giotto has eclipsed his master Cimabue, and that Dante has
eclipsed the poet Guido Guinizelli. By bringing together these two great
cultural heroes, Villani not only shows that their fame was not transient, he
also posits an intimate connection between poets and painters. It manifests
Cennini’s aspiration to have painting ‘crowned with poetry’, and for artists
to become named authors.
An early commentator on Dante, Benvenuto da Imola, noted that some
people wonder why Dante immortalizes ‘men of unknown name and low-
class occupation’, but by so doing ‘he gives silently to be understood how
the love of glory does so indifferently fasten upon men, that even petty
artisans are anxious to earn it, just as we see that painters append their names
to their works’.17 In Tuscany some leading artists were putting prominent
signature inscriptions on their works, no one more so than the sculptor
Giovanni Pisano on the Pistoia pulpit (completed 1301). The inscription runs
beneath the narrative reliefs, and although the patron is credited as the
‘originator and donor’ of the work, Giovanni gets a mini-biography that is
both personal and fulsome:

Giovanni carved it, who performed no empty work. The son of Nicola
and blessed with higher skill, Pisa gave him birth, endowed with
mastery greater than any seen before.18

At around the same time in France, (named) artists in royal employ started to
gain titles such as peintre du roy and the even more prestigious valet de
chambre.19 This may have been because of increased competition for their
services from a socially broader-based clientele. Perks could include furred
robes, houses and some access to the royal household, though pay was not
always forthcoming, and much time could be spent decorating banners,
saddles and shields. Giotto was made City Architect of Florence in 1334 – a
most prestigious post – in unprecedented recognition of his fame as a painter
(no comparable position as City Painter existed). The architectural settings
of his pictures imply that he could at the very least design facades: his most
famous design is for the cathedral bell tower. He is the first artist since
antiquity to generate a considerable amount of comment, starting with Dante’s
citation.
Recognizable portraits of patrons had begun to be inserted into religious
pictures in the fourteenth century, with Giotto’s portrait of the kneeling
Enrico Scrovegni, patron of the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, being a
distinguished example. Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294–1303) was attacked by
the French King Philip IV, among others, for allowing sculpted images of
himself to be erected in cathedrals in Italy and France, and even on altars.20
A market for portraits of famous poets had also developed. Portraits of
Petrarch were frequently painted for his patrons and admirers, with their
accuracy being an abiding concern.21 In the mid-fifteenth century the
Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti wrote that Giotto’s pupil Taddeo Gaddi
(the father of Cennini’s master) painted in Santa Croce a miracle of St
Francis resurrecting a child. Gaddi supposedly included portraits of Giotto
and Dante, and a self-portrait, all taken from life.22
Where the future of self-portraiture is concerned, Dante is not only
important for naming artisans; he is also crucial for the self-referential nature
of his texts – and his example was to be followed by Petrarch. Dante’s
writings were so autobiographical he felt the need to justify his approach at
the beginning of his Convivio (The Banquet), a philosophical commentary on
his own quasi-autobiographical love poems. Orators, he says, ‘forbid a man
to speak of himself, except when strictly necessary’. This is because a man
will either praise or blame himself, and no one is a good judge of
themselves. But there are two exceptions to this rule. Firstly, when defending
oneself against slander and danger; and secondly, when one’s life story is
exemplary in some way and so can give instruction to others – here Dante
mentions Augustine’s Confessions, ‘for by the progress of his life, which
was from bad to good, and from good to better, and from better to best, he
gave example and instruction which could not have been received otherwise
on such sure testimony’.23 The fact that Augustine spoke from personal
experience guarantees the authenticity of what he writes. Most painted and
sculpted self-portraits set out to prove the artist to be exemplary in some way
(hard-working, humble, presentable, upstanding, eagle-eyed, socialized, etc.)
and thus a ‘spotless mirror’.
It is initially perplexing that Villani tells us Giotto painted the double
portrait ‘with the help of mirrors’ – in the plural. It seems unlikely that Giotto
would have needed more than one mirror to paint a self-portrait (like
Marcia), and why would he have needed any mirrors at all to paint Dante’s
portrait? One possibility is that Giotto used the mirrors simply to improve
the lighting, in the same way that scholars placed a mirror over their desk.
But why would Villani even need to mention this relatively minor detail?
Something more significant is going on. The only depiction of a mirror in
Giotto’s surviving works is in his frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua,
where the female allegorical figure of Prudence is shown sitting at a desk
with an open book before her and a quill pen in her right hand. She turns
sharply to her left to gaze into a small convex mirror that she cradles in her
left hand like a medieval iPad. As we have seen, Villani praises Giotto as ‘a
most prudent man’ and this work may partly have inspired his account of
Giotto. But it is still only a single mirror.
Dante is the key, for he had a vast amount to say about mirrors. Villani
had initially planned to write a book solely about Dante, so he would have
known of the poet’s fascination with mirrors. Dante uses mirrors as symbols
on thirty occasions in his writings, with half of these references occurring in
the Paradise section of The Divine Comedy. Many involve more than one
mirror, and on one occasion Beatrice tells him to do a scientific experiment
involving three mirrors.24 On three occasions the viewer is encouraged to
see their physical selves reflected in the mirror, and these are important for
the subsequent history of self-portraiture – or at least, they help explain why
Villani thinks it worth crediting Giotto with mirror ownership, and with the
creation of a double-mirror-assisted self-portrait.
 Giotto, Prudence, 1306, fresco from the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua

Two of these passages occur in close proximity towards the end of the
Purgatory section, and the second of these is especially relevant to artists.25
When night falls, Dante lies down to rest and he has a dream in which he
sees a beautiful young woman, who gathers flowers and looks into a mirror.
She is Leah from the Book of Genesis, the eldest daughter of Laban and the
first wife of Jacob.26 She addresses Dante and tells him about her younger
sister Rachel, who became Jacob’s second wife, marrying him a week after
her sister. In the Middle Ages, because Leah was fecund and Rachel sterile,
they came to represent the active and contemplative life. Dante innovates by
furnishing them with mirrors, and has them sit all day long in front of them,
Leah weaving a garland of flowers, Rachel doing nothing but look:
‘[Rachel’s] joy / In contemplation, as in labour mine’ (27: 100–8).
Dante’s respect for Leah and Rachel came about because he believed the
human soul has a double purpose, to be both active (pratico) and
contemplative (speculativo).27 The active life works on behalf of the human
race with prudence, honesty and justice; the contemplative life considers the
works of God and nature. We can see how Leah, busy working on her
garland, might be an apposite model for an artist. Giotto’s Prudence has
aspects of both Leah and Rachel. She holds her quill pen, poised to write or
draw, at the same time as she quietly looks in the mirror. That Giotto, in
Villani’s account, has mirrors while in the presence of Dante suggests that he
too is both Leah and Rachel, active and contemplative, and that his self-
portrait is painted as part of a process of self-knowledge and self-love. So
too Marcia, staring at herself in her gorgeously appointed studio. It is a
virtuous circle: the self-portrait proves you are a mirror-owner, and know
how to use them. The mirror-assisted self-portrait perpetuates your fame and
– by its perfection – proves that your fame is merited.
Many of these ideas inform the most famous mirror in art – the circular
convex mirror hanging on the middle of the rear wall in Jan van Eyck’s
portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife (1434). It is probably the earliest
surviving portrait on panel of two people who were not rulers, and it is the
earliest known portrait where the subjects are seen in a domestic setting. Van
Eyck was the highly paid court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy,
with his own coat of arms and the title of valet de chambre, and he
sometimes even performed secret missions for the Duke. Arnolfini supplied
textiles and luxury goods to the court.
The frame of the mirror is decorated with ten roundels, each showing a
scene of Christ’s Passion, with the Crucifixion at the top. The backs of the
Arnolfinis, the room they are in, and two men standing in a doorway opposite
the Arnolfinis, are reflected in the mirror in miniature with impossibly
crystalline clarity (crystal glass was not yet invented). On the wall above the
mirror is inscribed in a calligraphic flourish: ‘Jan van Eyck was here /
1434’. It is widely assumed that the painter may indeed be here – as one of
the men in the doorway, being greeted by Arnolfini. Few painters have been
as fascinated by reflective and transparent surfaces as van Eyck: in an
altarpiece dated 1436 he seems to be reflected in miniature in the curved
edge of the convex/concave shield of St George, perhaps exploiting the
similarity between the Flemish for shield (schild) and painter (schilder).
The Arnolfini mirror embodies many of the key aspects of the mirror
craze that we have been discussing. It is first and foremost a mirror of God,
insofar as it is a permanent ‘mirror’ of Christ’s Passion and it reflects light;
it is secondly a mirror of creation, insofar as it shows the Arnolfinis and the
contents of their room; and it is finally a mirror of the individual, insofar as it
shows the Arnolfinis and their visitors. The mirror, with its Christological
frame, reminds anyone who looks in it (and especially this mortal married
couple) that they should each aspire to be a worthy ‘bride’ of Christ. Its
circularity gives it a cosmic dimension. A similar mirror, adorned with the
seven virtues, would be made a century later by the father of Benvenuto
Cellini.

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, oil on panel

 Jan van Eyck, Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?), 1433, oil on oak

Van Eyck not only depicted himself miniaturized, however (‘my littleness,
pettiness, smallness’). He may also have painted the first surviving
independent self-portrait, a third-life-size hypnotic head and shoulders of a
man wearing a turban-like red chaperon. His lined and stubble-peppered skin
glows brightly against the dark background. Though traditionally considered
a portrait, it is now usually assumed to be a self-portrait because the sitter
looks out at us, and because of the unusual prominence of the painter’s motto.
The motto is inscribed at the top of the gilded frame, which is signed and
dated along the bottom: ‘As I can [Als ich can] / Jan van Eyck made me on
21 October 1433’. Van Eyck obviously enjoyed the pun on ich/Eyck, and he
leaves it open whether the authorial ‘I’ is boastful (‘As only I can’) or
modest (‘As best I can’). The meticulousness of the paintwork shows it took
far longer than a day to complete, but van Eyck may want to imply he did not
spend too long self-absorbed. Indeed, his shoulders and head are shown in
three-quarter view, and he turns his slightly bloodshot eyes sharply in our
direction. White highlights turn these eyes into scintillating mirrors. A
moment later, and his piercing gaze will be gone – perhaps following the
light that streams in from his right. He is a man who sees things – himself
included – in close-up, but without losing track of the bigger picture.
We do not know why he painted this work. It has been suggested that it
may have been painted to mark his marriage to his second wife, Margaret,
but van Eyck’s surviving portrait of her was only painted in 1439 and is
larger. Another proposal is that he kept it in his workshop to demonstrate his
skill to potential clients. Yet he scarcely needed to prove his skill as a
portraitist to clients at this stage in his career. To portray himself at all, and
in fine clothes (perhaps supplied by Arnolfini), demonstrates pride in his
social status and his mastery of art. It is more likely he painted it as a
dynastic image, to be passed down as model and memorial to his own
descendants. Like most Renaissance self-portraits there is no indication of
the source of his wealth – the tools of his trade – or even his hands. The
absence of hands and of painter’s equipment might almost suggest it is a
miraculous image, painted without human agency.
There is a clear religious allusion. The work was painted in 1433, and
‘33’ is written in arabic rather than roman numerals (MCD33). This was
believed to be the ‘perfect’ age at which Christ died, and the age that people
would be when resurrected – though we do not know when van Eyck was
born and he may have been older than thirty-three when he painted it. He
painted Margaret when she was thirty-three, and her age is inscribed on the
frame. This age-consciousness recalls Seneca’s view that mirrors were
invented so that man might know himself – by noting his own age. Dante
seems to refer to a similar kind of mirror-gazing when he attacks looking into
a mirror for the purposes of beautification, and harks back to a golden age
when women ‘came away from the mirror…without a painted face’
(Paradise 15:113–4). Both Margaret and Jan van Eyck wear fine clothes, but
Margaret does not seem to be wearing make-up while Jan’s face is seemingly
unidealized. In this period, private meditation manuals and spiritual conduct
books such as Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ (1418) were
encouraging solitary scrutiny and prayer. Here van Eyck is the mirror of
painters, spotless because of his ‘honesty’ about his age, crow’s feet and
stubble.

At around the time van Eyck was painting the Arnolfini’s mirror and his self-
portrait, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) was establishing the pool-gazer
Narcissus as a model for the artist. Both in charismatic person (he was the
illegitimate son of an exiled but still wealthy Florentine banker) and in his
treatises on painting, sculpture and architecture, Alberti did more than
anyone before or since to establish the visual arts as a ‘speculative’ rather
than a mechanical art. For him the ideal artist was learned in all the liberal
arts, especially mathematics. Using anecdotes about ancient artists extracted
from Pliny and other Roman authors, he insisted that the visual arts and
artists had been held in the highest esteem in antiquity, and that emperors and
philosophers had practised painting and taken a close interest in architecture.
Alberti’s adoption of Narcissus as the ‘first’ artist in his treatise On Painting
(the Italian version dedicated to the architect Filippo Brunelleschi) has been
seen as ushering in the modern age of art, with everything centring on and
originating with the artist. But Alberti’s Narcissus can equally be seen as a
culmination of the medieval mirror craze.
Alberti was fascinated by self-portraiture, both in theory and in practice.
His signed bronze self-portrait plaquette (a single-sided medal with relief
decoration) may well be the first independent self-portrait by a Renaissance
artist. Generally dated to the mid-1430s, it influenced the production of
antique-style medallic portraits by Pisanello and Matteo de’ Pasti in the
1440s and 50s. So authoritative was Alberti’s example that the only
independent self-portraits that survive from the fifteenth century in Italy are
medals – two by the Venetian painter Giovanni Boldù; and one each by
Pisanello, Filarete and Lysippus the Younger.28
 Leon Battista Alberti, Self-Portrait, c. 1435, bronze plaquette

Alberti also writes about making self-portraits in his autobiography, and

Vasari reports seeing in Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, the most famous of
Alberti’s secular buildings, a now lost painted self-portrait made with the
aid of a mirror. An autograph manuscript of Alberti’s essay On Tranquillity
of Mind features a possible self-portrait drawing that shows him standing in
a field or garden filled with flowers.29 For this reason, Alberti must be
considered one of the key figures in the history of the genre.
In a brief autobiography, written in the third person in around 1438,30
Alberti gives a vivid account of his activities as a maker of portraits and
self-portraits. He paints and models portraits of friends, both from life and
from memory, even friends he had not seen for a year. Further:

He strove to render his own features and characteristic appearance,

so that, by the painted or modelled image, he might be already known
to strangers who summoned him.31
Portraiture is here a manifestation of that selfless love that Alberti advocated
in his treatise On the Family, and which he based on classical notions of
ideal friendship.32 The idea that the artist should not appear interested in
money is an essential part of their claim for social status (more than, as in the
Middle Ages, proof of spirituality and humility), and the attraction of
independent self-portraits is partly due to the fact that they would seem to be
the least obviously commercial of artefacts – almost art for art’s sake. Even
today, self-portraits are still often regarded as the most autonomous of art
forms, spontaneous uncommissioned expressions of the artist ‘at free play’.
That said, they were probably sent out as loss-leader ‘gifts’ to prospective
employers, and as evidence of Alberti’s own Petrarch-like status and fame.33
Love, rather than friendship, plays a central role in Alberti’s famous
discussion of portraiture and self-portraiture at the start of the second part of
his treatise On Painting. Having given a formidably detailed account of
perspective and geometry in the first part of the treatise, he opens the second
part with an assertion of the high status and universal significance of
painting. It ‘possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the
absent present (as they say of friendship)’.34 Painters ‘see their works
admired and feel themselves to be almost like the Creator. Is it not true that
painting is the mistress of all the arts or their principal ornament?’35 Here he
alludes to the ancient idea that God had ‘painted’ the world into existence.36
Alberti’s argument takes an even more astonishing and original turn with his
identification of the first human painter:

Consequently I used to tell my friends that the inventor of painting,

according to the poets, was Narcissus, who was turned into a flower;
for as painting is the flower of all the arts, so the tale of Narcissus fits
our purpose perfectly. What is painting but the act of embracing by
means of art the surface of the pool?

In Ovid’s canonical version of the Narcissus story, recounted in his

Metamorphoses, Narcissus is a beautiful youth loved by the nymph Echo, but
who refuses to love her in return. As a punishment for rejecting Echo, the
goddess Nemesis makes him fall in love with his own reflection in a pool.
He pines away and at his death is turned into the eponymous flower. All
authors before Alberti had regarded Narcissus in a bad light, embodying
vices such as pride, vanity, self-delusion and (because the narcissus flower
bears no seeds) sterility. He hardly seems like an appropriate model for the
socially adept, convivial, intellectually curious and productive artist that is
Alberti’s ideal. The successful artist requires ‘good manners and amiability’,
he writes, and should ‘ask and listen to everyone’s opinion’ since it helps ‘to
acquire favour’.37
Alberti must have taken the idea very seriously for he says he repeatedly
discussed Narcissus, and claims not to be the first to call him the first
painter. Yet no modern scholar has discovered such a reference in the earlier
literature. Narcissus’s reflected image was sometimes referred to as a
painting, ‘painted’ by the pool, but Narcissus is never said to be the author of
the painting.38 Alberti’s claim could, however, be based on a passage in The
Romance of the Rose. A ‘pilgrim lover’ goes in search of an allegorical
‘rosebud’, experiencing lots of adventures and temptations along the way.
Looking into wells is central to the poem’s symbolism, and Narcissus is
referred to on several occasions (there is also a long passage about
experiments you can do with different kinds of mirror). In one scene, the
mythical sculptor Pygmalion, who successfully prayed to Venus that his own
female statue could come alive, compares his love favourably to that of
Narcissus, who was never able even to touch his beloved. From this negative
comparison, Alberti may have imagined Narcissus as a painter counterpart to
Pygmalion.
Alberti must also have been influenced by the medieval mirror craze, for
he believed, in a very traditional way, that mirrors could educate the viewer,
and show them the way to self-perfection. In his treatise On Painting, there
is a fascinating passage in which he advises the painter to use a mirror to test
out the quality of his pictures:

I do not know how it is that paintings without fault look beautiful in a

mirror; and it is remarkable how every defect in a picture appears
more unsightly in a mirror. So the things that are taken from Nature
should be emended with the advice of the mirror.39

It is not often that the rationalist polymath Alberti says, ‘I do not know’. But
by doing so he avoids having to admit that he too believes in the magical,
oracle-like properties of mirrors.
 It seems perfectly justified to regard Alberti’s advocacy of the
‘Narcissus-painter’ as the seminal celebration of self-portraiture, and a key
catalyst for its placement at the heart of artistic practice. The idealization of
the ‘narcissistic’ painter, looking at and admiring himself alone, chimes
perfectly with certain modern notions of individualism, and of the emergence
of the cult of solitary genius (the term ‘narcissism’ was first coined by a
German psychiatrist in 1899).40 However, there is a crucial difference
between early conceptions of Narcissus and modern interpretations. Indeed,
Alberti’s interest in Narcissus is more complex than many modern
commentators would have us believe.41 This is because in most versions of
the myth Narcissus does not even realize that the image reflected in the pool
is his own.42
As Ovid tells it in what became the most influential version of the myth:
‘Unwittingly, he desires himself’. It is only when it is too late that Ovid’s
Narcissus finally recognizes himself. In most subsequent accounts, however,
the recognition scene never occurs, so Narcissus never knows what we know
– that he is a narcissist. In The Romance of the Rose, Pygmalion says
Narcissus thinks he is staring at a beautiful girl, a device that prevents us
seeing him as homosexual. In a much later variation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
has him falling in love with a female portrait that turns out to be a portrait of
Narcissus in drag.
Alberti must have known his designation of Narcissus as ‘first human
painter’, bolstering his claim with a non-existent lineage in poetry, was a
potentially dangerous idea. But his silence about what his Narcissus-painter
sees gives the idea some elbow-room. It allows Narcissus not to be
excessively narcissistic: he can see his surroundings and ‘another’ person,
and last of all – himself. Alberti’s Narcissus is a figure in a landscape, just
as Alberti was in his self-portrait drawing in a field of flowers, and van
Eyck in the Arnolfini’s convex mirror.
This interpretation is corroborated by Alberti’s self-portrait medal.43
From Alberti’s exaltation of the Narcissus-painter, we might expect a full
frontal face, looking out in an intent manner. But the plaquette is very
different. Its aggression, obliquity and idiosyncratic busyness come as
something of a surprise. Alberti depicts himself in craggy, unerring bust-
length profile, staring horizontally. The format evokes the stern profile
images of Roman emperors on coins and gems that had fascinated Florentine
and northern Italian intellectuals since the fourteenth century. He is even
clothed in a toga, tied with a big knot, which projects forcefully from his
chest like the pommel of a sword.
Hovering between the knot and Alberti’s chin is his ‘winged-eye’
emblem. The eye faces towards us, though its attached wings would launch it
horizontally, like a projectile, in the same direction in which Alberti’s own
eyes are looking. The winged eye trembles and flickers because vermicular
tendrils flare off it, almost as though it has just been plucked out of a head
and is still quiveringly alive. Three more winged eyes provide punctuation
stops for Alberti’s abbreviated signature, piled up vertically behind a ramrod
straight neck.
Alberti believed there is ‘nothing more powerful, swift, or worthy than
the eye…it is the foremost of the body’s members, a sort of king or god’.44
The winged eye appears again on the reverse of a profile portrait medal of
Alberti, made by Matteo de’ Pasti in c. 1446–50, this time accompanied by a
Latin inscription ‘QUID TUM’? – ‘what next?’, or ‘what then?’ This motto
suggests Alberti’s restless curiosity and Argus-eyed omniscience. Even the
knot of his toga is shaped like an eye. But it also implies an element of
cynicism about worldly affairs. In his treatise On the Family, a speaker says:
‘Everything in the world is profoundly unsure. One has to be far-seeing in the
face of frauds, traps and betrayals’.45
The combination of Alberti’s severely static profile and the ‘flying-eye’
motifs suggests he is a visionary, rather than a science boffin making
complicated arrangements of mirrors to see himself in profile. Like God, this
particular artist can see everything. His ‘flying eyes’ get everywhere, and
that is why he has been able to depict himself from the side, including areas
like the back of his head and neck that are normally invisible to him. The
Greek physician Hippocrates believed that during sleep the soul (which was
commonly envisaged as a winged figure) wandered about and observed the
body.46 In shamanism, each person has three souls, one of which can travel
outside the body and stay there for some time.47 Alberti’s winged eyes have a
comparable ever-awake function. One is reminded, too, of Plato’s
comparison of the painter with a revolving mirror that captures everything in
heaven and earth, including the painter.
At the end of his treatise, Alberti asks all those who have profited from it
to include his portrait in their paintings ‘as a reward for my labours’.48
Narcissistic, yes – but with his sleepless eyes cropping up everywhere, and
claiming co-authorship.
We have seen how interest in mirror-assisted self-portraiture long pre-
dates the appearance of large, flat crystal glass mirrors, and that the key
catalyst is the late medieval fascination with the science and symbolism of
mirrors. Being able to demonstrate a mastery of mirrors was a crucial
indicator of virtue and intellect, and made the artist worthy of enduring fame.
In the next chapter we will explore how artists used self-portraiture to assert
their position in society at large, establishing ties and making themselves a
mirror in which society sees itself.
3.
THE ARTIST IN SOCIETY

Taddeo di Bartolo, detail of self-portrait from The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, 1401, see
full picture

DURING THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH centuries, new kinds of self-

portrait develop in which the social and spiritual relations of the artist are
put on a more formal and less fleeting basis. They take on a dynastic
character, in which the self-portrait of the artist is juxtaposed with other
portraits. These group scenes encompass a greater variety than ever before,
asserting ties of friendship, kinship, love and devotion. They range from
feudal courts to the court of heaven; from family members to workshop
assistants.
However idealized and mythical these group self-portraits might be, they
do at the very least reflect a new intimacy with the great and the good that
could be enjoyed by an artist while making a portrait from life. This notional
intimacy implies the existence and demands the cultivation of certain social
skills from the artist. The first surviving independent portrait from life is
often claimed to be a profile portrait of the French King Jean II (1319–64),
and his court painter Girard d’Orleans remained with him even when he was
in captivity for four years in England with a select few retainers after losing
the Battle of Poitiers.1 Alberti’s insistence that the portrait, whether painted
from life or from memory, is the product of friendship implies that even if the
sitter is not a friend before it is painted, they will be a friend after.
The controversial apogee of this trend is the catchphrase ‘every painter
paints himself’, which gains currency during the fifteenth century in Italy, and
is most closely associated with the consummate courtier Leonardo da Vinci.
It implies that whoever the artist is depicting will bear a ‘family
resemblance’ to the artist himself, in the same way that retainers might wear
the colours of their feudal overlord. He recreates elite society in his own
image.
The best starting point for a study of these kinds of social self-portrait is
the 1380s. During this decade, we not only have two fictional literary
accounts of social self-portraits (including Villani’s of Giotto/Dante, see
Chapter 1) but also a group portrait by Peter Parler that includes the first
naturalistic self-portrait.

At exactly the same time that Villani was setting up Giotto on a blind date
with Dante, the French author Jean Froissart was making self-portraits
central to a courtship ritual. Froissart is best known for his Chronicles of the
Hundred Years War, but he was also a very successful poet. One of the
stories in his lengthy yet still incomplete 31,000-line verse romance
Méliador (1383–8) stars Sir Agamanor, a fearless knight who happens to be
a painter and poet. He was inspired as a nine-year-old by seeing painters
decorating his home with scenes from the Trojan wars. They lent him their
tools and gave him lessons, and after three years he was as good at painting
‘in all colours’ as they were.2
While fighting anonymously as the Red Knight in a tournament, Sir
Agamanor falls in love with the daughter of the castle owner. Back at his
lodgings, he obtains brushes, ‘coloured paints of oil and gum’, and a linen
cloth a metre and a half (some 5 ft) wide, and sets about immortalizing the
tournament and party in a beautiful multi-scene narrative painting that
contains several self-portraits, and portraits of his beloved.3 Sir Agamanor’s
self-portrait is a potent new weapon in a courtship ritual. At just this time,
King Charles VI of France was commissioning portraits of potential brides
and in 1385 chose Isabelle of Bavaria on the basis of her image. Previously,
verbal descriptions had been used to select brides.4 So portraits were now
playing an important role in the marriage game.
Froissart realizes full well that a knight who paints and writes is socially
dubious – at one point Sir Agamanor berates himself for ever having picked
up a paintbrush: ‘Her heart is of too high an estate / To be given to an
entertainer’. But it is clear that Sir Agamanor’s talent for portraiture and
self-portraiture in particular gives him a competitive advantage: it proves
him to be articulate, heartfelt – and someone prepared to risk derision in the
service of love. His love and self-knowledge is demonstrated by his ability
to memorize and immortalize his beloved’s face, and to create his own
likeness. It was standard practice to refer to the ‘colours’ of rhetoric when
discussing eloquence, and Sir Agamanor’s eloquence is visual as well as
verbal.
The French poet Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377) imagined Memory
working with a brush, painting the past in front of his mind’s eye.5 Froissart
clearly knows about painting, and he delights in the details of Sir
Agamanor’s training, tools and media. The lover-artist is an exotic kind of
magus – and he eventually (after painting another self-portrait and fighting
two knights) gets the girl.
The knight-as-painter also reflects the fact that all medieval knights were
painted living artworks by virtue of the ‘colours’ they wore – both those of
their heraldic blazons, and those of their lady, which they fixed onto their
armour. The first troubadour poet whose work survives, William IX, Duke of
Aquitaine (1071–1126), painted a picture of his married mistress, the
Viscountess Dangereuse, onto his shield because ‘it was his will to bear her
in battle, as she had borne him in bed’.6 In the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, knightly adornment became increasingly elaborate and
particularized, with all manner of inscriptions and devices – the most famous
being the garter of the English Order of the Garter (founded c. 1348). Sir
Agamanor’s practice of painting ‘in all colours’ on linen could easily carry
the same message, and it certainly singles him out.
Froissart’s Sir Agamanor would soon have a real-life counterpart in King
René of Anjou (1409–80), a poet and presumed painter, as well as the author
of a book of rules for tournaments, lavishly illustrated by his Flemish valet
de chambre, Barthélemy d’Eyck. According to a letter written to the Venetian
connoisseur Marcantonio Michiel in 1524, René taught Flemish-style
painting to an Italian artist during his short reign in Naples, and the essayist
Michel de Montaigne later saw a supposed self-portrait by René being given
to the French King François II.7
In the story of Sir Agamanor, we have an instance of a painter trying to
convince a peerless virgin of high rank that he is both a noble knight and
worthy of her. A comparable scenario occurs in a painting by the Sienese
artist Taddeo di Bartolo, but in this case, the virgin to whom the painter is
devoted is the mother of God. The self-portrait is inserted into Taddeo’s
Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin (1401), a gold-ground altarpiece
that was the largest yet made in Italy. It was painted in Siena for the high altar
of Montepulciano’s cathedral, and paid for by the Aragazzi, the dominant
family in that city. Taddeo was then one of the leading painters in Siena, and
is now best known for his frescoes of Roman civic virtue in Siena’s Palazzo
Pubblico – the first such cycle in a city republic.
In the presumed self-portrait, Taddeo depicts himself as St Thaddeus, his
name saint, one of the apostles crowding round the Virgin’s empty tomb.
Thaddeus was famed as a preacher and debater, and he went to visit King
Abgar and cured him of leprosy. While there, Thaddeus would have seen the
Holy Mandylion, the ‘self-portrait’ specially made for Abgar by Christ by
pressing his face into a linen cloth (this story is inserted in the ‘Life of St
Thaddeus’ in The Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine’s book of saints, first
compiled in around 1260, which gained great popularity in the medieval
period).8 We know it is Thaddeus because each of the major protagonists in
the altarpiece is identified by an inscribed halo. It is a self-portrait of
Taddeo not simply because of the name, but also because he is the only
apostle who looks out directly at the viewer, and his facial features are more
subtly and naturalistically drawn, especially his facial hair.

Taddeo di Bartolo, The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, 1401, tempera on panel, altarpiece
of the cathedral of Montepulciano

Thaddeus is using his elegantly raised hands, with their impossibly long
fingers, to convey a special message to us. His gesture is usually taken to
mean he is counting or making debating points, but this was typically done by
using the index finger of the right hand to touch the fingertips of the left hand.9
Here he touches the ring finger of his left hand with his thumb and index
finger, an action that mimics the putting on of a wedding ring. Ancient folk
belief had it that this finger was directly connected to the heart by a nerve,
and this was why it became the wedding ring finger.10 Thaddeus’s finger is
here visually attached to his heart because his left hand is placed directly
over the left side of his chest. In The Golden Legend, Thaddeus is someone
who takes care of his heart, and is called ‘heart for his greatheartedness,
little heart for his purity….’11 His warmheartedness is suggested by his
unusually rosy cheeks and lips.
The Florentine artist Orcagna had depicted himself at the side of a carved
tabernacle of the Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin (1359), but he is a
static observer in contemporary dress, not an intimately involved
participant.12 Taddeo/Thaddeus is showing that he wants to enter into a
mystic marriage with the Virgin, such is his devotion to her. A giant seated
image of her floats directly overhead as she ascends to heaven (he is aligned
with her heart). She holds her hands up in prayer, with her ring and middle
fingers heavily laden with rings, presumably gifts from her earthly acolytes
(rings would have been offered by devotees). Right at the pinnacle of the
altarpiece we see the coronation of the Virgin by Christ, another quasi-
marriage ceremony in which she becomes the ‘Bride of Christ’.13
The idea of mystic marriages principally derived from the medieval cult
of the Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, the only erotic book in the Bible.
This had had a huge influence on mysticism and love poetry since the
eleventh century. It consists of a series of rhapsodic and intensely physical
exchanges between a man and a woman in which they praise each others’
beauty and body parts (cheeks, eyes, neck, hair, breasts, navel, jewels,
perfumes). The speakers were assumed to be a bridegroom and a bride, with
the former often interpreted allegorically as Christ, and the latter as the
Church, the Virgin Mary or the human soul, both male and female. The
bridegroom’s place was often taken by the male worshipper, and the bride to
whom his rapturous prayers were addressed was the Virgin.
This substitution became more prevalent as the cult of the Virgin gained
in popularity and she came to be regarded as the most approachable and
amenable saint, who would intercede directly with God on behalf of
mankind. The French Benedictine Prior and troubadour poet Gautier de
Coincy (d. 1236) collected accounts of the Virgin’s intercessory miracles and
wrote songs addressed to her, punning on ‘marier/Marie’: ‘let us marry the
Virgin Mary’, he implores, ‘no one can make a bad marriage with her’.14 The
Virgin was the patron saint of Siena. So the gesture also alludes to the artist’s
place of origin, and his special claim on the Virgin. We do not know whether
Taddeo was married or not (Vasari only mentions a nephew) but he is
claiming, through this blushingly impassioned self-portrait, an unrivalled
intimacy with the Virgin.
 Taddeo’s claimed intimacy with the Virgin gained further sanction by
painters’ identification with St Luke the Evangelist, the disciple who had
been on closest terms with her. St Luke had become patron saint of painters
in the mid-fourteenth century because he was reputed to have painted a
portrait from life of the Virgin and Child. From this time, St Luke became the
model for the learned, literate painter who has unparalleled access to the
great and good (as such, he is the precursor to the Albertian painter). The
identification became complete with images in which the painter gives St
Luke his own features.
No one knows quite how or why St Luke, a doctor by training,
metamorphosed into a painter, but it was a useful myth to justify the church’s
use of images: the church needed a prestigious ‘first Christian painter’,
particularly during the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth
centuries. From the sixth century onwards, more and more pictures of the
Virgin and Child were claimed to have been painted by him. Pope Gregory
the Great (r. 590–604) was said to have eliminated plague in Rome by
carrying around Luke’s painting of the Virgin housed in Santa Maria
Maggiore. It is only during the fourteenth century that St Luke’s activities as a
painter, rather than his products, became of interest. The earliest surviving
depiction of the evangelist making a picture, by the Bohemian illuminator
John of Troppau, is dated 1368. (Troppau’s own painters’ guild in Prague
had installed a now lost altarpiece to St Luke in 1348.)15 He is shown alone
in his studio painting a small panel of Christ on the cross, flanked by the
Virgin and St John – the only subject apart from the Virgin and Child he was
said to have painted. St Luke looks upwards for inspiration, presumably in
the form of a vision. The temporal difficulty of how an adult St Luke, who
had first met Christ in adulthood, came to paint the infant Christ is likewise
sometimes sidestepped by showing him having a vision in which the Virgin
and Child float into view.
In The Golden Legend, there is no mention in the ‘Life of St Luke’ of his
being a painter, but his special intimacy with the Virgin is insisted on. St
Luke’s gospel says more about the childhood of Jesus than any other, and he
is the only one to describe the angel’s annunciation of the birth of Christ. The
typical mise-en-scène of St Luke painting is often identical to that of scenes
of the annunciation, with the painter playing the part of a recording as well as
an annunciatory angel.16 Luke records and announces, in a sensational world
exclusive, what the Virgin and her baby, and their chamber, actually looked
like. The chamber is often richly carved and decorated, but there are no
paintings, which may imply that St Luke – a Christian – is the true inventor of
that art form.
The finest of these paintings, and the earliest surviving panel painting of
this subject from northern Europe, was made by Rogier van der Weyden
(1399/1400–1464) soon after he was appointed salaried Town Painter of
Brussels in 1436, with the right to wear the cloak of a town official. Together
with his contemporary Jan van Eyck, Rogier was the most celebrated painter
in Europe for the latter part of the fifteenth century, and even more influential.
St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child (c. 1435–40) was probably painted –
like most such images – as an altarpiece, in this case probably intended for
the chapel of the Brussels painters’ guild. The setting of the scene within a
luxurious portico with a panoramic landscape view is inspired by van Eyck’s
Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (c. 1435), which Rogier may have seen in the
artist’s studio. His treatment, however, is broader, softer, and more
monumental and expansive: he does not share van Eyck’s taste for
scintillating miniaturist detail and reflective surfaces.
Rogier van der Weyden, St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child, c. 1435–40, oil and tempera on panel

The work is often understood as a self-portrait, albeit idealized, with St

Luke taking on Rogier’s features, and a pretty good case can be made for this.
A later copy of a lost self-portrait is a good match; and so too is a
contemporary copy of a lost self-portrait included in a history painting (see
below). Luke also tends to be shown as old and bearded; Rogier’s Luke is
beardless and in early middle age.
This work, one of the earliest depictions to show the Virgin seated before
St Luke as if for a portrait, is the first to show him drawing – using the
difficult technique of silverpoint – rather than painting.17 With less
equipment, the intimacy increases. St Luke is shown half kneeling, half
hovering. His hands float up before him, holding their tools with the same
delicacy that an angel might hold a lily or sceptre. Luke’s other role as a
writer of the gospels is alluded to by the open gospel book in the room
behind him. He is drawing the Virgin’s face, seen from the front, as if for a
simple portrait likeness. He is almost hypnotized by it (just as well, as her
breast is bared), but has had to interrupt his sketching. She has turned her
head to breastfeed, and he can now only observe the left side of her bowed
head. Like St Luke, the Christ child only has eyes for his mother’s face. Or
rather: she has turned her head so that a second painter, St Luke’s modern
alterego, Rogier van der Weyden, can get a better view. In this respect,
Rogier is even more privileged than his alterego St Luke. And are we not
meant to think that the modern way of painting things – with lovely landscape
backgrounds and architectural settings – is so much better? We moderns get
the small, ‘baby’ truth of the portrait (Rogier himself also painted small-
scale devotional panels) together with the larger truth of the figures in the
splendid room and landscape. Luke’s silverpoint is, as it were, the seedpod
to Rogier’s blossoming plant. Rogier’s picture is an annunciation of the
whole world by an artist at ease in it.

The painters’ embrace of St Luke enabled them – by proxy – to achieve a

partial parity with mason-sculptors, for the most prominent self-portraits in
this period were sculptures placed on the fabric of churches. Around seventy
sculpted self-portraits have been identified on churches from the twelfth
century until the sixteenth century, mostly in German-speaking countries, but
also in Italy, France and Spain.18 Most of the early ones tend to be sited on
the building in a slightly ad hoc way, but this changes with the self-portrait by
the German architect and sculptor Peter Parler (c. 1333–99) in St Vitus
Cathedral, Prague. It is a bust, truncated horizontally just below the
shoulders, and the gaunt intensity and tilt of the head that lends it animation is
very striking. Not only has it been called ‘in all probability the first real [i.e.
naturalistic] self-portrait of an artist known to us’19 (half a century before
Alberti and van Eyck), it also takes its place alongside nineteen other busts
of the ruling family and their inner circle.
 Peter’s father Heinrich (d. 1371) was an innovative and successful
master mason, and more than a dozen family members are recorded in the
building trade. The Parlers had a major influence on architecture in southern
Germany. In 1356, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV summoned Peter to
Prague to be Master of Works of St Vitus Cathedral, and to work on several
other important projects including the Charles Bridge. The cathedral had
been begun in 1344 by Matthias of Arras (d. 1352).
Parler’s self-portrait, which has been dated c. 1379–86, is sited in a
niche set high on the triforium (the gallery above the arches of the choir),
together with portrait busts of eleven members of the royal family, three
archbishops and four rectors, and his predecessor Matthias – a total of
twenty in all.20 They are arrayed at the same height beneath a projecting
cornice and distributed around three sides of the triforium, with the royal
family at the semi-circular eastern end, nearest the high altar. Many of the
busts are aligned with their subject’s tomb below. Each individual seems to
look across and along the upper reaches of the building, rather than down
into the choir. Peter and Matthias occupy a position furthest away from the
royal family on the north side, and their tomb slabs were placed on the floor
nearby, just outside the choir. Full-length statues of the aristocratic founders
of Naumburg’s cathedral had been sited in the choir in around 1260, but there
is no precedent for the social inclusiveness of the Prague scheme. Other
master masons who had included their self-portraits on their buildings were
never such a permanent fixture in an aristocratic dynasty.
 Peter Parler, Self-Portrait, c. 1379–86, sandstone, St Vitus Cathedral, Prague

The remarkable cultural politics of Emperor Charles IV (1314–78)

provide a partial explanation. Charles was descended from the powerful
Counts of Luxembourg, who had secured vast territories in Italy, Germany
and Bohemia. His grandfather Henry VII had forced the Pope to crown him
Holy Roman Emperor in 1312, and his father John, King of Bohemia, had
died at Crécy in 1346, fighting for the French even though he was by then
blind. Charles spent much of his reign travelling through his domains. He
was extremely cultured, wrote Latin works including an autobiography, and
had close contacts with Italian humanists, including the poet Petrarch. He
founded universities in Prague, Arezzo, Pavia, Lucca, Orange and Geneva.
Prague, as the capital of the empire, was the focal point of Charles’s vast
building projects and cultural schemes, with Karlštejn Castle and the
cathedral being the most important. In his autobiography, he said he had
found it a ‘wilderness’ on returning as a young man. When Petrarch later
visited Prague on a diplomatic mission, he rebuked a Bohemian cleric who
had apologized for the backwardness of his native land. Petrarch said he had
never seen anything less barbarous than the Emperor and his entourage: they
seemed to be authentic Athenians.21 The Emperor’s mason/sculptor would
then be a new Phidias.
Charles was concerned above all else with claiming that his rule had
divine blessing, and that he was invested with sacred powers. He built
churches and monasteries, collected relics and commissioned gold and
jewel-studded reliquaries to house them. He was given two thorns from
Christ’s Crown of Thorns by the French king, and three of Charlemagne’s
teeth came from Aachen. He also secured the tablecloth from the Last Supper
and Christ’s loincloth. Hieratic bust reliquaries were made for St Wenceslas
and St Sigismund, and the triforium bust portraits were evidently meant to
evoke this kind of reliquary.
That the reliquary-style busts are so far from the ground suggests their
aloofness from ordinary mortals: they are made more for divine than human
consumption. Other Christian emperors – Constantine, Charlemagne and
Henry II – were traditionally depicted holding models of churches or cities
they had built, and the presence of rectors (who managed the cathedral on a
daily basis) and architects can be seen as the ‘human resources’ equivalent.
Charles is, of course, in a perfect position to survey the church he has had
built, and to examine at close quarters some of its most distinctive structural
features.
Yet the presence of Peter Parler adds to Charles’s sacred allure, too. For
art, as well as rulership, had recently been established as a quasi-sacred,
visionary calling. The court painter Master Theodoric was elected the first
master of the newly founded Prague Brotherhood of Painters in 1348, and it
may have been he who painted the now lost altarpiece to St Luke that was
installed that same year in the Guild Chapel. In 1367 he was referred to in
the course of an imperial grant as ‘beloved master…our painter and our
familiaris’ – a rank comparable to valet de chambre.22 The earliest
surviving depiction of the evangelist making a picture by the Prague
illuminator John of Troppau is dated 1368 – a few years before Peter
Parler’s self-portrait. When visiting Lucca, whose university he founded in
1369, Charles must have seen the Volto Santo, the Holy Face of Christ, a
wooden crucifix supposedly carved by Nicodemus, who had helped take
Christ down from the cross and carry him to his tomb. Or rather, Nicodemus
had carved the body, and an obliging angel had carved the face. The realism
of Parler’s own self-portrait and of many of the portraits (others, more
generalized, were made by members of the workshop) bears witness to their
existence as real historical figures. Peter Parler is not just present as
Charles’s builder, but as someone who can carve the faces of God’s elect on
earth, and fly high like an angel.
Peter Parler’s vivid presence in the entourage of the Holy Roman
Emperor may seem surprising, but it makes good sense when we consider the
paramount importance to Charles of building projects. It is far harder to
explain the purpose of another self-portrait by Rogier van der Weyden which
makes big dynastic claims inserted into one of his four Scenes of Justice for
Brussels Town Hall, but its conspicuousness demonstrates the prestige of the
artist. Rogier stands in the middle of the entourage of the legendary Pope
Gregory the Great (r. 590–604), yet depicted in such an idiosyncratic way
that it became the first authentic self-portrait to inspire comment from his
contemporaries, and probably the most famous of the fifteenth century.23
The Scenes of Justice was the largest and most important commission of
Rogier’s career. Each of the four panels was about 4.3 metres (some 14 ft)
square, and illustrated two episodes from scenes of ‘impartial’ justice, one
Roman and one Christian, with long explanatory inscriptions along the
bottom. They were placed in the Golden Chamber of Brussels Town Hall,
where capital cases were tried, and soon became a tourist attraction (though
surely not as much of an attraction as the executions performed outside). A
group of nobles is known to have come to the town hall specially to see the
series in 1441. Destroyed in 1695 during the bombardment of Brussels by
French troops, the panels are known today from early tapestry copies and
contemporary accounts.
The first panel, signed and dated 1439, showed the Emperor Trajan
delaying his march to war so that one of his soldiers, who had murdered the
only son of a widow, could be executed. The second panel showed Pope
Gregory the Great, four centuries later, praying to God to be merciful to
Trajan because, despite being a pagan, he had been just. God listened, and
Gregory miraculously found Trajan’s tongue still alive in his skull. Gregory
is shown being offered his dark green and black skull on a jewelled platter,
with the tip of a pink tongue poking through the teeth. Rogier mingles with the
papal court, his head in half profile poking above the Pope’s crown. He is
the only one to look out of the picture, and scrutinizes us from beneath a big
black and blue hat.24
 The theologian Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) mentioned visiting
the town hall in his treatise On the Vision of God (1453). For Cusa, images
in which the eyes stare out at the viewer, and seem to follow them round the
room, are analogous to the way in which God relates to the individual. He
tells the monks he is addressing to carry out an experiment – gather in a room
and look at an icon of Christ. Each monk will feel that the icon is looking at
them alone, only to discover later that everyone in the room felt the same
sensation. So too with God’s love: God’s attention to us is ‘so strong that the
one who is being looked upon cannot even imagine that the icon is concerned
for another’, yet God’s love is actually spread around equally. Love of God
springs from self-love that is stimulated by this feeling of specialness. Cusa
includes in his list of ‘omnivoyant’ images a face ‘by the pre-eminent painter
Rogier in his priceless painting in the city hall at Brussels’.25
It is an interesting image for Cusa to choose, as Rogier’s self-portrait –
the only face to look out of the picture – is not obviously icon-like. Since he
looks at us over his right shoulder, only his right eye is fully visible. The
painter’s forthright yet cyclopic gaze is not his only distinguishing feature.
The swarthy, weather-beaten colour of his skin – a combination of browns,
pinks and reds – and his black and blue hat also single him out. Those around
him have almost uniformly pale skins. The darkness of Rogier’s face makes
the whites of his eyes seem more staring. Indeed, his skin colour is closest to
that of Trajan’s exhumed skull, and an African or Middle Eastern soldier in
the first panel. The skin colour is unlikely to have been an innovation or
mistake by the tapestry weavers to distinguish him from the historical figures,
as it is technically complex, and unflattering. Yet it is the dark colour of
Rogier’s skin, as well as his gaze, that makes Nicholas conflate him with an
icon, for most viewers of the veil of Veronica in Rome were struck by the
dark colour of Christ’s skin, explaining it as the side effect of his suffering.26
But it seems unlikely that Rogier’s sunburnt skin colour and posture is
just meant to evoke the famous portrait of Christ in Rome. The artist was
surely inspired by one of the most celebrated and discussed passages in the
Song of Songs. Very early on the bride announces:

I am black, but beautiful, O ye daughters of Jerusalem….Look not

upon me because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me (1:
5–6)
Commentators debated whether this simply meant that she was apologizing
for being Ethiopian or Saracen, or simply for being sunburnt; confessing her
sins or welcoming persecution and suffering.27 The best all-round
explanation for Rogier’s strange appearance and awkward position (he
nearly has his back to the proceedings, and twists his head sharply round)
comes from the influential early Christian Father Origen. For Origen, the
bridegroom is God, the ‘Sun of Justice’, a cosmological term that was
frequently used. Having seen that the bride was ‘crooked’ and ‘not standing
straight’, he ‘looked askance’ at her, and so she was cast into dark shadow.
To be delivered from sin, she will be ‘crooked in nothing’, and not ‘turn
aside’.28 Rogier would depict Christ as the ‘Sun of Justice’ in the Braque
Triptych (c. 1450), with his head placed before the rising sun so that its rays
create a halo. Here Rogier, in his very own scene of justice, is straightening
himself out, turning himself round, hoping – rather like Trajan – to be looked
on forgivingly by the ‘Sun of Justice’. But by donning a mask of humility he
makes himself far more conspicuous – and alive – than any other member of
the papal court.

It is often said that Renaissance self-portraiture is primarily a product of

competitive aristocratic court cultures, with the artist using self-portraiture to
claim the status of courtier. Yet the most high-profile fifteenth-century self-
portraits were not made by court artists (who anyway rarely worked for a
single patron). Rogier van der Weyden was Town Painter of Brussels, and
although it was part of the Duchy of Burgundy and Philip the Bold and his
court were frequent visitors, he was an independent master rather than a
court painter. The most conspicuous kinship self-portraits (made by the
sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti and his pupil Filarete) emanate from the republic
of Florence and the papacy in Rome. Great artists added lustre to a wide
range of political entities.
Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) is celebrated above all for making two
sets of bronze doors for the Baptistery of Florence’s cathedral after
triumphing over his rivals in open competition; he incorporated his self-
portrait in both, putting himself in the most exalted of company. Ghiberti,
who trained as a goldsmith, seems to envisage himself as a great prophet at
the court of heaven rather than a mere courtier or craftsman. Supremely
confident, Ghiberti was the most successful artist of his day, despite failing
to keep any deadline. While working on the doors his earnings were the
equivalent of a branch manager of the Medici bank, and he died a rich man.29
Ghiberti was one of four Florentine artists referred to in Alberti’s dedication
of the Italian version of his treatise On Painting – the only one to produce a
self-portrait and to have written a theoretical treatise. His narrative reliefs
set a new standard for clarity, verve and elegant naturalism, and his second
set of doors features sophisticated perspectival effects that help create mood,
and deft borrowings from antique sculpture.
In both sets of doors a self-portrait bust is inserted into the decorative
foliate borders. The self-portraits are part of a series of projecting bust-
length heads of prophets and (in the first door) sibyls. Below each self-
portrait, Ghiberti included a signature inscription. On the second door, the
artist is flanked on his left by an image of his sculptor son and heir, Vittorio,
again in the same format, instantly creating a dynasty. Although analogous to
the bust series of Peter Parler, they are more conspicuous by virtue of being
at eye level, and projecting further forward like chunky door knobs.
Both of Ghiberti’s self-portrait heads look down, but from on high, as it
were, penetratingly rather than humbly. The other prophets twist and turn
their heads in a more transitory way. We would normally say they were alert,
animated, even inspired. But the presence of Ghiberti’s bust makes them
seem fidgety, surprised and perplexed. He seems more magisterial.
The self-portrait bust for the second door, made in around 1447–8 when
Ghiberti was seventy, emerges from a circular aperture. This type of framing
device is antique in origin, and was used for images of gods and emperors.
He looks older than in the first self-portrait, but he is wiser and more
powerful. He has a bald pate, but his skull is perfectly domed and sleek, both
architectural and light-catching. His ears, partly covered by a large
astrolabe-like turban in the first self-portrait, are now exposed, to listen to
the music of the spheres, and the praise of passers-by. A wonderfully
observed flower – perhaps a wild rose – blooms directly below him.
Ghiberti’s autobiography shows he was proud of his skill at depicting flora
and fauna; and Florence was, after all, the city of ‘flora’. Alberti, in his
passage on Narcissus, said painting was the flower of the arts. Ghiberti is
here the flower of artists, leaning over to survey his own creations. In both
self-portraits Ghiberti has a cool unerring gaze that is keyed in to the
geometry of the doors. In the second self-portrait the diagonal lines formed
by the sides of the mountains in the reliefs below converge on Ghiberti and
his son Vittorio.
Ghiberti’s doughty studiousness is absolutely in keeping with an artist
who was, with the exception of Alberti, the greatest artist-intellectual of his
day. He was the first artist to write an autobiography, and the first person
since antiquity to write a history of art – or rather two histories of art. These
appear in the three books that comprise his Commentaries (begun c. 1447).
The first book lists the skills and knowledge required by the artist followed
by a short history of ancient Greek art; the second is a short history of
modern art since Giotto, followed by Ghiberti’s own autobiography; and the
third book is a sophisticated digest of medieval theories of vision and optics.
Becoming a Ghibertian artist is not for the faint-hearted: they must have a
‘working knowledge’ of grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astrology,
perspective, history, anatomy, the theory of drawing and arithmetic. And they
must study at night, and not oversleep.

Lorenzo Ghiberti, Self-Portrait with Turban, c. 1420, gilded bronze, north doors (detail), Baptistery,
Florence
 Lorenzo Ghiberti, Self-Portrait and Portrait of His Son Vittorio, c. 1447–8, gilded bronze, eastern
doors (detail), Baptistery, Florence

Ghiberti’s text is associated with the Florentine tradition of the

Zibaldone, collections of moralizing commonplaces meant to inspire future
generations of the family. But it is more systematic than a commonplace
book. Vasari consulted the Commentaries when researching his Lives of the
Artists. He rebuked Ghiberti for his self-absorption and use of the first
person in the autobiographical section: ‘“I made”, “I said”, “I was making”,
“I was saying”’.30 He clearly recognized that this unapologetic authorial ‘I’
was a milestone in artistic self-portrayal. Alberti and Vasari both still used
the third person when they wrote their autobiographies.
The inscription on the first set of doors merely says ‘the work of Lorenzo
of Florence’. That on the second set leaves us in no doubt that we stand in a
privileged place: ‘Lorenzo di Cione Ghiberti Made with Marvellous Skill’.
Ghiberti’s artistic and literary ambitions clearly rubbed off on the
Florentine sculptor, architect and theorist Antonio di Pietro Averlino (c.
1400–c. 1469), the self-styled Filarete (Greek for ‘lover of virtue’). He is
the most prolific of early Renaissance self-portraitists – and the only one to
depict himself with his studio assistants, or ‘disciples’, as he calls them.
With them, he holds his own exuberant court.
 After training in Ghiberti’s studio, Filarete is recorded in Rome in 1433,
where he made bronze doors for the porch of St Peter’s, before moving on to
Milan in 1451 and working as an architect and architectural theorist, writing
his Treatise on Architecture. Four self-portraits survive, with his face
invariably appearing in all’antica – or all-Alberti – profile. In Milan he
created one of the earliest double-sided self-portrait medals, with a
remarkably naturalistic profile self-portrait on the recto, and on the verso an
allegorical image of himself tapping the trunk of a tree for honey. But it is the
two earlier self-portraits on the doors for St Peter’s that are most intriguing.
In comparison to Ghiberti’s Baptistery doors, Filarete’s are an
antiquarian mish-mash of early Christian and classical elements. The best
parts are the exuberant fillers and framing elements featuring ancient and
modern profile portraits, mythological scenes, animals and plants. Filarete’s
own self-portrait profile roundel is located here, held up by a pair of
centaurs. On the rear of the doors, which are otherwise undecorated, he has
included his self-portrait with ‘disciples’. This is a long rectangular relief
with Filarete leading a line of six assistants in an energetic line dance,
similar to a medieval carole, with all of the figures moving to their left.31
They hover over the ground, each managing the considerable feat of holding
hands and a tool of their trade. Their names are inscribed below their feet,
and there is no doubt who is in charge. Filarete’s own inscription is in much
larger letters and explains that these are his ‘discipuli’. He also holds up a
compass, traditional tool of deus artifex – God as creator. A circle is
inscribed in the empty space behind it, as if conjured up magically out of thin
air. In contrast Agniolus, who brings up the rear, holds a claw hammer.
Unlike the ‘disciples’, Filarete does not wear a leather apron, and his dance
step is more restrained than theirs. The dance troupe is flanked by a man on
an ass who holds a pitcher and a second man on a camel playing pipes. An
explanatory inscription stretches just above the heads of the dancers, grandly
disclaiming: ‘For others the fame and the money, for me joy’.
The Latin word for joy – hilaritas – is almost graffitied into the bronze,
and curves down as though it were made from the hot alcoholic breath
issuing from Filarete’s mouth. Hilaritas was a prime Christian virtue – St
Hilary felt joy even when suffering excruciating torture. The panel is
precisely dated – 31 July 1445 – and must represent their unalloyed delight
at finishing the doors after a decade of torturous toil. The ass and camel are
exotic biblical references that tie their celebrations in to various biblical
feasts. Drunkenness was often interpreted by Christian as well as pagan
writers as akin to mystical rapture.32
Over the door in the porch was Giotto’s mosaic showing Christ walking
on water, and Filarete’s relief is a joyful, airborne response to it. Giotto’s
lost mosaic is the only modern work of art described in Alberti’s treatise on
painting: ‘Each [disciple] expresses with his face and gesture a clear
indication of a disturbed soul in such a way that there are different
movements and positions in each one’.33 Filarete’s ‘disciples’ contort
themselves into different positions, but are fearless and full of belief.
The relief is a celebration of teamwork, and hilaritas was a sign of
civilized societies. Aristotle believed smiling and laughter distinguished man
from the animals: there is a pig and a dog at Filarete’s feet, as well as the ass
and camel, but not even the dog shares the joy. The Florentine humanist and
biblical scholar Giannozzo Manetti, writing in 1438 in a moving dialogue on
the death of his son, said that ‘man by his nature is a social and civic animal,
capable of smiling, born for doing good and acting, even to be a certain type
of mortal god’. Manetti later wrote a treatise On the Dignity and Excellence
of Man (c. 1452) in response to a medieval pope’s treatise On the Misery of
the Human Condition.34 The compass-wielding Filarete seems to see
himself as ‘a certain type of mortal god’ and a social animal.

Until around 1490, the social construction of the artist excluded wives –
except for the ultimate bride, the Virgin Mary. Van Eyck is a partial
exception, but his portrait of his wife was still painted much later than his
own self-portrait. Portraits of bourgeois married couples became quite
common in the second half of the fifteenth century, but it is not until around
1490 that an artist would depict himself in a double portrait with his wife.
The German goldsmith and printmaker Israhel van Meckenem (active 1465;
d. 1503) depicted himself with his wife Ida in a single print, and it is the
earliest example of a formal self-portrait in a print. In Froissart’s poem, Sir
Agamanor expresses his love with a self-portrait presented privately to his
lady. Van Meckenem’s celebration of his love was much more public.
Filarete, Self-Portrait with His Workshop, c. 1445, bronze, relief on interior of doors for the porch of
St Peter’s, Rome

The print is not only pioneering in genre terms, it is also one of the most
delightful and intense double portraits ever made. The couple are shown in
close-up, their heads and upper shoulders filling the entire pictorial field.
They turn towards each other, smiling, eyelids drooping in a swoon, his cap
and her bonnet practically touching, his nose tumescently bulbous, the tops of
her breasts pushed up by her low-cut gown. Israhel’s sloping left shoulder
overlaps Ida’s right, and we imagine their lower bodies practically merging.
Were they not fully clothed, they could easily be lying in bed.
They are clearly not poor. The background is a framed patterned ‘cloth of
honour’, often placed behind people of importance, such as the Virgin Mary,
and Ida wears a fur-trimmed gown. Israhel may have a lined, unshaven,
rugged face, but it becomes a showcase for his considerable shading skills,
and a swarthy contrast to Ida’s pellucidity.
Ida is situated to her husband’s left (our right) in traditional fashion. But
any subservience this might imply is moderated not just by their close
proximity, but by the heart shape formed by Ida’s bonnet and veil. She is not
just standing on Israhel’s ‘heart side’, she is his heart. Here Ida has opened
her heart and Israhel has reciprocated. The print is signed along a strip at the
bottom: ‘The Portrait of Israhel and Ida his wife’. His signature – I V M – is
placed further along, right over her heart. Israhel would subsequently make
an innovative series of twelve engravings of courting couples, including
Couple Seated on a Bed, and the germ of the idea is here.
 If the body language is intimate, the impersonal inscription (the portrait;
his wife) is in keeping with its creation for public as well as for personal
consumption. Israhel was a famous artist, and in 1505 he was ranked
alongside Dürer and Schongauer as a pioneer of printmaking. But he was
very different from them, and far more prolific; only ten per cent of the over
six hundred prints connected with him were original. Most were copies and
reworked versions of the work of other printmakers, including Dürer and
Schongauer, repackaged and reissued in big editions with his own
monogram. He has been called ‘the most voracious pirate in Renaissance
printmaking’.35
Married-couple self-portraiture would have to wait until Peter Paul
Rubens’s Self-Portrait with Isabella Brant (c. 1610), set in a honeysuckle
bower, for anything as erotic. Rubens’s work gave rise to a Netherlandish
genre of ‘fertility self-portraits’ showing the artist with his wife and
children, and exemplifying the aphorism ‘Art is born of Love’ – a genre
which van Meckenem, the great pirate of printmaking, invented.36
 Israhel van Meckenem, Self-Portrait with His Wife Ida, c. 1490, engraving

The claims of kinship made by all these works are modest in comparison to
the most radical form of Renaissance self-portraiture – the ‘unwitting’ or
‘disguised’ self-portrait, whereby every figure made by a particular artist
shares his features and mannerisms. The recognition of this new form of
surrogate self-portrait coincides with Alberti’s choice of Narcissus as a
model for the modern painter, but it is more solipsistic and all-encompassing
than anything envisaged by Alberti.
This form of self-portrait was suggested in a popular catchphrase coined
in the fifteenth century that would remain in vogue until the eighteenth, and
which has been revisited by modern psychology: ‘every painter paints
himself’. The basic idea was that when painting any figure it would be, at
some level, an unwitting self-portrait – whether in terms of the physiognomy,
gesture and character, or general pictorial style. This catchphrase was
inspired by the classical notion that a man’s works and deeds, whether good
or bad, will reflect his essential character and personality – in short, his
soul. It was even applied to architecture, possibly because of the presence of
Alberti’s self-portrait in Palazzo Rucellai.37
In a Florentine collection of witty anecdotes compiled in the 1470s,
Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) is quoted using the catchphrase ‘every
painter paints himself’ to illustrate the instinctive (bad) habits and
compulsions in man.38 A sonnet attributed to Filippo Brunelleschi, and
possibly addressed to an artist whose work displeased him, includes the
lines: ‘a crazy nature produces crazy results, because they have to resemble
their cause’.39 That this catchphrase became popular in fifteenth-century
Florence must be due to an increasing awareness of personal styles in art.
The catchphrase is used in the late 1490s to criticize a particular painter
and a particular artwork. Here the beauty of the painter is insisted on, as if to
suggest he is a new Narcissus – in love with himself, and reproducing
himself in his art. When he wishes to paint someone else

He often paints not the subject but himself.

And not only his face, which is beautifully fair
According to himself; but also in his supreme art
He forms with his brush his own manners and his customs…40

The sonnet was written by Gaspare Visconti, a poet at the Milanese court,
and is part of a series of poems written for Bianca Maria Sforza, the
illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Milan. The target of the poem must be
Leonardo da Vinci, who had until recently been painting the Last Supper in
the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. All
Leonardo’s figures and portraits, Gaspare claims, are imbued with his own
ideal beauty, deportment, gesture and manners: his art is a private hall of
mirrors.
Leonardo, with his Albertian range of interests and skills, would have
been horrified at the idea that he always painted himself. He might even have
regarded Visconti’s sonnet as a joke, for in the Last Supper he had striven to
devise a wide range of gesture, expression and physical type (Visconti may
have seen its sheer flamboyance as typically Leonardo). Leonardo repeatedly
railed against those painters who ‘painted themselves’ – the first diatribe
dates from 1492; the last from after 1510. He regarded it as the ‘greatest
defect of painters’:

If the master is quick of speech and movement his figures are similar
in their quickness, and if the master is devout his figures are the same
with their necks bent, and if the master is a good-for-nothing his
figures seem laziness itself portrayed from the life…any part that may
be good or poor in yourself…will be partly shown in your figures.41

If figures ‘often resemble their masters’, this is because judgment, ‘one of the
powers of the soul’, is at fault:

Having to reproduce with the hands a human body, [judgment]

naturally reproduces that body which it first invented. From this it
follows that he who falls in love naturally loves things similar to
himself.42

Thus Israhel van Meckenem makes his wife a virtual mirror image of
himself.
For Leonardo, it was important that the painter was aware both of his
own shortcomings and of the ‘praiseworthy proportions’ for ‘a body in
nature’. He advises artists to have themselves measured up to see where they
fall short of the ideal.43 This doctrine does not, of course, address the
question of what the painter should do if he is a perfect specimen – like the
famously beautiful and refined Leonardo.
Leading artists were now putting themselves more in the picture,
physically, socially and stylistically – so much so that they were accused of
only ever painting self-portraits. These developments coincide, in the years
around 1500, with artists depicting themselves in heroic and splendid
isolation.
4.
THE RENAISSANCE ARTIST AS
HERO

Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500 (detail), see full picture

UNTIL THE 1490S, THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY record of achievement in self-

portraiture is still relatively modest and spasmodic. Independent self-
portraits are generally small-scale, and those insinuated into religious
narratives tend to be discrete and marginal, or they are ‘disguised’ as St
Luke. The most conspicuous – by van der Weyden, Ghiberti and Filarete – all
belong to the second quarter of the century.
 This changes in the 1490s, in central Italy, Mantua and Nuremberg, when
for the first time several self-portraits are made that match the fictional self-
portraits of Villani and Froissart for heroism and panache. The idea of the
artist as cultural hero would also merge with the myth of the child prodigy,
with artists aggrandizing their youthful achievements.
The dazzling decade of the 1490s started with the resurrection of an artist
who had been dead for over 150 years. In Florence in 1490 a wall monument
to Giotto was unveiled in the cathedral where he had been Master of Works.1
One of the first commemorative monuments to an artist, it features a specially
commissioned ‘portrait’ bust by Benedetto da Maiano, possibly based on a
presumed self-portrait.
The Giotto monument was almost certainly financed by Lorenzo de’
Medici as part of a policy to promote the arts in general, and Florentine
artists in particular. He was partly inspired by the classical concept of virtue,
which considered conspicuous expenditure on architecture and art, secular as
well as sacred, to be a personal and civic duty, rather than mere vainglory or
penitential reparations for being a money-lending banker. Lorenzo was called
‘the Magnificent’, because magnificence – as Aristotle wrote in the Ethics –
becomes the wealthy and redounds to their greatness and prestige: they
should embellish their city and their own house, which is also ‘a public
ornament’.2 A central part of magnificence is patronizing the best artists,
though partly because of his own money troubles, Lorenzo frequently acted as
an artistic consultant, recommending Florentine artists (such as Leonardo,
Filippino Lippi and Verrocchio) to foreign patrons. He was particularly
interested in architecture, regularly reading Alberti’s treatise on the subject,
and even submitting a design for the facade of the cathedral in 1491.
Growing appreciation of individual artists would be manifested in the
inventory of the contents of the Medici Palace made in 1492 after the death of
Lorenzo de’ Medici. This is one of the first to mention the name of the artist,
as opposed to just describing the subject matter or (in the case of portraits)
giving the name of the sitter. As yet, though, no self-portraits are listed.
A series of monuments to famous men had been planned during the second
half of the fourteenth century for the cathedral and the seat of government, the
Palazzo Vecchio, but although poets were included in the cathedral scheme,
artists were not. However, a wall monument was erected in the cathedral to
Filippo Brunelleschi, architect of its famous dome, after his death in 1446.
This monument consists of a half-length marble portrait bust, carved by
Andrea Cavalcanti, set inside a decorated roundel. The face is based on
Brunelleschi’s death mask, presented to the cathedral by his heirs. Beneath
the roundel is a long laudatory inscription. The dead man stands before us
looking very much alive.
The Giotto monument is in almost exactly the same format as the
Brunelleschi memorial, and shows Giotto making an image of Christ out of
mosaic, an art form that Lorenzo de’ Medici hoped to revive. Below is a
long Latin inscription by the poet and philologist Angelo Poliziano, in which
Giotto boasts of his achievements in the first person:

I AM HE THROUGH WHOM PAINTING, DEAD, RETURNED TO LIFE

AND WHOSE HAND WAS AS SURE AS IT WAS ADEPT
WHAT MY ART LACKED WAS LACKING IN NATURE HERSELF.
TO NO ONE WAS IT GIVEN TO PAINT BETTER OR MORE.
DO YOU ADMIRE THE GREAT BELL TOWER RESOUNDING WITH SACRED
BRONZE?
THIS TOO ON THE BASIS OF MY MODEL HAS GROWN TO THE STARS.
AFTER ALL, I AM GIOTTO. WHAT NEED WAS THERE TO RELATE
THESE THINGS?
THIS NAME HAS STOOD AS THE EQUAL TO ANY LONG POEM.

DECEASED 1336. ERECTED BY THE CITIZENS 1490.3

The claim that Giotto is the ‘equal to any long poem’ is a clear reference to
Dante’s Divine Comedy, of which the first printed edition had appeared to
great fanfare in 1481, financed by Lorenzo de’ Medici. A large ‘portrait’
fresco of the author had been painted on a wall of the north aisle of the
cathedral in 1465. Dante is shown holding up his book, a colossus who
towers over Hell and Purgatory to his right, and over present-day Florence
(with the bell tower that Giotto designed and Brunelleschi’s dome) to his
left. The Giotto monument establishes him too as a fully-fledged cultural hero
and shaper of present-day Florence.
The Giotto of Poliziano’s inscription has no truck with Dante’s meditation
on the transience of all art and fame in the Purgatory section of The Divine
Comedy. The inscription is a revival of a Roman genre, whereby an epigram
attached to an image on a tomb or monument buttonholes the passer-by and
tells them about their claim to fame. Classical authors also sometimes
prefaced their work with ‘I am he who…’. Poliziano’s Giotto claims to be an
omnipotent, autonomous miracle-worker. No credit is given to God, guilds or
private patrons. Although Poliziano says that Giotto has brought painting
back to life, he is careful not to say that he has revived a previous, antique
type of painting. This is in keeping with a riposte made by Poliziano when
the style of his own Latin had been criticized: ‘Someone says to me, “You
don’t express yourself as if you were Cicero”. What of it? I am not Cicero.
Yet I do express myself, I think’.4 This quip is justifiably seen as a key
marker in the development of Renaissance individualism. So too is the even
more emphatic declaration ‘I am Giotto’.
At the time of the creation of the Giotto memorial, the most famous and
wealthy artist in Europe was probably Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), court
artist to three generations of Gonzagas, the condottieri rulers of Mantua. He
was in the vanguard of classicizing artists, collecting and studying antiquities
and filling his pictures with classical architecture and inscriptions. His
frescoes of Gonzaga court life and his vast series the Triumphs of Caesar
seemed to many to usher in a new age. He was made a knight by Federico
Gonzaga.
Three Mantegna self-portraits inserted into religious narratives have been
identified.5 A self-portrait also appears in the Gonzaga frescoes, as part of a
triple self-referencing. Mantegna wove his own facial features symmetrically
into the plant decoration of a painted pilaster, suggesting both that he is the
‘flower’ of painters and endlessly fertile. To his right, winged putti hold up
an inscribed tablet dedicating ‘this humble work’ to Ludovico Gonzaga and
his wife by ‘their Andrea Mantegna of Padua’. To the left, Cardinal
Francesco Gonzaga, in the so-called ‘Meeting Scene’, holds a folded note on
which is written ‘ANDREA ME PINXIT’ (Andrea painted me).6 Andrea – rather
than the pope or God – has made this cardinal.
From 1476–94 Mantegna built his own house in Mantua, in the style of a
Roman town house, cubic in shape with a circular central courtyard. A
bronze self-portrait bust in high relief, inspired by antique busts, and perhaps
by those of Brunelleschi and Giotto, has been dated to the early 1490s, and it
may have been intended to adorn his new home. It is assumed that Mantegna
designed and modelled his bust, even if he did not actually cast it.7
In 1504 Mantegna purchased the rights to a funerary chapel in Mantua’s
main church, the decoration of which was completed in 1514. The bronze
self-portrait bust ended up here, placed against a marble roundel with a
central disk made from Roman imperial porphyry, one of the hardest of
stones. A Latin inscription below buttonholed the visitor: ‘You who see the
bronze likeness of Aeneas Mantegna, know that he is equal, if not superior, to
Apelles’.
As Virgil tells it in the Aeneid, Aeneas, the son of the Trojan Anchises
and the goddess Aphrodite, had heroically led the surviving Trojans out of
their burning city and ultimately to the shores of Italy. His descendants had
founded Rome. Mantegna is thus one of the great pioneers and founding
fathers – a new Giotto. Apelles, the most famous painter of antiquity, had
worked for Alexander the Great (who had given him his mistress Campaspe).
In the inscription, Mantegna is cast as both man of action and artist. His
Gonzaga patrons are flattered by being associated with Alexander the Great.
In its visceral machismo, the bust out-Romans the Romans. Mantegna
looks out horizontally, his head turned to his right. His tumescent bulldog
face scowls. This is perfectly in keeping with what we know about
Mantegna’s fiery character. Shoulder-length matted hair, bare chest and
shoulders, add to the heroic allure. His only adornment is a wreath of laurel
leaves that crowns his head. In antiquity laurel was used to honour great
leaders and poets, and Petrarch claimed to have been crowned in Rome.
Boldù used it in his medallic profile self-portrait of 1458, in which the
‘painter of Venice’ sports naked shoulders and upper chest.8 However, that
work’s mood is much more reflective. Boldù’s features are smooth and
exquisitely disembodied; on the reverse of the medal is a seated boy with his
head in his hands confronted by a skull and a winged boy symbolizing the
spirit of Death. Mantegna looks away from the altar, primed for irresistible
action in this world. He flaunts his nudity, and wears it heroically like a suit
of armour.
Andrea Mantegna, Self-Portrait, c. early 1490s, bronze bust mounted on marble and porphyry roundel,
Mantegna Chapel, Sant’Andrea, Mantua

But even Mantegna’s bare-chested heroism pales beside the life-sized

self-portrait sculpture made by Adam Kraft (c. 1440–1507) in the free
Imperial City of Nuremberg in c. 1493–6. It was the largest, most
conspicuous and impressive self-portrait that had ever been made.9 Kraft is a
kind of Atlas figure: he supports an entire building on his shoulders, but not
as penance – in the medieval style – because he does it effortlessly and
joyously. His self-image emerges from the long Germanic tradition of
architectural self-portraits already referred to in relation to Peter Parler, but
it is virtually a freestanding statue. Kraft was a stone sculptor who also
advised on architectural projects, and his self-portrait is placed at the base
of a twenty-metre-high sacrament house that he designed for the church of St
Lorenz (the consecrated host was locked up inside). Commissioned by one of
the richest men in the city, Hans Imhoff, in 1493, it would have redounded to
the patron’s credit to have employed the leading sculptor in the city – a man
who could not only design and build a tower (like Giotto), but also lift it.
The contract stipulated that the sacrament house be ‘beautifully made’.
 Adam Kraft, Self-Portrait, c. 1493–6, sandstone with partial painting, St Lorenz Church, Nuremberg

This towering sandstone structure, surmounted by a crucifix, was located

in the church’s choir, to the left of the high altar. It was originally brightly
painted, but now only a few traces of paint remain. Kraft’s full-length
bearded figure is placed at the front, on the western side, facing the main
entrance of the church. He crouches down on one knee, holding his mallet
and chisel, and bears the entire structure on his broad shoulders. Kraft means
strength, so he lives up to his name. He looks up, his face held up and open
like a sunflower, with a wonderfully rapt expression, and seems about to
stand – or sprint. Two workshop assistants bear the south and north sides of
the structure. Astonishingly, Kraft and his colleagues are larger than any of
the religious figures represented on the tower. The arms of Imhoff and his
family (two wives, ten children) are displayed on the tabernacle shrine
above, but are far less conspicuous and would have been even when they
were painted. How did Adam Kraft get away with it? It is almost as though
Imhoff is conspicuously expressing his own humility (and distracting us from
the vast size of his monument) by allowing himself to be upstaged by this
giant armed with mallet and chisel.
Alberti, in his dedication to Filippo Brunelleschi of the Italian version of
On Painting (1436), said that until now he had always believed nature was
no longer producing great intellects – ‘or giants which in her youthful and
more glorious days she had produced so marvellously and abundantly’.10 It
was commonly believed, because of the occasional discovery of large bones
and fossils, that in the past humankind was of greater stature. Kraft is just
such a giant, and his Christian name is that of the first man, Adam (he took
this so seriously he tried to get his wife to change her name to Eve).
Nuremberg had grown rich on international trade, and the city council
was run by merchants.11 Unlike most other cities, there were no trade guilds,
and crafts vital for the city’s economic and military wellbeing were directly
controlled by the council. Painting and sculpture were called the ‘free arts’
because there were no guild regulations determining training and conduct, or
licensing artists to practise. Until 1509, foreign masters could set up shop in
Nuremberg, and the more open environment does seem to have encouraged
innovation and fruitful competition between artists and between patrons.
Artists were not ‘free’ politically, however, as they had no say in the running
of the government, and there was no safety net if they fell on hard times.
No Nuremberg artist was more commercially innovative or cosmopolitan
than the printmaker and painter Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), the son of a
distinguished goldsmith. He is the first non-Italian artist to become famous
for his conduct and appearance – especially his hair and hands – as well as
his art. Leonardo was known for his beauty, wit and elegance; Dürer used
self-portraiture to immortalize himself as the northern ‘artist-as-beauty’.12
Dürer is the most celebrated, prolific and inventive creator of self-
portraits during the Renaissance. Altogether he made some sixteen self-
images – including independent drawn and painted self-portraits, and painted
images of himself as a bystander in three major altarpieces. He also made
studies of his hands and legs. In around 1510, he sent his own self-portrait to
Raphael, and Raphael reciprocated with some drawings of his own (though
not a self-portrait). He believed that ‘many painters paint figures resembling
themselves’, and that great artists had ‘a creating power like God’s. For a
good painter is inwardly full of figures’.13
 Paradoxically Dürer is not the most public of self-portraitists, for he did
not make (like van Meckenem) a print self-portrait. He may have felt his
‘AD’ monogram sufficed, and several print portraits of him were made by
other artists in his lifetime. Cold commercial considerations may have
played a part too: a print of the Virgin would make more money than a self-
portrait. Three independent painted self-portraits of 1493, 1498 and 1500
appear to be personal milestones for they are all signed, dated and
elaborately inscribed. All three show him dressed opulently, and make a
feature of his hair, the drawing of which is invariably a masterpiece of the
calligrapher’s art.
The most opulent is the self-portrait of 1498, a half-length image, in
which we see him from his right side in half profile (a Flemish convention),
standing before a window with a view of a verdant landscape. It was painted
in Nuremberg while Dürer was working on a series of fifteen woodcuts of
the Apocalypse, or ‘The Revelation of John the Divine’. This was the first
book to be both published and illustrated by an artist, though some images
were sold individually as loose sheets. These dramatic full-page images,
timed to fuel and exploit the religious fervour connected with the imminent
half-millennium, and the supposed second coming of Christ, made Dürer
famous throughout Europe. Yet he presents himself in the self-portrait as
someone who has never felt fear, let alone apocalyptic fear. He must have
been aware of the irony. He could easily be one of the sumptuously dressed
male clients in his own Apocalypse print of The Whore of Babylon. The only
pain this man might have experienced is the pressure of being a living work
of art.
Dürer initially trained to be a goldsmith, and this goldsmith manqué is
pure gold. Golden hair with coiffured corkscrew curls, all painted with the
finest of brushes, tumbles down golden skin. He sports an elegant moustache
and beard. The faces in Dürer’s painted portraits rarely look animated, and
this one is no exception. Just below the window ledge we find inscribed in
calligraphic letters: ‘In 1498 I painted this from my own form. I was twenty-
six years old. Albrecht Dürer’.
It is usually assumed that Dürer is presenting himself here as an Italian-
style gentiluomo (gentleman), and his letters home from Venice during his
second stay there in 1505–7 are often used as virtual speech bubbles for the
picture. The letters were sent to his friend the Nuremberg humanist (and
sybarite) Willibald Pirckheimer, on whose behalf Dürer acquired luxury
textiles, jewelry, feathers, etc. Dürer wrote: ‘What do you mean by setting
me to such dirty work [buying rings]? I have become a gentleman at Venice’;
‘My French mantle, my doublet, and my brown coat send you a hearty
greeting’; ‘How I shall freeze after this [Venetian] sun. Here I am a
gentleman, at home only a parasite’.14 Dürer’s expensive tastes meant he was
frequently in debt, and Pirckheimer had loaned him the money to undertake
the second Venetian trip.
But he also complains about Venetian artists who steal his ideas and copy
his works; and he says he is so thronged by friendly Italian artists ‘that at
times I have to shut myself up’.15 There is already a sense in this self-portrait
of him being protectively yet constrictingly shut away, like a reliquary in a
cathedral treasury. Through the window we glimpse an alpine landscape with
a distant snow-capped mountain, which picks up the white stripes on his
tasselled cap: the visual echo emphasizes his indomitable remoteness. His
gaze is sly, suspicious. Petrarch called his own autobiography ‘My Secret’
because he claimed to want to keep its contents private and there is
something grandly secretive about Dürer’s self-portrait.
 Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1498, oil on panel

The intensely hieratic and sombre self-portrait of 1500 is more the kind
of thing we might imagine being made by the creator of the Apocalypse
series. It is a half-length, full-frontal image, placed against a black
background with darker brown hair and skin to match Dürer’s brown coat.
The principal break in the painting’s symmetry is the artist’s portentously
raised right hand, the fingertips placed in front of his breastbone. Since the
mid-nineteenth century, this format has frequently been compared to images
of Christ, especially the Mandylion and Veronica.16 Veronica’s veil was the
most important relic kept in St Peter’s, Rome. By making the visual analogy
(and the darkness alludes to it too), Dürer implies he is a Christ-like figure,
with divine powers of creation. In his later treatise on proportion, Dürer
would claim that God ‘grants great power unto artistic men’.17

Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500, oil on panel

That said, Dürer is much too well turned out to be an exact counterpart to
Christ. His permed hair, plucked eyebrows, waxed handlebar moustache and
trimmed beard are a tour de force of the barber’s art. Indeed, hair has surely
never been so intricately and painstakingly painted, with many individual
strands picked out. If we compare the self-portrait with Dürer’s engraving of
1513 showing Veronica’s veil held by two angels, the artist’s cascading curly
hair is much closer to that of the angels than of Christ, which is
understandably rather dishevelled. Indeed, no image of Christ by Dürer has
such finely wrought hair. The closest comparisons are with the hair of
Dürer’s women and the fur of his animals.
Dürer’s hair was famous among his contemporaries, and after his death in
1528 his admirers exhumed his body to take casts of his face and hands, and
cut lockets of hair. In 1507 the canon Lorenz Beheim joked to Pirckheimer
about their mutual friend, while hinting at an emotional entanglement: ‘The
obstacle is his pointed beard, which doubtless has to be waved and curled
every single day. But his boy [assistant], I know, loathes his beard; thus he
had better be careful to shave’.18 In 1509–10 Dürer published some poems
and when the secretary to Nuremberg city council derided them, he countered
by calling himself the ‘hairy, bearded painter’.19 In the self-portrait of 1500,
individual strands are depicted with filigree fineness and the colours range
from precious gold and silver to brown and black. At the central parting, a
long lock of hair has been looped and tied in a circle. His clothes are luxury
items lovingly delineated.
Because of his richly ornamented, proffered beauty, Dürer’s self-image
recalls aspects of the bride and bridegroom in the Song of Songs. Here we
find several rapturous celebrations of hair, by both the bride and the
bridegroom: ‘Your tresses are like flocks of gazelles’ (4: 1); ‘You have
wounded my heart, sister, with one of your eyes and with one hair of your
neck’ (4: 9); ‘His head is like the finest gold; his locks are like the shoots of
palm-trees / fir-trees, and black as a raven’ (5: 11).20 Biblical commentators,
in interpretations that would surely have appealed to Dürer, claimed that the
hair signified thoughts. Gregory the Great believed that hair was the external
manifestation of the flux of spiritual thoughts;for the Venerable Bede curls are
‘thoughts that do not dissipate but stay governed by rules’.21 So this is not the
self-portrait of the artist as proto-hippy, but as supremely fertile and versatile
thinker, who even sports an ‘O’-shaped locket. At precisely this time, Dürer
had become more interested in art theory, especially human proportions.
When he painted this self-portrait, he may even have had a specific
passage from the Song of Songs in mind. The bride explains how the
bridegroom came to her house during the night to tell her he has to depart:

I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that

knocketh, saying, open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my
 undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops
of the night. I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? (5: 2–3).

We have the dark background, the shiny dark hair, the fiddling with a coat, the
reverential stare…
This self-portrait is meant to be the last word in the artist as beauty. And
that beauty is meant to live forever. The inscriptions on the painting, placed
either side of the artist’s eyes, emphasize this. The more laconic one on
Dürer’s right – the date 1500, above Dürer’s AD logo, here making a pun on
Anno Domini – prompts thoughts about eschatological time, and the second
coming of Christ; the chattier, more localized inscription to Dürer’s left – ‘I,
Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg painted myself thus, with undying colour, at the
age of twenty-eight years’ – suggests the picture will never fade.
Initially the painting’s reception seems to have been enthusiastic. Conrad
Celtis, the German poet laureate, had written an epigram about it by the end
of 1500.22 At an unknown date it was put on display in Nuremberg’s town
hall, alongside sculpted and painted portraits of the great and good, which
had populated the building ever since its construction in 1332–4.23 Visitors
record its presence there later in the century, with particular praise given to
the hair by the Dutch art historian Karel van Mander. Dürer painted some of
the town hall in 1520/1, and in 1526 he donated his two panels of the
Apostles to the city fathers. A portrait of his elderly mother Barbara would
later be installed, too. It is probably the first portable self-portrait to be
publicly displayed.
Nonetheless, it had no significant artistic progeny until the nineteenth
century. Whereas his other painted self-portraits in half profile from two
altarpieces were reproduced in the seventeenth century, it was not until 1811
that a reproductive print seems to have appeared. The writer Goethe later
described the face of Christ in a fifteenth-century German painting of St
Veronica as ‘frightening, Medusa-like’,24 and Dürer’s self-portrait may have
inspired similar feelings. Its static, hieratic format may have looked crude
and its austere opulence almost medieval in the era of Titian and van Dyck.
Even if Dürer’s self-portrait had been displayed in Nuremberg’s Great
Hall shortly after it was made, it would not, strictly speaking, be the first
independent self-portrait to receive such an accolade. Indeed, the idea may
have come from a bust-length self-portrait by the Umbrian artist Perugino
displayed in the council room of the banker’s guild in Perugia, the Collegio
del Cambio. The self-portrait is part of an elaborate allegorical fresco cycle
started in around 1496 and completed in 1500. Depicted on the walls and
ceiling are classical gods and heroes; the planetary deities; the four Christian
virtues; prophets and sibyls; and, on a wall of their own, the Nativity and
Transfiguration of Christ. The iconography and the Latin inscriptions were
devised by a Perugian humanist, Francesco Maturanzio, but Perugino is
definitely the star of the show (there is, as far as we know, no portrait or
verbal acknowledgment of Maturanzio). Perugino’s self-portrait is painted in
fresco like a framed easel painting that hangs on a cord strung with marble
beads fixed to a central painted pilaster. It appears as though the members of
the Collegio have acquired or commissioned a self-portrait of Perugino, and
have given it pride of place in their council chamber.

Perugino, Self-Portrait between Famous Men of Antiquity, 1496–1500, fresco, Collegio del Cambio,
Perugia

Beneath the self-portrait is a framed Latin inscription extolling the artist:

PIETRO PERUGINO OUTSTANDING

PAINTER.
IF THE ART OF PAINTING WERE LOST
 HE WOULD BRING IT BACK.
IF NO ONE HAD INVENTED IT
HE WOULD DO SO.

Another framed inscription on a pilaster on the opposite wall gives the date
1500, the likely completion date of the whole fresco cycle.
When he worked on the Collegio del Cambio, Perugino was one of the
leading artists not just of Italy, but of Europe, sought after by powerful
patrons and very highly paid. He had included himself as a bystander in
religious scenes painted for a church in Perugia, and on the wall of the
Sistine Chapel, Rome (1481–2), whose decoration he probably
masterminded, and which made his name. From 1500–5, Isabella d’Este tried
desperately to secure an allegorical painting from him for which she had
drawn up a detailed plan. This transaction produced an extensive three-way
correspondence between the fiercely independent-minded artist, the micro-
managing Isabella and her agents. Isabella is informed that Perugino is
incorrigible, and behaves as if he were Giotto – presumably the Giotto of
Lorenzo de’ Medici’s monument.
Perugino’s confidence and originality had been brilliantly shown in a
half-length depiction of the martyrdom of St Sebastian (c. 1493–4). The
naked saint is transfixed by a single arrow, which projects from the left side
of his neck, producing a trickle of blood. However, it is far from a
conventional arrow, for it is formed from a thin line of letters: PETRAUS
PERUGINUS PINXIT. Perugino implicates himself as a sinner – albeit an
immensely powerful one – by virtue of having restaged the martyrdom in his
art. This is one of a number of dramatized, interactive signatures that appear
in Italian and German art in the years around 1500, where the signature
becomes a major protagonist, rather than being confined to the border, or
being ‘inert’.25
In the Collegio self-portrait, Perugino looks straight out unerringly, across
to the tribunal’s bench and the allegorical sculpture of Justice, as if waiting
to hear their considered opinion of his work. It is far from being an idealized
portrait – his face is plump with a double chin and ruddy complexion – but
he is supremely attentive and focused. His vigilant expression, with lowered
eyelids and downturned mouth, is determined to the point of truculence,
while his wavy shoulder-length hair is dashingly unkempt. The blue
monochrome background, his bright red cap and simple black robe give the
image a heraldic clarity and austerity.
Perugino places himself at the central, pivotal point of a diptych
comprising two frescoes with arched tops (a lunette). Two Virtues are placed
in the lunette, with six antique heroes below. Above and to his right, where
his head turns, female allegories of Prudence and Justice sit on a fluffy
cloud-bank hovering over a panoramic, soft-focus pastoral landscape that
continues into the neighbouring lunette.
Prudence holds an astonishing sceptre, topped by a bulbous circle of
convex mirrors, towards which she points. She explains in the accompanying
inscription that she undertakes the search for truth and for hidden causes, and
that if her example is followed, nothing will be done incorrectly. Her head is
angled in the general direction of Socrates – who theorized that mirrors were
invented so man might know himself – as if to imply they have a particular
affinity. Prudence’s sceptre is the most elaborate mirror artefact yet seen in
painting. It suggests she has panoramic, 360-degree vision, and this same
compound-eye vision is being claimed by Perugino, both through the
encyclopaedic range of figures included in the fresco cycle, and in the
evanescent panoramic landscape that stretches out far behind him to right and
left. His intent frontal gaze in the self-portrait has the Albertian effect of
saying: ‘I may be looking hard at you but I have eyes in the back of my head,
and that’s how I saw and painted the whole landscape’. This is the first self-
portrait in which a landscape background underscores the painter’s own
depth and breadth of vision. Vasari recognized the revolutionary quality of
Perugino’s landscapes, and so too did the Victorian critic John Ruskin: ‘he
carried the glory of his luminous distance far beyond all his predecessors’.26
But it is also the notional portability of Perugino’s ‘framed’ self-portrait that
underscores his ocular ubiquity. Rather than being fixed into the wall, the
painting is merely hung, so it can be moved and set up in different
environments – just like St Luke’s miraculous icon of the Virgin.

Another key aspect of the artist’s heroization in the years around 1500 is the
appearance of self-portraits depicting the artist as a boy or young man. The
myth of the male child prodigy, who either outstrips his teachers or else has
no teachers apart from nature, would become an abiding theme of artistic
biographies and autobiographies during the Renaissance, when the
idealization of boys and boyhood became very fashionable.27 As we have
seen, Sir Agamanor, hero of Jean Froissart’s fourteenth-century verse
romance Méliador, was nine years old when he started to paint, and only
three years later, at the ripe old age of twelve, surpassed his teachers who
were professional painters (according to Cennini, the ideal apprentice spent
thirteen years in his master’s workshop, from the age of ten to twenty-three).
Stories told about Giotto hold out the possibility of dramatic social
mobility for the talented. In Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentaries, Giotto’s
childhood marks the dawn of painting:

The art of painting began to arise in Etruria in a village called

Vespignano, near the city of Florence. There was born a boy of
wonderful talent, who was drawing a sheep from life [when] the
painter Cimabue, passing by on the road to Bologna, saw the lad
seated on the ground, drawing on a slab of rock.

Cimabue is impressed, and ‘perceiving his skill came from nature’, visits
Giotto’s father and asks if he can take the talented child with him. The rest is
history, as Giotto superseded his master and reinvented painting.28 All the
basics of the standard child prodigy myth are here, from the chance discovery
of the child, to the innate talent and the ultimate superseding of the teacher.
Chance discoveries of youthful genius had been common mythological
staples, as are stories of youthful precociousness (for example, Hercules
strangling the snakes in his cradle). The Romans had believed there was
sometimes a sacred aspect to the simplicity of childhood, and that the
gestures and words of children could be coded prophecies.29 Isidore of
Seville, in his great compendium of etymologies (c. 615–30), believed that
the Latin for ‘boy’, puer, derived from purus, meaning ‘pure’, and that
pueritia (boyhood) lasted from the age of seven to fourteen.30 Miraculous
precociousness is almost compulsory in saints’ lives, and would become
ever more so in the life of Christ. St Luke, who specialized in Christ’s
childhood, has him, at the age of twelve:
 in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors [of divinity], both
hearing them and asking them questions. And all that heard him were
astonished at his understanding and answers. (2: 46–7)

In the fifteenth century, when there was an upsurge of interest in the education
and wellbeing of boys, Christ’s childhood was fleshed out even further, and
his exploits became even more miraculous. In numerous artworks, the Virgin
is shown either teaching her baby how to read, or else he is reading unaided.
These ideas were not only applied to Christ and the saints. In 1459, the ten-
year-old Lorenzo de’ Medici was described as a ‘manly little boy, a wise
head on young shoulders’ after his leading role in assuring the triumph of
Cupid in a masque held in honour of the son of the Duke of Milan.31 The
addition of visual artists to the elite tribe of the precocious would attest to
their improved status – or, at the very least, their increasing boastfulness.
Dürer’s first three surviving self-portraits, dated 1484, 1491–2 and 1493,
seek to establish his precocious power in different ways. They insist that for
this youthful maker of images, work is not toil – punishment for original sin –
or the slow accumulation of expertise. Precocious art is always, as it were,
created out of thin air, with a quasi-divine effortlessness.32
Self-Portrait at the Age of Thirteen (1484) is a meticulous silverpoint
study in which we see the fresh-faced boy half-length and side-on. His right
arm is raised, and he points horizontally out of the side of the picture at some
‘off stage’ entity with the elegantly elongated forefinger of his right hand. As
Dürer was born on 21 May 1471 – that is, nearly five months, or half way
through the year – it would be perfectly possible to call it Self-Portrait at
the Age of Twelve (for some unknown reason art historians have settled on
thirteen). This title would make much more sense of the picture’s
portentousness. ‘Twelve’ gives it a grandiose symbolic resonance – just as
‘1500 AD’ does on the Munich self-portrait.
 Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait at the Age of Thirteen, 1484, silverpoint on paper

Dürer inscribed it at an unknown later date: ‘This I drew myself from a

mirror in the year 1484, when I was still a child. Albrecht Dürer’. It is the
first document in what would become an ambitious project of self-
commemoration. In 1524, aged fifty-three, and only four years before his
death, he wrote a family history using notes and documents preserved by his
father, and this self-portrait must have been one of those lovingly preserved
documents. The pose is closely modelled on a self-portrait by the father, in
which the goldsmith is seen side-on proffering a statuette with his right hand,
while the left hand is hidden from view. The self-portrait was surely a task
set for the son by the proud father, and destined to take its place in the family
archive. His talented son, still at this stage training to be a goldsmith, already
depicts himself as an instructor rather than a fabricator.
The Dürer family project is remarkably similar to that of Ghiberti, who
also trained as a goldsmith. Ghiberti’s Commentaries featured
autobiography, a history of art and theoretical treatises. Dürer the younger
would also write treatises on proportion and perspective. Ghiberti
emphasized the father-son relationship, placing his own self-portrait and a
similar one of his son, whom he trained, next to each other on the Baptistery
doors (see Chapter 3).
The fact that we know Dürer’s birthday, and that he flaunts precise dates
in his self-portraits, is of great importance. During the fifteenth century,
merchants, especially in Nuremberg and Florence, increasingly wrote family
histories, and were noting down birthdays, whereas in previous centuries
only the date of death was accurately recorded – the Paduan humanist
Albertino Mussato (1261–1321) is the first European since antiquity known
to have celebrated his own birthday: in 1317 he wrote a poem ‘Whether His
Birthday Ought To Be Celebrated or Not’.33 Alberti, in his book On the
Family, recommended that every father note with care the exact day, month,
year, hour and place of birth of each child.34 This had a bureaucratic and
legal purpose insofar as it made it easier to ascertain when children had
come of age, and could therefore occupy public posts and pay taxes; but it
also fostered a greater self-consciousness about an individual’s personal
history and development. Accurate astrological predictions could be made
about the individual’s present and future.
With the young Dürer’s slightly wide-eyed, visionary stare, and his
mysterious pointing gesture, he has something about him of the scryer’s
assistant, the puer purus who looks in the mirror with his clear eyes for
revelations, and then points to the person he has seen within. However, the
prime motivation of Dürer – and of his father – must have been to make the
pose echo that of the twelve-year-old Christ debating with the doctors.35
Even at the age of twelve the artist seems to measure himself against Christ –
and does not find himself wanting.
A more militant ideal of boyhood flourished in Florence in the 1490s, and
may have inspired two artists in their twenties, Michelangelo and Giorgione,
to identify with the boy David in his battle with Goliath. A mobilization of
boy vigilantes occurred in Florence in the late 1490s when the Dominican
Prior of San Marco, Girolamo Savonarola, was the dominant figure in
Florentine politics and society. Religious companies for boys had been
established in Florence at the beginning of the fifteenth century, reflecting a
new interest in their education, but from around 1496 until his burning at the
stake in 1498 Savonarola turned these groups into a unified moral police
force. They were God’s elect, guardian angels entrusted with upbraiding and
reforming their weak and debauched ‘fathers’. Their policing activities could
and did turn violent. Michelangelo compared himself to David in a poetic
couplet inscribed on a drawn study for marble and bronze statues of the
biblical hero that he made in 1501–4. Just as David overcame insuperable
odds to defeat Goliath with his sling, so would Michelangelo in making his
statues with his bow (drill). The outstretched arm of David in the sketch is
analogous to Michelangelo’s own arm, as he draws and writes.
A new phase in self-portraiture begins with Self-Portrait as David with
the Head of Goliath (c. 1505–10) by the short-lived Venetian painter
Giorgione da Castelfranco (1477/8–1510). Previous painters had almost
exclusively produced religious works, with the most successful receiving
large-scale public commissions for church or state. But Giorgione worked
primarily for sophisticated private patrons, producing intimate cabinet
pictures with secular subject matter that is deliberately esoteric. He made
landscape, weather and lighting key protagonists of several pictures, using
them to create the prevailing mood. His pictures seem expressly designed to
provoke discussion and reverie.
 Michelangelo, Study for a Bronze David, c. 1501–4, pen and brown ink

His self-portrait survives as a cut down canvas that shows only the head
and shoulders of David. The appearance of the original work is known from
a later engraving (in reverse, without the chiaroscuro, and with a light
background) by Wenzel Hollar that is inscribed: ‘True portrait of Giorgione
da Castelfranco made by himself and praised in Vasari’s book’. Here, the
courageous shepherd boy David appears to be wearing the armour he was
given by Jonathan after defeating Goliath. He rests his left hand on the
severed head of Goliath, which he has deposited on a parapet. His fingers
grip Goliath’s thick wavy hair.
 Giorgione, Self-Portrait as David, c. 1505–10, oil on canvas

Giorgione probably identified with David not only because of his

precocious bravery, but also because he was a musician and a lover of
women. At any rate, this is how Vasari describes the artist: ‘[He] took
unceasing delight in the joys of love; and the sound of the lute gave him
marvellous pleasure’.36 David was famous for his musical talents – he
played the harp (a viol is sometimes shown in sixteenth-century art) and was
infamous for his adulterous affair with Bathsheba.
Giorgione’s David turns his head sharply towards us. Some have seen
this as a defiant gesture. Yet the mood is sultrily sensuous and melancholy,
almost as if, at the moment of his first triumph, he were already conscious of
the snares that lay in wait. The dark background of the portrait contributes to
the brooding atmosphere. St Augustine saw David as marking the transition
from adolescence to manhood of God’s people,37 but in Giorgione’s painting,
it is as though a boyish clarity of vision is becoming clouded by experience.
David’s face is sharply divided by the light that falls from his right, casting
the left side into darkness, and his polished armour is divided into light and
dark segments, a mirror of his mixed state. In Venice, it was fashionable for
youths who were not soldiers to go around in armour. So now we have a
wholly new type of hero – the soulful soldier, the giant killer who is also a
reflective mirror-man.
The brilliant play of contrasts may have inspired a pictorial analogy
made by Baldassare Castiglione in his great conduct book, The Courtier
(1528), which was begun in around 1508. Just as a good painter juxtaposes
light and dark, and puts contrasting colours and figures together, and by so
doing makes each component stand out with greater intensity and beauty, so a
courtier who is a brilliant fighter and soldier should be mild-mannered and
unboastful. By this ‘honest dissembling’, his various virtues will appear all
the greater.
Michelangelo and Giorgione’s identification with the boy David suggests
a new, more iconoclastic conception of art, where the young overthrow the
old, and where genius is innate rather than learned. Nothing is known about
Giorgione’s conception of himself as an artist, but his self-portrait is first
noted in a collection famous for its antiquities. It may be that the head of
Goliath, displayed on a shelf-like ledge, is a surrogate antique fragment, and
Giorgione is saying, ‘I have slain and surpassed antiquity’. Michelangelo in
his later years derided his teacher Ghirlandaio, claiming he taught him
nothing, and he frequently used martial metaphors to describe the art-making
process – guilt-free equivalents of Perugino’s identification with an arrow.38
Yet a more reverential ideal of boyhood, in which a boy felt ‘platonic’
love for an older man, had also come to the fore in late fifteenth-century
Florence. The most influential and elevated account came in the philosopher
Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love (1474),
which had been written for Lorenzo de’ Medici and was the first of many
Renaissance treatises on love.39 It was Ficino who coined the term ‘platonic
love’.40 While the ‘beloved youth’ offered beauty, the man offered wisdom.
The same sort of transaction could occur in art education, between pupil and
master, and would be mutually inspiring. The famously beautiful Raphael
made a self-portrait drawing and a painting as a ‘beloved youth’ with doe-
like uplifted eyes, radically reducing his age in the process. But the most
astonishing ‘beloved youth’ image is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c.
1524) by Parmigianino (1503–40). The twenty-one-year-old artist brought
the painting with him to Rome in 1524 as a gift and calling card for the newly
elected Medici pope, Clement VII, then forty-six. It is a middle-aged platonic
lover’s dream.

Raphael, Self-Portrait, c. 1506, oil on poplar

 Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, c. 1524, oil on panel

A tour de force of technical and conceptual ingenuity, it is the most

famous of all Italian self-portraits, and was described in unusual detail by
Vasari. The wooden support for the self-portrait is gently convex: 24.1 cm
(nearly 9½ in.) wide, it is 1.8 cm (nearly three-quarters of an inch) deep at
the centre. The room in which the artist sits has the voided austerity of a
monk’s cell. The optical distortion turns the single window on the left into a
roof light, suggesting an attic designed for thoughts of higher things. But this
artist is no monk. Rather he belongs to the physical and intellectual
aristocracy, an ideal of the cultivated and elegantly dressed painter put
forward by Leonardo and – in relation to courtiers – by Castiglione. He is a
priceless work of art, with his flawlessly pale skin, flowing chestnut hair,
chestnut eyes and cushion lips fractionally parted. His oval face is
miraculously immune to optical distortion.
The work is usually dated to 1524, which would make the artist twenty-
one. But in the self-portrait (as in two other self-portrait drawings of this
period),41 he has given himself the face of a child who has not begun to
shave. As such, it may have been passed off as the self-portrait of a child
prodigy painted many years before.42 Raphael had died four years earlier in
Rome – because of a fever brought on by excessive love-making, according
to Vasari – and Parmigianino’s self-portrait proposes himself as a new
‘platonic’ Raphael.
The self-portrait’s pièce de résistance is the depiction of the artist’s
massively magnified (left) hand. This lies on a parapet-style table in the
foreground, languid and etiolated as a Venetian reclining nude. The fact that
this is his left hand (Parmigianino was right-handed) is important because in
the courtly love tradition the left hand is pre-eminent. Rings given by lovers
were supposed to be placed on the little finger of the left hand because (for
right-handers) the left hand is ‘unused’ and therefore unsullied. For the
Pope’s poetry-writing father Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ultimate privilege was
to be offered his lady’s left hand, and he even urged everyone to strive to
become left-handed.43 In relation to a Medici pope, and to other prospective
patrons, Parmigianino’s proffered left hand is the pure ‘platonic’ hand of
love and service.
Vasari’s glowing description of this tour de force is longer than that of
any other portrait – excepting the Mona Lisa. So too is his account of the
portrait’s owners. He had first seen the painting in his youth in Arezzo, when
it was in the collection of the writer Pietro Aretino, a gift from the Pope.
From Aretino it passed into the collection of the medallist Valerio Belli, then
based in Vicenza. It was clearly a desirable commodity but (to the Pope and
Aretino at any rate) perhaps also a novelty whose appeal, like the
youthfulness it depicted, did not last.
During the 1550s, the production of child prodigy self-portraits would be
turned into a cottage industry by Amilcare Anguissola, a nobleman from the
small northern Italian city of Cremona, then under Spanish control. In 1566
Vasari paid him a visit. The celebrated artist and art historian was
researching the second edition of the Lives, published two years later, and
was there to see paintings by Amilcare’s six daughters, who had been fast-
tracked by their father into this overwhelmingly male profession, and were to
varying degrees regarded as prodigies. They mythologized their family life
by painting edifying portraits of each other.
The eldest sister, Sofonisba (c. 1532–1625), was already one of the most
famous artists of her day. She had been invited in 1559 to the court of Philip
II of Spain, to paint portraits and give art lessons to his fourteen-year-old
bride.44 Sofonisba’s fame was cemented by her numerous self-portraits,
which were sent by her father as calling cards to potential patrons, and
painted on commission. In several, she looks even younger than Raphael and
Parmigianino, and much more cultivated. She was the most prolific maker of
self-portraits before Rembrandt: at least twelve survive; perhaps another
seven are lost.45 Most were made in Cremona during her teens and twenties.
Vasari was impressed by one he saw in the nearby city of Piacenza, in the
house of the archdeacon, whose portrait she had painted. Vasari does not say
if both of Sofonisba’s paintings were displayed side by side, but if they were
– as seems highly likely – it would be one of the first recorded instances of a
self-portrait being displayed next to a portrait by the same artist.
The circumstances of the Anguissola sisters were unprecedented. Few
women practised as painters and those that did were almost invariably the
daughters of painters. But Amilcare encouraged all his daughters to paint,
and Sofonisba and Lucia were apprenticed to local portrait painters. Because
women were not allowed to study anatomy, perspective or do life drawing,
they tended to specialize in minor genres such as portraiture. Castiglione had
recommended drawing and painting as a suitable pastime to noble women.
And there does then seem to have been an upsurge of women painters in the
middle years of the century, just as there was with women poets. Vasari
mentioned only one female artist in the first, 1550, edition of the Lives (the
sculptress Properzia de’ Rossi), but thirteen are mentioned in the expanded
1568 edition, with a specially warm mention for the Anguissola sisters.
Increasing demand for portraits must also have improved the prospects for
women painters. When the Milanese painter and art theorist Giovanni Paolo
Lomazzo wrote the first extended discussions of portraiture in his Trattato
dell’arte della pittura (1584), he complained that so many people now
wanted to be immortalized that ‘any crude dauber [could] set up as a
portraitist’.46
Amilcare created such demand for Sofonisba’s self-portraits that he
effectively became the world’s first dealer in self-portraits. The family was
not well off, and he could scarcely have afforded dowries for six daughters,
so the potential profits from painting must have been an incentive for him –
and for any future husband. He was evidently a wheeler-dealer. On 23
December 1558 Annibale Caro, a distinguished poet and translator of
Virgil’s Aeneid, wrote to thank Amilcare for letting him visit the family home
and experience the ‘virtues’ of his ‘honoured’ daughters, especially
Sofonisba. He gladly accepts the offer of a self-portrait (a Christmas
present?), an honour which even princes are unlikely to receive. He then
states, for the first time in print, what has become a truism about self-
portraiture:

Nothing do I desire more than the effigy of Sofonisba herself, so that I

can simultaneously show two marvels together, the work, and the
artist.47

Unfortunately, Amilcare took it back after only seven months, probably

because Caro had offered only honeyed words rather than hard cash.
Sofonisba’s early self-portraits emphasize her status as a virginal yet
bookish child. A painting of 1554 is probably the earliest signed and dated
independent self-portrait in Italian art, and features the first book to be
included in a self-portrait – a tribute to the high literacy levels of women,
especially in the vernacular.48 She gives herself the large cat-like eyes and
oval face of a beautiful child. She looks even younger in an oval miniature
from the same period, which rivals Parmigianino’s in its intellectual
ambition and wit – and its shape. It is usually entitled Self-Portrait Holding
a Medallion (c. 1556), but the circular artefact is far too big to be a
medallion, and it covers her entire torso ‘like a large shield’.49 It is inscribed
in gold with large letters interlaced into a mysterious monogram, surrounded
by bunches of grapes. The best explanation is that they make up the letters of
her father’s name, AMILCARE. Her own longer Latin inscription
circumnavigates the border, but in smaller letters: ‘Painted from a mirror
with her own hand by the Cremonese virgin Sofonisba Anguissola’.50
The ‘medallion’ may be a large steel convex mirror, and what we see is
its inscribed and decorated back. Putting her father’s name to the mirror
would imply that he is its rightful owner, controlling access to it, and that he
is her rightful owner (which legally he was). What this simultaneously
asserts is her childlike innocence and dependence, and her precociousness.
Her father’s ownership of the mirror, and her willingness to advertise his
ownership, would prove she is no vain Venus (or Parmigianino), staring at
her own mirror image all day. Perhaps her large output of self-portraits had
brought criticism. Here the mirror conceals her body as much as it reveals it,
by blocking our view of her torso.
Portrait miniatures were often exchanged by lovers and, protected by
covers, they were worn next to the heart. In Shakespeare’s Merchant of
Venice, Bassanio finds a miniature of his beloved Portia, and is jealous of
the painter’s intimacy with the sitter:

Fair Portia’s Countefeit. What demi-god

hath come so near creation? .... Here, in her hairs
The painter plays the spider, and hath woven
A golden mesh to entrap the hearts of men

Sofonisba has refused to ‘play the spider’ with her own hair, à la Dürer, for
it is tied back leaving no stray or loose hairs. The only place where she has
played the spider is with the letters of her father’s name, which together
create a golden tangled mesh that seems to entrap her own heart. This willing
state of entrapment may be symbolized by the grapes, which suggest she is
almost mystically intoxicated by her father.
She renounced the role of precocious daddy’s girl in around 1559, shortly
before leaving for Spain. In an ingenious double portrait she depicts her
former teacher Bernardino Campi painting her portrait. She acknowledges
his role in ‘creating’ her and in shaping her career, but the half-length portrait
he is painting is much larger than life-size. She is on a much bigger scale than
he, and her head is higher. She is also positioned in the centre of the
composition, with Campi at the margins. She is a giantess among painters, an
enthroned personification of painting.
 Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait Holding a Medallion, c. 1556, varnished watercolour on
parchment

We have traced the ‘heroization’ of the artist in self-portraiture from the

1490s; in the next chapter we see how this heroization licensed its polar
opposite – the mock-heroic self-portrait – often made by the very same
artists who had made heroic self-portraits.
5.
MOCK-HEROIC SELF-PORTRAITS

Caravaggio, Self-Portrait as Sick Bacchus, 1594 (detail), see full picture

THE SELF-PORTRAITS DISCUSSED so far tend to show the artists at their best,
and even if the artists are prostrate (St Dunstan), overburdened (Rufillus and
Kraft) or over-stimulated (Alberti), they are well turned out.
During the course of the sixteenth century, a sub-genre emerges in which
self-abnegation and self-mockery reach unprecedented extremes. A de-
idealization process takes place, for both comic and tragic effect. We can no
longer be sure the artist will be saved from damnation – or just plain
ridicule. By the artist’s own account he may not be competent; he may be
over the hill.
A major catalyst for this is the heroization of the artist that occurs in the
years around 1500. The status and wealth of the very best artists – at least in
Italy – did markedly improve, and Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian died
bedecked with honours and extremely rich, on a par with the minor nobility.
The visual arts were discussed in Castiglione’s The Courtier, and the
traditional claim that they were mechanical refuted; stories from Pliny about
the prestige of the arts in antiquity are related, especially that of Apelles’s
intimate relationship with Alexander the Great, and Pliny’s claim that in
antiquity drawing was classified as a ‘free art’ which no slave could
practise. Castiglione’s ideal courtier has to learn how to draw, and to have a
good understanding of the ‘rare’ art of painting, which can represent every
aspect of nature. Castiglione was a close friend of Raphael, who twice
painted his portrait.
The mutual respect that might exist between painter and patron prompted
an epistolary tour de force in 1543, when the poet Claudio Tolomei wrote to
Sebastiano del Piombo (c. 1485–1547), who had succeeded Raphael as the
leading portrait painter for Rome’s elite:

I don’t know whether I’ve been prompted by ambition, vanity, or a

mixture of both. You know how many times you yourself have said
you wanted to paint my portrait. When, as I hope, this is
accomplished, then I will seem to have gained a mirror, which I will
always call a divine mirror, because in it I will see you and me
together. You, because I will perceive in my image your singular
ability and your marvellous skill; me, because I will see my image
expressed vividly in your art, which will constantly stimulate me to
purge my soul of its many defects…it will fire my soul with a fine
desire for honour and glory.1

The portrait is, in effect, a double portrait – a mirror of the artist and a
mirror of Tolomei.
Aggrandizement of the artist could license its polar opposite –
debasement and a vision of the world turned upside down. Self-mockery and
self-laceration is a perk afforded to the supremely confident. Only emperors,
kings and nobles have fools, and the powerful prove their wisdom, urbanity
and invulnerability by tolerating laughter. Castiglione’s ideal courtier also
needs to be witty, and he devotes a long section to jokes. Alberti’s flying
eyes are witty; and so too Mantegna’s stony features woven into the
grotesque plant decoration. Sebastiano del Piombo, in a characteristically
droll letter to Michelangelo, suggests he recycles a depiction of Ganymede
as St John of the Apocalypse. The ready wit of Renaissance artists
distinguishes them from their classical forebears: there are few jokes in
Pliny. The historian and great portrait collector Paolo Giovio (1483–1552)
ranked artists with wits.2
The mock-heroic occurs with far more intensity and intimacy in self-
portraiture than in portraiture. Sitters for portraits understandably enough
wanted to look their best – fare figura. The impossibility of painting a non-
idealized portrait is the subject of a ‘portrait’ by Michelangelo Cerquozzi
(1602–60), famous for his pictures of battles and Roman street life. As we
know from the inscription, the portrait shows a much-loved, Tolomei-style
connoisseur (‘virtuoso amato’). He is a dapper youth holding out a piece of
paper with a flourish. Turn the picture round, and on the reverse Cerquozzi
has painted the same scene from behind the sitter, and now, looking out at us,
we see a grotesque self-portrait of the craven money-grabbing painter
grinning and wearing the crown of Midas.3
Michelangelo, who created both heroic and anti-heroic self-portraits,
was, along with his many other accomplishments, a distinguished poet who
alternated between an elevated Petrarchan style of love poetry, and a low
buffooning burlesque. His first patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, had done the
same in his own poetry. These styles are usually kept apart, rather than mixed
in the same poem, although the vocabulary and sound effects of
Michelangelo’s ‘high’ style are harsher than those of his contemporaries, and
make him the most congenial of Italian Renaissance poets to modern tastes.
Michelangelo’s most famous burlesque poem was written while he was
painting the second half of the Sistine ceiling (1508–12). It was addressed to
an unknown ‘Giovanni’, and is accompanied by a caricatural self-portrait.
In the sonnet, Michelangelo complains of the physical contortions he has
to make while standing on the scaffolding. He’s grown a goitre, his chin
‘points to heaven’, and ‘I feel the nape of my neck on my hump’. The paint
drips onto his face making it ‘a richly decorated floor…I cannot see where to
put my feet’. His skin is stretched and wrinkled, and he is no longer master of
a bow, but the slave: ‘I bend myself like a [semi-circular] Syrian bow’.
Inevitably, he paints badly:

the thoughts that arise in my mind are false and strange, for one shoots
badly through a crooked barrel. Defend my dead painting, from now
on, Giovanni, and my honour, for I am not well placed, nor indeed a
painter.4

We are a long way from Leonardo’s idealized image of the painter, sitting
before the easel in his finest clothes, listening to music. This is more like
Leonardo’s caricature of the sculptor, his face ‘plastered and powdered all
over with marble dust which makes him look like a baker’.5 According to his
biographer Ascanio Condivi, Michelangelo’s eyesight was temporarily
damaged by the four-year ordeal, and for a while he had to hold letters above
his head in order to read them. Even in the summer of 1509 he had
complained to his father of unhappiness and illness because of overwork.
His father informed him that a rumour had spread in Florence that he was
dead. In the poem, his painting is ‘dead’, too.
This is quite a contrast to the confidence of the poetic couplet written next
to a sketch for his statues of David (see Chapter 4). He does seem to have
reveled in choreographing these melodramatic mood-changes, passing from
militant certainty to savage self-pity.
 Michelangelo, Sonnet with Self-Portrait Caricature, 1508–12, pen and brown ink

In the full-length self-portrait sketch accompanying his poetic lament on

painting the ceiling he shows himself in disfigured action. His bottom,
stomach and neck are distended, his facial features summarily indicated. He
is elongated, and looks as though he has been suspended from the ceiling by
his painting hand.6 Having said that, Michelangelo does not mention or depict
his famously squashed nose, broken in a fight with a fellow artist. Indeed, he
doesn’t look quite as bad as we imagined he would from the poem.
What Michelangelo is painting overhead is even more caricatural – a
naked crouching figure with four strands of electroshock sticky-up hair, and a
goofy round-eyed, open-mouthed face. Michelangelo surely intends this
diabolical gargoyle to be his alter ego, and he was certainly interested in the
idea that ‘every painter paints himself’. He uses the trope in two poems,
threatening to make an ugly portrait of a cruel mistress if she continues to
make him ugly through grief.7 Vasari quotes him as saying that Gentile da
Fabriano’s paintings lived up to his name (i.e. ‘gentile’ – refined); and, on
being asked why a certain painter ‘had made the ox more lifelike than the
rest’, Michelangelo quipped: ‘Any painter can make a good portrait of
himself’.
A wonderfully perceptive illustration of Michelangelo’s anecdote was
later made by the Florence-based English caricaturist and landscape painter
Thomas Patch (1725–82). Patch gave his own face to the body of an ox lying
down in a field with a bell around its neck and with a view of Florence in the
background. A biblical inscription – ‘he that humbleth himself shall be
exalted’ (Luke 14: 11) – is a riposte to those who deride practitioners of
‘low’ genres. But it can stand as a motto for all those who allow themselves
to be laughed at. Indeed, Christ himself was the supreme ‘Holy Fool’, the
God who became man in order to endure mockery and suffering.
By being sardonically self-deprecating, and by presenting himself as
filthy and deformed, Michelangelo makes himself the inheritor of Giotto’s
mantle. Giotto was the archetype of the witty yet modest artist, never at a loss
for the mot juste and the clever put down.8 In Boccaccio’s story collection
the Decameron (c. 1350), which featured recognizable contemporaries, he is
physically ugly, and mud-spattered after being caught in a torrential
downpour but still firing off quips.9 The ostensible purpose is to show that
nature ‘has frequently planted astonishing genius in men of monstrously ugly
appearance’. We are meant to respond in similar fashion to Michelangelo’s
verbal and visual self-portrait. It panders to the Renaissance taste for
paradox and polarities.
 Thomas Patch, Self-Portrait as an Ox, 1768–9, etching

Vasari tells a marvellous anecdote about the cultivation of stylistic

ineptness by the young Michelangelo and his Florentine contemporaries:

In his youth, being once with his painter friends, they played for a
supper for him who should make a figure most completely wanting in
design and clumsy, after the likeness of the puppet figures which those
make who know nothing, scrawling upon walls; and in this he availed
himself of his memory, for he remembered having seen one of those
absurdities on a wall, and drew it exactly as if he had had it before
him, and thus surpassed all those painters – a thing difficult for a man
so steeped in design.10

Even this stylistic slumming brings credit.

A similar sensibility informs a badly drawn figure by Giovanni
Francesco Caroto (c. 1480–1555), who spent most of his life in Verona, with
an extended stay in Milan from around 1510–15. In around 1515, Caroto
painted a small half-length portrait of a young boy with shoulder-length red
hair who turns towards us grinning. He holds up a piece of paper with a
drawing of a full-length figure, in expectation of our approbation. The joke is
that he is no child prodigy in the Dürer or Raphael mould, for this is no more
than a stiff stick figure. A slightly more sophisticated profile image of an eye
has been drawn at the side, as if an adult has been trying to help him.
The drawing must be the child’s first self-portrait. Caroto is very similar
to the Italian for carrot (carota), so it may be that the family name derived
from their orange hair (as with Rufillus), or that Caroto is using orange hair
as a comic trademark.11 Vasari says that Caroto had a son, but a mocking
portrait of his young son would hardly be witty. It is more likely to be an
imaginary or fake self-portrait of himself as a would-be child prodigy: ‘This
is me as an eight-year-old – and already a genius!’

Caricature seems to have been invented by Leonardo while working in Milan

at the ducal court. It was a courtly entertainment which demonstrated the
artist’s refined awareness of cultural, social and stylistic difference. And, of
course, his powers of observation and mastery of nature. It is not known
whether any of his grotesque heads represented particular people or were
just physiognomic types. However, Leonardo’s critical account of the motto
‘every painter paints himself’ – a lazy painter will paint lazy figures; a
devout painter figures with bowed heads – suggests he believed artists made
‘true’ self-portrait caricatures every time they painted, and that these were
instantly recognizable. The germ of the idea for caricature must have come
from this motto, and this must be why the first caricatures of known
contemporaries are self-portraits.
 Giovanni Caroto, Portrait of a Red-Headed Youth Holding a Drawing, c. 1515, oil on panel

Leonardo famously juxtaposed profile drawings of idealized youths and

grotesque old men. The contrast encapsulated his society’s suspicion and fear
of the old, and of old age – even if dying young was much more likely than
living to a ripe old age. Until the second half of the sixteenth century, artists
preferred to portray themselves in vigorous youth and maturity. When Dürer
at forty-two draws himself ailing in The Sick Dürer (1513), pointing
helpfully to the spot where it hurts, he remains a fine athletic figure of a man.
Lorenzo Ghiberti is perhaps the only fifteenth-century artist to have depicted
himself after the age of fifty, yet the seventy-year-old’s skin is unlined and he
looks far younger. This youth cult corresponds to the pattern for male
portraiture, where many were commissioned when the sitter was around
thirty-three, the ‘ideal’ age.
This pattern changes with Michelangelo, and especially with Titian, who
depict themselves as old, ugly, and no longer in total control. Age and ageing
are among their favourite topics of discussion, with their decrepitude being
brandished and perversely relished at strategic moments. Even at fifty, at the
height of his powers in the mid-1520s, Michelangelo writes in an
exaggerated fashion to an impatient patron: ‘I have many obligations, and I
am old and ill disposed, so if I work one day, I need to rest for four’.12 Titian
regularly mentions his age to patrons, and the imminence of death.
The Italian Counter-Reformation must have something to do with the
appearance of ‘extreme old age’ self-portraits, for one of its heroes was
Nicodemus, the Pharisee who came secretly by night to receive teaching from
Christ, and who assisted at his burial (John 3). On being told that a man
could only see the Kingdom of God if he is born again spiritually, Nicodemus
asked how a man can be born again when he is already old. Christ replied he
must be born again through baptism, implying that it is never too late to be
reborn. Nicodemus’s interchange with Christ was cited in a decree on
Original Sin, promulgated by the Pope in June 1546.13 Crucially, Nicodemus
was believed to be a sculptor who carved a portrait of Christ (the Volto
Santo in Lucca), so he was an appropriate role model for the penitent artist.
Michelangelo seems to have felt an acute need for visual self-mockery
when working heroically high up in the Sistine Chapel, for in his mid-sixties
he gave his own unrefined facial features to the crumpled flayed skin held up
by St Bartholomew in the Last Judgment (1536–41). He is understandably
even more stretched out than in his self-portrait caricature sketch.
Bartholomew was martyred by being flayed alive, so the skin should
logically be his own, yet there is a striking mismatch between
Bartholomew’s own features and those on the flayed skin. It was only
claimed as a self-portrait in 1925, but it has been widely accepted, and the
‘flayed’ head is a close match with a contemporary craggy portrait of
Michelangelo.14
This ‘flayed’ self-portrait is the grisly apogee of the penitential self-
portrait. St Bartholomew, holding up the butcher’s knife which was his
traditional attribute, turns to Christ as if to appeal on Michelangelo’s behalf
for pity and for admittance to the realm of the blessed (the flayed skin hangs
perilously over the zone of the damned, and the face ‘looks’ down).
Bartholomew was known in his own right as someone who weeds out
‘harmful thorns’ and ‘cuts down the forests of impiety’,15 and the implication
here is that it is he who did the purgative cutting – at Michelangelo’s request.
 At just this time, Michelangelo’s poetry is full of metaphors relating to the
shedding of skin. In a sonnet probably written for his beloved boy Tommaso
da’ Cavalieri, he praises the selflessness of the silkworm that ‘with pain and
suffering’ sheds its own covering, and ‘clothes another’s hand.’ He wishes
with morbid wit that his own dead skin could clothe Tommaso’s living skin
by being made into a gown and slippers.16 Later, the sculptural process itself
becomes a form of flaying: just as the sculptor removes the rough outer ‘skin’
of the marble block to reveal the figure within, ‘so the excess that is one’s
own flesh, with its coarse, rough, hard bark, hides some good works in the
soul which trembles under this burden’.17 Ultimately, this self-cleansing is an
‘imitation’ of Christ’s Passion, for it was believed that the scourging caused
his own skin to come away.18
Vasari claimed, in a letter of 1565, that the figure of Nicodemus in
Michelangelo’s Pietà of c. 1547–55 is a self-portrait. This colossal
sculptural group was designed to be placed over an altar in Michelangelo’s
funerary chapel. Christ’s crumpled body is barely supported by the Virgin
Mary and Mary Magdalene, who are being helped out by the giant, hooded
figure of Nicodemus. He looms large over Christ and the two Marys, his
craggy bearded face poking out from the pointed vulva-shaped opening in the
hood, ‘reborn’ at the pinnacle of a pyramidal composition. But Michelangelo
had problems with the carving, and in frustration and anger set about it with a
hammer. His assistant partially restored it, but Michelangelo-Nicodemus still
has to stand among the self-inflicted ruins. The artist-as-hero has become the
sculptor-as-failure.19
 Michelangelo, Last Judgment (detail), 1536–41, fresco, Sistine Chapel

When the great Venetian painter Titian (c. 1490–1576) paints himself in
old age his decrepitude is there for all to see.20 Titian’s first self-portraits
were made strikingly late; three made for important patrons no longer survive
(an inaccessible ‘copy’ in a private collection may be the original), but the
appearance of two is known, and Titian, while clearly elderly, appears
dignified and senatorial. Two self-portraits that do survive, both probably
kept in Titian’s home or studio, but publicized through copies, are very
different. They could be called ‘extreme old age’ self-portraits. These, and
several self-portraits inserted into other late pictures, demonstrate an acute
interest in the ageing process.21 The results are not altogether flattering, and
commentators have detected an element of caricature. Titian no longer has
strong and steady painter’s hands, and looks both unable and unwilling to
work. These self-portraits in turn became the basis for caricatures of the
artist produced after his death, making him probably the first artist to be
caricatured.
Titian’s contemporaries assumed he was much older than we do now, and
it must have been the artist who misinformed them. His death certificate said
he was 103, which would give a date of birth of 1473. The current consensus
is that he was born around 1490. His desire to be older may have been
influenced by Venice being a gerontocracy, with an elderly ruling class and
the average age of the doges being around seventy (like popes). It also
marked him out as Venetian, for Venice was famed for its large number of
healthy old people; in Venice old age legally started between fifty and sixty.22
Titian exaggerated his age more by design than by accident. He may initially
have liked the idea of being, as it were, a ‘second-childhood prodigy’.
Already in 1542 his writer friend Pietro Aretino, in relation to a gorgeous
child portrait of Clarissa Strozzi, praises the artistic miracles kept for the
‘ripeness of your old age’.23 Aretino marvels that Titian can still produce
beautiful children in his old age – something that would become the subject
of the most famous posthumous caricature of the artist, the now lost Titian
and His Mistress, a faked-up pastiche possibly by Jacopo Bassano in which
the doddering artist touches the pregnant belly of his young mistress, and
which for two centuries was believed to be an authentic self-portrait. There
were commercial reasons, too, for exaggerating his age. Most of Titian’s
letters after 1559 mention his age, often when appealing for money from
patrons (a habit that gave him a reputation for greed). By hinting he was in
his ‘ultimate old age’, he encouraged patrons to act promptly if they wanted
any more pictures.
But Titian’s two late self-portraits – despite the artist wearing fine
clothes and the gold chain given to him by his principal patron the Habsburg
Emperor Charles V of Spain, who ruled over much of Europe – tell a more
compelling story. The self-portrait that has been variously dated from the
mid-1540s to the early 1550s shows him seated in an empty room behind a
small table covered with a white cloth. His impossibly broad torso faces us,
but he averts his gaze by turning his head to his left, from where the light
comes, as if he has seen or heard something. His right hand rests on the table
top, and his left hand is lower down, presumably on his left thigh. The basic
twisting pose, and the scale of the torso, recalls Michelangelo’s heroic
seated statues of Giuliano de’ Medici and Moses.
 But there is a sluggishness and absent-mindedness about Titian. The eyes
look a little watery, the mouth a bit slack, the hands weak. Some of the
brushwork is correspondingly summary. Whereas Michelangelo’s giants look
as if they might rise at any moment, Titian seems immobilized by his large
torso, and is hemmed in by the table, beneath which his right leg must be
placed. The pose has been called ‘awkward, under-occupied’.24 It would be
all too easy to turn this into a genre scene in a tavern, in which an absent-
minded gourmand impatiently awaits his dinner. Here Titian made himself
look older and frailer than in the other self-portraits from this period, and
perhaps older than he really was – closer to the age he claimed to be. A very
similar figure, seated at a table, appears in Jacopo Bassano’s Purification of
the Temple (c. 1580). He is a moneychanger, and has been interpreted as a
satire on Titian’s greed.25 Titian may have been uneasy about his wealth, for
in his great Flaying of Marsyas (1570–6), the watching elderly figure of
Midas looks like a caricatural self-portrait.
 Titian, Self-Portrait, c. 1546–7, oil on canvas

The second self-portrait, painted in the 1560s when Titian was probably
in his seventies (nineties to his contemporaries), is a visual last rites, and
was not sold during the artist’s lifetime. It is painted in profile – an archaic
format scarcely seen in painting since the fifteenth century – and it has been
said that this ‘accentuates the sitter’s gaunt and hawkish features to an extent
almost verging on caricature’.26 He resembles one of Leonardo’s ugly old
men in profile. His right hand is tucked down at the bottom of the picture,
holding a brush. The hand, barely brushed in, seems inactive and withdrawn,
as if he has just renounced his calling. He still wears his gold chain, but it
has shrunk radically in length and thickness: worldly success now hangs by a
thin gold thread. The face and beard are thinly painted, and the weave of the
canvas shows through, giving the face a crumbly texture. At just this time,
Titian’s contemporaries doubted his desire as well as his capacity to paint.
 Titian was evidently satisfied with the picture, and recycled it in several
other works. It became his ‘official’ image. By turning/looking to his right, he
faces the side traditionally associated with all things spiritual. By contrast, in
the earlier self-portrait, with its more worldly genre-scene feel, he turns
sharply to his left. Titian’s ‘extreme old age’ self-portraits certainly helped
increase his fame. But their novelty – their frankness to the point of
grotesqueness – suggests punitive piety played an important part. The ability
to caricature one’s appearance, or to refrain from idealization, establishes a
critical distance between body and soul. Titian’s gaunt, bony features belong
to a man who is shedding his flesh.

In 1576 the Milanese physician Girolamo Cardano wrote the first warts-and-
all autobiography, describing virtues and vices, successes and failures, and
even his physical appearance, wallowing in his deformities, infirmities and
impotence. The Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) painted
two great mock-heroic self-portraits that are comparably confessional.27
They are lugubrious, but there is no hint of a spiritual pay-off for the artist:
Annibale imagines painting and painters as dead or dying things, actors in a
black comedy. The second one is of particular interest because a preparatory
drawing survives, and this is for a heroic self-portrait.
 Titian, Self-Portrait, 1560s, oil on canvas

Annibale started out sharing a studio with his elder brother Agostino and
cousin Ludovico. Annibale and his brother pioneered a return to life drawing
after the ‘mannered’ excesses of much late sixteenth-century art characterized
by convoluted (Michelangelesque) body language and lurid colours. The
brothers depicted street life and made caricatures,28 as well as being leading
religious and mythological painters. After moving to Rome in 1596 to
decorate Palazzo Farnese with mythological scenes, Annibale became the
most sought after artist of his age. But in 1605, on completion of the work at
Palazzo Farnese, he was paid what he considered to be a derisory amount by
Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. This slight, together with exhaustion from
overwork and depression at having to play the part of a courtier, seems to
have caused a breakdown from which he never fully recovered before his
death in 1609. His Bolognese biographer, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, described
him as follows: ‘Neither clean nor well-dressed, with his collar askew, his
hat jammed on any old way and his unkempt beard, Annibale Carracci
seemed to be like an ancient philosopher, absent-minded and alone’.29 This
is pretty much what we see in a self-portrait drawing from the early 1580s,
where a sallow, dishevelled figure leans forward through an oval window
embrasure decorated with skeletal sea-monsters and dolphins – perhaps this
is the loneliness of a sea-sick Narcissus.
Self-Portrait with Other Male Figures (c. 1585) is ostensibly a kinship
self-portrait located in a bare studio. It shows Annibale standing before his
easel, brush and loaded palette in hand, with only the nailed edge of his
canvas visible. A frieze-like group of three standing male figures is arrayed
behind him. We know it is a self-portrait because the painter looks out
towards us, rather than to his companions, and he shows himself painting
with his left hand (he was right-handed). Thus the painting is what Annibale
sees when he looks in a mirror placed at right angles to his canvas.
Annibale Carracci, Self-Portrait, early 1580s, pen and brown ink
 Annibale Carracci, Self-Portrait with Other Male Figures, c. 1585, oil on canvas

The men are probably family members, from different generations,

representing the three ages of man. A boy in the centre is being offered a
spatula loaded with black paint by the stooping man in his thirties on the
right. The man’s body is cut off by the edge of Annibale’s canvas, and his
hand and head almost appear to be emerging out of it. He is probably
Annibale’s painter brother Agostino, and the boy a symbol of future
generations of Carracci artists. This private ceremony wittily parodies the
offering of a communion wafer – the spatula hovers before the boy’s mouth
and nose. Agostino is, as it were, a High Priest of Art transmitting the
painting potion. The caviar-like black paint evokes black bile, one of the four
ancient humours, the Greek word for which is melancholia. Black is indeed
the dominant colour in the picture, used for doublets, hats, Annibale’s hair
and eyes – its blackness all the deeper for being contrasted with white neck
ruffs. It was Aristotle who first claimed a connection between the
melancholic humour and exceptional talent in the arts and sciences, and this
idea was revived in the Renaissance by Florentine philosopher Marsilio
Ficino who said that melancholy, the brooding temperament of those born
under the planet Saturn, was a divine gift comparable to Plato’s poetic
frenzy.30 Yet this dynastic scene is lugubrious rather than triumphant. Faces
are joyless, impassive, mask-like. Despite his proximity, Annibale seems
blankly disengaged, alone in the crowd.
Self-Portrait on an Easel in the Studio (c. 1604) is one of the most
celebrated and mysterious of Italian self-portraits. Two versions exist, in St
Petersburg and Florence, both likely to be autograph. A bust-length self-
portrait has been left on an easel in a dark studio that is undecorated and
unfurnished. The man who stares impassively out of his picture, lit from his
left by a cold lunar light, is the Annibale of the description – neither clean
nor well-dressed. The legs of the easel frame the image like the
foreshortened outline of a coffin. A small dog and a cat guard the base of
each leg. Relieving the gloom is a squarish, shimmering patch of off-white
paint, made by a coarse brush dragged horizontally. This is set in the
background near the top left corner. It could be a roughly primed canvas, but
is more likely to be a window for a figure stands before it. In the St
Petersburg version, one arm seems to hang by the figure’s side with the other
resting on the window sill. In the Florentine version, the figure’s arms seem
to be truncated, and it leans slightly forward out of the window. This is no
ordinary figure. It is tall, attenuated, spectral.
Because the figure’s bottom half seems to taper in, it has been said that
this is a herm, an armless male bust attached to a tall pedestal; the most
famous herm was Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries, and here it would
represent the boundary between life and death, flesh and spirit.31 This
interpretation seems broadly correct. The elevated zone of light, with its hazy
glow, must represent a trembling spirit world of some kind, in contrast with
the lower, hard-edged ‘bestial’ zone inhabited by the painter, his pooch and
pussy. Yet the figure is too asymmetrical, slight and feminine to be a herm. It
is more likely to have been inspired by the story of Echo. When Narcissus
spurned her, Echo withered away until nothing was left but her voice. During
the sixteenth century, she was given a prominent role in interpretations of the
Narcissus myth, and for Neoplatonists she became a spiritual, feminine foil
to Narcissus’s brute materialism. In Alessandro Farra’s treatise Settenario
(The Seven Days; 1571), Echo signifies the divine spirit that descends to
enlighten our souls; it blows hither and thither like the wind and emits a
luminous splendour. By contrast, Narcissus, ‘sunk in the senses’, is ‘entirely
earthly, weak and sickly’.32
The self-portrait, with its back turned to the dissolving ‘woman in the
window’, depicts an ‘earthly, weak and sickly’ man, ‘sunk in the senses’.
The canvas also happens to be placed very low down on the easel. The
divine wind may be evoked by the shimmering brushstrokes used for the
white ‘view’ through the window. Annibale was in his forties when he
painted this picture, but he makes himself look younger here, of an age more
befitting Narcissus. Both he and his pets are a mordant memorial to his
younger sensuous self, the pioneering genre painter who made vibrant, earthy
images of labourers gulping down bean soup, drinking boys and butchers.
 Annibale Carracci, Self-Portrait on an Easel in the Studio, c. 1604, oil on panel

The image is a kind of recantation, for the ‘preparatory’ drawing is an

unqualified celebration of worldly success. Here the easel is set up in a
well-lit studio with a beamed roof. The sitter for the portrait is in a more
dignified Roman pose, perhaps wrapped in a toga and evoking a famous print
portrait of Raphael in which he is wrapped in a cloak. A group of
greyhounds looks up at it as in the ancient anecdote about dogs mistaking a
portrait for their master – in this case a wealthy one who goes hunting. In the
background we seem to see a painting or bust with a similar pose, but in
reverse. This reduplication, perhaps in a more costly medium, emphasizes
that there is a demand for such images, and that the sitter must be rich and
famous. In Annibale’s painted self-portrait, the lap dog may not even
recognize his master.

Three Milanese artists made a significant contribution to the mock-heroic

self-portrait in the second half of the sixteenth century. By then, Leonardo had
become a legendary figure, and his physiognomic and anatomical drawings
were well known in the city. The mordant verbal and visual wit involved in
emblems, which Leonardo had also devised and which were popularized by
the Milanese jurist Andrea Alciato (1492–1550), also played a part.
Alciato’s Emblemata (1531) was eventually published in nearly two hundred
editions.
The Milanese master of emblematic visual assemblages Giuseppe
Arcimboldo (1527–93) perfected the self-portrait made for tragi-comic
effect.33 He is best known for works like his jolly portrait of Emperor Rudolf
II as Vertumnus (1591), Roman protector of gardens and orchards, fabricating
him from fruit and vegetables. (Rudolf not only invites us to laugh at him, but
also to eat him.) Arcimboldo also made a portrait of a bespectacled librarian
precariously constructed from books; and of a notorious syphilitic jurist
fashioned from fish. For his own bust-length self-portrait, a drawing on
paper, Self-Portrait as a Man of Papers (1581), Arcimboldo fashioned
himself from curling pieces of paper, like a human house of cards. He thereby
insisted that great art is rooted in drawing, or disegno, while at the same time
demonstrating its fragility: a gust of wind will scatter him; a shower of rain,
pulp him; a spark, incinerate him.
The assemblages all seem to have been painted after his summons in
1562 to Vienna and Prague to work for the Habsburgs as a portrait painter.
The few that have been identified are routine affairs. The Habsburgs were
sometimes portrayed in ‘straight’ portraits with their dwarves, and were
great collectors of natural and man-made marvels that were displayed in
cabinets of curiosities. Arcimboldo’s assemblages were marvels of just this
kind. They are in the burlesque mode exemplified by a Michelangelo poem
where he compares his beloved’s beautiful teeth to parsnips, her breasts to
watermelons, her mouth to a bag full of beans.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Self-Portrait as a Man of Papers, 1581, pen and ink, wash and coloured ink on
paper

Yet the composite appearance of Arcimboldo’s fantastic heads is

something very new. It must have owed a great deal to Leonardo and his
contemporaries’ interest in anatomical dissection.34 By the mid-sixteenth
century, this had brought about a revolution in the visualization of the human
body thanks to publication of highly illustrated anatomical treatises. For the
first time, large numbers of Europeans could become familiar with the
‘marvels’ of the inside of the human body.
 Arcimboldo’s Self-Portrait as a Man of Papers has an elegantly ‘flayed’
appearance, or at least the feeling that the skin, hair and clothes could be
peeled and torn away. It invokes ‘flap’ anatomies, where a paper flap could
be lifted up to reveal the organs and skeleton below. No wonder the
expression of this man in his mid-fifties is so solemn. He is turned to his
right, and before long could look even the worse for wear than Michelangelo
or Titian. This papery self-portrait was surely also inspired by the fragile
legacy of Leonardo, which largely consisted of works on paper: the inheritor
of Leonardo’s drawings and notebooks, the Milanese nobleman Francesco
Melzi (1491/3–c. 1570), had chosen the young Arcimboldo to make organ
shutters for Milan’s cathedral. Here Arcimboldo is comically offering his
body up as an object of anatomical study. As such, his self-portrait pokes fun
at the academic pretensions of artists in the mould of Alberti, Leonardo,
Dürer – and especially Vasari.
In 1563 the first modern art academy with a set of regulations and
extensive curriculum, as well as a ‘royal’ patron, had opened in Florence,
with Vasari one of the main movers. The Accademia del Disegno followed in
the footsteps of literary academies, and was dedicated to raising the status
and ambitions of art. Vasari intended the Accademia to form a collection of
artists’ portraits and self-portraits, and although this never happened, the
second expanded edition of his Lives of the Artists (1568) credited artists
with far more self-portraits than in the first edition (Giotto went from none to
three),35 and was illustrated with 144 woodcut portraits of the artists, based
on drawings that Vasari and his pupils made of supposed portraits and
especially self-portraits. These were placed at the beginning of each life, a
magisterial frontispiece.36 Most were based on bystander portraits, taken
from altarpieces and frescoes, deemed ‘self-portraits’ simply because the
figure looks out towards the viewer, or seems more individualized. Vasari
had a keen interest in self-portraiture, and in the preface to the Lives he
claimed that according to Pliny, the inventor of art was ‘Gyges the Lydian,
who, being by the fire and gazing at his own shadow, suddenly, with some
charcoal in his hand, drew his own outline on the wall’.37 This is a double
mistake on Vasari’s part, for Pliny actually credits Gyges, a king of Lydia,
with the invention of ball games; and while Pliny does say that art began with
the drawing of a man’s shadow, he says nothing about it being a self-
portrait.38 Gyges’s importance to Vasari is twofold. He corroborates Vasari’s
belief that disegno – drawing and design – was the foundation stone of all the
arts; and he puts self-portraiture at the heart of artistic endeavour. Vasari
pushes Alberti’s Narcissus aside and crowns someone more respectable –
and considerably more athletic. He painted a dignified elderly Gyges tracing
his shadow alongside other famous scenes from Pliny as part of the
decoration of his house in Arezzo (1540s); and he did the same again, but
giving Gyges a youthful muscular body, in his Florentine residence in the
1560s, adding his own self-portrait bust above the mantlepiece.39

Giorgio Vasari, Self-Portrait, c. 1561–9, fresco above the mantelpiece, with Gyges on the left,
northwest wall of the Sala Grande, Casa Vasari, Florence

A self-portrait painted c. 1568 by the Milanese painter and art theorist

Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo challenges the Vasarian ideal of the artist. Lomazzo
belonged to the Accademia della Val di Blenio, founded in Milan in 1560.
This was a literary and artistic society dedicated to promoting a fabricated
dialect that was claimed to be the ancient language of Swiss wine porters
working in Lombardy. (Porters were a stock figure of fun, as in
Shakespeare’s Macbeth.) The 160 members wrote burlesque literature in the
dialect, and wined and dined each other. Artists belonged to it too, and many
made caricatures and ‘child art’, in the spirit of the youthful Michelangelo. In
1568 Lomazzo was appointed ‘Abbot’ – or ‘Nabad’ – of the Accademia, and
in the following year published some of his own dialect writings. Lomazzo
celebrated his appointment by painting Self-Portrait as the Abbot of the
Accademia della Val di Blenio. It is one of the slyest and sleaziest self-
portraits.
The thirty-year-old Lomazzo depicts himself as a dissolute shepherd-
cum-devotee of the wine-god Bacchus. His pose is closely based on the
louche Shepherd with a Flute, from Giorgione’s circle. An earlier profile
self-portrait, with a white tunic slipping off Lomazzo’s left shoulder (a
traditional attribute of Cynic philosophers), suggests a long-standing love of
subversion. It was probably painted in his late teens, but he makes himself
look sultrily prepubertal – a knowing child prodigy. In the bust-length self-
portrait, largely a symphony of devilish blacks and greys, he leers at us over
his left shoulder. Like a one-man band, he is absurdly overloaded with
literary, artistic and sybaritic symbols. He could be a frontispiece for a
pirate edition of Alciato’s emblems.
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Self-Portrait as the Abbot of the Accademia della Val di Blenio, c. 1568,
oil on canvas

Lomazzo’s hat is covered in laurel and vine leaves. A gold seal is pinned
to it, adorned with a vine-covered ship. An ivy-clad thyrsus – the spear of
Bacchus – rests on his left shoulder. Anyone pricked by its point goes mad.
He holds a pair of steel compasses, symbol of God as Creator and of the
geometry-obsessed Renaissance artist. Here, however, he holds them up
menacingly, more weapon than tool. You would not want to argue. He seems
to parody the compass-wielding allegory of Architecture on the reverse of
the pompous all’antica portrait medal of Bramante (c. 1505), the great
Milanese architect.40 In his later theoretical treatises, written after he had
gone blind in the 1570s, Lomazzo repudiated the scientific and empirical
emphases of early Renaissance art.
Lomazzo’s Bacchus could almost have stepped out of the pages of In
Praise of Folly (1511) by Erasmus, the great Dutch scholar and satirist who
also produced some pioneering self-portrait caricatures, profile images with
a giant nose, that are found in a manuscript of around 1515 concerning the
letters of St Jerome. The noses function as reference marks ‘pointing’ to the
text. Erasmus wrote in praise of noses, and the various uses to which they
can be put.41
‘Folly’, in Erasmus’s book, gives a first-person account of his own life
and opinions, and Bacchus looms very large. Folly was nourished at the
breast of Bacchus’s offspring drunkenness, which washes away the cares of
the soul. Drunkenness also induces a kind of pleasant madness, and is
responsible for what Plato called the ‘frenzy of poets and seers’.42 The
members of the Accademia della Val di Blenio may have appreciated the
association between drunkenness, folly and genius. Aurelio Luini, a co-
founder of the Accademia, owned a sketchbook containing around fifty
caricatures of old men and women by Leonardo, which inspired the
caricatures made by the society’s members.43 Could it be that they drew
caricatures while drunk?
In 1573, the Venetian painter Paolo Veronese was asked by the
Inquisition, an institution created by the Catholic church to supress heresy, to
explain the presence of German soldiers, a buffoon with a parrot and a
servant with a bleeding nose in a painting that might have been a Last Supper
or a Feast at the House of Simon (no one seemed to know). He gave a reply
that might also serve as the credo of Lomazzo’s self-portrait: ‘We painters
take the same license as the poets and the jesters take’.44

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), who was born near Milan

and trained there, was an ardent devotee of Bacchus. No Old Master has
been more blamed – or praised – for ‘painting himself’. Few commentators
have strayed far from the verdict of Giovanni Pietro Bellori, in the first
detailed biography (1672):

Caravaggio’s style corresponded to his physiognomy and appearance;

he had a dark complexion and dark eyes, and his eyebrows and hair
were black; this colouring was naturally reflected in his paintings…
the dark style…is connected to his disturbed and contentious
temperament.45

Although Caravaggio never seems to have painted an independent self-

portrait, his own features recur in his mythological and religious paintings.
More than for any other Old Master, self-portrayal was an occasion for self-
incrimination, and an assertion of his own unheroic status. Confirmation that
Caravaggio used himself as a model comes from another early biographer,
Giovanni Baglione, who says that when he first came to Rome in 1592,
Caravaggio ‘painted some portraits of himself with a mirror. The first was
Bacchus with different bunches of grapes….’46
In order to intensify the drama and naturalism of their work, artists were
increasingly using themselves as models when they needed to do a face
exhibiting extreme or fleeting expressions. Dante had claimed that you could
only paint (pinge) a figure properly if you first became that figure:47 he
doesn’t mention looking in a mirror when trying to ‘inhabit’ a character, but it
is probable he meant this. Bernini is said to have made faces in front of a
mirror while planning his St Lawrence and David. Rembrandt’s pupil
Samuel van Hoogstraten believed the artist must

reform oneself totally into an actor… at best in front of a mirror,

where you are simultaneously the performer and the beholder. But
here a poetic spirit is necessary in order to imagine oneself in
another’s place.48

Caravaggio’s ‘Bacchus’ mentioned by Baglione is probably the half-length

picture now usually referred to as The Sick Bacchus. Here the wine-god is
far from being footloose and fancy free. He sits behind a grey stone table,
wanly smiling. His complexion is both livid and marmoreal. He also has
very dirty fingernails. His white toga, draped over his left shoulder, leaves
his right, nearest side, provocatively naked. We are positioned above him, as
if we have just strolled over to his table. In its boyish semi-nudity and
twisting pose, it evokes – and parodies – the Sistine ceiling ignudi, painted
by Caravaggio’s great namesake Michelangelo:49 but whereas the elevated
ignudi grasp bunches of acorns (papal symbols), Caravaggio’s debased low-
lifer clutches grapes. This smallish, hunched up sybarite is quite clearly our
social and even physical inferior. The table lowers and confines him.
As a self-portrait, it reveals little directly about Caravaggio, even if some
art historians claim he painted it after a serious illness. It certainly alludes to
his night-owl, drinking-den existence. But knowing what we do about the
artist’s almost psychotic touchiness and ferocious pride, there ought to be
some knives, plates, pitchers or glasses on the table ready to be shoved into
faces or smashed over heads. In this respect, Lomazzo’s Bacchus would be a
much truer model for the enfant terrible, for it intimates imminent gratuitous
violence.
An inventory of Caravaggio’s possessions made in 1605 includes a
convex mirror and a large mirror – which may or may not have been flat. The
large convex mirror of polished steel that appears propped up on a table in
his Conversion of the Magdalen is probably his own. Judging by his
paintings, a flat mirror would have been of little use, except for directing
light. Caravaggio was far more interested in the distorted, sensuously
rounded images offered by convex and concave mirrors, as well as by their
symbolism; and in later works by curved polished armour.50 Visual rhymes
are often made in his pictures with other shiny spheres, whether fruits or
eyes. His fascination with unnatural roundness is even manifested in his use
of his own features for the severed heads of Medusa and Goliath, with the
former being painted on a circular convex parade shield. In both works, the
artist is gruesomely spherical. Spherical glass carafes furnish enchanting
reflections in five early works of the 1590s. His own reflection, first
discovered by a restorer in the 1920s and recently revealed by
reflectography, appears in a glass carafe in a large picture of Bacchus (c.
1596–7). Caravaggio would surely have agreed with the philosopher Francis
Bacon’s later assertion that human understanding ‘is like a false mirror,
which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things
by mingling its own nature with it’ (Novum Organum, 1620). The painting
marks the culmination of Caravaggio’s love affair with glass.

Caravaggio, Self-Portrait as Sick Bacchus, 1594, oil on canvas

When Caravaggio includes his self-portrait in his great religious

paintings, he struggles both to see and escape the horrifying action. In The
Martyrdom of St Matthew, we glimpse him in the background running away
half dressed, glancing back fleetingly over his shoulder. In The Taking of
Christ, he is at the side, peering over a crowd of soldiers, holding up a
lantern. Where once the artist was a heroic witness or helpful assistant, here
he is a grubby rubbernecker, merely glimpsing and ogling.
David with the Head of Goliath was probably painted in penance for his
crimes (he had been involved in several brawls, killing a man in Rome in
1606), and was sent as such to Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome to help
secure a pardon. The severed self-portrait head of Goliath looks gruesomely
alive: his eyes remain wide open, albeit blearily.
The pose is loosely modelled on the St Bartholomew scene in
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment – in each painting a mutilated bit of body is
held up in the left hand, and the implement of mutilation in the right. Here,
despite the almost magnanimous tilt of David’s head towards his vanquished
enemy, and the glowing nakedness of his ‘heart’ side, he may soon drop it
into the pit of hell. But the disparity in size, age and position of the two
heads, with the giant adult head situated lower down, apes what was by now
a standard format for court portraiture. Boy princes and young princesses
were frequently shown next to their dwarf, with the contrast in looks and
height redounding to the children’s credit. So, for example, in Giacomo
Vighi’s Charles I of Savoy as a Child, Accompanied by a Dwarf (early
1570s) the young prince, armed with a sword, stands next to his large-headed
adult male dwarf, towering over him, with his hand resting on his head.51
This ‘dwarfing’ is Caravaggio’s last word in self-mockery.
 Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath, 1609–10, oil on canvas

In this chapter we have argued that the ability of artists to indulge in

conspicuous self-mockery is made possible by the heroization of the artist
that occurred after around 1490. In the next chapter we will see how this
heroization of the artist is manifested in spectacular self-portraits depicting
the artist at work in the studio, which had itself become a destination for
wealthy art collectors and tourists.
6.
THE ARTIST’S STUDIO

Jan Vermeer, The Art of Painting, c. 1666–8 (detail), see full picture

THIS BOOK HAS BECOME increasingly dominated by images in ‘flat’ media –

prints, drawings and especially paintings. That is not solely due to the
obvious fact that more ‘flat’ self-portraits can be produced due to the relative
speed and cheapness of their execution, for we have previously observed the
extraordinary richness, variety and prominence of sculpted self-portraits in
the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. One reason for the decline is
changing attitudes towards architectural sculpture. Renaissance and Baroque
churches do not, by and large, have so much sculptural decoration.1
 More important than any loss of outlet, however, is the assumption that
painting is the more expressive and universal art form, and the supreme
vehicle for self-portrayal. The supremacy of painting had in fact already been
preached by fifteenth-century theorists who practised sculpture, such as
Alberti, Filarete and Leonardo. Gradually the catchphrase ‘every painter
paints himself’ came to exclude rather than include the idea that ‘every
sculptor sculpts himself’.2 This chapter investigates how painting came to
dominate self-portraiture and art in general. It then analyses the mythology of
the painter’s studio, and the ideas behind great self-portraits showing
painters at work. It ends with a survey of the incomparable self-portraits of
Rembrandt, and the first collection dedicated to the genre.
The supremacy of painting, and the higher social status of most painters,
was reinforced by the belief, deriving from antiquity, that painting and poetry
are ‘sister’ arts. As early as the fifth century BC the Greek lyric poet
Simonides called painting mute poetry (at this time poems were read out
loud, or sung) and poetry a speaking picture. This sort of thinking made
painting the ‘natural’ medium for writers to turn to for a metaphor of their art.
The essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) is typical. His self-reflexivity
is couched in terms that are by now extremely familiar. In the preface to the
Essays, he tells us that he is ‘painting’ himself, with the implicit
understanding that every painter does paint himself: ‘Here I want to be seen
in my simple, natural, everyday fashion without striving or artifice: for it is
my own self that I am painting’.3
In the essay On Presumption, Montaigne excuses his autobiographical
tendencies by citing the inspirational example of the painter King René of
Anjou (1409–80):

I saw one day in Bar-Le-Duc King Francis II being presented with a

self-portrait by King René as a souvenir of him. Why is it not equally
permissible to portray yourself with your pen as he did with his
brush?4

Montaigne feels envy for the unique freedom supposedly granted to painters.
His own skills as a self-painter are gradually improving: ‘I have portrayed
my own self within me in clearer colours than I possessed at first’.5 In 1590
the Milanese artist and theorist Lomazzo would even claim that Christ’s Holy
Shroud – the full-length version that had recently been taken to Turin and the
‘face’ in Rome – was a ‘painted’ self-portrait, which proved the divine
origin of painting.6
The philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), who frequently refers to
painting in his writings, would see the painter’s studio as a model for the
mind.7 In his unfinished dialogue The Search after Truth by the Light of
Nature (1640s), some friends discuss the best way of acquiring knowledge.
One of them says that the imagination of children is said to be a tabula rasa,
or rather a blank canvas. ‘The senses, the inclinations, our masters and our
intelligence’ are various painters who paint pictures on it, which are usually
imperfect. Intelligence comes along, but since it takes a while to learn how to
paint, it takes a while before the painting can be rectified. However,
intelligence can only partially improve it, because from the beginning it has
been ‘badly conceived, the figures badly placed, and the proportions badly
observed’.8 Descartes demonstrates how a painter’s studio might be seen to
furnish a complete autobiography of our own faltering development.
This kind of pictorial metaphor, in which personal development is a
succession of false starts, followed by only partially successful corrections,
belongs to the age of the visible brushstroke, and the pentimento (derived
from the Italian word meaning ‘to repent’). The collecting of drawings,
which had taken off in the mid-sixteenth century, also directed attention to the
processes of art-making – and so too did learning how to draw. A pioneering
collector – both of drawings and self-portraits – is the Venetian soap
manufacturer Gabriel Vendramin (1484–1552), a close friend of Titian.9
Vendramin not only owned several artists’ portraits and self-portraits
(Raphael, Dürer, Valerio Belli, Vittore Belliniano), he also seems to have
sought out self-portraits by artists whose paintings and drawings he
collected.10 Most innovative of all was his ‘Titian room’,11 located in a big
bedroom in his palatial house on the Grand Canal. This contained a pair of
Titian female portraits and two circular pictures, an Ecce Homo (probably),
and a half-length self-portrait of the artist drawing. Vendramin was not the
first collector to group works by a single artist together (Lorenzo de’ Medici
kept five large paintings by Paolo Uccello in his chamber, and three
Donatello reliefs in an antechamber). But he is the first on record to arrange
a room in this artist-focused way, and thereby transform it into a kind of
artist’s studio, with the artist at work next to his pictures.
 This approach was taken even further by the Nuremberg merchant
Willibald Imhoff (1519–80), grandson of Dürer’s closest friend. In 1560 he
bought the artist’s remaining papers and drawings from the widow of Dürer’s
brother. Imhoff was buying up everything by the artist that he could find, and
eventually owned about twenty of Dürer’s paintings, including the self-
portraits of 1493 and 1497, and family portraits. Imhoff not only had what
was probably Dürer’s earliest surviving work; he also had what was then
believed to be his last, the unfinished painting Salvator Mundi (1505). So
his collection gave a cradle-to-grave account of the artist’s creative life, in
the manner of Dürer’s own family history. Inventories of Imhoff’s large
collection grouped works by individual artists, and this may have been
unprecedented.

THE ARTIST AT WORK

By the seventeenth century, studio visits were fashionable for anyone who
considered themselves a gentleman. Descartes may well have made studio
visits while living in Holland from 1628–49. In England, the popularity of
studio visits led to a new genre of ‘advice-to-a-painter’ poems in which the
poet instructs a painter by standing, as it were, at their shoulder. The first of
these dates from 1633.12
No wonder, then, if some of the greatest of seventeenth-century self-
portraits depict the artist at work.13 Strictly speaking, this represents a
revival of medieval conventions, but whereas in most medieval depictions
the artist is at work ‘on site’ or, in the case of St Luke, going to the Virgin’s
palace to do her portrait, in the seventeenth century the artist’s studio itself is
the ‘destination’, an exotic site of pilgrimage and entertainment. Much of the
interest of these self-portraits stems from the ways in which the artists
negotiate the spatial and conceptual limitations of the studio: the banality of
the workshop situation, and even its intimacy and domesticity, has to be
balanced by a sense of sacredness, and the artist’s contemplative aloofness.
One of the finest ‘artist-at-work’ pictures was painted by Artemisia
Gentileschi (1593–after 1653). Like her Italian precursors Sofonisba
Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, she made several self-portraits but few of
these have survived or been convincingly identified (they are cited in letters
and inventories). Artemisia specialized in female heroines and the female
nude, and there has been a tendency to assume that at some level she always
‘painted herself’, even if the physiognomies of her heroines are
differentiated. Because she was raped by a collaborator of her painter father,
who was subsequently tried and convicted, her many depictions of Judith,
killer of Holofernes, have been interpreted as self-portraits.
A purely biographical interpretation is probably anachronistic, however.
Her idiom is resolutely heroic and non-domestic, her scale monumental.
Judith was a popular subject, painted on several occasions by her father
Orazio, who taught her how to paint, and it is debatable if her Judiths refer to
her feelings about the rape (Holofernes never touches Judith).14 The 1630s
would see the emergence of a cult of the strong woman, promoted by Queen
Marie de’ Medici of France and her daughter-in-law Anne of Austria.15
Artemisia depicted herself as an Amazon in a lost painting for Cosimo II de’
Medici, and in 1649 promised a patron: ‘You will find the spirit of Caesar in
this soul of a woman’.16 She was famous in her own lifetime and this
generated demand for self-portraits and portraits.
Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (c. 1638–9) was probably
painted for Charles I when Artemisia was visiting her father in London.
Orazio was court painter to Henrietta, Queen of England. In the catalogue of
Charles I’s collection, compiled after his execution in 1649, it is listed with
another self-portrait which has been lost.17
Guessing the hand and style of different artists was a popular pastime at
the Stuart court,18 and the King had a particular and well-known interest in
self-portraits. He commissioned self-portraits of his court painters, Daniel
Mytens, Rubens and van Dyck, which were hung in the intimacy of the King’s
breakfast chamber. His love of Italian painting was reflected in self-portraits
by Titian, Pordenone, Bronzino and Giulio Romano, hung in the Long Gallery
at Whitehall. He was given a Rembrandt self-portrait (1630–1) by the Earl of
Ancram; Dürer’s self-portrait (1498) and the so-called Portrait of Dürer’s
Father were a gift from the city council of Nuremberg.19 The sheer chutzpah
of Artemisia’s picture – she is both sexy and awesome, near and far – would
in part be due to the fact that it had to compete with so many rival self-
portraits by famous male artists.
 Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, c. 1638–9, oil on canvas

Artemisia’s picture is generally, though not universally, accepted as a

self-portrait, but it has the air of Artemisia, and how could it not have been
an important mission statement? It is the most forceful affirmation of artistic
genius that had yet been painted. It is based in part on the description of
Pittura (Painting) in Cesare Ripa’s iconographic handbook Iconologia (first
edition 1593), which became a bible to many seventeenth-century painters. It
was designed to increase the intellectual content and legibility of art. Ripa
describes Pittura as: ‘A beautiful woman, with full black hair, dishevelled,
and twisted in various ways, with arched eyebrows that show imaginative
thought…with a chain of gold at her throat from which hangs a mask, and has
written in front “imitation”. She holds in her hand a brush, and in the other
the palette, with clothes of evanescently coloured drapery….’20 Ripa
envisages Pittura as a full-length figure, her robes extending to her feet,
where painter’s tools and instruments are scattered on the ground, but the
lower body of Artemisia’s Pittura is elided and there is no sense that she is
even fixed to the ground.
Artemisia’s eyebrows are not arched – but her arms and back are. No one
since the Middle Ages had shown painting to be such an intensely physical
activity – except for Michelangelo in his tiny caricature, bent like a Syrian
bow. Her outstretched right hand is blotchy and looks as though it is dusted
with charcoal; she sensibly wears a brown apron over her green dress. She
actually leans her left forearm, which bears the palette and spare brushes, on
a small table (its corner marked with A. G. F. – ‘F’ for fecit (made it). But
we scarcely notice that she is supported at all. Her body below the waist
merges with the dark background, and her heroically scaled and
foreshortened upper body seems to be floating towards the light, which
powerfully strikes her forehead and pneumatic breast. The background – a
mass of scumbled browns and blacks – seems almost inchoate and
immaterial. It has been variously interpreted as a blank canvas and as a wall.
Whatever it is, it is surely the kind of surface Leonardo had in mind when he
said the painter could get inspiration from stains on walls.21
So where are we and what is going on? The cult of Michelangelo, as
much as Ripa, is the key to our understanding of the London self-portrait. In
1612, Artemisia had married a Florentine and moved to his home city.
Orazio had recommended her as ‘without equal’ to the Grand Duchess
Cristina, and from then on she enjoyed Medici patronage and protection. In
1616 Artemisia became the first woman artist to join the Accademia del
Disegno in Florence, and in 1615–17 she contributed an Allegory of Natural
Talent to the decorations glorifying Michelangelo in Casa Buonarroti.
Commissioned by his great nephew and namesake, Michelangelo the
Younger, it consisted of a scantily clad woman holding a compass – the
iconography, once again, taken from Ripa.
No compass will help us map the later self-portrait, for Artemisia is
creating something out of nothing. Her open-armed pose and monumental
scale and her floating foreshortened torso are modelled on the creating God
of the Sistine ceiling – especially God separating light and darkness. It is a
breathtakingly bold double appropriation of Michelangelo and of the ‘God-
as-painter’ idea. To this end, the brown background is not clearly identified
as a blank canvas, and it is parallel to the picture plane: it would have to be
angled into the room for her to feasibly paint it. She seems to be reaching
across and beyond it, towards the powerful light, and this is where her
unsquinting eyes are looking. Artemisia is posited as an artist who works
directly with light, and for whom the sky is the limit. A grotesque mask hangs
on a chain around her neck – as recommended by Ripa – but it is not
inscribed ‘imitation’, for she is a creator ex nihilo – out of nothing.
Artemisia may have assisted her father with oil-on-canvas ceiling
paintings for the Queen’s House in Greenwich (1638–9), which included an
Allegory of the Arts under the English Crown. Her self-portrait could easily
be displayed on a ceiling: it could be rotated and shown any way up.22 It is a
gravity-defying self-portrait, and it also articulates a frustration with the
limitations of small-scale easel painting: it challenges the cult of the studio
as much as it contributes to it. As Artemisia was a woman, she was never
able to get commissions for frescoes and large-scale decorative schemes,
like the Greenwich ceiling. So the self-portrait – a ‘mere’ 96.5 by 73.7 cm
(c. 38 by 29 in.) – gestures towards something much larger, and is full of
yearning. Yet her gender is not the only reason for her confinement to easel
painting. The Carracci were already regarded as the last of the universal
painters, who could work on a variety of scales, media and subjects. This
was increasingly the age of the subject specialist, and the gallery picture.
There is nostalgia for a more heroic age not just in Artemisia’s specialism in
ancient heroines, but in her emulation of Michelangelo.
When Artemisia was working in Florence for Michelangelo the Younger,
he was preparing the first edition of his great ancestor’s poetry. One hundred
poems were eventually published in 1623 – with the language smoothed out
and the gender of the addressee changed, where necessary, from male to
female. One can only wonder if he showed her the madrigal written for
Vittoria Colonna which begins: ‘A man in a woman, indeed a god speaks
through her mouth….’23

The Rome-based French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) contributed

more than anyone in the seventeenth century to the cult of the easel painter.
He never painted a fresco, and executed only one major altarpiece, early in
his career. He was only too aware that he was a ‘mere’ easel painter, and his
anxieties over his limitations are transmitted in the two very different self-
portraits painted in succession in 1649–50, the first time we know of an artist
doing such a thing. They were painted for two of his most important Parisian
patrons, the banker Jean Pointel and Paul Fréart de Chantelou, the king’s
steward. Poussin specialized in religious, mythological and ancient Roman
subjects, which were often esoteric. He researched his subjects with great
attention to historical accuracy, and painted in a sonorously rhythmical,
classicizing style. He offered intellectual depth to compensate for his
pictures’ lack of size.
The commission for a self-portrait came about because Chantelou had
asked Poussin to arrange for a portrait to be made in Rome – presumably
because Poussin was not a portrait painter himself. Having looked around for
a suitable artist, and being dissatisfied with the available talent, Poussin
decided to execute the portrait himself, despite, as he warned Chantelou in a
letter of March 1650, not having painted a portrait for twenty-eight years.
The only earlier portrait that is known is a brooding melancholic self-portrait
drawing of around 1630, supposedly made when Poussin was recovering
from an illness, though some scholars contest the attribution.24 He may also
have been reluctant to stare at himself in the mirror: in his paintings, the only
people to do so are a recumbent Narcissus (c. 1630) and a transvestite
Achilles, seduced by the daughters of Lycomedes (1656). His 1630 self-
portrait is indeed rather camp.
Poussin claimed to be dissatisfied with his first effort for Chantelou, so
he immediately painted another. He then sent the first self-portrait to Pointel,
and the second to Chantelou, assuring him it was ‘the better painting and the
better likeness’ and so he had no need to be jealous of Pointel. They are
fascinating works for many reasons, but here we will focus on their
differences, especially the intimacy of the first and the expansive
grandiloquence of the second. Taken together, they exemplify different yet
equally vital aspects of Poussin’s art. As such they are the first contrasting
‘pair’ of self-portraits.
In the first self-portrait (1649), which has been cut down on all four
sides, especially the top and the bottom, Poussin turns wistfully towards us in
a fidgety side-on pose that is very similar to that of Giorgione’s Self-Portrait
as David (see Chapter 3), of which he may have known copies.25 The
sombreness of his black toga is only partially belied by his tilted head,
tousled hair, pale pink cheeks and pensive smile. Behind him is a ghostly
sculpted relief with an inscribed tablet flanked by two putti trailing a
garland. The Latin inscription gives his name, title (First Painter to Louis of
France), age (fifty-five), and the date of the picture. The relief is similar to
funerary monuments made by his sculptor friend François Duquesnoy, with
whom he had shared a house and who had died young in 1643.
The ‘crossed’ position of Poussin’s wrists is very striking. His right arm
stretches across his body so that he can grasp the top edge of a book,
propped at an angle on an invisible ledge or table. The book once had ‘On
Light and Colour’ inscribed on its spine, as if to reinforce the picture’s
Venetian qualities. Meanwhile, his left hand, elegantly holding a chalk-
holder, is pushed towards the viewer. It is supported at the wrist by the right
arm, which functions like the painter’s mahlstick. Poussin, despite being a
right-hander, holds the chalk as if he means to use it. He may be alluding to
the greatest of Venetian artists, Titian, who in a ‘reversed’ print of Gabriel
Vendramin’s self-portrait that shows him drawing, holds a pencil in his left
hand, and a tablet in his right.26 But it is also an expression of love and
loyalty to his patron. In folklore, love spells were best written using the
fingers of the left hand, which was closest to the heart.27 Poussin’s chalk-
holder is a kind of artist’s Cupid’s arrow, with which he snares his patron.
 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait, 1649, oil on canvas

The commission occurred in a climate of jealousy among Poussin’s

patrons, and protestations of love and loyalty from the artist. In a letter of 24
November 1647, Poussin reassures Chantelou, who considered a painting
recently sent to him, Ordination from the great series Seven Sacraments, to
be too austere, and inferior to a more charming work sent to Pointel:

I am not a fickle person, givens to switching my affections, when once

I have committed myself. If the picture of Moses Discovered in the
Waters of the Nile in Monsieur Pointel’s collection generates feelings
 of love in you, is that proof that I painted it with more love than I did
the pictures I painted for you?28

Having gone to great lengths to justify the austerity of the Ordination,

Poussin must have realized he could hardly send Chantelou a self-portrait
that was so intimate and charming. So he immediately painted another more
formal and manly self-portrait (1649–50) that would complement the Seven
Sacraments. He stands in a similar position, in the same black toga, but he is
hieratic, his head stiffly upright with a stern gaze, his hair less ‘fly-away’ on
top. His face is fuller and he makes himself look much older. The right hand
holds a folio volume, presumably containing drawings, and a diamond ring
adorns his little finger, the stone cut into a pyramid shape – a Stoic symbol of
constancy and indomitability. The dainty proffered left hand of the first
picture is edited out entirely.
 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait, 1649–50, oil on canvas

The background consists of framed pictures, stacked on top of each other

in front of a door (which looks like a framed picture), at roughly the same
height as Poussin’s eyes but extending to left and right beyond the vertical
edge of the self-portrait. The picture in front, extending to Poussin’s left, is
blank except for a similar inscription to the first self-portrait, though now we
are informed that the year, 1650, is a papal Jubilee, and that Poussin is fifty-
six. It overlaps a picture that extends the other way, to Poussin’s right. In this
picture, we can see a woman with a rosy complexion in left profile, being
embraced by a pair of hands that come from ‘offstage’. According to the art
historian Gian Pietro Bellori, writing in 1672, this symbolizes Painting being
embraced by the arms of Friendship.
This is a new kind of self-portrait that tries to counteract the
claustrophobic intimacy of so much independent self-portraiture – and of
Poussin’s first self-portrait. Poussin certainly looks us in the eye, with a cold
Medusa-stare that would turn us to stone. But its real purpose is to outstare
us and to make us look aside. The framed pictures in the background suggest
a visual world of potentially limitless lateral expansion – sliding doors
opening up new vistas, portable paintings entering and charting new worlds.
It evokes an ambitious series such as the Seven Sacraments, rather than a
‘one-off’ easel painting. The allegorical figure of Painting looks away from
us, beyond the borders of the self-portrait, and is embraced by someone
outside (we only see Friendship’s forearms and hands). In the Jubilee year,
thousands of European pilgrims went to and from Rome, centre of the
‘universal’ Catholic church. Poussin’s easel pictures claim a comparable
reach and scope. But he remained acutely size conscious. After sending The
Gathering of Manna (c. 1637–9) to Chantelou, he wrote to a painter friend
in Paris asking them to bear in mind ‘that in such small spaces it is
impossible to do and to observe [all] that one knows, and that in the end this
can only be an idea of a grander thing’.29

The conundrum tackled by Poussin in separate pictures achieves a splendidly

preposterous synthesis in Jan Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (c. 1666–8).
Never has a painter’s studio been more sumptuously idealized. It puts the
‘ease’ into easel, and has become the classic image of the painter working
from beautiful life. But central to the idealization process is to present us
simultaneously with two types of artist – an erudite painter of history, and an
impassioned painter of love.
A foppishly dressed artist paints a young woman standing in a window
who is dressed, Ripa-style, as Clio, the Muse of History. She holds a big
history book and a trumpet (which stands for fame), and is crowned by a
laurel wreath (representing honour and glory).30 On the table next to her lies
another big book, propped up at an angle (a treatise on perspective?); a
colossal plaster cast of a face; and an open folio manuscript. These all allude
to artistic education, and aspiration: the plaster cast is face upwards,
‘looking’ towards the window, bathed beatifically in light.
On the wall behind Clio is a printed map of the Netherlands, flanked by
views of the principal towns. As well as alluding to the painter’s place in the
world, Vermeer’s map was surely also inspired by Marco Boschini’s 681-
page poem, La carta del navegar pitoresco (1660), a patriotic defence in
Venetian dialect of Venetian painting. The title and subtitle would have
sufficed for Vermeer: ‘The map of pictorial navigation. Dialogue between a
Venetian senator and dilettante, and a professor of painting…. Divided into
eight winds which lead the Venetian boat across the high seas of painting as
the dominant sea power to the confusion of him who does not understand
compasses’.31 For Venice, Vermeer substitutes the Netherlands, the great
northern sea – and painting – power. Already in 1572, inspired by Paolo
Giovio and Vasari, Hieronymus Cock had published a series of twenty-three
portrait prints of famous Netherlandish artists, with eulogizing epigrams.
Dirck van Bleyswijck’s Description of the City of Delft (1667) celebrated
the many famous artists the city had produced, and mentioned Vermeer.32
The set-up is clearly not realistic. Studios were workshops and did not
look like this. Vermeer’s was on the top floor of his house – not nearly so
grand. A model would not pose holding a heavy book and trumpet – she
would probably just be required for the painting of her face. Painters did not
paint in fine clothes on unprotected marble floors. The mise-en-scène
represents a Leonardo and St Luke-style idealized vision of the painter’s
existence. This studio is set up for visits by connoisseurs: the big chair in the
foreground awaits us. A French diplomat visited Vermeer on 11 August 1663,
but unfortunately he had nothing to show. The Art of Painting was never sold
by Vermeer, and was probably painted so he had a sample of his work in
house.
 Jan Vermeer, The Art of Painting, c. 1666–8, oil on canvas

Taking our cue from the new genre of ‘advice-to-a-painter’ poems, what
advice would we give this painter? We could begin by asking him how he
will fit the trumpet into his small picture. There is altogether something odd
about what Vermeer’s alter ego paints. It is strikingly different in conception
to the scene we see. For the painter is working on a close-up, half-length
image of the woman, and at the scale he is working on, the trumpet will be
reduced to a meaningless fragment, as indeed will the map (if included). The
painter has so far only painted the laurel leaf wreath that crowns Clio’s head
(he has chalked the outline of her upper body). In the 1660s Vermeer
produced several luscious close-ups of jewel-like pretty girls, the most
famous being Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665). It seems that this painter
is ruthlessly editing Clio down into one of these lovely keepsakes, adorned
with laurel leaves like those adorning Giorgione’s Laura. His tunnel vision
rejects the wider world of maps, oceans and loud trumpets.
He is clearly a bit of a fop. Slashed doublets had come back into fashion
after being popular in the early sixteenth century, and then again in the 1620s
and 30s.33 The drunken lecher on the left of Vermeer’s Procuress wears one:
he is often said to be a self-portrait. Artistically, slashed and striped doublets
were associated with the lover artist Giorgione, in part because of the
mistaken attribution of Titian’s Bravo to him.34 Vermeer seems to be
expressing the exotic and louchely bohemian side of artists, known for their
flamboyant clothes. But the slashed doublet also expresses something about
his approach to art-making. ‘Slashing’ is precisely what the painter is doing
to the total mise-en-scène, insofar as he has ruthlessly cut his small fragment
of a picture out of a larger visual whole.
In The Art of Painting, Vermeer shows himself to be two artists – the
macrocosmic painter of Clio and declamatory trumpets, and the whispering
microcosmic painter of Laura. In the Clio camp we can situate three pictures
from this time – The Geographer and The Astronomer (both from around
1668), and The Allegory of Faith (early 1670s); in the Laura camp, most of
the rest of his work. To a degree, he is recreating the tension that exists in
paintings of St Luke, where there is an implied rivalry with, and critique of,
the first Christian painter: whereas Luke offers a close-up of the Virgin and
Child, the ‘modern’ painter offers a panoramic view of the entire interior.
Vermeer was head of the Delft Guild of St Luke in 1662–3 and again in
1670–1, so the subject would have been in his mind when embarking on this
picture. Clio looks at the book she is holding with the same rapture that might
be shown by the Virgin towards the Christ child. Vermeer does not want to
renounce his Laura side, but as in Poussin’s second self-portrait, he wants to
show that his domestic art of modest scale can give ‘an idea of a grander
thing’.

Several Dutch seventeenth-century paintings of the artist’s studio show the

artist being visited by potential patrons, but these generally mediocre and
modest pictures are completely upstaged by Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas
(1656), the most ambitious statement about the status of easel painting that
had been made. Earlier painters to the Spanish court, such as Titian and
Anthonis Mor, had made self-portraits that were exhibited alongside their
portraits of the royal family.35 Here the Spanish royal family occupy the
centre of this large canvas (318 cm high and 276 cm wide; c. 10½ by 9 ft),
while Velázquez stands to the side and in partial shadow. But the picture is
so dominated and determined by the canvas at which he works, and by
perspectival and illusionistic trickery, that it was rightly described by a near
contemporary as ‘the theology of painting’ – with Velázquez as the Christ and
St Luke of painting.
Our main source of information about Las Meninas is a description by
Antonio Palomino in his El museo pictórico y escala óptica (The pictorial
museum and optical scale, 1724). Palomino had talked to four of the nine
people depicted in the work, and to others who had known and worked with
Velázquez. As a result we know the names of eight of the protagonists. We
also know that the scene is located in a fairly accurate depiction of
Velázquez’s studio in the former apartments of the deceased Crown Prince
Baltasar Carlos in the royal palace, the Alcázar. The completed picture was
displayed in the King’s private office.
At centre stage stands the key dynastic pawn, the five-year-old Infanta
Margarita María, daughter of Philip IV of Spain and his second wife Mariana
of Austria, whose images are vaporously reflected in the mirror behind (van
Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait was in the Royal Collection). She is flanked by
two ladies in waiting, las meninas, the curtseying Isabel de Velasco, and the
kneeling María Agustina Sarmiento, who offers her a clay pitcher of water,
red and a bit heart-shaped. This must symbolize her purity, loyalty and clarity
of vision – she is the most brightly lit, and gazes the most intently: only her
eyes are not in shadow.
 Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas

In the foreground, stage left, are a female and male dwarf: Maribárbola
and Nicolás Pertusato, an Italian fool who puts his tiny foot on a large
slumbering dog, which belonged to the King. Behind them the chaperone
Marcela de Ulloa, dressed in widow’s robes, turns towards a bodyguard. At
the back, silhouetted in the doorway, is José de Nieto, Chamberlain of the
Queen’s Quarters. The foreground, stage right, is dominated by a huge canvas
planted squarely on the floor, like a stage flat. The court painter Velázquez
stands away from it, partially in shadow.
So far, so relatively simple. But why are they gathered here and what is
going on – these are among the most intriguing and irresolvable questions in
art history. The dramatic lighting effects, with a gloomy mid-ground
sandwiched between a light foreground strip and the illuminated open
doorway in the background, contribute to the mystery of the scene. The room
is lined with pictures (copies of paintings by Rubens, the epitome of the
successful court artist), but none is well lit.
One of Chamberlain José de Nieto’s main responsibilities was to open
doors for the royal couple, so it seems likely that the King and Queen are
standing in the viewer’s position. Their presence here is recorded in the
mirror, as well as in the outward gazes of so many of the protagonists. They
are present in sublime, hazy miniature – near and yet far. The swag of red
curtain above the King’s head in the mirror image suggests a studio prop, so
Velázquez could be painting their portraits. Yet this is no ordinary mirror, for
despite being unusually large, it reflects none of the figures in the studio.36
By this stage in his career, Velázquez was Chamberlain of the Palace,
with little time for actual painting. He has his key of office hanging from his
waist. He was probably already expecting to be knighted by the King, and his
candidature was indeed put forward in 1658, but was rejected because it
could not be proved he had noble ancestry. This monumental painting, with
its extraordinary array of suggestive flecked and dabbed brushwork, must
have been part of his candidature.
It has been said that Velázquez posits his relationship with the King as a
modern equivalent of that of Apelles and Alexander the Great: Alexander
visited Apelles’s studio and gave him the exclusive right to paint his
portrait.37 Palomino says that while the picture was being painted, the royal
family and court made frequent visits. They ‘came down often, considering
this a delightful treat and entertainment’. Alberti said the ideal history
painting should include no more than eight or nine figures, varied in age,
gender, dress and attitude – so this is a group portrait in an Albertian mould.
And yet the painter leaves the question of his status tantalizingly,
amusingly and, above all, courteously, open. This painting could easily have
been the grand rousing finale of the chapter on mock-heroic self-portraits.
Paolo Giovio put painters with wits, and Veronese compared painters with
jesters – and Velázquez seems to accept and even relish this designation. He
is here in the entourage of the five-year-old Infanta, along with her dwarves
and fools whom he paints with unique sympathy, both here and in a famous
series of individual portraits. He has used a canvas of a size appropriate for
a history painting – it is taller and nearly as wide as his much-praised
Surrender of Breda – for a portrait of mostly tiny creatures, confined to the
bottom half of the picture. Although Velázquez ‘rises’ highest, he will still
not be able to reach the highest section of the canvas he is painting.
The job of the dwarf was, in part, to put the perfection of the royal child
in relief. In Velázquez’s early portrait of Baltasar Carlos with his dwarf, the
latter holds a rattle and an apple to contrast with orb and sceptre held by the
Crown Prince. But dwarves, and fools, also show the world turned upside
down. In 1638, on Shrove Tuesday, Velázquez had appeared in a burlesque
play as the Countess of Santiesteban, required to speak a single line, with the
King’s first minister appearing as a porter.38 Here, he shows a painting
turned back to front in a ‘behind-the-scenes’ view of a painter’s studio. The
visual and conceptual conundrums in the painting belong to the most exalted
of courtly games, with Velázquez as master of ceremonies. The most daring
reversal is the mirror image of the royals, for not only are they miniaturized,
the Queen now stands to the right of the King, in the honorific position.
Velázquez aligns himself most closely of all with José de Nieto,
transforming Nieto into a surrogate painter, for his right hand, raised to push
aside a curtain, could be that of a painter, about to apply paint to canvas,
while his left hand holds a palette-like hat. The coffered design of the door
by which he stands is analogous to the back of Velázquez’s canvas – which,
placed on the floor, functions for us as a kind of giant door (it has also been
called a ‘vast cage’).39
Velázquez had a large library, which contained Dürer’s treatises on
proportion and measurement, and many other books on perspective and
optics. He also owned many measuring instruments and a grand total of ten
mirrors.40 Dürer’s 1498 self-portrait was in the King’s collection, a gift from
Charles I of England – which raises the question as to whether Las Meninas
has a link with Dürer. Dürer’s coat of arms was an open door, using a partial
pun on his name (‘tur’ is German for ‘door’). An open door is visible at the
summit of a triumphal arch in an astonishing print produced by Lucas Kilian
of Augsburg to mark the centenary of Dürer’s death in 1628. ‘Twin’ Dürers,
derived from two full-length self-portraits included in altarpieces, stand in
front of the arch, either side of a table where they perform geometrical and
perspectival demonstrations.41 This is the grandest prior evocation of an
artist’s studio, and perhaps the closest precursor to Las Meninas. Las
Meninas is a tour de force of perspectival and optical effects, and Velázquez
envisages the ideal painter as a magician who can encompass all of human
life: the studio as secular cathedral.

Lucas Kilian, Double Portrait of Albrecht Dürer, 1628, engraving

 The painting prompted Palomino to write what may well be the earliest
attempt at a history of self-portraiture, albeit of a particular kind:

I consider this portrait of Velázquez to be no lesser work of artifice

than that of Phidias, the renowned sculptor and painter, who placed
his portrait on the shield of the statue he made of the goddess
Minerva, executing it with such artifice that if it were removed the
statue itself would be completely ruined. Titian made his name no less
eternal by portraying himself holding in his hands another portrait
with the image of King Philip II. Thus just as the name of Phidias was
never effaced so long as his statue of Minerva remained whole, and
Titian’s as long as that of Philip II survived, so too the name of
Velázquez will live from century to century, as long as that of the most
excellent and beautiful Margarita, in whose shadow his image is
immortalized.42

It is a jumble of thoughts and protocols – Phidias’s name has obviously

survived the destruction of his statue; Titian’s self-portrait had been burnt in
1602, and his fame is scarcely dependent on that of Philip II; Velázquez’s
fame is no longer dependent on that of the Infanta Margarita who, having
become Habsburg Empress, died in Vienna aged twenty-one. As early as
1696 Felix da Costa had already concluded, in a treatise on painting: ‘The
picture seems more like a portrait of Velázquez than of the Empress’.43 In
1724, the same year in which Palomino’s treatise was published, the Alcázar
was destroyed by fire, and the rescued masterpiece was taken from the
King’s private office to the new royal palace. In inventories it was the
painting with the highest valuation, and in 1778 Goya made the first
reproductive print. Its modern fame, however, derives from when it was
displayed in a new public museum, the Prado, in 1819.

With Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), the production of self-portraits is taken

to a new level, both in terms of quantity, quality, variety and duration. The
self-portraits created his fame as much as they reflected it, and more than
ever before, they allude constantly to the history of self-portraiture, inserting
the artist into the roll call of great artists. Although he is the first artist whose
features were widely recognized throughout his working life, he estranges the
viewer with his changing costumes and expressions, and his proximity. His
studio, as mediated through the self-portraits, is not exactly hospitable or
even accessible. The intimacy and interiority of these self-portraits is
qualified.
Over a forty-year period Rembrandt painted himself over forty times,
etched himself thirty-one times and drew himself half a dozen times. Studio
copies were made, and passed off as originals. Self-portraits comprise
nearly twenty per cent of his total production. Even here, though, the bulk of
his output came in the early part of his career, and there is a trough in the
1640s. The peak period came when he was first establishing himself in
Leiden from 1628 to 1631: he made around thirty self-portraits, more than
half of which are etchings. By the time he was thirty, in the mid-1630s, he
had painted more than half his eventual output of self-portraits.44 From
around 1640 to 1652, he produced few self-portraits, and these are – for
Rembrandt – routine affairs. No such doubts surround the best of the twenty
or so late self-portraits: their force, originality and size (most are life-size)
never cease to amaze.
There are problems of definition, however. It has recently been argued
that most of these early pictures are not really self-portraits, but tronies, the
Dutch term for a picture of a head or face, often of an emblematic or
symbolic sort – a virtue or vice, or a study of a particular expression. He
used his own likeness for convenience, and for its generic qualities.45 There
is some truth in this, and there was to be no sustained discussion of the self-
portraits as a series until the nineteenth century.46 But many of his early self-
portraits do mark themselves out as images of a particular ‘inspired’ artist.
Moreover, his physiognomy in these self-portraits is distinctively imperfect
rather than generic (wide nose, perpetual frown, etc.), which suggests he
wanted the sitter as well as the author of the self-portraits to be recognized.
Even his adoption of a beret, partly inspired by depictions of sixteenth-
century artists, became a trademark.
The large number of etched likenesses meant he was among the most
recognizable artists in the world, and his likeness was prized from early on –
even in foreign lands. In the 1639 inventory of the collection of King Charles
I, a Rembrandt self-portrait was described, displayed above the office door
of Lord Ancram, who had brought it back from Holland as a gift for the King
in the early 1630s: ‘the picture done by Rembrant. Being his owne picture &
done by himself in a Black capp and furrd habit with a little goulden chaine
upon both his Shouldrs’.47 The term self-portrait was coined only in the
nineteenth century (1831 is the first recorded use in English), and the
repetition of ‘done by Rembrant’ / ‘done by himself’ suggests the genre of
self-portraiture was still quite novel. The compiler of the inventory is making
sure that future readers understand exactly what type of picture he is talking
about.
We see Rembrandt feeding off earlier self-portraits, and establishing self-
portraiture as an autonomous genre with its own history.48 Self-employed
rather than a salaried court painter, it may be that he felt he needed to keep
reminding distant patrons, actual and potential, of his continuing presence
and present fame. No self-portrait is recorded in the inventory of his
possessions made at the time of his bankruptcy in 1656, and the assumption
must be that all had been sold. Only three self-portraits are cited in
documents in his lifetime, but two had entered royal collections rich in self-
portraits, and a third was owned by a major dealer. All the owners knew the
identity of the sitter.
Rembrandt was apprenticed to a painter in his home town of Leiden in
1622, and in around 1626 set up in business on his own, sharing a studio with
Jan Lievens. He used his own features for the protagonists in several of his
earliest religious paintings, but there is a flurry of independent self-portraits
in 1628/9. They were a self-reinforcing prophecy: it is as though he wanted
to make himself seem famous before he really was famous.
The painted Leiden self-portraits established Rembrandt as a ‘child
prodigy’ – perhaps in competition with van Dyck (1599–1641), the great
child prodigy of the day who had painted his first major self-portrait aged
fourteen or fifteen (it may have been painted later and made to look
younger).49 Rembrandt looks tiny and childlike in The Painter in his Studio
(c. 1629), standing at the back of a spartan studio to contemplate a large
canvas from a distance. He is swallowed up in his voluminous working
clothes and wide-brimmed hat, and dwarfed by the giant wooden easel with
its elephantine legs in the foreground. It is a David versus Goliath scenario –
armed with brush and pigment, rather than sling and shot – and there can be
only one victor. The largest, most hieratic and glamorous of the early works,
Self-Portrait with Plumed Beret (1629), is a tour de force of seductive
sfumato. Now he wears expensive clothes and a gold chain despite having
the flawless ivory skin and fluffy stubble of a teenager.
The famous head-and-shoulders self-portrait etchings are usually
considered studies in expression performed before a mirror – similar in kind
to the ones that the Italians Caravaggio and Bernini made. They are now
given titles such as Self-Portrait Open-Mouthed and Self Portrait with
Angry Expression. But the comparisons that are made between these studies
and the facial expressions found in Rembrandt’s other works are rarely
compelling, and the most expressive feature of all – Rembrandt’s fantastical
hair – is found only in the etchings, for example Self-Portrait with Curly
Hair and White Collar (c. 1630). Indeed, the idiosyncratic depiction of hair
proves the etchings were more than mere tronies: they were depictions of an
inspired artistic temperament. In many cases it is the hair, rather than the face
– often hidden by deep shadow – that is the most striking and expressive
feature.
Never before had etchings been made with such a sketchy technique, but
the sketchiness is at its most extreme in the hair, which leads a comically
dishevelled life of its own. A nineteenth-century cataloguer called it ‘frizzley
hair’. This was a golden age for male hair, with no style more distinctive –
or controversial – than the lovelock, in which a long lock of hair hung down
the ‘heart’ side, either tied with a love token or ‘shaggy’. Lovelocks were
especially popular in England, and de rigueur at the court of King Charles I –
as we can see from van Dyck’s portraits. The Puritan polemicist William
Prynne, in his infamous diatribe The Unlovelinesse of Love-Locks (1628),
considered their only useful function to be ‘to give the Divell holdfast, to
draw us by them into hell: a fitting place for such vaine, Effeminate,
Ruffianly, Lascivious, Proud, Singular and Fanatique persons’.50
Lovelocks were rarely found in sober republican Holland, but Rembrandt
advertises his devil-may-care exoticism by sporting the shaggiest of
lovelocks in eight early self-portraits, and Prynne’s adjectives could be
variously applied to all of them.51 His wild, ever-changing hair is a virility
and fertility symbol. Even his signature became unkempt, as the art historian
Filippo Baldinucci pointed out later in the century: ‘He used to sign his
prints with badly composed, deformed and botched letters’.52
 Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Curly Hair and White Collar, c. 1630, etching

The wildness of his hair evokes the dishevelled hair of Ripa’s Pittura –
‘thick, scattered and twisted in diverse manners, with arched eyebrows, the
manifestation of fantastical thoughts’. Its curly luxuriance equally attests to
Rembrandt’s fascination with Dürer, his most important precursor as a
painter and printmaker, and as a serial self-portraitist. His early work is full
of allusions to Dürer’s art and his eruption into hairy self-portraiture pretty
much coincides with the centenary – in 1628 – of Dürer’s death. From
around 1570 to 1630 there had been a so-called ‘Dürer Renaissance’ in
German-speaking lands, and in Antwerp (which Dürer had visited).53
Rembrandt eventually formed a large collection of Dürer prints.
Dürer’s hair is highlighted by the Dutch art historian Karel van Mander in
his Schilder-boeck (1603–4), a biographical history of Netherlandish and
German painters that became a standard work, and which Rembrandt, an
educated man, would have read. Of particular relevance to Rembrandt would
be his claim that Dürer was very friendly with the most eminent artist from
his home city, Lucas van Leyden. Van Mander made a pilgrimage to
Nuremberg in 1577 and his eyewitness description of the panel painting in
Nuremberg’s town hall, where it was displayed with a portrait of the artist’s
mother, focuses on the depiction of hair:

There is a small self-portrait, in which he painted his face with long

hair on it, hanging down. Some of the hair intertwines, and some is
traced in gold very effectively. I can remember this well: I had the
painting in my hands when I was in Nuremberg in the year 1577.54

Gold filigree strands of calligraphically curly hair are a trademark of some

of Rembrandt’s earliest painted self-portraits, and he achieves this effect by
scratching a sharp implement across the still-wet brown paint to expose the
lighter ground layer beneath. This ‘etching’ trick is seen in a self-portrait in
the background of a historical scene of 1626. It is also used for the hair of
two other background figures, and – discretely – for the emperor’s beard. But
the trick culminates in the two versions of Self Portrait as a Young Man
(1628/9). Here a shadow occludes the face like a carnival mask, while the
hair glows in exuberant gilded autonomy.
Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam in 1631, enjoying considerable success,
and the 1630s are the high point for painted self-portraits in opulent dress
and gold chains. The darkness of the clothes, sombre smokiness of the
monochrome backgrounds, and almost permanently frowning brow, lend
these pictures a certain intensity, yet this is still his least original and most
repetitive phase of independent self-portraits. In the 1640s, Rembrandt
painted only four relatively routine self-portraits, and made a single self-
portrait etching. This has been put down to personal difficulties, such as the
death of his wife Saskia in 1642, financial problems due to vast expenditure
on a house and on collecting art, and the fashion for more highly finished and
classicizing art. But it is just as likely that he had – momentarily – lost
interest in the genre.
In the 1640s and early 1650s, Rembrandt made his great sequence of
landscape paintings, drawings and etchings, and his almost exclusive focus
on peasant culture – dilapidated cottages and back-breaking work – seems to
have been the catalyst for a new kind of self-portrait that emphasized labour.
In his paintings, now built up from thick impastos, his face emerges into the
light like a potato from peaty soil.
 In 1652, Rembrandt painted his first self-portrait in about seven years,
and the existence of a rare preparatory drawing suggests he took some
trouble over it.55 It is his largest and most imposing independent self-portrait
so far. He stands before us in three-quarter length, hands on hips, thumbs
through his sash belt, jutting elbows penetrating and putting pressure on the
vertical edges of the canvas. He wears a coarse brown short-sleeved robe,
tied at the waist with a brown sash. Underneath is a black doublet, its colour
complementing the browny-black background, and matching that of his beret,
which provides a dark halo for his rugged but brilliantly lit face. A pair of
black eyes stares at us unblinkingly. His hands look as though they are made
from the same rough, dark material as his clothes. It is painted freely and
even brutally.
The uncompromising pose in the painting, and in the drawing, which
shows him full length with legs apart, is remarkably similar to that of
Holbein’s militant full-length mural portrait of Henry VIII in London’s
Whitehall Palace (1530s), of which many copies were made: four large
painted copies were even made in the aftermath of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII
(1613).56 Rembrandt owned Holbein prints, and he must have read van
Mander’s life of Holbein; van Mander says that everyone who approached
Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII was ‘stricken with fear’, and Holbein is just
as terrifying. An ‘almost perfect exemplum of the Northern artist’,
comparable with Dürer, his genius came from nowhere – the ‘rocky,
desolate’ wasteland of Switzerland. He was always his own man. An
English lord once tried to make a studio visit, but Holbein refused to open
his door because he was ‘painting something from life or doing something
private’. When the aristocrat persisted, Holbein threw him down the stairs.
The story has an equally appealing if fanciful coda, for when the courtier
complained to King Henry, he was reprimanded: out of seven peasants he
could fashion seven lords, but not one Holbein out of seven lords.57 A
similar anecdote is told about Rembrandt by Baldinucci in his biography of
the artist: ‘When he worked he would not give an audience to the most
powerful monarch in the world, who would have had to go away and come
back repeatedly, until he had finished that work’.
 Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1652, oil on canvas

The artist’s insistence on privacy recounted in these tales recalls

Montaigne’s famous assertion in his essay ‘On Solitude’ (1580) that we
should ‘set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping
it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude
and asylum’. In the 1652 self-portrait, Rembrandt certainly does look as
though he might throw us down the stairs in order to preserve his privacy. He
must maintain his solitude and thus his liberty. Montaigne’s essay continues
in a way that seems pertinent to what we see:
 there we should talk and laugh as though we had no wife, no children,
no possessions, no followers, no menservants, so that when the
occasion arises that we must lose them it should not be a new
experience to do without them. We have a soul able to turn in on
herself; she can keep herself company; she has the wherewithal to
attack, to defend, to receive and to give. Let us not fear that in such
solitude as that we shall be crouching in painful idleness.58

Whether Rembrandt in his busy successful years worked in the solitude that
the painting suggests is doubtful. There are more drawings by Rembrandt and
his many pupils recording life in the artist’s studio than by any other
European painter of this period. And it is a crowded, bustling place, and a
tourist attraction for eminent art lovers.
In the 1652 self-portrait Rembrandt may have resurrected a defiant pose
used by Holbein, and a defiant aspect of his character, but he equally
defiantly rejects his style. At just this time in the Netherlands, Holbein was
lionized for his hyperreal, meticulously painted illusionism. He was seen as
the ‘father’ of the hugely fashionable ‘fine painters’, such as Rembrandt’s
former pupil Gerrit Dou (1613–75) and Dou’s pupil Frans van Mieris the
Elder (1635–81). Dou and van Mieris specialized in meticulously detailed
(so-called ‘washed’) genre paintings, and were prolific self-portraitists,
depicting themselves wearing expensive clothes in opulent settings, rich with
symbolic meaning. Rembrandt had partially catered to this taste in his early
paintings, but his increasingly ‘unwashed’ style led to him becoming less
fashionable.
Rembrandt was not the first artist to draw attention provocatively to the
harsher, more ascetic and less courtly aspects of their working lives. Dürer
(again according to van Mander) would sometimes wander round Nuremberg
in his working clothes, and Michelangelo in his later years slept in his
working clothes and boots.59 In 1656, the sculptor Bernini made a point of
wearing rough working clothes when the former Queen Cristina of Sweden
visited his Rome studio:

Since it was what he wore for his art, he considered it to be the most
worthy possible garment in which to receive that great lady. This
beautiful subtlety was quickly perceived by the Queen’s sublime
 genius. His action not only increased her concept of his spirit, but
even led her, as a sign of her esteem for his art, to wish to touch the
garment with her own hand.60

There is a clear Christian aspect to this dressing down: Christ was the son of
a carpenter, and his disciples included fishermen. Once again, though, it is
the prior heroization of the artist that makes these sartorial choices possible.
It is not until Rembrandt’s very late self-portraits that he takes a close-up
and in-depth view of his own working practice. The sequence starts with
Self-Portrait at the Window, Drawing on an Etching Plate (1648),
continues in the lost Self-Portrait with Pen, Inkpot and Sketchbook (1657?),
and culminates with three paintings of the 1660s where he is painting.
Rembrandt had been declared bankrupt, and his house and extensive art
collection sold off in 1657, and it is hard not to feel that the elderly artist
was taking stock and laying claim to his own artistic territory at a time when
his commercial star was on the wane.61
Two of these late self-portraits make ambitious statements about the
nature of art, but could not be more different, and embody polarities in
Rembrandt’s art and self-image. In Self-Portrait as Zeuxis (c. 1662),
Rembrandt recreates the mischievous exuberance of his early etchings. He
appears in the guise of the great Greek painter Zeuxis as he paints the portrait
of an old lady.62 Although Zeuxis was famed for his portrait of the supremely
beautiful Helen of Troy, he had reputedly died by suffocating with laughter
while making a portrait of a wrinkled, droll old lady. The painting technique
is astonishingly coarse, and Zeuxis has rugged, bark-like skin as he grimaces
at us conspiratorially over his shoulder. This is the only self-portrait by
Rembrandt to suggest his studio might have been busy and noisy.
The self-portrait of c. 1665 at Kenwood is the most grandiose and heroic
that Rembrandt ever made. Lit from his right, he wears his painter’s tabard
and cap, and stands before a canvas mysteriously inscribed with two circles.
His right hand is placed on his hip, and his left hand merges with a palette,
brushes and mahlstick, to make a prosthetic painting arm. Various
explanations have been given for the circles, none of which has gained
universal assent. Are they the circles of a world map? Do they allude to the
circle that Giotto was reputed to have drawn freehand to demonstrate his
prowess? Another interpretation suggests itself when we notice that if the arc
of the ‘circle’ behind Rembrandt’s head were continued downwards, it
would pass through the painter’s right eye, which is illuminated. It would
then be a visualization of a credo attributed to Michelangelo, and cited by
van Mander in his life of the artist, which stressed that it was necessary ‘to
have compasses in the eyes and not in the hand’.63 Michelangelo was
attacking the academic notion that it was sufficient for the artist to follow
proscribed rules of proportion and geometry; while these ‘rules’ had to be
absorbed, it was the eye that made the final judgment in making the figure
appear to breathe, move and feel. Here Rembrandt takes his stand against
classicizing and ‘washed’ art. The vision of this easel painter is visionary:
his paintings offer profound truths. And doesn’t his famously sweaty and oily
face, with its shiny bulbous nose, confront us like a new, artist-centred
sudarium?
Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, c. 1665, oil on canvas
Rembrandt’s fame was still such that when the future Grand Duke Cosimo III
de’ Medici (1642–1723) toured Europe in the 1660s, twice visiting
Amsterdam, he saw ‘the famous painter Rembrandt’ on both occasions.
During his 1669 visit he acquired, a few months before the painter’s death, a
recent self-portrait.64 He was acquiring self-portraits by other artists after
studio visits for his uncle Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici (1617–75), who
had begun the first dedicated collection of painted self-portraits in 1664. A
great collector of drawings and scientific instruments, he is seen as a pioneer
of modern museological methods. At his death in 1675, he owned seventy-
nine self-portraits, half of which came from family collections and the rest
from acquisitions and gifts.
Leopoldo’s collection was left to his nephew and displayed in toto in the
Uffizi in 1681. It is now hung in the Vasari Corridor, and numbers over 1,600
works. For the first 225 years the collection featured only paintings. For
sculptors to gain admittance, they had to have painted their self-portrait.65
Many painters would donate their self-portrait, seeing it as a way of securing
their reputations. Especially during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, inclusion was a key indicator of a painter’s worldly success; it
placed them in a line of painters reaching back to Raphael, whose youthful
self-portrait (see Chapter 4) was the most prestigious exhibit.66 The
collection represents a culmination of the Medici cult of the artist, which had
begun with Lorenzo de’ Medici’s monument to Giotto, and which had
continued with Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s support for the Accademia del
Disegno. Indeed, in the late sixteenth century, some self-portraits in the
family collection were already gathered together in a room.67
In 1681, the collection’s curator, the brilliant art historian Filippo
Baldinucci (1625–97), had many of the self-portraits cut down to a standard
size and given a standard frame. The self-portraits, mostly small-scale and
close-up, were displayed cheek-by-jowl, covering every inch of the walls,
from floor to ceiling. Baldinucci displayed the self-portraits chronologically
by regional school – though it is hard to see how this could have manifested
itself visually with any clarity when the display was so tightly packed and
regimented. The uniformity of the packed display must always have been
peculiarly dispiriting, like a catacomb or prison for painters. It is unclear
whether such a collection is really a celebration of individual artistic genius
or of conformity to an academic type. The chronology was determined not by
the artist’s date of death, as at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (saints’
days were determined by the date of death), or by date of birth, or by the date
when they reached the golden age of thirty-three, but according to the decade
of their creative flowering.68
The last Medici duke died in 1737, and his collections were given to the
city of Florence in perpetuity. The first catalogue of the self-portrait
collection, the de luxe four-volume folio-sized Serie di ritratti degli
eccellenti pittori…, was published 1752–62 with the support of the
Florentine collector of self-portraits Francesco Gabburni.69 Each volume
contained a reproductive engraving and brief biography of fifty-five artists
by Francesco Moücke. Even though Rembrandt, van Dyck, Annibale
Carracci – among others – had several self-portraits in the Medici
collection, Rubens is the only artist to have two, albeit quite similar, self-
portraits reproduced, probably because he worked for the Habsburgs, who
now ruled Tuscany. The single ‘definitive’ self-portrait was the ideal.
Moücke’s biographies focus on the lives of the artists but say almost nothing
about the self-portraits themselves as works of art. Rembrandt died
‘tormented by regrets for past follies’.70 This retrospective nostalgia was, of
course, shared by anyone looking at the Medici collections, for their golden
age, and that of Florence, were also in the distant past.
In this chapter we have been tracing the way in which the processes of
painting, drawing and printmaking, and the painter’s studio, became
mythologized in seventeenth-century art and literature; we also briefly
explored the formation of the first extensive collections of self-portraits. In
the next chapter we look at how eighteenth-century artists depicted
themselves at an existential crossroads, buffeted by contrary and fleeting
passions, with an agitated body language to match.
7.
AT THE CROSSROADS

James Barry, Self-Portrait with Dominique Lefèvre and James Paine the Younger, c. 1767 (detail),
see full picture

IN 1761, JOSHUA REYNOLDS (1723–92) painted an allegorical portrait of the

most famous actor of the day, David Garrick. Garrick between Comedy and
Tragedy shows the actor standing in verdant woodland having his arms
pulled by female allegories of Comedy and Tragedy, the former smiling and
scantily clad, and practically ripping his clothes, the latter severe and veiled,
and pointing upward to higher things. Garrick’s body language is what we
would now call ‘conflicted’, so while his head turns towards Tragedy and
his arched eyebrows vault up his forehead, he is smiling even more broadly
than Comedy, and his torso turns towards her. Perhaps his head says
‘Tragedy’, and his heart says ‘Comedy’.
The picture is a witty and necessarily inconclusive variation on the theme
of ‘Hercules at the Crossroads’, or ‘The Choice of Hercules’, in which the
Greek hero is shown caught between female allegories of Virtue and Vice,
still unsure whether to stride off and perform heroic labours (which he does),
or to remain a pampered fornicating sybarite. This subject had been depicted
many times since the Renaissance, and Federico Zuccaro painted ‘The
Choice of Hercules’ on the ceiling of his own house in Rome, with a stirring
inscription telling the viewer to take the arduous path of Virtue. But
Reynolds’s picture is the first version to put a particular artist in the place of
Hercules.

Angelica Kauffman, Self-Portrait Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting, early 1790s,
oil on canvas

The first self-portraits to explicitly put a painter at the crossroads were

made in the early 1790s. Angelica Kauffman’s sumptuously sentimental Self-
Portrait Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting (early 1790s)
is in the same urbane vein, for the choice of female allegories it offers might
almost be one between red wine and spring water. The Swiss-born Kauffman
(1741–1807) had come to England in 1765, and was a co-founder of the
Royal Academy (and the last female to be a member until 1922). In 1781 she
married an Italian artist and moved to Rome. This is probably the last, and
certainly the largest, of her many self-portraits. In her youth Kauffman had
apparently consulted a priest as to whether she should become a musician or
painter, and he recommended painting as less likely to interfere with her
devotions.1 The work depicts her teenage self making her career choice.
Kauffman, clad in a white vestal dress, stands between the female allegories.
She looks wistfully and squeezes the hand of the submissively feminine
Music, while gesturing towards the upstanding and more masculine Painting,
who is energetically pointing upwards. There is an implicit stylistic choice
going on, too, for Music is voluptuous Venetian, while Painting is
Raphaelesque Roman.
Far more traumatic and complex psychodramas, with the artist caught at
an existential crossroads, profoundly unsure which way to turn, would
inspire some of the finest self-portraits of the eighteenth century. Reynolds –
a prolific self-portraitist – is the pioneer here, too, for his greatest self-
portrait dramatizes a major turning point in his own life.

Reynolds was the most successful artist of the eighteenth century, and
probably the most prolific portrait painter of all time. A founder member and
first President of the Royal Academy, he was knighted by King George III in
1769. He worked seven-day weeks for nine months of the year, not even
finding the time to attend church (much to the dismay of his sister).2 In one
year he had over 150 different sitters, and in total painted over 2,000
portraits. He painted nearly thirty self-portraits, with three-quarters made
after 1766, when the honours started to roll in. Many were publicized in
reproductive prints, making him the earliest serial self-portraitist whose
works could be laid out on a library table and studied virtually from
beginning to end.
Most are standard-sized half-lengths with the artist side on, looking
penetratingly over his shoulder. This is the basic format of his first self-
portrait, painted in 1746; and of that painted at the request of the director of
the Uffizi in 1775. In the latter he wears doctoral robes to receive an
honorary degree from Oxford University, and clutches – rather too firmly for
conservation purposes – a sheaf of rolled-up Michelangelo drawings. A
Latin inscription painted on the back lists his many honours.
Compared with Reynolds’s overall output, thirty self-portraits is a mere
drop in the portrait ocean. And on the whole they did not detain him for long.
When he was elected (absentee) Mayor of Plympton, his home town, in 1773,
he sent a self-portrait in doctoral gown conceived and executed in a single
day. The varnish was still wet when he sent it, and it hung in the Guildhall
with ‘dust & other foul matter’ sticking to it.3 He took more time over the
self-portrait for the Uffizi, rejecting his first effort, but that was unusual.
An early self-portrait is exceptionally innovative, however. Here he is
heroic, but in a nuanced way that is very moving. The image dramatizes
distance and absence, the difference between ambition and actuality. He
stands before a blank canvas, boldly brandishing in his right hand a
mahlstick, brushes and palette. He turns sharply to his left to look far away,
his left hand shielding his eyes from the light streaming in.
Because his eyes are in shadow, it is usually seen as an essay in
Rembrandtian self-portraiture (Reynolds was a great admirer and collector),
but the gestures, shadowed face and relative formal clarity are closer to the
startled figures in Raphael’s great nocturnal altarpiece The Transfiguration.
It was in Rome but widely known through copies and prints.4 Here, a semi-
recumbent disciple on a hillock below the levitating Christ uses one hand to
shield his eyes from the divine light, while stretching the other arm out
laterally. Reynolds is also experiencing a blinding revelation he can barely
see or comprehend. He is usually assumed to have painted it just before he
left for Italy and his Grand Tour, in 1747–8, but it would not be surprising if
he painted it shortly after his arrival in 1749. The Grand Tour, de rigueur for
artists and fashionable aristocrats, was the culmination of a young man’s
education.
This is one of Reynolds’s rare portraits with prominent hand gestures.5 It
is also the only one to show him painting, and the only one in ‘landscape’
format (Reynolds probably turned a standard half-length ‘portrait’ canvas –
like the one on his easel – on its side). It surely shows him straining to see in
the blazing Mediterranean light, scanning vast new cultural horizons.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self-Portrait, 1775, oil on canvas
 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self-Portrait, 1747–9, oil on canvas

Is this the earliest consciously sublime self-portrait? The first translation

of Longinus’s Greek treatise On the Sublime (AD third century) had appeared
in French in 1674, and the English critic and portrait painter Jonathan
Richardson concluded the second edition of his Essay on the Theory of
Painting (1725) with a chapter on the sublime – nature or art that inspired
fear and awe by its measureless grandeur. This treatise was one of the
inspirations for Reynolds to become an artist. Richardson regarded a portrait
as ‘an Abstract of one’s life’. In the 1730s, while in retirement, Richardson
drew daily self-portraits that are strikingly candid (the practice recalls the
daily letters in an epistolary novel), and painted a self-portrait juxtaposed
with his own son and the ‘sublime’ poet John Milton. Richardson had
invented a new genre – what we might call the ‘tracker’ self-portrait.
For Richardson, the sublime painter ‘must be perpetually Advancing’.
The sublime ‘Ravishes, it Transports’, and ‘like a Tempest drives all before
it’. When it appears it is as ‘the Sun traversing the Vast Desert of the Sky’. It
‘disdains to be Tramell’d, it knows no Bounds’. It is like going ‘on a great
Expedition’.6 This self-portrait certainly evokes sensations of boundlessness
and immensity. Reynolds is turning away from puny half-length
(self-)portraiture, yearning to produce something truly epic. A pained
awareness of the limitations of easel painting – and of what Hogarth
derisively termed ‘face-painting’ – is implied. Yet portraiture – aggrandized
by classical references and by heroic scale – would always remain
Reynolds’s bread and butter.

Jonathan Richardson, Self-Portrait Wearing a Cloth Hat, c. 1730–5, black chalk heightened with
white chalk on blue paper

To understand how Hercules became the model for the heroically

conflicted artist we need to turn to the influential and famously pedantic
essay by the English political philosopher and aesthetician Anthony Ashley
Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. A Notion of the Historical Draught or
Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules (1713) was written in the form of
incredibly detailed instructions for the Neapolitan painter Paolo de Matteis,
from whom Shaftesbury had commissioned a large picture of Hercules at the
Crossroads between Virtue and Vice, of which three versions, and a print,
are known.7
For Shaftesbury, it was essential for the painter to depict a single
‘pregnant moment’ that both recalled the past and prophesied the future.
Shaftesbury identifies four ‘moments’ in the story that could be depicted, but
he opts for the third because it represents the peak of psychological drama,
when Hercules ‘is wrought, agitated, and torn by contrary Passions…. He
agonizes, and with all his strength of Reason endeavours to overcome
himself’. Shaftesbury goes on to describe in forensic detail what Hercules
does during this key transitional moment. His body moves much slower than
his mind, with the exception of ‘the Eyes and Muscles about the Mouth and
Forehead’.
With his minutely nuanced proscriptions, Shaftesbury established the
depiction of the ‘pregnant moment’, and the subtle play of mixed emotions, as
a central goal for great art.8 Shaftesbury claims that the flicker of emotions
and sensations will be ‘easily comprehended’, and thus subject to reason, but
his proto-novelistic addiction to piling physiognomic and psychological
nuance on nuance makes this all but impossible. He even believed that those
with self-knowledge acquire ‘a peculiar speculative habit, so as virtually to
carry about with them a sort of pocket mirror, always ready and in use’.9 No
doubt Shaftesbury’s interest in closely observing the ebb and flow of
consciousness influenced Jonathan Richardson’s diet of daily self-portraits.
But we are not that far from David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature
(1739), where the self is defined as ‘nothing but a bundle or collection of
different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable
rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’.10
The Irish-born painter James Barry (1741–1806) was the great exponent
of the embattled self-portrait, and has become the Romantic-era symbol of
thwarted and misunderstood genius, a would-be giant in an age of pygmy
painters. He insisted that only a hero should be permitted ‘to commemorate a
hero’,11 and accused the British government of neglecting history painting
because of a preference among patrons and the public for portraits, which
had corrupted artists. The ‘real artist’ had to stand firm against ‘fraud and
wrong’. Whether ‘we [artists] are martyrs or conquerors, can be no part of
our concern’.12 Barry had become Professor of Painting at the Royal
Academy in 1782, but was expelled in 1799 because of the stridency of his
lectures and public criticism of artists, patrons and the public. The rest of his
life was spent in poverty and increasingly paranoid isolation: he believed
Royal Academicians were plotting to kill him.
Paradoxically this reputation as a doomed artist has been cemented not by
his epic history paintings, which then as now had a lukewarm reception, but
by five ‘passion-beaten’ self-portraits (to use the adjective coined by an Irish
contemporary to describe his character).13 In four of these self-portraits he
places himself in direct relation to Hercules, so situating himself at an
existential crossroads, both agonized and ecstatic.
His earliest surviving self-portrait, painted in Rome in c. 1767, is as
impressive a calling card as Reynolds’s youthful self-portrait shielding his
eyes. Barry depicts himself with his back towards us painting a double
portrait of two artist friends, Dominique Lefèvre and James Paine the
Younger. The heads of the three artists are loosely aligned and form a wave
that dips then rises up to the obscure object of their desire. They are shown
admiring the greatest of antique fragments, the Belvedere Torso, whose
modern fame and unrestored state owed much to the admiration of
Michelangelo. A frontal glimpse of the Torso is shown hovering overhead in
the top corner of the picture. It was displayed at the time in a small room in
the Vatican surrounded by railings, and there was a cast in the French
Academy in Rome, but here it has been elevated for overwhelming dramatic
effect. Paine is in the foreground making a painting of it, while Lefèvre (a
member of the French Academy) gazes up enraptured, clutching a portfolio of
drawings. Barry’s picture-within-a-picture appears unfinished, almost
painted in grisaille, which makes everything appear disembodied.
The Torso was believed to be a depiction of Hercules, and the German
antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his History of Ancient Art
(1764) had given a characteristically evocative and fanciful account. Despite
being ‘abused and mutilated’, it appears ‘in a blaze of its former glory’:

the artist has figured a high ideal of a body raised above nature, and a
nature of virile maturity elevated to a state of divine contentment.
 Hercules appears here as if he has purified himself by fire of the slag
of humanity and attained immortality among the gods.14

Barry, too, gives us an elevated and dematerialized Hercules, and the

spectral quality of the picture suggests the sculpture purifies any human that
comes into its orbit. The back and side views of the Torso were as admired
as the front, and by showing himself from the back, Barry strives to become a
living embodiment of the Torso.
Yet Barry turns his head sharply, down and towards us, in a surprising
and arresting gesture as though he has been distracted. It is not clear what he
is looking at. If he were looking at his artist friends, so he can paint them,
why would he position them behind him? And if he were looking at himself
in a mirror, would this mean he has already finished the spectral group
portrait on his easel? Or have we interrupted him?
James Barry, Self-Portrait with Dominique Lefèvre and James Paine the Younger, c. 1767, oil on
canvas
 The last two proposals seem the more credible, for Barry belongs more
to the material world than the spectral world of the Torso. He has spent more
time painting himself than his picture-within-a-picture. A stooping figure, he
is marvellously incarnated in his delicately flushed face, piercing yet sad
eyes, tremulously parted lips, back-swept flowing black hair, with a rippling
lock pouring into the gap between his jacket and white shirt collar. Overall,
Barry’s head is one of the most tautly sensuous pieces of painting in all
British art.
Barry’s first patron was his compatriot Edmund Burke, whose A
Philosophical Inquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
had influenced his decision to become a history painter. Barry is clearly
drawing a contrast between the ‘sublime’ background scene, and the
‘beautiful’ foreground self-portrait. He is hesitating at the crossroads, unsure
whether he can commit himself wholly to the high abstract ideal of history
painting, and turn away from the ‘low’ sensuous immediacy of art made using
the ‘mirror of nature’. Winckelmann had criticized the poor standard of
modern studies of the Torso: they are ‘but weak reflections of the original’
because its contours ‘that rise and fall like waves’ defeat accurate
depiction.15 Is not Paine, with his blank canvas, suffering from painter’s
block, paralysed by its greatness? Barry is dramatizing a similar dilemma
that confronted Reynolds. It is a choice between being a myopic portrait
painter or an epic Michelangelo.
Barry’s fellow Royal Academician the Anglicized German artist Johan
Zoffany (1733–1810) was equally torn by contrary passions, but sexual
torment plays a far more important part.16 In 1778–9 he produced a trio of
extraordinary self-portraits while working in Florence and Parma that are
thematically connected. This outpouring was prompted in part by spending a
great deal of time in the Uffizi, for in 1772 he had moved to Florence to paint
for the English Queen Charlotte his radiantly detailed Tribuna of the Uffizi
(1771–8), showing groups of connoisseurs and members of the nobility
admiring works of art in the Uffizi’s foremost gallery, depicting himself
among the art lovers. At this time, foreign artists and patrons showed great
interest in the self-portrait collection. The Florence-based English patron
Lord Cowper commissioned Giuseppe Macpherson to make 223 miniature
copies, which Cowper presented to George III.
Zoffany, a Catholic, had come to England with his wife in 1760, and
made his name with his portraits and theatrical pieces commissioned by
David Garrick. Portraits of the royal family led to King George III
nominating him for the newly founded Royal Academy, and the Florentine
commission from the Queen. Zoffany’s wife had returned home soon after his
arrival in London, probably because of his womanizing, but they were never
divorced. His pregnant teenage mistress went with him to Italy, and he
passed her off as his wife. He spent several years in Florence and Parma,
receiving many prestigious commissions and honours.
Zoffany had urged the Grand Duke of Tuscany to ask Reynolds for a self-
portrait in 1773, which was promptly supplied. When it arrived, Zoffany
apparently ran to embrace it. But it was later claimed he encouraged local
artists to find fault with it. Recent commentators have cast doubt on the story,
though the self-portrait submitted by Zoffany to the Medici collection in 1778
could almost be a parody of Reynolds’s portentous offering. Artists queued
up to copy Zoffany’s picture as soon as it had been delivered, and a colour
engraving was included in Carlo Lasinio’s illustrated catalogue of the
collection in 1789.
 Johan Zoffany, Self-Portrait with Hourglass, 1778, oil on canvas

The silver-haired artist sits enveloped in a voluminous fur-lined painting

robe. There is a Venetian opulence and insouciance about the pose and
costume. But he is hemmed on all sides and overhead by a cacophony of
allegorical props, relating to art, death, religion and sex. Zoffany’s right arm
cuts right across the foreground, the seams on the sleeve of his coat making a
large cross pattern – an indication of the criss-crossing we have to perform
to read the picture, as well as a ‘cross he has to bear’. His hand cradles a
grinning skull. Behind the hourglass on a table is a folio sketch book
inscribed ‘ARS LONGA VITA BREVIS’ (Art is long but life is short), and next to
it a volume of Pliny’s Natural History, probably a modern edition containing
the sections on ancient art.17 Standing by is another symbol of mortality, a
version of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s flayed écorché figure of John the Baptist
(Johan’s name saint), first made in 1767 and a standard prop in artists’
studios. The Baptist reaches out his right arm as if to bless/baptize the
painter, and also to point to the large landscape painting on the wall behind.
This depicts a kneeling monk in a wild, Salvator Rosa-style landscape. He is
being tempted by three naked beauties.
Zoffany has an unforgettable mobile expression on his face, which has
been called a rictus. He throws his head back and to the side, his mouth ajar
to reveal an uneven top row of white teeth. This recalls the heads of
celebrated antique pathos figures such as the Laocoön displayed in the
Vatican, and the Dying Alexander, which was acquired by the Medici. But
there is a wistful twinkle in Zoffany’s eye, and a faint smile on his lips,
which makes his expression disconcertingly enigmatic. Is he laughing, like
Democritus, at human folly? Or is he nervously smiling at his own inability
to turn his back on temptation in the form of women, fur trim and pagan
antiquity?18 The French art theorist Roger de Piles (1635–1709), who wrote
the first detailed discussion of portrait painting, had criticized ‘unnatural’
faces assembled from disparate parts where ‘the mouth is smiling, and the
eyes are sad’. The treatise in which this passage appears was translated into
English in 1743.19 But Zoffany’s self-portrait turns the tragi-comic facial
assemblage into high art.

Not even Zoffany’s ‘rictus’ can quite prepare us for the self-portrait busts of
the Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–83). More than any
previous artist, he believed that self-portraiture had a vital therapeutic and
empowering function. The presence of his self-portraits proved he had
battled heroically with his demons and, if only momentarily, vanquished
them.

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, The Vexed Man, 1771–83, alabaster

On the sculptor’s death, sixty-nine busts were found in his studio. His
brother subsequently sold forty-nine to an entrepreneurial chef who
organized an exhibition in 1793. This was the first-ever solo show of self-
portraits, and one of the largest ever held. The exhibition was, however,
staged in Vienna’s old Municipal Hospital, as a kind of freak show (full-
sized automata were also exhibited there).20 They were displayed as a group
on several occasions subsequently until being dispersed at auction in 1889,
and they were later feted as pre-cursors of Expressionism.21 The heads were
identified in the Hospital handlist as Charakterköpfe (character heads), with
exciting genre-scene titles such as Childish Weeping, The Vexed Man, The
Sinister Looking Man, The Enraged and Vengeful Gypsy, The Incapable
Bassoonist and Grief Locked Up Inside. We do not know who gave them
these melodramatic titles, which are still used today, but it is unlikely to have
been the artist.
The traveller Friedrich Nicolai visited Messerschmidt in 1781, and his
detailed account, published in 1785, was the first discussion of a group of
self-portraits to appear in print. He said they were ‘grimaces’ made by the
artist after pinching himself in front of a mirror – the term ‘grimace-heads’
would give a better sense of their involuntary, visceral qualities. Then as
now anyone seeing the heads en masse would have found them both
perplexing, intriguing and repellent – none more so than A Man Vomiting and
the Beak Heads, where the lips of a raised head are transformed into a
cantilevered proboscis, possibly inspired by the protective ‘beaked’ masks
worn by plague doctors. The artist is referred to in the title only once: The
Artist as He Imagined Himself Laughing. This title was surely an attempt to
suggest it was all a big joke at our expense, and that Messerschmidt was a
caricaturist. But he was in deadly earnest, a holy fool rather than a wit.
Despite the extreme expressions and sensations depicted, often with
shocking levels of naturalism, they manifest a high degree of ‘self-control’.
Each head is perfectly frontal and symmetrical, with the small variations in
crow’s feet and wrinkles probably being accidental. The French painter and
designer Charles Le Brun had made an influential illustrated treatise on
expressions in the late seventeenth century, in which the faces are
symmetrical, but the drawings are schematic outlines, and thus somewhat
disembodied. Messerschmidt’s ‘grimace-heads’ are fully embodied. The
symmetry, polished finish, usually a drab alloy of tin and lead, and stylization
of details such as hair and eyebrows, make them resemble masks, gargoyles,
decorated parade helmets and grotesque finials.
Messerschmidt had established himself as an independent sculptor in
Vienna in the 1760s, making portrait busts and religious works in the
prevailing Baroque style. In 1765 he spent several months in Rome (dressed
as a labourer he had strode up to the Farnese Hercules, and then carved a
‘splendid’ version out of ‘misshapen’ limewood). On his return to Vienna he
added a severe Neoclassical bust in Roman style to his repertoire. His
portrait head of the art critic Franz von Scheyb – symmetrical, pupilless and
truncated at the neck – was the first work of its type to be made in Vienna.
The five years following Messerschmidt’s return from Rome marked the
zenith of his fortunes. He received several prestigious commissions from the
court, and in 1769 he became a member of the Vienna Akademie. A year later
he bought a large house, but by the following year commissions had dried up
and he was plunged into financial difficulties. In 1774 he had to sell his
house and was refused a professorship at the Akademie because of his
‘deranged behaviour’. He moved to Bratislava to be with his brother in
1777, and made portrait busts and reliefs. Despite being regarded as very
eccentric, and the subject of all sorts of rumours, he continued to receive
some commissions – and visits from curious sightseers. His ‘straight’ work
shows no signs of mental or physical deterioration. Messerschmidt is thought
to have begun the ‘grimace-heads’ in around 1771, when in his mid-thirties,
and at about the time when he started having hallucinations. But the vast
majority were probably made in the last six years of his life.
In Vienna, Messerschmidt had frequented spiritualist circles, which were
the height of fashion. The English traveller Sir Nathaniel Wraxall visited
Vienna in 1779 and was told there were three thousand practising alchemists
and found widespread interest in freemasonry: ‘Princes, ministers and
general officers of distinguished reputation’ were not ashamed to be initiated
and attend ‘nocturnal meetings for the purpose of invoking and raising
apparitions’.22 The German physicist and writer Georg Christoph
Lichtenberg saw Garrick perform Hamlet three times on a visit to England in
the early 1770s, rating the ghost scene ‘one of the greatest and most terrible
which will ever be played on any stage’.23 Even sculpture was being
‘spectralized’ by the European fashion for nocturnal visits to sculptors’
studios and galleries to experience works by lamp and torchlight.24
Messerschmidt’s spiritualist circle in Vienna was interested in all things
Egyptian. They believed that the ancient Egyptians possessed secret
knowledge, and that Egyptian sculptors, by making a statue in perfect
proportion, animated it with a divine spirit.25 The sculptor began to think, in
quasi-astrological terms, that everything in nature and in art was governed by
a secret system of proportions and correspondences. If he felt a pain in his
lower body while working on a particular area of a bust, it was because the
nose, ear, etc. ‘corresponded’ to the place where he felt the pain. His interest
in Egyptian sculpture may have been prompted by the printmaker, designer
and polemicist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whom he could have met in Rome.
Piranesi praised the eclecticism of Roman art and architecture, and above all
its appropriation of Egyptian motifs. Messerschmidt would certainly have
seen Piranesi’s pioneering Egyptian-style wall decoration for the Caffè degli
Inglesi, with Egyptian statues placed in fictive windows.26 He hung a
drawing inspired by Egyptian statues in his studio window, and claimed its
proportions were the model for those of the human body. Sunlight and
moonlight shining through the drawing would have animated it.
But Messerschmidt believed the Spirit of Proportion had become jealous
of his discoveries, and had started to cause him pain. The only solution was
to pre-empt and master the pain by pinching himself every thirty seconds
‘especially on his right side amid the ribs’. The right side is traditionally the
virtuous and strong side, and pinching himself there caused him to grimace
but always with the requisite ‘Egyptian proportion’ (we can assume the
Spirit of Proportion pinched him on the weaker left side). He stood in front
of the mirror and recorded for posterity the expressions he made. He
discovered a total of sixty-four (26 or 8 × 8) grimaces with ‘Egyptian
proportions’.
Such grimaces may have had a sexual component, and the ‘pinching
fights’ code for masochistic masturbatory practices. The self-portrait busts
would then be a record of his Herculean attempts to control his ‘vicious’
libido. Goethe’s Sorrows of the Young Werther (1774) showed the disastrous
suicidal consequences of a cult of total amorous spontaneity that does not
have a creative outlet – ‘if only you could express all this…creating there a
mirror of your soul’. Messerschmidt’s busts are, as it were, mirrors that
channel his emotions. Nicolai describes the sculptor as a ‘melancholy
Pietist’ who ‘places his entire faith in an imagined rebirth’.
Silence is a crucial component of that striving for self-control. In several
works, the mouth is clamped shut, either through the lips being sucked in or
pushed out, or through a mysterious horizontal band of material being ‘taped’
across the mouth. For Winckelmann, silence was a condition of supernatural
beauty and perfection, and a characteristic of Greek sculpture.27 More
generally, silence was an inherent property of the visual arts, and in antiquity
they were called ‘silent poetry’ (because poetry was read aloud or sung).
Cesare Ripa’s allegorical figure of Painting has her mouth gagged. So in
these works Messerschmidt strives to maintain stoical silence and symmetry
against all the odds. Even in the open-mouthed works, he may have
envisaged silent screams.28
Messerschmidt’s ability and desire to maintain control over the most
extreme facial expressions, with each expression held only for a few
seconds, recalls a famous account of an acting exercise performed by David
Garrick, probably in silence. The French writer Diderot described it in the
Paradox of Acting (1769):

What I am going to tell you is something I witnessed myself. Garrick

put his head through the gap between two leaves of a door, and in the
space of four or five seconds his face passed successively from wild
joy to moderate joy, from joy to composure, from composure to
surprise, from surprise to astonishment, from astonishment to sadness,
from sadness to gloom, from gloom to fright, from fright to horror,
from horror to despair, and then back again from this final stage up to
the one from which he started.

So far, so David Hume. But Diderot believed Garrick was entirely master of
these emotions, and so separate from them:

Was his soul capable of feeling all those sensations and of

collaborating with his face in playing of that scale, as it were? I don’t
believe it for a moment, and neither do you.29

Is Messerschmidt an actor trying to stage-manage the facial scales, thereby

triumphing over sensation?

The violent switchbacks of emotion and sympathy that were so fashionable in

this period are also exemplified by the struggles Francisco Goya (1746–
1828; see also Chapter 8) went through to produce a frontispiece self-
portrait in 1799. In that year the Spanish painter and engraver published the
Caprichos (Caprices), a series of eighty prints exposing human folly. He
wanted to set himself up as a force for moral good, but like Hercules in
Shaftesbury’s ‘third phase’, he is forever adjusting his position to strike the
right balance between fascination, indifference and contempt.
Goya announced his new project in a Madrid newspaper, writing grandly
in the third person:
 Since the artist is convinced that the censure of human errors and
vices (though they may seem to be the province of Eloquence and
Poetry) may also be the object of Painting, he has chosen as subjects
adequate for his work… those that he has thought most suitable matter
for ridicule as well as for exercising the artificer’s fancy.30

Goya initially planned to have as a frontispiece a version of what became

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. This print went through several
metamorphoses, visual and conceptual, and had initially been planned as the
frontispiece to a series of prints about dreams. The first version had ‘Goya’
asleep in his studio, slumped over his box of painting materials. To his left
are giant fluttering bats and a prowling cat. The basic mise-en-scène derives
from Dürer’s print Temptation of the Idler, in which a scholar sleeps next to
his stove, while a dragon-winged devil pumps bellows into his left ear, and a
naked Venus holds out her hand to him. However, directly above the head of
Goya’s dreamer is a screaming face, and above that, regally presiding over
the proceedings, is a spectral self-portrait of Goya: he looks over towards
the bats, smiling wryly. This watchful spectre reflects Hippocrates’s
shamanistic notion that during sleep the soul wanders around and ‘has
cognizance of all things’.31
 Francisco Goya, Self-Portrait, 1799, frontispiece of the Caprichos, etching and aquatint

But in the revised version of the print, Goya got rid of the spectral self-
portrait, and it is easy to see why. He looks too interested in the bats – they
have taken the ‘artificer’s fancy’. He then added a caption – ‘The author
dreaming…’32 – but this too called into question his own virtue (why is he
dreaming this?). He finally opted to turn the dreamer into an anonymous
symbol of unreason: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. But the print
that had caused him so much conceptual to-ing and fro-ing was relegated to
the back of the book.
A new frontispiece self-portrait was provided, yet the artist remains at a
moral and conceptual crossroads. We see him in surly left profile, encased in
the heavy sartorial armour of big overcoat and helmet top hat. He glances
surreptitiously in our direction out of the tiniest corner of his left eye. This is
a new kind of self-portrait in which an artist pretends not to be looking. He is
having a joke at his own expense. His ‘enigmatic’ facial expression demands
the forensic skills of a Shaftesbury. Preparatory drawings show Goya
struggling with the downturn of the mouth, and eventually closing the left eye
until it looks like a so-called ‘lazy eye’.33 But none of this can quite mask
Goya’s glee in the obscene.
The dilemma for Goya is that his desire to be a moralist does not always
coincide with his ‘artificer’s fancy’. This was given its most famous
formulation by William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793),
when he commented on Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘The reason Milton wrote in
fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and
Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing
it’. Even Milton is now a Hercules at the Crossroads.

The St Vitus dance of self-portraiture climaxes in the print self-portraits of

Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon (1747–1825). The French engraver,
diplomat, author and museum director was that rare thing – a serial self-
portraitist with a sense of humour. His large lithograph of 1818 trumps all
previous serial self-portraitists by depicting Denon from cradle to near-
grave. Whereas Jonathan Richardson made a daily self-portrait in retirement,
Denon appears to have done so from birth.
Denon was made Baron as a reward for being Napoleon’s roving cultural
commissar and in 1802 the Director of the Louvre – which he immediately
renamed the Musée Napoléon – with responsibility for artworks looted from
foreign as well as from French collections. Denon had a sharp eye, and a
finger on the cultural pulse. His admiration for Rembrandt’s prints, which he
collected and engraved, and his naked ambition, inspired him to make some
of the most inventive self-portraits of his period, many of which were
included in catalogues of his own engravings. In c. 1795, he made a trompe-
l’œil composition showing six prints casually strewn on a flat surface, with
his own dapper self-portrait in plumed hat overlaid by three Rembrandt
prints, including a self-portrait whose edge cuts across his heart. In 1794, he
published what was marketed as forty-five engraved self-portraits from the
Uffizi, though many were not even in that collection, some were not self-
portraits, and few were faithful to their painted models.34 The saucy
showman side of his personality appears in a circular self-portrait in
nightgown and nightcap, in which he finger-wags the viewer/voyeur with a
smirk on his face.35 He may have been aping some of the more grotesque and
dissolute aspects of Rembrandt’s character that were traditionally highlighted
by critics, and reiterated in the Musée Napoleon catalogue – his ugliness,
pompousness, sordidness and greed.36 The confrontational self-portraits of
Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802), yawning and pointing, are also crucial
precursors.
The culmination of Denon’s printmaking was a large lithograph entitled
Memories of Vivant Denon Evoked by Father Time. Father Time flies across
a winter landscape with a white sheet draped over his sickle. Two putti try to
slow Father Time down, one snatching at his hourglass, the other pulling his
arm. The sheet sports sixteen self-portrait heads jostling together in higgledy-
piggledy Hogarthian profusion, like different faces in a crowd. This sheet is
a new Holy Shroud, with Father Time as St Veronica. It shows the sixteen
‘stations’ of Denon from breastfeeding babyhood through to blind
decrepitude. The Raphaelesque baby sports the unmistakable wry Denon
smile. He implies he was the ultimate child prodigy, and is a second
childhood prodigy (a blind engraver).
 Dominique-Vivant Denon, Memories of Vivant Denon Evoked by Father Time, 1818, lithograph

It is a parody of a series of twelve engravings by the German

Riepenhausen brothers charting the life of Raphael, published in 1816: the
series starts with Raphael as a newborn baby being presented by an angel to
a Muse (?), and ends with his tragic death, surrounded by distraught friends
and pupils. Like the restless and pluralist curator he was, Denon starts off in
angelic Raphaelesque mode, and passes on through the more diabolical
Rembrandt, Hogarth, etc. It is a stylistic ‘Rake’s Progress’.
Denon did not only make self-portraiture central to his own art. During his
Directorship at the Musée Napoléon (1802–15), single self-portraits by ten
painters – five of whom were French – were hung in the Grande Galerie, and
four by Rembrandt (a family portrait was mistakenly identified a portrait of
Rembrandt’s own family).37 The emphasis on self-portraiture is strikingly
different to that of the Paris Salon, founded in 1737 and suppressed in 1793
after the Revolution, which rarely included more than a single self-portrait,
and often none at all.38 The most prolific self-portraitist had been the genre
painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, who exhibited three self-portraits
entitled Tête d’étude in 1771, 1775 and 1777.39 However, there had been a
rise in 1791 (eight self-portraits) and 1793 (six self-portraits). The Royal
Academy Summer Exhibition in London was little different, though there
were some self-portraits in its members’ rooms. Only one (unidentified)
Reynolds self-portrait was ever exhibited, in 1790.40
The displays at the Musée Napoléon prompted a group of wealthy
collectors and connoisseurs in London to organize a series of spectacular
exhibitions, and these would include self-portraiture in an even more
emphatic way. In 1805 they founded the British Institution for Promoting the
Fine Arts in the United Kingdom. Funded by subscribers, it took a long lease
on premises in London’s Pall Mall, and held regular summer exhibitions of
‘sublime’ pictures by Old Masters and winter exhibitions of contemporary
British art. Until this time Old Master exhibitions had been ramshackle
affairs, generally thrown together in a rather ad hoc way and lacking in
coherence.41 When some contemporary artists complained there was too
much emphasis on foreign Old Masters, a Reynolds exhibition comprising
142 pictures was held in the summer of 1813, with two self-portraits from
the 1780s along the west side of the middle room, placing the artist at the
heart of his own exhibition. In the catalogue preface Reynolds was praised as
a British Giotto who raised the nation’s art from a ‘state of degradation’.42
This was the first full retrospective exhibition given to a single artist. The
most significant precursor was the survey exhibition of sixty-four works
organized by portrait painter and miniaturist Nathaniel Hone (1718–84) in a
rented room in 1775. Hone organized this after his painting The Conjuror, a
satire on excessive veneration of the Old Masters (especially by Reynolds),
was excluded from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.43 Hone painted
several self-portraits, and one or more would have been included in this
pioneering exhibition – seemingly the first one-man show.44 But it was
probably not much more systematic than the displays put on in artists’
showrooms.
The Reynolds exhibition coincided with the publication of a substantial
biography written by the portrait painter James Northcote, who had been his
assistant. Northcote was himself a prolific self-portraitist, usually depicting
himself wearing a ‘Titian cap’.45 There is barely a mention of the self-
portraits in the text of Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1813), except for a
passing reference to the Uffizi self-portrait. But there is a frontispiece
engraving (in reverse) of the great early self-portrait of the late 1740s, and a
momentous reference to the self-portraits in the ‘alphabetical list’ of the most
important portraits:

Of Sir Joshua Reynolds himself

The portraits have been so numerous, as to bid defiance of
enumeration. These are all from his own pencil, with the exception of
one by C G Stuart, an American, one by Zoffanii, and one by Mr
Breda, a Swedish painter.

For the first time, an artist is credited with having a veritable mania for self-
portrayal that cannot be quantified; or else, credited with satisfying an
insatiable demand for his self-portraits. There were many more busts and
painted portraits than the three cited here.46 Northcote then recommends the
‘best engravings’: most of the self-portraits had been engraved during his
lifetime.
In the summer of 1814 and 1817, the British Institution held two
exhibitions of historic British art, with numerous self-portraits, including two
by Hogarth ‘with the pug dog’ (no. 94), and ‘painting the figure of Comedy’
(no. 97). Then in 1823, another retrospective of Reynolds was held, with
sixty-three works, accompanied by a selection of works by European Old
Masters. This included three self-portraits, two of which were identified in
the handlist as follows:

42 Sir Joshua Reynolds; the first Portrait painted of himself

43 Sir Joshua Reynolds; the last portrait painted of himself
For the first time, an artist’s career is, as it were, bookended by self-
portraits. He starts, and ends, with himself.
In the European Old Master exhibitions held regularly at the British
Institution, a few self-portraits were included, but despite there being many
supposed Rembrandt self-portraits in British collections, only one was
shown.47 Rembrandt’s self-portrait prints had been treated as a distinct
category in the first (unillustrated) catalogues of his prints, published in 1751
and 1797, but the authors were embarrassed by their burlesque qualities,
bizarre hairstyles and general grossness.48 The first serious, though still
guarded, discussion of the self-portraits as a group appeared only in 1876.49
Van Dyck was the only Old Master of whom two self-portraits were
shown, albeit in separate exhibitions, but he was treated as an honorary
Englishman: one of the self-portraits, from the Royal Collection, was
included in the exhibition ‘Portraits of Eminent British Men’.50 Thus the
British Institution established self-portraiture as well as portraiture as a
peculiarly modern and British genre, and Reynolds as the world’s first
lifelong ‘tracker’ self-portraitist.51
We have explored the emergence during the eighteenth century of self-
portraiture in which the artist is ‘torn by contrary passions’, from the high
seriousness of Reynolds and Barry, to the demonic comedy of Zoffany,
Messerschmidt, Goya and Denon. We concluded with public displays of
multiple self-portraits in exhibitions in Paris and London.
By positing self-portraiture as something quintessentially British, the
exhibitions at the British Institution touch on the theme of the next chapter: the
self-portrait that speaks of rootedness and even nationality rather than of
transience and travel.
8.
COMING HOME: INTO THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY

Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio, A Real Allegory Defining Seven Years of My Artistic and
Moral Life, c. 1854–5 (detail), see full picture

DURING THE LATE EIGHTEENTH and nineteenth centuries many scathing yet
nostalgic attacks were made on the current state of art and patronage. The
critics practised or promoted a wide variety of different artistic styles, and
they differed on the precise identity of the lost golden age that was
aesthetically and morally superior, but they all cast doubt on the authenticity
of modern art, artists and patrons.
Concern with authenticity is partly a consequence of changes in the art
world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The rise of selling
exhibitions open to the public, auction houses and dealers, and the
proliferation of ‘minor’ genres such as portraiture, landscape and genre
scenes, increased the dominance of portable artworks that were not site-
specific and were often made on spec. The ‘commercialization’ of the art
world brought new freedoms as well: artists could be less dependent on a
single patron, whether aristocratic, ecclesiastical or – after the French
Revolution – the State. But new kinds of self-portrait and new modes of
display that emphasized integrity and rootedness would be devised to
reclaim that lost authenticity.
In 1778 an aristocratic Englishwoman Anne Seymour Damer (1748–
1828) carved a marble self-portrait bust that marks a turning point in the
history of art, both because of its novelty and its unlikely destination. The
stillness and symmetry of Damer’s bust is in marked contrast to the
fidgetiness of most earlier eighteenth-century self-portraits. It exudes a firm
sense of self. Yet it has scarcely been discussed in the modern literature
either on self-portraiture, sculpture or women’s art.
 Anne Seymour Damer, Self-Portrait, 1778, marble

Damer was the daughter of a favourite cousin of the author and

connoisseur Horace Walpole, and it was he who encouraged her to take up
sculpture after the suicide in 1776 of her husband John Damer, Lord Milton,
who had run up huge gambling debts. She had begun modelling in wax in her
early teens.1 Damer was a notable eccentric, known to stomp around the
fields near her home with a hooking stick, dressed in a man’s coat, hat and
shoes. Her special forte was animal sculptures, which Walpole regarded as
the equal of Bernini, but she also gave busts of the politician Charles James
Fox (whose Whig politics she famously supported) and of Lord Nelson to
Napoleon. When Sir George Beaumont bought Michelangelo’s unfinished
Taddei Tondo, she unceremoniously offered to finish it.
 Even at a time when there were ever-increasing numbers of successful
women painters, in both Britain and France, all producing numerous,
generally glamorous self-portraits, Damer represented the height of novelty.
There seems to have been something of a vogue for women trying their hand
at modelling in clay, for the actress Mrs Siddons apparently executed busts of
herself and her brother. But carving was something else. James Dalloway
wrote more about Damer than any other sculptor in his Anecdotes of the Arts
in England (1800), noting that in antiquity no female sculptor ‘had attained to
excellence sufficient to be recorded’.2
Damer may have made sculptures of kittens and lap dogs, but there is
nothing fluffy about her over life-size self-portrait bust (with a height of some
60 cm; 23 ⅝ inches). It is severely symmetrical and frontal, the short hair
split into neatly regimented flame-like clumps, the face impassive and
streamlined, eyelids lowered meditatively rather than meekly, lips
fractionally parted with the hint of a very superior smile. She wears a round-
necked linen peplos (the garment of ancient Greek women), and the base of
the bust is cut into a clean ‘U’ shape that excludes her breasts. She wants her
viewers to be unsure of her gender, and she looks boyish. A Greek
inscription on the trapezoid pedestal (written by Damer, who studied
classics) identifies her as the maker (and the heir to Greek sculptors), as
does another brief inscription behind the head. It seems to be the first frontal
and symmetrical marble portrait bust since late antiquity, when Roman
portraits busts took on some of the hieratic qualities of Egyptian art, and one
of the first of many such Neoclassical busts.
Narcissus – traditionally regarded as a deluded loser – had recently
become a model for rooted self-knowledge and contemplation. In the preface
of 1757 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s comedy Narcisse, ou l’amant de lui-
même (Narcissus, or the lover of himself), egoism is compared unfavourably
to self-knowledge – the preserve of Narcissus. By self-knowledge Rousseau
did not mean understanding the nature of mankind in general – the traditional
meaning – but of one’s own individual self. Equally pertinent to Damer’s
bust is a passage in Edward Young’s The Complaint, or Night-Thoughts on
Life, Death and Immortality (1745), where Narcissus and Cain are
exemplars of Virtue and Vice. While Cain is on the move and hopelessly
impressionable – always, as it were, at Shaftesbury’s crossroads – Narcissus
is quietly steadfast and self-contained, like Dante’s Rachel:
 Man’s greatest strength is shown in standing still…
The true is fix’d, and solid as a rock…
[Virtue], like the fabled self-enamoured boy,
Home-contemplation her supreme delight;
She dreads an interruption from without,
Smit with her own condition; and the more
Intense she gazes, still it charms the more.3

Damer’s bust is a perfect illustration of Young’s Virtue, and makes a stark

contrast to other more Cain-like contemporary self-portraits, including those
by successful women portrait painters. Angelica Kauffman, Elisabeth Vigée-
Lebrun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard dressed up fashionably, apparently
happy to be the object of the admiring gaze. Damer is unaware of admirers
for she only performs ‘home-contemplation’.
Equally remarkable is the fact that her bust was made for the Uffizi
collection, when Damer stayed in Florence in 1778–9.4 It was to be the only
sculpture in the self-portrait collection until the twentieth century. One can
only imagine the irritation of male sculptors when an aristocratic part-timer
was admitted, but her novelty value as a woman sculptor must have
prevailed. No doubt some might have complained it was far easier to carve a
symmetrical bust, but post-Damer full-frontal, symmetrical, ‘solid-as-a-rock’
self-portraits, often with transfixed ‘eyes-front’ gaze, became common. John
Flaxman made two such reliefs (with lanky locks) in 1779; there are hieratic
drawings by Jakob Carstens (1784) and Goya (1790s); Bertel Thorvaldsen
made a bare-shouldered marble bust in 1810. Portraits were also made in
this format – notably Chaudet’s and Houdon’s bare-shouldered busts of
Napoleon (1804 and 1806). This vogue created the climate in which Dürer’s
hieratic self-portrait of 1500 could be rehabilitated, becoming the iconic
image of the artist. In 1811 the first reproductive print appeared, but with the
right forearm lowered to make the image completely symmetrical.

Traditionally, symmetry had been the preserve of architecture rather than of

sculpture or painting, and it was Goethe who made architecture central to his
vision of a harmonious and stable society. In his hugely influential essay ‘On
German Architecture’ (1772), he visits Strasbourg’s medieval cathedral in
search of the gravestone of its first architect, ‘noble Erwin’. But no one can
tell him where it is. Goethe wants to erect a memorial to this forgotten hero,
but then realizes Erwin already has ‘the most magnificent’ memorial – the
cathedral itself, which rises from German soil like a ‘wide-spreading tree of
God’.5 Goethe sensed an organic relationship between the medieval
architect, his building and the place, which had been lost in modern times.
The finest German self-portrait to respond to Goethe’s clarion call is by
the messianic landscape painter Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810). He is best
known for an uncompleted four-part cycle, The Times of the Day, with
complex allegories and hallucinatory detail that he hoped would be a ‘total
work of art’, stimulating all the senses. But he was also a penetrating portrait
painter of family and friends, and a prolific self-portraitist. About seventeen
self-portraits survive, mostly close-up, bust-length drawings, with the artist’s
head sharply turned to look hypnotically over his shoulder at the viewer.
Runge was in close contact with Goethe until his early death in 1810,
corresponding with him about his art and particularly his ideas about colour,
and in 1806 sent him a haunting self-portrait drawing with some silhouettes
depicting the growth of plants.6 Goethe himself had made several self-
portrait drawings.
We Three (1805) is one of a number of remarkable family portraits
painted after Runge returned to Hamburg (his childhood was spent along the
coast). The picture, created as a gift for the artist’s father, was destroyed by
fire in 1931, but is known from colour photographs. It is in landscape format,
with the three family members depicted in half-length. Runge shows himself
standing in a shady nook in woodland beneath the ‘wide-spreading’ branches
of an oak tree, his body brushed by leaves, with ‘naturally’ tousled hair. His
head rests on that of his wife Pauline, who hugs him. On the other side, his
brother Daniel leans his back against the gnarled bark of the oak tree, holding
hands with Pauline. Its structure evokes Hercules at the Crossroads, with
Pauline as Hercules. But although she has chosen Philipp, she maintains
unbreakable intimate contact with Daniel. They all look out at us unsmilingly,
rather than towards each other, and it is hard for us to know who is the
artist.7 Their rootedness, and the intensity of their bond with each other and
with nature are expressed silently, solely through rough, smooth, and even
clammy forms of touch.
 Philipp Otto Runge, We Three, 1805, oil on canvas (destroyed 1931)

We Three exemplifies Runge’s belief that art is a secret ‘family language’,

incomprehensible outside the family circle.8 Whereas earlier self-portraits
with family members by, say, Rubens, and by many late eighteenth-century
artists, had emphasized the worldly success and ease of the artist, during the
nineteenth century family and friends can take on the characteristics of an
incestuous sect.
Where Runge insists on being lovingly embedded in family and nature,
Francisco Goya (1746–1828) insists on being embedded in his art. He is the
first artist to be obsessed – almost ad absurdum – with demonstrating the
intimacy of his relationship to his art. In some of his early self-portraits in
which he shows himself either in the process of painting, or with a canvas on
a stretcher, he lays claim to them as physical objects. The intensity with
which Goya wanted to stamp his imprint on his own work must in part have
been due to the machine-age speed with which he worked, and the generally
small scale. Over six decades, he produced around 700 paintings, 900
drawings and 300 prints.
From 1774–92, Goya was employed at the Royal Tapestry Factory in
Madrid producing cartoons (sixty-three in all). By the 1780s he had also
begun to establish himself as a portrait painter, and between 1780 and 1783,
in his mid-thirties, Goya inserted himself into four important pictures: he
appears as a bystander in an altarpiece, beneath a crucifix held out by St
Bernardino of Siena; as a smirking bullfighter in a tapestry cartoon; and as a
painter in major portraits of the Secretary of State, the Conde de
Floridablanca (1783), and of The Family of the Infante Don Luis (1783),
the King’s brother. He also painted an independent self-portrait.
In both portraits, and in the independent self-portrait, he shows himself
with a canvas, so that no one can doubt he is the painter. The influence of
Velázquez’s Las Meninas must have played a part. Goya had made the first-
ever reproductive print of it in 1778, extremely hazy in style as if trying to
evoke its age.9 But whereas Velázquez stands well back from his picture-
within-a-picture, and leans away from it, Goya engages bodily with his own
canvases – carrying them, touching them, casting his shadow over them like
Vasari’s Gyges.
In his half-length Self-Portrait (1783) we see him in left profile, his
brightly lit face half looking towards us. He is a portly figure, and his
distended stomach presses up against an inclined canvas, whose nailed edge
is visible. His right hand, holding a porte-crayon, is jammed between his
chest and the canvas, as if about to pin it or cut a hole through it. Although the
canvas ‘rises’ directly from his groin area, it is not phallic. Goya is deadpan
rather than aroused. He might be putting on a sandwich board or corset.
Where Titian, Rembrandt and Velázquez used their fingers to paint, Goya
uses his whole body. Philosophers in the eighteenth century had idealized the
sense of touch, considering it the most truthful sense and the one most used by
children. Goya exemplifies this, making the canvas a prosthetic architectural
exoskeleton.

Francisco Goya, Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta, 1820, oil on canvas

In Self-Portrait in the Studio (1790s) he stands with his back towards a

large light-shot, multi-paned window, a darkly sublime apparition beadily
scrutinizing us. Armed with palette and brush, he seems to take a big step
towards a large canvas on our left. This is not a realistic studio set-up
because the light from the window is dazzling, and would make Goya’s own
shadow fall darkly and fully over the picture he is painting – surely the
viewer’s portrait. But nothing can stop him haunting and inhabiting his own
picture.
Typically, when he portrays an aristocratic painter in her studio, the
Marquise of Villafranca, he distances her from her artwork. She sits holding
her painting implements in a throne-like armchair, but with her back to the
canvas. Only Goya can be on intimate terms with art, and he gets closer to his
own canvases than his patrons will ever be. It has been said that the self-
portrait is ‘the one form of easel painting that resists being owned’ because
‘it is not about [the owner]’ and it ‘denies in its every detail that a mere
owner has any right to it’; Goya makes this thought possible and extends it to
all art.10
In his final self-portrait, Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta (1820), painted as
a gift for the doctor who saved his life, Goya’s guardian angel puts his arm
around him, tugs his white shirt, and tries to give him a glass of water. His
feverish, sweaty patient sits up in bed tugging the white sheet. Goya’s hair
brushes the doctor’s cheek. In the pitch-dark background a line of diabolical
cadaverous heads wait in vain to receive Goya into their company. A long
inscription along the bottom thanks ‘his friend Arrieta’ for saving his life
when he was seventy-three years old. Here a self-portrait becomes a quasi-
legal document that bears witness both to a friendship and a miracle of touch.
The composition is clearly modelled on a pièta. This picture is Goya’s Holy
Shroud, the imprint of his Passion. And now he does not grasp a canvas; he
tugs at a white sheet.

In Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1808), an architect who is restoring a

Gothic chapel in the grounds of a country estate asks the beautiful young girl
Ottilie to help him repaint the interior. Ottilie, who has been orphaned, keeps
a journal, and notes the architect’s observations on the ‘orphaned’ status of
modern art. The works of a sculptor ‘desert him as the bird deserts the nest in
which it was hatched’ while the architect ‘employs his whole mind and his
whole love in the production of rooms from which he himself must be
excluded’. Is it surprising that the artist becomes gradually alienated

since his work, like a child that has been provided for and left home,
can no longer have any effect on its father? And how beneficial it must
have been for art when it was intended to be concerned almost
exclusively with what was public property, and belonged to
everybody and therefore also to the artist!11

It was just these kinds of complaint that gave rise to the one-artist museum in
the artist’s birthplace or adopted home – a fashion that continues to flourish.
Many were dedicated to famous Old Masters. The headquarters of the
Albrecht Dürer Association, founded in Nuremberg in 1817, were in Dürer’s
own timber-framed house, which had been bought in 1826 for the city by
Dürer enthusiast Friedrich Campe, and passed on to the Association. This
became the first one-artist museum, and the first major exhibition was
mounted for the 1828 tercentenary of Dürer’s death, celebrated in ten
German cities.12 The emphasis was much more on Dürer’s supposedly
impeccable life than his art. A bronze commemorative statue, with the head
based on the 1500 self-portrait, was erected in the renamed Albrecht Dürer
Platz in 1840. This was the first free-standing statue erected to an artist.
The most ambitious and influential memorial to a modern artist was the
mausoleum and museum built for the leading artist of his time, the Rome-
based Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757–1822). He had hoped to be
buried in the Pantheon in Rome (near Raphael)13, but when this plan was
rejected in 1820, he designed his own Pantheon-style memorial in Possagno,
the small rural backwater in the Veneto where he was born. Built on the site
of a church dominating the town, the Tempio della Trinità was conceived as
a ‘total work of art’, with Canova responsible for architecture, sculpture and
paintings. The interior is presided over by a grandiose tomb and colossal
self-portrait bust that looks across at one of his own altarpieces.14
Work carried on after Canova’s death in 1822, energetically supervised
by his stepbrother and heir, Bishop Giovanni Battista Sartori (1775–58). The
Tempio was finished in 1830 and consecrated in 1832. Canova’s body was
interred in his tomb, minus the heart, which was buried in a spectacular tomb
in Venice (one he had designed, but never executed, for Titian), and his right
hand, which was preserved by the Venice Academy of Art.
In the Tempio, brotherly love was celebrated. The colossal marble self-
portrait bust flanks the tomb he shares with his stepbrother, and a matching
bust of Sartori by Canova’s pupil Cincinatto Baruzzi balances it. Canova
turns to his left, towards his large altarpiece, with raised enraptured eyes and
lips slightly parted to draw breath. He is forever transfixed. Sartori looks
horizontally to his right, towards the doorway, emphasizing his guardian role.
No clothes compromise the severe Roman nakedness of their powerful necks
and upper torsos. Canova’s self-portrait bust had been made in 1812,
probably in response to a similar-sized herm bust self-portrait made in 1810
by his Rome-based rival Bertel Thorvaldsen, who would establish a
mausoleum-museum in his native Denmark (1839–48).15
 Antonio Canova, Self-Portrait, bust (on right), 1812, marble, in the Tempio della Trinità, Possagno, in
the tomb that he shares with his stepbrother Giovanni Battista Sartori, completed 1830

A vast museum, the Gipsoteca, was built to display Canova’s full-sized

plaster models, terracotta sketch models and sculptures from his Roman
studio, as well a painted self-portrait. Completed in 1836, it was located
next to the house where Canova was born. Canova’s tools, sketch models,
paintings, prints, and some of the many portraits made of the artist, were
displayed in the family home, with the most important room being the one
where he was born. The ‘prodigal sculptor’, together with his art and money,
and most of his body, had come home.
The idea of the pantheon, devoted to a single artist of transcendent genius,
would be given its greatest yet flimsiest expression by the French painter
Gustave Courbet (1819–77). A serial self-portraitist, his self-exaltation
would culminate in the most ambitious and evocative self-portrait ever
made: The Painter’s Studio, A Real Allegory Defining Seven Years of My
Artistic and Moral Life (c. 1854–5) At 3.6 metres high and nearly 6 metres
wide (some 12 ft high and 20 ft wide), and with around thirty near-life-size
figures, some famous, some anonymous, it dwarfed any previous depiction of
an artist’s studio (as did its title). The people encapsulate the seven years
since 1848, the year of the revolution that led to France’s short-lived Second
Republic, after which Louis Napoleon gained power, becoming Emperor in
1852. Whereas previous depictions of a visit to the artist’s studio, from
Velázquez onwards, are relatively convivial affairs, Courbet seems oblivious
of his visitors. He is busy painting a picture of a river valley in his rural
home region – and this is where they must all go to save their souls.
Courbet’s leadership of the Realist school was established by
monumental, unflinching pictures of the rural poor such as The Stonebreakers
(1849) and A Burial at Ornans (1849–50), but self-portraiture was the nerve
and mood centre of his art. He is the first artist to write about his self-
portraits. In 1854, he informed his patron Alfred Bruyas: ‘I have done a good
many self-portraits in my life, as my attitude gradually changed. One could
say that I have written my autobiography’.16 More studio photographs and
caricatures were made of Courbet than any other nineteenth-century artist,
and he probably painted more self-portraits.17
In the same letter, Courbet discusses the different moods manifest in four
self-portraits, one of which – ‘of a fanatic, an ascetic’ – is being bought by
Bruyas for two thousand francs. The self-portraits are a special category,
direct proof of his desire to ‘realize a unique miracle’ and live a principled
life ‘without having made a painting even the size of a hand to please anyone
or to be sold’. He is delighted his ‘dear friend’ Bruyas is buying his Self-
Portrait with a Pipe (1849), which he claims he refused to sell ‘in a period
of utter poverty’ to Emperor Napoleon III, and later, ‘in spite of pressure
from the dealers’, to a Russian ambassador: ‘It has finally escaped the
barbarians’.
 Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio, A Real Allegory Defining Seven Years of My Artistic and
Moral Life, c. 1854–5, oil on canvas

Courbet’s first surviving self-portrait dates from 1840, and altogether he

painted and drew about twenty-five, the vast majority by 1855, when he was
thirty-six. Age-wise, they follow the traditional pattern, and he had no
interest in tracking his physical decline, hastened by alcoholism. Self-
Portrait at Sainte-Pélagie (1872–3) was painted while Courbet was
imprisoned for participating in the Paris Commune (an insurrection to
prevent the restoration of the monarchy). He depicts himself as a youthful
pipe-smoking dandy, though contemporary reports describe him as grey-
haired, haggard, barely recognizable.18
Courbet’s father was a wealthy landowner in the rural region of Franche-
Comté, on the border with Switzerland, and Courbet was brought up in
Ornans, a small town about sixteen kilometres (ten miles) from the regional
capital Besançon, where he trained before moving to Paris in 1839.
Asserting his rural regional roots would be a central feature of his
metropolitan art, but he insisted above all on his independence. His
outsider/insider status owed much to a new invention: the steam train.
 From 1843 to 1851 he included one or two self-portraits in every
submission to the Salon, an annual exhibition of new art selected by a jury.
Despite the great variety of activities being performed in the self-portraits –
smoking, dying from sword wounds, committing suicide, dancing and
sleeping al fresco with a beautiful woman, playing the cello – they are
unified by the intensity of the sensory experiences. The tactile emphases we
observed in Goya and Runge are taken to a new pitch. He makes us aware of
the weight, shape and feel of his body – its relationship to the ground and
solid matter more than its relationship to air and sky. He is frequently a
victim of gravity – falling, flopping, lying, sleeping, usually ending up in
positions no physiotherapist would recommend. He is perpetually rehearsing
his dying fall and burial, dreaming of his body’s merging with the soil (he
would add sand to his paint) and his skeleton’s discovery by a future Goethe
and the development of a cult (in one self-portrait, he is an expiring medieval
sculptor who has just been carving into natural rock). His staging of his own
death has similarities with the first staged self-portrait photograph, Hippolyte
Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840), made in protest against
the government’s failure to support his new photographic process: ‘no one
has recognized or claimed the body’.19 Many of Courbet’s self-portraits are
very dark, but not just to make them look Old Masterly. This is a nocturnal
world, full of semi-conscious musings and strange groping hand movements.
Courbet evidently liked the way looking into a mirror makes the right hand
into a left hand: in one self-portrait he plays a cello (an instrument he did not
play) left-handed. The untrained hand makes more authentic mood music.
Courbet’s hands often touch his own body, but they seem to belong to
someone else, checking he is still there and not just a figment or fragment. In
five self-portraits (some perhaps made with a convex mirror), he touches his
head or face, but the hand seems alien. In The Desperate Man (1844–5), a
head and shoulders close-up in landscape format, both hands seem to travel
without a map over his pop-eyed head. Is this me? Is this connected to a
body? Or is it severed like the heads of Medusa, Goliath and Robespierre?
The motif of the hand-clutched head is inspired by a head-grabbing,
tormented, flayed figure that was then attributed to Michelangelo, a copy of
which appears in two other self-portraits. Courbet’s self-portraits could
almost illustrate the definition of Romantic painting furnished by the
philosopher Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics (1835). Hegel argued that
the Romantic arts of painting and music could not only express ‘the particular
spirit of nations, provinces, epochs, and individuals’, but also the subjective
life of the soul – ‘Grief, agony, both spiritual and mental, torture and
penance, death and resurrection, spiritual and subjective personality, deep
feeling, fear, love, and emotion’.20

Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man, 1844–5, oil on canvas

 Gustave Courbet, The Meeting, 1854, oil on canvas

Yet Courbet could also touch the ground commandingly and without
bathos. When he wrote to Bruyas about his penchant for self-portraiture, his
patron had just taken delivery of The Meeting (1854), in which Bruyas and
his servant meet the great man out hiking on a country road. Bruyas was a
banker’s son from Montpellier who wrote about and collected contemporary
art, and he believed Courbet represented the future. He commissioned his
own portrait and a self-portrait from the artists he favoured. Courbet takes on
the role of a bohemian nomad doomed to roam the earth, but free. Yet his feet
are planted firmly on the ground, and his incarnatedness is demonstrated by
the fact that he, like Dante in hell, is the only entity to cast a shadow. Dante
was idolized by the Romantics, and the painter Eugène Delacroix had
attended a ball in 1830 dressed as the poet. Bruyas doffs his cap, a
deferential Virgil. With his swagger, his cantilevered ‘Assyrian’ beard, and
spilt shadow, Courbet is every inch the messianic artist whom Bruyas
believed would lead the struggle for an ‘elevated and serious’ art.21 His
body language says ‘noli me tangere’ – do not touch me, for I only touch the
earth.
The Universal Exhibition of 1855 was the French answer to the Great
Exhibition of 1851 in London, and propaganda for the rule of Emperor
Napoleon III, who had taken power in a coup in 1851. Painting had been
excluded from the London Exhibition, and so here at least the French could
prove their supremacy, and the State’s commitment to commissioning vast
history paintings (they lagged far behind industrially). A survey of modern
French art was planned, including retrospective solo shows for four grand
old men of French painting – Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Delacroix, the
battle painter Horace Vernet and the orientalist genre painter Alexandre-
Gabriel Decamps. They had all been born in the last century, except for
Decamps, who escaped by a whisker (b. 1803).
Courbet was invited to paint a large new commission for the show, but he
turned the offer down when instructed to send in a sketch for prior approval.
He still submitted a number of works, but after The Painter’s Studio and the
Burial at Ornans had been rejected (eleven others were accepted), he
decided to go it alone. He had a tent erected on a piece of land opposite the
Palais des Beaux-Arts, which he called the Pavilion of Realism. This one-
man show is a milestone in the history of self-portraiture – and of self-
publicity.22 Never before had so many and varied self-portraits by a single
painter been exhibited. The centrepiece of the group of thirty-nine canvases
and two drawings was The Painter’s Studio. The critic Maxime Du Camp
was dismayed by what he saw: ‘Courbet waving, Courbet walking…Courbet
everywhere, Courbet forever’.
Visitors paid an entrance fee and received a booklet prefaced by a brief
signed statement. The artist insisted: ‘all I have tried to do is to derive, from
a complete knowledge of tradition, a reasoned sense of my own
independence and individuality’. Courbet hoped to make a profit from sales
of tickets and paintings. But few came, and there was scant interest, even
from the caricaturists – and even after Courbet reduced the entrance charge.
Courbet must have been mortified by the lukewarm reception accorded to
The Painter’s Studio – bafflement seems to have been the prevailing view.23
To make matters worse, it explored a supremely fashionable subject.
Fanciful paintings of great Old Masters in their studios – with visiting lovers
and royals – were very popular, and throughout 1854 the leading art journal
L’Artiste published many detailed accounts of ‘les ateliers de Paris’ (the
studios of Paris).24 Courbet’s great contribution to the genre was rolled up
after the exhibition, and put in storage until being sold at auction by his sister
in 1881. It was used as a backdrop in an amateur theatre for twenty years
before being bought by the Louvre in 1920.
It has a triptych format, with the artist at work painting a landscape in the
centre. He explained the structure in a letter of 1864 to the art critic and
realist novelist Champfleury.25 On the right are ‘the shareholders, that is,
friends, workers and devotees of the art world…the people who serve me,
support me in my ideas, and take part in my actions’. They included Bruyas
(with whom he surely planned the work when he had visited him in
Montpellier),26 the poet Baudelaire, and various socialists. Those on the left
represented ‘the other world of trivial life, the people, misery, poverty,
wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, the people who live off death’. They
included a Jew, priest, clown, game hunter and other workers. Despite going
into some detail about the cast, he confessed: ‘it is fairly mysterious, it will
keep people guessing’.
Courbet himself sits parallel to the picture he is painting, and so we see
him in profile, his right arm raised to put the finishing touch to a straw hut in
an untamed Franche-Comté landscape. He is observed from behind by a nude
female model, whose clothes lie on the floor, and from the front by a little
orphan boy in clogs. Sitting on the ground to the left of the canvas is an Irish
beggar woman with a swaddled baby, and behind her is an academic
mannequin figure, hung in a martyrdom pose.
 Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio, c. 1854–5 (details, left and right of the artist)

Delacroix visited the exhibition, and was so impressed he stayed for an

hour, but although he considered the rejected picture a masterpiece, he wrote
in his Journal that the landscape painting ‘creates an ambiguity: it has the
character of a real sky in the middle of the painting’. If Delacroix had visited
Besançon’s cathedral, he would have had a better idea of what Courbet was
up to. For there, right in the middle of Fra Bartolommeo’s Carondelet
Altarpiece (c. 1511), the most famous artwork in Franche-Comté, is an
Arcadian landscape seen through a doorway – though at first sight, it looks
like a picture-within-a-picture.27 The doorway is flanked by saints and the
donor, Ferry Carondelet, Bishop of Besançon. He kneels in profile to the
right, and gestures towards the Virgin and Child who are being wafted in
through the top half of the doorway on a dark cloud, supported by putti. The
landscape is populated by four small nude figures. The basic premise seems
to be that with the arrival of Christianity, untamed nature will be civilized
and pagans baptized and clothed. To the left of the doorway kneels John the
Baptist in his hermit’s rags, and standing behind him is an arrow-encrusted St
Sebastian.
In The Painter’s Studio Courbet takes the place of Carondelet as master
of ceremonies, gesturing towards the landscape in the act of creating it. The
Irish beggar woman substitutes for John the Baptist, and the mannequin for St
Sebastian. But with his landscape, Courbet reverses the flow. Now, in its
untamed state, the landscape is the redeeming object of desire. It must be
entered, not exited – and to this end Courbet presses his body up against the
canvas so that his right leg seems almost to step into it.28 Imaginatively
‘entering’ landscape paintings had been a favourite fantasy for critics and
viewers since the mid-eighteenth century – the most famous being Denis
Diderot’s forty-page travelogue, accompanied by an abbot, through the
landscapes of Joseph Vernet exhibited at the Salon of 1765.29
The central trio of Courbet, model and child (and a white cat), inhabit the
most brightly lit zone of the picture. Almost everything outside is more thinly
painted and gloomily lit. The groups of figures either side of Courbet – the
‘shareholders’ and the ‘trivia’ – have a lugubrious spectral quality, and have
been compared to sleepwalkers in a waiting room. They are like sinners in
limbo or purgatory, waiting for their summons from Courbet (or, more
prosaically, for their train to Besançon). Some of the figures on the left may
have the facial features of political figures: the bearded hunter seated in the
front with his dogs resembles Napoleon III, the ‘poacher’ of the Republic. So
politics, economics and culture are going to be reborn, with Courbet as the
redeemer: in his letter to Champfleury, he said that here ‘it is the world that
comes to me to be painted’. In 1855, Baudelaire jotted down in his notebook:
‘Courbet saving the world’.30 But he is not saving his earlier pictures, big or
small. Stacked and hanging in the background, they have faded irredeemably,
drained of all vitality in the face of this landscape’s effulgence.

Few artists went to greater lengths to root themselves in primordial soil than
the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–90). From very early on, he aspired
to be a peasant painter, living and recording the life of a peasant with
religious fervour. He even collected the clothes of peasants and labourers. In
a very early letter, about the early life of Oliver Cromwell in flat rural East
Anglia, he observed that:

The souls of places seem to enter the souls of men; often from a
barren, dreary region there emerges a lively, ardent and profound
 faith.31

He identified with the more sentimental and heroizing peasant painter Jean-
François Millet, rather than with Courbet. In 1885, he went to live in the
rural village of Nuenen, and while there he wrote: ‘I’ve never seen the house
where Millet lived – but I imagine these 4 little human nests [pictures of
cottages] are of the same kind’.32 He praised the intense look of a Millet self-
portrait in charcoal wearing ‘a kind of shepherd’s cap on top’33 and agreed
with a critic’s remark that Millet’s Sower seems ‘painted with the soil he
sows’.34 Even from the asylum in Saint-Rémy, he would write to his mother –
in reference to his thick impastos – ‘I plough on my canvases as they do in
their fields’.35
Van Gogh’s first major bout of self-portraiture occurred when he lived in
Paris from 1886–8. He painted himself over twenty times, gradually adopting
the high-keyed palette and dabbed brushstrokes of the style that was called
Neo-Impressionism. He was determined to use portraiture as a vehicle for
self-expression – which he believed to be totally lacking in his bête noire,
portrait photography: ‘painted portraits have a life of their own that comes
from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can’t go’.36
Painting himself saved money – he did not have to pay the model37 – but
it also helped anchor him in an unfamiliar environment. He was now in a
fast-moving cosmopolitan world of artists and art galleries. He touched base,
as it were, with his first darkly brooding self-portrait, for it was inspired by
Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Easel (1660) in the Louvre. Rembrandt had
become the great exemplar of the down-to-earth, home-loving Old Master.
He had apparently never travelled abroad, and was reputed to have preferred
fraternizing with beggars rather than princes. In an extraordinary coloured
print made at the time of the Dürer tercentenary, a Rembrandt self-portrait
literally rises up from the ground next to a rickety house that was mistakenly
believed to be his home. A plaque on the building shows a gardener
digging.38
Rembrandt bookended van Gogh’s Paris stay, for his last and most
impressive self-portrait, Self-Portrait at the Easel, was inspired by the
same Louvre self-portrait.39 But now the painter stares blindly at the canvas
with black-green eyes, a frozen zombified version of a hieratic Neoclassical
bust. He looks literally petrified amid the splintery craquelure of
brushstrokes, and the icy-white shimmer of the background. In Carel
Vosmaer’s Rembrandt: Sa vie et ses œuvres (1877), the first major
biography, geniuses are said to be as ‘isolated, colossal, and sometimes also
as bizarre and enigmatic’ as sphinxes in the desert, or Celtic menhirs.40 Van
Gogh strives for this sort of menhir-like immovability.

Rembrandt’s Woning, 1828, etching and aquatint

On a more down-to-earth level, the picture was painted in January 1888,

and he could not afford much heating. So it is also the first frozen self-
portrait. On arriving in Arles in February, van Gogh said his blood was
‘more or less starting to circulate again’.41 In June, he told his sister that she
may well consider this self-portrait the face of death.42 But he is petrified
less by his own circumstances than by his own genius – by the Medusa-stare
of his own sensational picture. He also told his sister that it was much more
profound than any portrait photograph.
Van Gogh went to the southern rural backwater of Arles to realize his
dream of becoming a peasant painter, and with the hope of enticing like-
minded artists to form an artists’ colony. Having rented the four-room Yellow
House, and set up a studio there, he invited Paul Gauguin to join him. They
had met in Paris, but Gauguin was then in Pont-Aven, a favoured haunt of
artists on the Brittany coast. Gauguin agreed, and van Gogh set about making
what he called a ‘Studio of the South’, decorating it with pictures of
‘connected and complementary subjects’. This was now the age of the ‘house
beautiful’, where each object was carefully chosen to create harmony and to
advertise the unique sensibility of the owner. Van Gogh’s Yellow House is a
budget version of William Morris’s Red House, built for him by Philip Webb
in 1859–60.
Van Gogh hung Japanese prints (the height of avant-garde fashion), and
decided to put his sunflower paintings in Gauguin’s room. Sunflowers were
the favourite decorative motif of aesthetes: a Punch cartoon of 1881 depicted
Oscar Wilde as a sunflower, with the caption: ‘O, I feel just as happy as a
bright Sunflower!’43 Van Gogh bought twelve traditional rush-bottomed
chairs in the mistaken belief that there were twelve members of the Pre-
Raphaelite brotherhood. He bought two beds, and planned to paint his own
with a naked woman and a baby in a cradle,44 and over it hung two portraits
of male friends, a poet and a soldier, to represent his artistic and sexual side.
He also painted pictures of the Yellow House, inside and out, and of the
neighbourhood, including the café and a nearby garden.
He envisaged it as a quasi-monastic retreat, a church for the religion of
the future, with Gauguin as abbot. It was also to be a museum filled with self-
portraits, and with portraits of artists, friends and local people. He was
sending his pictures to his art-dealer brother Theo in Paris, but if he
particularly liked a work, he made a copy to keep. He wanted to track his
own development, and not send his favourite offspring away and become
alienated from his art. He approved of the increasing tendency for dealers to
mount solo shows, or group shows of like-minded artists.45 Édouard Manet
had started the trend when he exhibited fourteen works at a Parisian dealer in
1863,46 and there were eight Impressionist group exhibitions from 1874–86.
Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait at the Easel, winter 1887–8, oil on canvas
 As a youth, van Gogh had copied out texts by German Romantics into
albums to be given as gifts to friends, and he was full of their idealism. It
was the German Nazarenes in Rome in 1808 who pioneered the idea of an
artists’ brotherhood, based on a sentimental belief in medieval piety and
solidarity, and they in turn influenced the English Pre-Raphaelites. Their
inspiration was Wilhelm Wackenroder’s Confessions from the Heart of an
Art-Loving Friar (1796), published anonymously when he was a lawyer of
twenty-three. The fictional friar preaches universal harmony in which
temporal, physical and individual ‘antipodes’ are brought together into a
variegated and pleasing whole. The centrepiece is a paean to Dürer, in which
the friar visits Nuremberg – ‘with what childlike love I gazed at your
antiquated houses and churches, upon which the permanent trace of our early
native art is imprinted!’ – and sees the neglected cemetery, made beautiful by
tall sunflowers that ‘spring up in multitudes’, and Dürer’s ‘forgotten bones’.
Two great ‘antipodes’ – Dürer and Raphael – are brought together in a
dream. The friar dreams he visits a gallery of Old Masters after midnight,
and finds it ‘illuminated by a strange light’ and all the artists standing in front
of their own pictures. He is told they descend from heaven every night to
look at ‘the still beloved pictures [painted] by their own hands’. Apart from
the others, he sees Dürer and Raphael standing hand in hand ‘silently gazing
in friendly tranquillity at their paintings, hanging side by side’. He was just
about to greet ‘my Albrecht and pour out my love’, when he awoke. Only
after the dream did he read in Vasari that Dürer and Raphael had been friends
‘through their works’ – a reference to their exchange of drawings.47 The art-
loving monk is really an artist-loving monk, for he describes artists rather
than artworks. The artist is their art, and always stands in front of it. Van
Gogh clearly had a similar meeting of ‘antipodes’ in mind with ‘abbot’
Gauguin. It resulted in what may be the first multiple exchange of self-
portraits.
When Gauguin delayed his arrival, ostensibly due to lack of money for
the train fare, van Gogh suggested he and his painter friend in Pont-Aven,
Émile Bernard, send portraits of each other. In the end, they sent painted self-
portraits, with portrait drawings of the other artist shown pinned to the
background wall. Gauguin’s output of self-portraits had been meagre before
his association with van Gogh; but it now rocketed. A further exchange of
self-portraits was made with Gauguin’s painter friend Charles Laval, whose
gift van Gogh considered ‘very assured’.48 He also hoped to do an exchange
with the leading Neo-Impressionist, the short-lived Georges Seurat,49 but
hoped in vain (Seurat obliterated his one attempt at a self-portrait, inserted
into a portrait of his mistress). In a letter to Bernard, van Gogh even
proposed an exchange with an artist whose name he could not remember –
‘the other one’.50
Gauguin arrived in October 1888, and in November van Gogh painted a
novel kind of paired self-portrait and portrait, depicting his own rush-bottom
chair and Gauguin’s armchair in two pictures. He plays with traditional
gender associations. The set-up, with the chairs angled inwards, apes
Renaissance paired portraits of husbands and wives, where they are turned in
on each other. But while van Gogh situates his own chair on the male
‘dexter’ side (our left) in bright daylight, he gives himself the armless
‘lady’s’ chair. Gauguin gets the ‘gentleman’s’ armchair, albeit a very
curvaceous one, in a room lit by lamp and candlelight. This gender-bending
was a key component of their relationship. Van Gogh had wanted Gauguin’s
room to be ‘as nice as possible, like a woman’s boudoir, really artistic’,51
and Gauguin had depicted himself against a ‘girlish’ background of flowery
wallpaper – a symbol of purity.
The inspiration for a ‘chair’ portrait has been linked to Luke Fildes’s The
Empty Chair (1870), a lithographic tribute to Charles Dickens, published in
The Graphic after his death. Van Gogh had a copy of the print, and he
idealized the magazine’s illustrators as a brotherhood.52 The position and
type of chair in Fildes’s image is very close to Gauguin’s chair, and van
Gogh has even placed a lighted candle on the seat, as if in memory of his
friend. Already, there were strains in their relationship, and the image is full
of foreboding and fear for his friend (a novel is precariously balanced on the
seat edge).
Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh’s Chair, 1888, oil on canvas
 Vincent van Gogh, Gauguin’s Chair, 1888, oil on canvas

By contrast, van Gogh’s chair self-portrait seems full of optimism,

brightly sunlit and with two sprouting onions poking up healthily out of a
crate in the background that is inscribed ‘Vincent’. The sprouting shoots
resemble cuckold’s horns, as though van Gogh is making a jaunty joke about
Gauguin’s lack of faithfulness. It is his most enchanting self-portrait. German
Romanticism again offers a framework for interpretation. In Goethe’s essay
‘The Collector and His Circle’ (1799) a doctor sketches the history of his
family art collection, founded by his grandfather. He had started out
commissioning watercolours of local wildlife and plants, and then moved on
to life-size painted portraits of his nearest and dearest, depicted ‘with the
objects [the sitter] usually had about him’. Eventually, they had portraits of
‘all the furniture as well’. Later generations added to the collection. The
doctor’s brother-in-law, on the death of his sister, painted still lifes of her
effects, singly and in composed groups, but only ‘objects in everyday use’.
These ‘silent images did not lack for either unity or expressiveness’. The last
still-life arrangement he painted ‘hinted at transitoriness and separation, and
at permanence and reunion’.53 These are precisely the themes explored by
van Gogh in his very own ‘still-life’ self-portrait and portrait. Van Gogh
chose chairs because they are designed to be touched with impunity by the
whole body, and they are stabilizing entities firmly placed on the ground.
They make a house a home.
The day before Gauguin was due to leave Arles in December 1888, van
Gogh had a breakdown during which he first threatened Gauguin with a razor,
and later that same night he cut off part of his left ear, giving the severed
portion to a prostitute. This harrowing incident was memorialized yet
transcended in two self-portraits with bandaged ear of January 1889. The
bandages are held in place by a fur hat that ‘normalizes’ them, transforming
them into ear flaps, protecting him from the winter cold. Van Gogh was
admitted to the Saint-Paul Asylum in Saint-Rémy in May 1889, and in
September wrote to Theo:

People say…that it’s difficult to know oneself – but it’s not easy to
paint oneself either. Thus I’m working on two portraits of myself at
the moment – for want of another model…. One I began the first day I
got up, I was thin, pale as a devil. It’s dark violet blue and the head
whiteish with yellow hair….But since then I’ve started another one,
three-quarter length on a light background.54

Whereas Poussin pioneered the painting of consecutive self-portraits, van

Gogh pioneered the painting of simultaneous self-portraits. But it is not a
celebration of the luxuriant superabundance of an artist’s feelings and moods
– in the portentous manner of the young Courbet. It is now an index of
estrangement, of a catastrophic loss of control.

Gauguin responded to the idea of the furniture self-portrait, sculpting a

stoneware jug self-portrait in Paris in early February 1889.55 The jug is
formed from Gauguin’s severed head, with streams of red glaze simulating
blood. Every time the jug is lifted, it will appear as if the bearer is
presenting the head of an executed criminal, enemy or martyr. At a stroke,
Gauguin qualifies the domestic idealism rooted in everyday objects that
underpinned van Gogh’s Studio of the South.
The design revolution inaugurated by the Arts and Crafts Movement had
stimulated demand for handmade pottery in ‘folk’ styles. Gauguin first made
hand-built ceramics in Paris in 1886, collaborating with the ceramicist
Ernest Chaplet, using motifs inspired by Breton folk art and Pre-Columbian
ceramics. He saw it as a money-making sideline, but they failed to sell. He
was excited by the potential of stoneware, however, and after returning from
Martinique in 1887 made a series of vases and jugs in the shape of human
heads informed by Peruvian portrait jars, and by Toby jugs. Whereas the
imagery of the earlier ceramics had generally been utopian, the self-portrait
jug is apocalyptic. It was made after Gauguin had witnessed the guillotining
of a glamorous multiple murderer called Prado, who claimed – among many
other things – to be the illegitimate son of Emperor Napoleon III.56
Gauguin depicts himself as martyr, genie and Medusa. His eyes are
closed but we suspect he may be sleeping. Are we about to witness his
rebirth? The browny-orange glaze flows over his undulating face as if
coaxing it into life, and encouraging us to caress it. Where each ear should
be, an undulating ‘throat’ rises up to the lip of the jug. Van Gogh’s injury is
both alluded to and denied. There is only a trace of blood around these ‘ear-
throats’: redemptive water, wine, blood or milk will overflow the lips of the
jug, like a volcanic eruption. No meal could ever be the same again.
Gauguin’s demonic persona would re-emerge a few years later in Tahiti in a
life-size hieratic head sprouting two pairs of diabolical horns.
 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait Jug, 1889, glazed stoneware

Van Gogh’s communal idyll is not Gauguin’s only target. The writer
brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt excoriated contemporary culture,
and instead idealized the pre-revolutionary age of Madame de Pompadour,
when artists were also artisans, making decorative objects and doing interior
design. The holistic nature of the art world was reflected in the organicism of
the art: ‘all harsh and rebellious matter was subordinated to the supple
caress of the artisan’.57 The brothers were confirmed bachelors who shared a
house on the outskirts of Paris, which they filled with rococo and Far Eastern
artefacts, creating a ‘harmonie artiste’ (aesthetic harmony). Their passion
for objets d’art filled the erotic gap created by their disdain for modern
woman. Edmond, in his guidebook to his own house, Maison d’un artiste
(House of an artist) of 1881, describes drinking from Sèvres porcelain cups
moulded from the breasts of Marie Antoinette, and returning from a shopping
exhibition exhausted ‘as if from a night of sexual debauchery’.58
 Gauguin loathed ‘coy, insipid’ Sèvres porcelain, and the object fetishism
it gave rise to. In July 1889, he claimed it had ‘killed’ ceramics: ‘Everybody
knows this, but it’s inviolable: it’s the glory of France’. Porcelain was fired
only briefly, but for Gauguin, the fire in the kiln was ‘hell’, and the longer the
pot remained inside the ‘graver, more serious’ it became. Authentic pottery
was the primordial art form: ‘In the remotest times, among the American
Indians, the art of pottery making was always popular. God made man out of
a little clay’.59

Paul Gauguin, Head with Horns, 1895–7, wood with traces of polychromy
 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait Jar, 1889, enamelled ceramic

Having depicted himself at death’s door, Gauguin went right back to the
beginning and depicted himself at birth, as a foetal baby. But this is a world
away from Vivant Denon’s Raphaelesque self-image as a baby. Self-Portrait
Jar (1889) is a crumpled primordial foetus, sucking its thumb, daubed in a
weather-beaten white-brown glaze. Formally, it was inspired by a terracotta
mask from Asia Minor that had been illustrated in a book on illness in art as
an ancient depiction of mental illness.60 But it equally harks back to
Courbet’s sultrily insolent close-up Self-Portrait with a Pipe. The jar was to
contain tobacco, which van Gogh believed stoked the ‘furnace of creation’,
and, of course, the pipe was the adult’s thumb substitute.61 Like van Gogh’s
chairs, the two self-portrait pots are a complementary pair, and just as
paradoxical: the infant is much taller than the adult (28 as opposed to 19.5
cm high; or 11 to some 7½ in.). Pablo Picasso, who made ceramic sculptures
after seeing a Gauguin retrospective in 1906, may have been thinking of these
works when he said his own sculptures were vials filled with his own
blood.62
 In this chapter, we have explored the various ways in which self-
portraiture was at the centre of attempts to re-root ‘homeless’ artists. In the
next, we will explore the complex role of sexuality and sexual relations in
the artist’s domestic and studio life.
9.
SEX AND GENIUS

Lovis Corinth, Self-Portrait with His Wife, 1903 (detail), see full picture

THE OBSESSION WITH ‘LOCATING’ the modern artist, explored in the last
chapter, inevitably stimulated interest in their private life and domestic
arrangements. The role of women – and sex – in a male artist’s life became a
live and controversial issue in the nineteenth century, and generated some
extraordinary self-portraits. The beginnings of female emancipation – with
more middle-class women working and studying art – gave a disconcerting
new twist to the relationship between male artists and female models.
 The Goncourt brothers were key contributors to the debate. For the male
artist, did women, whether wives or mistresses, foster genius, or impair it?
Such questions owed much to social anxieties brought about by the Industrial
Revolution, and by the massive shifting populations drawn to cities. Chilling
attempts were made to identify social types, all the better to control them,
and the artist was one of the most interesting categories, both because of their
supposed originality, and their exposure to female models. The debate
centred on the relationship between art, genius and sex. The ideal was not
necessarily the mythical pious monogamy practised by Raphael and his
mistress La Fornarina, which was how the nineteenth century tried to rescue
him from Vasari’s slur of promiscuity, or the probable monogamy practised
by Ingres and his ‘excellent’ wife Madeleine – ‘our household is, I venture to
say, held up as an example’.1 The issue was whether aspiring geniuses
should be having sex at all.
Vasari had already claimed that Raphael had died young as a result of his
debaucheries, and that his art had declined as a result; and that Andrea del
Sarto’s excessive love for his wife, whose features he used for all the
women in his paintings, had been to the detriment of his career. His
predicament became the subject of Robert Browning’s 1855 poem ‘Andrea
del Sarto’: ‘Why do I need you? What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo?’ The
notion that genius was incompatible with sexual excess was given a
pseudoscientific grounding by the influential Italian criminologist Cesare
Lombroso in Genius and Madness (1863). Lombroso, who believed genius
was a form of epilepsy (something that was later credited to van Gogh), said
that ‘many great men have remained bachelors; others, although married,
have had no children’; some great women, such as Florence Nightingale, had
been celibate.2 The bachelor Goncourt brothers gave their repudiation of
woman a precise historical basis. Since the French Revolution, society had
become so fragmented that modern man could no longer relate to modern
woman: ‘For our generation, art collecting is only the index of how women
no longer possess the male imagination’.3 They are referring here to what
would become known as the femme nouvelle (new woman), who had often
left the family home to enter the world of work, relocating to metropolises
like Paris. They were stereotyped as frock-coated, trousered, bicycle-riding,
cigarette-smoking, predatory or lesbian hommesses.4 Women’s right to
divorce was established in France in 1884. The alienated male artist and art
collector sought refuge in his art.
 The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was the great exponent of art-
making as a sublimated sexual act. Great artists have to be physically strong
with lots of surplus sexual energy – ‘without a certain overheating of the
sexual system a Raphael is unthinkable’. Yet despite the artist’s susceptibility
to sensory stimulation and intoxication – ‘how wise it is at times to be a little
tipsy!’ – he is often chaste: his dominant instinct ‘does not permit him to
expend himself in any casual way’.5 So Raphael must have kept his mistress
La Fornarina waiting while painting his madonnas. The Symbolist writer
Albert Aurier despaired of modern artists ever being chaste: ‘dirty sexuality’
and ‘filthy passion…like a leper stalks and kills the artists of our villainous
epoch’.6 The ‘Choice of Hercules’ had been transmuted into a choice
between vicious women and virtuous art.
But the consequences of art-object fetishism could be suicidal madness
rather than genius. Claude Lantier, the painter hero of Émile Zola’s novel
L’Œuvre (‘The work’, 1886), slaves away for years on his masterpiece, a
large female nude, but can never satisfactorily complete it. His wife is
horrified to realize her husband only loves ‘this strange, nondescript monster
on the canvas’. In frustration, he punches the canvas, tearing a hole where the
bosom/heart is, and he wonders how he could possibly ‘have slain what he
loved best in the world’.7 He eventually hangs himself behind the picture.
In the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp would be fascinated by the idea
that modern man was alienated from woman, and thereby forced to be a
bachelor. He clearly saw Fountain (1917), the infamous urinal, as a fetish to
rival any piece of Sèvres porcelain: ‘One only has for female the public
urinal and one lives by it’.8 The inability of the male to achieve coition with
the female was the main subject of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), better known as The Large Glass. The
‘bachelors’ in the bottom half are unable to ignite the ‘love gasoline’ of the
bride in the top half, and they are forced to ‘grind their own chocolate’.
All these ideas inspired new kinds of ‘marriage self-portrait’
unprecedented both in their excruciating levels of intimacy and in their sheer
quantity. It is never clear whether the partner/wife is a fertilizing muse or
vampiric nemesis. The trend culminates in the 1920s and 30s with Pierre
Bonnard’s pictures of his untouchable wife Marthe, embalmed in the bath,
and with Stanley Spencer’s nude self-portraits of 1936–7, ogling his
increasingly untouchable bisexual wife.
The Goncourt brothers’ claim that women ‘no longer possess the male
imagination’ is scarcely true of the Norwegian painter and printmaker
Edvard Munch (1863–1944), for they are virtually the only things that
possess his imagination. But women induce nightmares rather than dreams,
and they cannot be exorcized.
Munch is one of the most prolific self-portraitists: if we include probable
self-portraits in subject pictures, there are over seventy paintings, over a
hundred drawings and watercolours, fifty-seven photographs and twenty
prints. More exhibitions of his self-portraits have been mounted than for any
other artist: at Oslo’s National Gallery in 1927 and 1945; at the newly
opened Munch Museum in 1963; and a touring exhibition of 2005. Most of
the self-portraits were produced after 1902, the year in which Munch split up
from the rich heiress Tulla Larsen, with whom he had had a stormy on-off
relationship since 1898. He shot himself in the left hand at the final parting,
having refused to marry her. He wrote to her explaining that ‘my art is my
greatest love’.
In four severely frontal and hieratic self-portraits of the 1890s, Munch
places a female symbol directly over his head.9 He is not just dominated by
them, but a part of them. So in the watercolour Salome-Paraphrase (1894–
8), Salome is ‘paraphrased’ into a black waterfall of dark hair, cascading
vertically down the blood-red page, but curving in at the bottom to caress
and hold Munch’s jug-eared moustachioed head, which sports a skew-whiff
miffed expression. Salome was a favourite type for the femme fatale, but this
Salome is not just decapitating Munch, she is giving birth to him. Her
cascading hair is a ‘paraphrase’ of the female genitalia, and Munch is being
born head first (his head is so small, however, he must be premature, a
miscarriage or an abortion).
 Edvard Munch, Salome-Paraphrase, 1894–8, watercolour, Indian ink and pencil on paper

To use Samuel Beckett’s phrase, he is born astride the grave, but this is
also a rebirth, with Munch cast as a primordial being, situated in the very
spot where life is created. So Salome-Paraphrase represents the ultimate
homecoming. The hieratic and frontal nature of the self-portrait heads may be
an allusion to the ‘self-portrait’ of Christ on Veronica’s veil (see Chapter 1).
The women positioned above Munch take on the role of St Veronica,
traditionally depicted holding her cloth in front of her torso, with Christ’s
head covering her midriff. The legend of St Veronica symbolizes something
basic about what self-portraiture means for Munch: the producer/catalyst is
invariably a woman.
After the end of his relationship with Tulla Larsen, Munch makes himself
appear increasingly androgynous and hermaphroditic – below the neck.
Androgyny was a Symbolist ideal, an emblem of pure self-sufficiency. It was
primordial insofar as Plato believed humanity had started out androgynous
before splitting off into male and female; modern science, too, was showing
the fundamental nature of androgynous organisms. Gauguin had imagined
himself as supremely androgynous in his self-portrait for van Gogh with male
and female qualities; Aubrey Beardsley depicted himself as a woman lurking
below a big-breasted satyress in Portrait of Himself in Bed (1894); and
from 1920–41, Marcel Duchamp had an alter ego Rrose Sélavy: he signed
works in her name and dressed in women’s clothing.10
Munch feminizes his body, but only below the neck. In Self-Portrait in
Hell (1903) he stands, a naked Frankenstein’s monster, before a flaming,
cave-like landscape. His own jug-eared head – a peeling mask of burning red
and orange – is placed on top of a golden girlish body with budding breasts.
The ‘join’ is marked by a red slash across the neck. He would later make
several androgynous self-portraits with full breasts. He looks like Ophelia in
1909, and then in Androgynous Self-Portrait (c. 1925), a grumpy old man in
his sixties who has just had a sex change operation and a jumbo breast
enlargement. The latter was a proposed centrepiece for a (thankfully)
rejected mural The Human Mountain, and was supposed to represent a new
ideal, but Munch was infinitely more suited to dramatizing the collision
rather than the coalition of the sexes.
 Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait in Hell, 1903, oil on canvas

Munch regularly treats his head as distinct from his body, and he may
have been influenced by Jules Michelet’s The Mountain (1868), a
ruminative, rhapsodic book on natural history republished in 1885 and in
1896 with his book on insects. The great French historian makes a visit to
some mud baths, standing in the hot mud with only his head exposed. Mother
Earth caresses the body of her wounded child, restoring it to life and making
it happy. They merge, his body becoming indistinguishable from her. But his
exposed head is excluded, and its complaints irritated him: it complained
that, by virtue of being unburied, it was ‘no longer me’.11 Munch’s male head
always looks out of sorts, and estranged from his debonairly androgynous
body.
Munch had a high and scandalous profile in Germany in the 1890s, living
there for several years and exhibiting. He had a considerable influence on the
Prussian-born pioneer of Expressionism Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), who
was equally haunted by the relationship between sex, debauchery and genius.
Corinth was to become the most systematic ‘tracker’ self-portraitist of the
early twentieth century, and one of the most successful German artists. He
painted forty-two self-portraits, after 1900 painting one on each birthday. He
made over thirty self-portrait prints, and many drawings. His autobiography,
begun in 1906 and published posthumously in 1926, is illustrated by thirty
self-portraits. A heavy-drinking depressive, he suffered a stroke in 1911,
after which his painting technique became much looser.
Corinth’s finest works are a series of self-portraits with his much younger
wife Charlotte Berend, an art student he met in 1901 when she was twenty-
one, and married two years later. By all accounts – including her own – her
deft sense of humour and tact defused Corinth’s dark nights of the soul when
he claimed to love no one. He eventually painted forty-one pictures of her,
and included her in twenty-nine genre scenes, producing a uniquely extensive
and intimate record of their partnership.12 Some of these pictures are
uncomfortably ludicrous. In The Artist and His Family (1909), Charlotte sits
serenely in the studio with their jolly baby, with Corinth standing behind,
seemingly about to strike her over the head with his palette. In 1910–11, he
made several pictures of old men in armour, but there is no avoiding the Don
Quixote aspects of The Victor where, with raised visor, he stiffly embraces
the swooning, bare-breasted Charlotte. Corinth was drawn to the burlesque
aspects of the bacchanalian, and it is hard not to see these as a new type of
parodic self-portraiture (he is an heir to Denon and Courbet). Corinth
identified with the Nietzschean Übermensch (superman), fighting to the death
in the battle for existence. But in his pictures, he courts disaster and ridicule.
The finest self-portrait was painted three months after his marriage. A
naked Charlotte, seen from the back, clings to the clothed Corinth, who is
seen from the front, one hand resting on his heart, her head and the other arm
resting on his shoulder. He stands to attention, bolt upright, eyes front, both
arms raised and bent in a ‘wing’ position, holding paint brushes and palette.
His role is usually described as protective, but this must be a ‘Choice of
Hercules’ moment, when the future of his art and life hangs in the balance.
(He had tackled this very subject in a drawing of 1895, where he is a knight
in armour between a naked woman with a glass of wine, and a nun bearing a
crown of thorns.)13 The voluptuous young Charlotte is preventing him from
painting, even if only momentarily. At the base of Corinth’s picture is an
Egyptian-style gold border, decorated with winged figures, whose colour
matches the golden background. The implication is that Charlotte will
determine whether he ever again takes flight. Or are they both already
trapped inside an Egyptian tomb of their own making? In Henrik Ibsen’s last
play, When We Dead Wake (1899), the sculptor Professor Rubek believes if
he touches his model, or even desires her sensually, his artistic vision will
be lost. Corinth tries not to touch or even look at Charlotte; but she is already
too close for comfort.

Lovis Corinth, Self-Portrait with His Wife, 1903, oil on canvas

The ominous, even overwhelming, presence of women in the work of both
Munch and Corinth attests to male anxieties about changes in the status of
women – changes that extended to art education as well. Women had been
admitted to official and private art schools during the second half of the
nineteenth century: Charlotte Berend was the first student to enrol at Lovis
Corinth’s private art school, and she exhibited her paintings and prints from
1906. But it is a German contemporary of Berend, Paula Becker (1876–
1907), who would produce a new kind of self-portrait that turns the tables on
male ‘bachelor’ artists, and instead parades female self-sufficiency and
(pro)creative genius.
In the 1890s Becker enrolled at several art schools, and in 1898 went to
live in an artists’ colony in Worpswede, a farming village, where she met the
painter Otto Modersohn whom she would marry in 1901, changing her
surname to Modersohn-Becker. In 1899 she made the first of several
extended visits to Paris, usually leaving Otto behind, and her art was
increasingly influenced by Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh. In 1906 she went
alone to Paris, the night after Otto’s birthday, and seems to have had an
identity and marriage crisis. Six days earlier she wrote to her friend the poet
Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘And now I do not know how to sign my name. I am not
Modersohn, neither am I Paula Becker any more. I am myself, and I hope to
become myself more and more. This is probably the final goal of all our
struggles’.14 Becker had always been a dedicated self-portraitist, usually
depicting herself alone, outstaring us with a hieratic glare – and in one case
with Munch’s jug ears.
Shortly after her arrival in Paris, she wrote to Otto saying that she did not
want to have his child. She immediately painted her largest, life-size self-
portrait, inscribed Dürer-style: ‘This I painted at the age of 30 on my sixth
wedding anniversary P. B.’ She stands before us, faintly smiling, naked down
to the waist (except for an amber-orange necklace), her hands placed above
and below a belly that looks very pregnant.
 Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait, 1906, oil on card

The picture, with its mottled green background, has given rise to all kinds
of speculation, but the pose, the simplified contours and almond-eyed
physiognomy, the tied-back hair, all evoke Raphael’s famous portrait of La
Fornarina. Whereas that picture proclaimed the great artist’s ownership of
his model (he signed her armband), Becker’s self-portrait implies that this
model is self-creating and indeed self-reproducing. A perfect title for it
would be Browning’s line ‘Why do I need you?’ – now addressed to her
husband and the world at large. The marriage soon resumed, however, and
Modersohn-Becker tragically died three weeks after giving birth to a
daughter in November 1907.
Another option for the turn-of-the-century man of genius was masturbation
(Wagner had warned Nietzsche’s doctor that the philosopher masturbated too
much; Duchamp’s bachelors grind their own chocolate…). The specialist in
this field was the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele (1890–1918). From
around 1910 until 1912, when he was imprisoned for letting minors see his
drawings, Schiele produced innumerable nude and semi-nude self-portraits,
including several that showed him masturbating, brandishing a giant penis, or
hermaphroditic with female genitalia. There are many other images of girls
masturbating. His standard technique is to isolate a single, writhing figure,
both gauche and lithe, against a blank ground. A major innovation was to
make a series of double and triple self-portraits. In the Self-Seers 1 (1910)
two naked identical twins cling together, one behind the other – a self-
sufficient artistic brotherhood. Yet they are joyless, orphaned marionettes.
In 1990, it was claimed that Schiele’s ‘narcissistic self-absorption – a
recurring irritant to certain critics – is, in fact, a normal aspect of
adolescence…much adolescent art is autobiographical’. The ‘hermaphroditic
quality of many of Schiele’s nudes…underscores a sexual ambivalence that
is not at all uncommon in males at Schiele’s stage of development’.15 These
subjects had not been explored before in such quantity and quality; while
Rembrandt and Courbet’s youthful self-portraits may be construed as
narcissistic, they could scarcely be said to be obsessed by sex. Indeed, if
anything, it is Schiele who, since his art was rediscovered in the 1960s,16 has
shaped our image of adolescence, rather than vice versa.
Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait in Black Cloak, Masturbating, 1911, gouache, watercolour and pencil on
paper

The French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) was perhaps the most
home- and-family-fixated artist who ever lived. During the 1890s he painted
over fifty pictures of his family in his parents’ country home, in windowless
interiors with the doors firmly shut. In 1893, he met Marthe de Méligny
(1869–1942), who became his model and mistress, and whom he married in
1925. She would eventually appear in around 384 paintings, almost always
in interiors, often nude and – after their marriage – soaking in the bath. ‘I
have all my subjects to hand’, he said.17 He was a modern version of the
wife-fixated Andrea del Sarto: in 1913 Sigmund Freud’s follower Ernest
Jones had dubbed Sarto a repressed homosexual, with a love-hate
relationship to his wife.18
Bonnard painted about twelve self-portraits, and drew several more. The
independent self-portraits are generally bust-length, small-scale
claustrophobic close-ups, all but one painted after meeting Marthe.19 The
only one painted pre-Marthe shows him as a bow-tied, besuited man of the
world, standing upright, holding up his palette and brushes with the certainty
of a samurai. Post-Marthe, they become constricted and he even invents a
new imprisoned type – the self-portrait in the steamed-up bathroom mirror.
Unlike Corinth, but like Ibsen’s Professor Rubek, Bonnard is never shown
touching his partner or looking at her.
The first paintings of Marthe soaking in her big bath date from 1925, the
year of their marriage. Marthe was secretive: she had run away from home,
changed her name, and pretended her immediate family were dead. She was
also reclusive, rarely going out or receiving visitors. They never had
children, so for most of the time, it was just them (and a cat). Marthe spent
several hours each day soaking in the bath. Hydrotherapy was a
recommended treatment for tuberculosis, and she may have suffered from
this, though others suggested some nervous disorder. No one knew for
certain. Bonnard only spoke openly about her condition in one letter of 1930:
‘For quite some time now I have been living a very secluded life as Marthe
has become completely antisocial and I am obliged to avoid all contact with
other people…it is rather painful’.20 These malaises may have played a part
in Bonnard starting an affair with Renée Monchat, whom he had met in 1918,
but the relationship was abruptly terminated by her suicide in late 1924.
Bonnard’s marriage to Marthe the following year may have been intended to
fill the void, and be a new start (though he never told his own family about
the marriage).
Bathrooms were still a luxury in Europe, and when Marcel Duchamp
went to New York he thought the plumbing (and bridges) the greatest works
of American art. So what we see is a privileged technological Eden, a
modern equivalent to the Roman baths in the historical fantasies of Lawrence
Alma-Tadema. Bonnard’s bathrooms are fashioned from blocks of cool and
hot colours, laid down in shimmering patchwork mosaics. Whatever his
domestic difficulties, Bonnard clearly luxuriated in the mystery of Marthe’s
condition and habits. He gives her a remembered, younger body.
Even though Marthe still seems to have been willing to pose naked for
Bonnard, the pictures themselves suggest a tense relationship. The white
enamelled bath is both a cocoon and sarcophagus for her inert, corpse-like
body. The interior of the bath is the only place where shadows are allowed
to spill. The painter’s viewpoint is extremely high and bird’s eye, as though
Bonnard needs to dominate her – or to show how much she trusts him. Yet the
overhead viewpoint might be predatory: Bonnard had painted a faun raping a
nymph in 1907, and a red-hot, faun-like self-portrait in 1920.
Bonnard’s presence is always felt, but in Nude in the Bath (1925) it is
glimpsed. The bath rises vertically up the picture plane, with Marthe’s inert
extended body seemingly upended (her head and torso are elided). Bonnard
stands near the foot of the bath, tall and attenuated in a mottled blue silk
dressing gown, but all we see of him is a thin side-on sliver, from slippered
foot to sleeved forearm. He cannot bring himself to look at his Ophelia. He
appears to be drawing a self-portrait in a mirror. If his subsequent self-
portraits of himself before a bathroom mirror are anything to go by, the result
would not be pretty. In The Boxer (1931), he is a flat-faced homunculus
throwing his emaciated arms around in a tantrum; in two self-portraits from
1938–40, he is a flayed, forlorn professor. Michelangelo’s self-portrait as
the flayed skin of St Bartholomew was first identified as a self-portrait by
the psychoanalytically inclined Italian physician Francesco La Cava in a
booklet published in 1925. For La Cava, Michelangelo was a near-suicidal
tragic hero who veered between ‘Dantesque anger’ and ‘infantile timidity’.21
It is a good description of Bonnard in these self-portraits.
Marthe is, of course, a ‘bride in the bath’, and Bonnard stands by her feet.
It is hard to think Bonnard was not aware of the irony. The notorious brides-
in-the-bath murder case had ended with the hanging of George Joseph Smith
in 1915. He had drowned three successive wives for their money, using
disguise and aliases to conceal his tracks. He took them on honeymoon to
rooms in different parts of England, waited until they were in the bath and
dispatched them by suddenly yanking their legs up by the ankles. There were
no signs of struggle, so their deaths by drowning were recorded as
misadventure. The case was a landmark in legal history because of the use of
forensic science and comparative cross-referencing between cases. But
Bonnard will never do it. He is angry with Marthe, but infatuated and
dependent on her too. She is his muse as well as his Medusa.

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in the Bath, 1925, oil on canvas

In this chapter we have been exploring how artists try to find an

accommodation between sexual desire and genius, between human and
artistic needs. In the final chapter we will see how the search for authenticity
and integrity leads to a marginalization of the principal component of
traditional self-portraiture – the face.
10.
BEYOND THE FACE: MODERN AND
CONTEMPORARY SELF-PORTRAITS

MUCH OF THE POST-MEDIEVAL history of self-portraiture (as indeed of

portraiture) is the history of the physiognomic likeness: in other words it is
the history of individual faces and especially of the eyes, the so-called
mirrors of the soul. The Medici (bust-length) self-portrait collection is the
supreme manifestation of this fixation on artists’ faces. In the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries this also became a fixation on heads, due to the
popular ‘science’ of phrenology, which read character into the ‘bumps’ on
the cranium. Phrenologists believed that different brain functions were
localized in anything up to forty zones, and the skull shaped by the brain
activity taking place below. The term ‘highbrow’ derives from the
phrenological belief that a high forehead denoted intelligence. Despite their
differences, self-portraits of Runge, Canova, Courbet, van Gogh, Gauguin,
Corinth, Schiele and Munch are united in showing a big flash of high
forehead.
Self-portraiture in the twentieth century has been many things, but its most
distinctive quality is its tendency to conceal or suppress the face and head,
thereby thwarting traditional physiognomic/phrenological readings. Masks,
mask-like faces and masquerade are a typical trademark of the modern self-
portrait. By the same token, there has also been a shift in focus away from the
face to the body, which is harder to individualize and memorize: full-length
self-portraits, often naked, and self-portraits featuring fragments of the
artist’s body have proliferated, especially in the last half century, and not just
in Western countries. Painting’s domination of self-portraiture has also been
broken by sculpture, photography and video, media that have seemed more
capable of fully and directly embodying the artist. These trends have their
cultural origins in the late nineteenth century.
Self-portraiture has become more prevalent than ever. Not only have
there been many serial and multiple self-portraitists, but a new type of
specialist has emerged – the career self-portraitist, whose oeuvre consists
almost entirely of self-portraits. There has also been ever-increasing interest
in self-portraits by Old and Modern Masters, and a high value – spiritual and
financial – attached to them. The ‘rise’ of self-portraiture, from the
Renaissance onwards, has been made to seem inexorable in celebratory
picture books such as Fünfhundert Selbstporträts (Vienna, 1936) and its
recent reincarnation, 500 Self-Portraits (London, 2000). The apotheosis of
van Gogh, and his status as the world’s most famous artist, would have been
inconceivable without his self-portraits (three van Goghs were included in
Fünfhundert Selbstporträts). His elevation to secular sainthood was
confirmed when his shaven-headed Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul
Gauguin was the star lot in the Swiss auction of ‘degenerate’ works
removed by the Nazis from German museums, held in Lucerne in 1939.1 It is
also in the twentieth century that the genre has received its own terminology
in all European languages, with the ‘self-portrait’ finally supplanting the
traditional ‘Portrait of the Artist’ and ‘Portrait by/of Himself’. In the 1920s
and especially the 1930s autobiographies of writers and artists start to be
entitled ‘a self-portrait’.2
Yet surprisingly few of the very best artists from around 1910–70 have
made a big contribution to the genre. The most obvious excuse would be the
rise of abstract and non-objective art, which precludes portraiture of any
kind, however much we might be tempted to assume that ‘every abstract
painter paints himself’. Indeed, the most influential art theoretical text for the
first half of the twentieth century, Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and
Empathy (1908), insisted that abstraction comes from ‘an urge to alienate
oneself from individual being’.3 He contrasted it with naturalism, which is
‘objectified self-enjoyment’ and involves empathy – a concept that had
dominated late nineteenth-century aesthetics.4 At a stroke, self-expression
was only an option, rather than a necessity.
The ‘urge’ to abstraction has been felt in figurative art as well, and helps
explain why some of the most important figurative artists, such as Henri
Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, most of the Surrealists, Willem de
Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, have remained relatively
aloof from the genre. Picasso is a telling example. His active interest in self-
portraiture is pretty much confined to his early years, as in his two
Munchified ‘searing stare’ self-portraits from 1901 signed ‘Yo Picasso’ (I
Picasso). This phase culminates in his mid-twenties with the primitivizing
half-length Self-Portrait with Palette (1906) and a mask-like proto-Cubist
head of 1907, the year of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. From the 1920s
onwards, the artist in the studio becomes a perennial subject, but it is almost
always a generic or mythical artist, and usually in burlesque mode – above
all in his Raphael and La Fornarina print series of 1968, where the great
artist paints and copulates simultaneously, with Michelangelo and the pope
looking on, amazed (and impotent) bystanders.
While Picasso’s youthful production of self-portraits might seem to
conform to the pattern of earlier periods, he had serious reasons for
desisting. In 1908, he began his collaboration with Braque which resulted in
the Cubist revolution. One of the most radical aspects of Cubism is its
antipathy towards the idea of the artist as genius. Both artists made much of
being worker-artists.5 They regularly wore blue mechanic’s outfits. Their
dealer Daniel Kahnweiler, of whom Picasso made a great Cubist portrait,
recalled them coming to the gallery one day ‘cap in hand acting like
labourers’. They immediately announced: ‘Boss, we’re here for our pay’.
This was far more than just a pose: they worked together as collaborators
until their paintings became almost indistinguishable, and gave up signing
their work on the front of the canvas. Sometimes, they got Kahnweiler’s
assistant to sign their works on the back. The only form of writing that
appeared on the front was stencilled letters or collaged newsprint. Picasso
later explained that they hoped to make ‘an anonymous art, not in its
expression, but in its point of departure’. The collaboration reached its height
in 1912 when they used ordinary ‘found’ materials to make collages and
constructed sculptures. Their aspiration to be humble worker-artists was a
radical updating of the cult of the anonymous medieval artisan and the artistic
brotherhood. Picasso would subsequently quip that Braque had been his
wife.
The approach Picasso and Braque were rejecting is exemplified by a
book on portraiture published in 1908 by the German art historian Wilhelm
Waetzoldt.6 The longest chapter, taking up about a quarter of the book, is
entitled ‘The Psychology of Self-Representation’, and is a celebration of
individual genius. Every self-portrait is the product of the artist’s ‘inner
compulsion’, a manifestation of an ‘intimate monologue, revealing the
personality’.7 Multiple self-portraits by the same artist illustrated the
development of genius and the path of self-criticism. Rembrandt’s self-
portraits do not document Rembrandt’s life, but the journey of his genius. The
journey begins with the ‘sturm und drang’ (storm and stress) of the emergent
years, when Rembrandt has ‘tangled hair and a provocative student-like
expression in his eye’. It ends with Rembrandt’s soul sick with life, and
engaged in a desperate struggle with the body.8
Waetzoldt’s definition of self-portraiture represents the same Romantic
ideal endorsed half a century earlier by the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne in
The Marble Faun (1860), a story of American artists in Florence and Rome.
When a beautiful self-portrait is found on a female artist’s easel, we are
advised that in each of the Medici self-portraits

there are autobiographical characteristics…traits, expressions,

loftinesses, and amenities, which would have been invisible, had they
not been painted from within.9

Waetzoldt was especially interested in tracking a complex and even neurotic

psychological ‘journey’ through successive self-portraits, something that had
been facilitated by the availability of black-and-white photographic
reproductions. Illustrated books and museum picture libraries meant one
could scan an artist’s oeuvre at a glance, and line up all the self-portraits,
something that Rembrandt himself could never have done with his paintings.
(Waetzoldt’s own book had eighty black-and-white reproductions.) The
‘oeuvre overview’ had previously been possible only in cases like
Reynolds, where prints had been systematically made and sold during the
artist’s lifetime. In his second section on ‘Artistic Individuality’, Waetzoldt
moves carefully from ‘Youthful Portrait’, to ‘Early Maturity Portrait’, through
to adult portraits and ‘Old Age Portraits’. He then discusses a trio of artists –
Reynolds, Goya, Böcklin – who have depicted ‘a life in self-portraits’, and
misquotes Oscar Wilde to assert: ‘The artist’s life is only self-
development’.10
The Hawthorne-Waetzoldt ‘tracker’ approach remains the most popular
way of thinking about self-portraits to this day. Nonetheless, we can say
categorically that 1908 represents the high-water mark of the self-portrait as
pure soul music. Not only does 1908 mark the beginning of Picasso and
Braque’s collaboration, and the publication of Worringer’s Abstraction and
Empathy; it is also the year of the mask.

MASKED SELF-PORTRAITS

In 1908, the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren dubbed James Ensor (1860–1949)
the ‘painter of masks’ in a monograph on his work. Interest in role playing
was nothing new (‘All the world’s a stage…’), and Rembrandt was of course
famous for his big wardrobe. But the use of masks now came to symbolize
the alienating and repressive condition of modern society, with its
superficiality, materialism and pressure to conform. Courbet, in his letter of
1854 to Alfred Bruyas, famously said, ‘Behind this laughing mask of mine
which you know, I conceal grief and bitterness, and a sadness which clings to
my heart like a vampire. In the society in which we live, it doesn’t take much
to reach the void’. A similar point is made in Baudelaire’s ‘Le Masque’
(1859), a poem included in Les Fleurs du mal. Nietzsche, in Beyond Good
and Evil (1886), insisted that ‘every profound spirit needs a mask’:

even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing

continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow,
interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.11

Freudian psychoanalysis would give a new twist to the culture of masks, with
its aim of stripping off the bourgeois masks of respectability to reveal the
repressed unconscious and subconscious urges beneath.
Ensor had become the ‘painter of masks’ in 1888, when he started to go
back over his earlier naturalistic work adding masks and skeletons.12 He
spent most of his life in his birthplace, the coastal town of Ostend, where his
father’s curiosity shop stocked masks for the annual carnival. He often
visited marionette theatres and puppet shows. Over the course of a long
career he painted 112 self-portraits, though only one, Self-Portrait with a
Flowered Hat (My Portrait Disguised), had been exhibited by 1900. It was
painted in two stages, in 1883 and 1888, and then transformed again by being
copied into another self-portrait of 1899, Self-Portrait with Masks. They are
rather like revised editions of literary texts.
 James Ensor, Self-Portrait with a Flowered Hat (My Portrait Disguised), 1883/8, oil on canvas

Ensor had first painted a side-on bust with him looking sharply at us over
his left shoulder. It is heavily impastoed, a mixture of Courbet and
Impressionism. But the pose, and the suddenness of the look, recall van
Dyck’s glancing-over-the-shoulder self-portraits, with bare head and high
forehead. Van Dyck’s exquisitely camp portraits of the Stuart court had for
centuries been regarded as prophetic, because their melancholy mood
seemed to prophesy the sitters’ imminent doom.13 Ensor’s aping of the art of
his great Flemish precursor fits in with his own frequent self-portrayal as an
artistic aristocrat and doomed martyr – whether as Christ (Calvary, 1886) or
a severed head being served up to art critics (The Dangerous Cooks, 1896).
When Ensor reworked his 1883 self-portrait in 1888, he added a
woman’s wide-brimmed hat decorated with flowers, and with purple
feathers cascading down the left side like a lovelock. He also painted in a
beard and a voluptuously upturned moustache. The hat is comparable to that
worn by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in the self-portrait painted in Brussels in
1782, which was itself inspired by Rubens’s The Straw Hat. His ‘disguise’
transforms him into a classic androgyne, not Wildean but from an earlier
century.
Finally, in 1899, as a farewell to the nineteenth century, we see him in the
same pose and costume (though now deep red), in the midst of a dense
Hogarthian crowd of masked figures, painted in bright clownish colours.
Some grin; all have open mouths. We cannot be sure what his role might be.
Is he their prisoner, the last real man in a nightmarish world of illusion? Is he
the puppeteer, or are these his own masks? Since he looks the same age as in
the 1883/8 self-portrait, we may further wonder if this is his real face or a
mask of youth.
In his 1908 monograph, Verhaeren claimed that ‘up close, one could
discern his psychology just by analysing his self-portraits from different eras,
and the elusive being that he is might be revealed better by this method than
by examining the daily actions of his life’.14 That elusiveness is seen in a
number of caricatural self-portraits – as a June beetle, then one of the most
destructive insects in Europe (1888); or as The Man of Sorrows (1891)
wearing a grimacing Japanese Noh mask. At the same time, they may tell a
larger truth. As Oscar Wilde wrote in The Critic as Artist: ‘Man is least
himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell
you the truth’.
 James Ensor, Self-Portrait with Masks, 1899, oil on canvas

Ensor rarely discussed his self-portraits, but in a letter of 1894 he had

already claimed to find himself elusive: ‘I’ve tried several times to paint my
portrait, but I’ve never managed to capture the resemblance’.15 It is
superficially similar to van Gogh’s letter of 1889 when he is painting
simultaneous self-portraits, and he confesses that it is not only difficult to
know oneself, ‘it’s not easy to paint oneself either’. But whereas for van
Gogh the elusiveness of a likeness marked a moment of acute crisis, for
Ensor the elusiveness of his likeness is an existential necessity. His inability
to ‘capture the resemblance’ underwrites his own freedom: by remaining in
disguise he can escape capture in this decadent world. So we have here one
of the chief paradoxes that stimulates the creation of multiple self-portraits
by modern artists: they need to repeatedly remake themselves – ‘My Portrait
Disguised’ – in order to maintain their disguised condition. The mask, in
Nietzsche’s terms, has to keep on growing.

Picasso did not entirely renounce self-portraiture in the years after 1908:
from 1911–16 he mechanically reproduced himself by taking several staged
self-portrait photographs in his studio, though these were kept private and
were not exhibited or reproduced until recently.16 He variously wears
workmen’s clothes with cloth cap, Braque’s military uniform, boxing shorts,
and formal wear. Picasso clearly enjoyed ringing the costume changes. It is
no coincidence that most were taken in 1915–16, at a moment when he was
starting to work simultaneously in different styles, Cubist and Neoclassical.
Tribal masks had already played a crucial role in the development of
Cubism, enhancing his figures’ mystery and malevolence, and we can see his
interest in masks and in role playing as related. They render the self not just
elusive but awesome.
Picasso explained his approach to art-making in an interview given in
1923, forcefully attacking the Romantic notion that an artist’s oeuvre was an
organic whole that gradually evolved, charting his personal ‘journey’:

Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me

there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in
the present it must not be considered at all….When I hear people
speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are
considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other
and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they
contemplate successive images of one mirror as his past, and the
images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken
as his present. They do not consider that they are all the same images
in different planes.17

What Picasso objects to is the way a spurious unity is imposed on an artist’s

oeuvre by extrapolating from something they have just made or said, and then
judging the rest of their work according to this one template, which may well
be ephemeral, marginal or mistaken. So because Picasso made Neoclassical
works after the First World War, and in art generally there was a so-called
‘return to order’, the history of French art, including that of Cubism, was
being rewritten to emphasize its rationalism and purity. Where Old Masters
were concerned, the modern ‘science’ of connoisseurship was predicated on
identifying archetypal features of an artist’s work, and where these could not
be found in a particular work, it had to be re-attributed.18 The new ‘science’
of psychoanalysis was equally culpable insofar as one’s lot was determined
at birth and in childhood, in a punitive variation on the doctrine of Original
Sin and the Romantic credo that the child is father to the man.
Picasso’s interest in tribal masks had a huge impact on avant-garde
culture, nowhere more so than at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the launch
pad of the Dada movement. It was founded in 1916 by the poets Hugo Ball,
Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck, and the painters
Jean Arp, Marcel Janco and Hans Richter. Most of its members were in
voluntary exile in neutral Switzerland from the First World War. Using
Futurist shock tactics, but rejecting Futurism’s love of machines and war,
they organized anarchic theatrical performances and concerts, and published
magazines. Many of the performers wore grimacing Cubist/tribal-style masks
made by Janco from found materials.
For Ball, writing in his diary, the ripening of the ‘individualistic-egoistic
ideal of the Renaissance’ had brought disastrous consequences: ‘the
accentuated “I” has constant interests, whether they be greedy, dictatorial,
vain or lazy’. As a counter to this, the Dadaist ‘loves the extraordinary, the
absurd’. They wanted to revive the medieval practice of praising foolishness
(i.e. Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly)and of sending noble children ‘to board
with idiotic families so that they might learn humility’. For the Dadaist, life
asserts itself in contradictions: ‘Every kind of mask is therefore welcome to
him, every play at hide and seek in which there is an inherent power of
deception’.19 A self-portrait assemblage by the American photographer Man
Ray is a fine example of this sensibility. A handprint raised in a ‘stop’
position is placed where the mouth should be, while the eyes are made from
bells for a non-functioning doorbell: it’s a ‘no entry’ self-portrait.
 Man Ray, Self-Portrait Assemblage, 1916, gelatin silver print

For Richard Huelsenbeck, writing in 1920, the Dadaist is ‘entirely

devoted to the movement of life’ – and of personality. He exploits

the psychological possibilities inherent in his faculty for flinging out

his own personality as one flings a lasso or lets a cloak flutter in the
wind. He is not the same man today as tomorrow, the day after
tomorrow he will perhaps be ‘nothing at all’, and then he may become
everything.20

One of the most assiduous players of hide-and-seek in the years after the
First World War was the painter and printmaker Max Beckmann (1884–
1950), who made over eighty self-portraits. Before around 1915, and his
war-induced nervous breakdown, he is generally an eagle-eyed, upright
observer; but then the eyes, face and body start to slide around, contort and
dislocate; and he rings the costume changes. He first took on the persona of
the fool in the bust-length self-portrait on the cover of the portfolio Hell
(1919), containing ten additional lithographs in which the artist takes us on a
whistle-stop tour of the social and political horrors of post-war German
society. Beckmann is a gibbering goblin-like figure dressed in fool’s garb,
Cubistically prickly and distorted, hands pinned to his chest like a foetus. An
accompanying text blithely explains, in a fairground manner:

Hell. (Great Spectacle in 10 images by Beckmann.) Honoured ladies

and gentlemen of the public, pray step up. We can offer you the
pleasant prospect of ten minutes or so in which you will not be bored.
Full satisfaction guaranteed, or else your money back.21

The cover self-portrait is both passive and aggressive, babyish and

malevolent, and the two self-portraits included as the first and last plates
exhibit these qualities too. In the first plate, he is a bewildered bowler-hatted
salary man asking the way home, and in the last he is engaged in gesticulating
debate with his mother about religion as his son plays with grenades. A
different kind of aggression is on view in the luridly sleazy painting Self-
Portrait with Champagne Glass (1919), and another kind of passivity in the
almost lyrical Self-Portrait as a Clown (1921), where his gestures have an
almost elfin delicacy and he shares his armchair with a kitten. Beckmann
would surely have sympathized with British painter William Orpen’s
reported response to criticism of his portrait of Archbishop Lang (1924): ‘I
see seven Archbishops; which shall I paint?’22 The creation of multiple
portraits is, of course, only really feasible with self-portraiture (or
photography).
 Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait, cover of the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph

In several self-portraits of the early to mid-1920s, Beckmann explores

something totally new to portraiture: shyness, introversion. He is even
awkward, embarrassed in Carnival, Double Portrait (1925), where he
poses in harlequin costume with his much-loved new wife. The psychologist
Carl Jung, in an essay of 1921 on aesthetics, had built on Worringer’s
distinction between abstraction and empathy to claim that the artist with an
‘urge to abstraction’ is an introvert, who separates himself from the alien
world around him, and the artist with an ‘urge to empathy’ is an extrovert,
who animates the surrounding world with himself.23 The extrovert artist is
manifested in Beckmann’s largest self-portrait to date, the more-than-life-size
Self-Portrait in Smoking Jacket (1927), which has the black-and-white
colour scheme and frontality of a studio photograph of a film star. It was
bought a year later by the National Gallery in Berlin, criticized for being an
expression of Nietzsche’s superman ideology, made the centrepiece of a
Beckmann room in 1933, and finally confiscated and sold off by the Nazis
after Beckmann was branded a ‘degenerate’ artist.24
Beckmann’s self-portraits have been seen in Waetzoldtian terms: in 1984,
for example, it was said that ‘in human terms, Beckmann’s self-portraits are a
sequential revelation of self; in artistic terms, of style and substance’.25 But
when Beckmann discussed his art in a 1938 lecture in London, he
emphasized the perpetual elusiveness of self: ‘Self-realization is the urge of
all objective spirits. It is this self that I am searching for in my life and my
art…. As we still do not know what this self really is…we must peer deeper
and deeper into its discovery. For the self is the great veiled mystery of the
world’.26 And then again in a diary entry for 4 May 1940: ‘I have tried my
whole life to become a kind of “self”’.27 Beckmann still clung to the idea that
selfhood did exist, but this statement indicates a modern approach to self-
portraiture predicated on the idea that the self is elusive and veiled. And that
becomes the excuse for continuing obsessively to stalk the quarry.

The writer, photographer and sculptor Claude Cahun (1894–1954) is the

great veiled mystery of French interwar culture, both in terms of her art and
her life. Cahun played with issues of identity in a series of photographic self-
portraits, though only one was published in her lifetime (1930). Most of her
work was destroyed by the Nazis when she was arrested for resistance work
on Jersey, but it seems she began taking her photographs during the First
World War. Although she also took photographs of enigmatic still-life
arrangements, and made Surrealist objects in the 1930s, she is the first
example of a specialist, career self-portraitist. She and her self-portraits
have, however, only been properly published and exhibited in the last twenty
years.28
Cahun’s first acts of masking were to change her name. Born into a
prominent Jewish family of writers and publishers in Nantes, she was
christened Lucy Schwob. Her uncle Marcel Schwob was a famous Symbolist
poet and friend of Oscar Wilde (he edited Wilde’s play Salomé). Lucy
changed her name to Claude Courlis (Curlew) and then Daniel Douglas (after
Lord Alfred Douglas), finally opting for Claude Cahun in around 1920.
Claude is a unisex name, and until recently many assumed from her published
writings that she was a man. She moved to Paris in the early 1920s with her
stepsister and lifelong lover Suzanne Malherbe (pseudonym Marcel Moore).
There, she was active in avant-garde and leftist cultural circles, and in the
1930s participated in the Surrealist movement. She never fully recovered
from her incarceration by the Nazis in 1944–5, but carried on making self-
portraits until her death in Jersey in 1954.
Cahun often confuses her gender and age by appearing with her hair cut
short or shaved, and keeping her (small) breasts clothed or concealed. In one
of the earliest surviving self-portraits, she adopts the conventions of studio
photography by standing before a floral curtain and striking an all’antica
pose. She wears a tasselled headband, a skimpy top, and puts one hand
behind her head in a way that suggests both an archer about to draw an arrow
and Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. She parodies the homoerotic nude boy
photographs of Wilhelm von Gloeden and Louise Biender-Mestro. There is
nothing sensuous or glamorous about her photograph. The composition is
angular, ascetic, Gothic-Cubistic. Her naked arms are thin and her headband
is not so much bacchanalian as a crown of thorns. But her sideways gaze is
coolly inquisitorial, that of a militant martyr – perhaps even a suffragette.
When she is at her most girly – wearing dresses, kiss curls, or skimpily
clad – she repulses the viewer by putting on white face paint or a carnival
mask. She has other weapons at her disposal, too. Face-painted with kiss
curls, she sits sexily in shorts on a table, but balances weightlifting barbells
across her thigh. English language graffiti adorns her tights and top: ‘I AM IN
TRAINING DON’T KISS ME’. In another self-portrait, she lies sleeping in the
shelving area of a large Victorian wardrobe: different versions of Claude
Cahun are pulled out on a daily basis like items of clothing.
In 1914 Cahun published a series of essays on masks and in 1926 she
published Carnaval en chambre (Carnival in the room) in which she
discussed the ‘charm of the mask’. With her various masks, she creates
‘several ways of being, thinking and even feeling’. But if the mask is put on
‘too heavily’, it ‘bites your skin’, and ‘with horror you see that the flesh and
its mask have become inseparable’. Try and remove the mask, and you risk
damaging your soul.29 Hence the importance of changing the mask every day.
In her only self-portrait published in her lifetime, printed in the journal Bifur
in 1930, her shaved head is distorted anamorphically into a Brancusi-style
egg shape, and in another her head appears enclosed inside a glass bell jar.
One of Constantin Brancusi’s ovoid sculptures was called The Newborn
(1915), and each time we see Claude Cahun she is born again, all the better
to taunt and tease.

Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, c. 1932, black-and-white photograph

 Käthe Kollwitz, Self-Portrait with Hand to Her Forehead, 1925–30, etching

Cahun’s account of the mask that is put on too heavily, so that flesh and
mask become inseparable, would be a good description of the almost
immutable self-portraits by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945).
She lived with her doctor husband in an impoverished district of Berlin, and
is best known for her prints of the poor and downtrodden urban proletariat.
She also made well over a hundred self-portrait prints and drawings, and
two sculptures. Apart from an early drawing of herself laughing (c. 1888) – a
laughing mask – she invariably depicted herself sombrely expressionless,
often with the head hieratically isolated as though the likeness were taken
from a death mask. In several works – the earliest from 1893, the latest from
1938 – her face is partially masked by her hand, further concealing and
erasing it. Her doubleness is disconcerting: she is both unflinching witness
and petrified victim, alive and dead, individual and anonymous, present and
absent, sighted and blind.
When Picasso complained about the reductiveness of evolutionary theories
of art, he was objecting to the pressure for art and artists to conform to a
preconceived type. This was already an issue with the Medici self-portrait
collection where the celebration of individual style, physiognomy and genius
vied with the mapping of period styles and regional schools; the standardized
picture sizes and frames created even more homogeneity.
But the mirror metaphor Picasso used to make his point was very modern.
The infinite regress effect of multiple mirrors had become increasingly
common during the nineteenth century, as new technologies increased the size
and clarity of mirror glass, while drastically reducing the price. One of its
most spectacular manifestations was in the new department stores. In Zola’s
novel The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), mirrors lining the walls of a department
store ‘reflected and multiplied the [mannequins] without end, peopling the
street with these beautiful women for sale, each bearing a price in big figures
in the place of a head’.30 The mirror was no longer just a means of knowing
oneself, or of knowing how little one knew oneself – it also challenged one’s
sense of uniqueness and individuality (as did the headless shop mannequins).
A photo booth was actually designed to create multiple images of the
sitter, who sat in a circle of mirrors, which multiplied the image so it looked
as though five clones were sitting round a table, with the one in the central
foreground seen from the back.31 The Italian Futurist painter and sculptor
Umberto Boccioni used one of these photographs for I-We-Boccioni (1907),
and so too did Marcel Duchamp for Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp
(1917). Both artists wore anonymous black suit and tie. The result was
analogous to Boccioni’s technique of showing simultaneous and sequential
images of the same person or object. He signed his surname across the figure
seen from the back, as if to emphasize his indifference to the viewer – and
unwillingness to show his face. Futurist simultaneity influenced Duchamp’s
early paintings, and he had also started to produce his ‘readymades’,
individual mass-produced items such as Bottle Rack (1914). But this
photograph is unusual, unique even in his oeuvre, in multiplying and, as it
were, ‘mass-producing’ the same entity.32
It is the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898–1967) who is the great
poet of the anonymous, cloned self-portrait. The mannequin man in the
bowler hat, black overcoat, and suit and tie first appears in 1926–7, and is
usually either seen from the front or the back. Magritte only started posing for
photographers in a bowler hat in 1938, and he made portraits of other people
wearing bowler hats (without being much good at ‘likenesses’),33 so we
cannot say for certain that the man in the bowler hat is his alter ego. Indeed,
in most of his seven bona fide self-portraits, which tend to be dull conceptual
one-liners, he is bare-headed. But it is clear that the Bowler-Hatted Man
(BHM) is Everyman, Magritte included. More conclusively, the first time
BHM appears, seen bolt upright from the back next to a river in The Musings
of a Solitary Walker (1926), with a levitating nude female corpse in the
foreground, it is a meditation on the death of his mother by drowning when he
was a child.
The next time BHM appears, in duplicate, in The Meaning of Night
(1927), is a variation on the same theme. This time the twins stand almost
back to back on a beach, hands in pockets, with a fragmented female
mannequin, clothed in silk stockings and fur dress, floating in from the right.
The previous year Magritte had made designs for a furrier’s catalogue,34 and
the duplication, in reverse, must surely have been inspired by the effect of
full-length mirrors in a shop. It mimics the way in which a person standing in
between two mirrors placed opposite each other will see reflections of both
their back view and front view.
The face of the BHM at the front is like a white Japanese mask, but with
the eyes closed (in this respect, Magritte is the heir of Ensor). He is a
sleepwalker, and this his dream. This ‘out-of-body’ experience, where the
sleeper is duplicated and transformed into a sleepwalker, suggests man is
now an automaton, who exists in a permanently unconscious state. The same
anonymous figures reappear again and again, and in his later years Magritte
repeated the same pictures with small variations, backdating them.
Magritte also pursued stylistic and technical anonymity, a pathological
neatness, as he explained to an interviewer: ‘I always try to make sure that
the actual painting isn’t noticed, that it is as little visible as possible. I work
rather like the sort of writer who tries to find the simplest tone, who eschews
all stylistic effects’.35 When in 1963 his lawyer asked for a self-portrait,
Magritte agreed, even though the idea of a self-portrait presented him with a
‘problem of conscience’.36 The ‘problem’ was that of presenting what Hugo
Ball had called the ‘assertive “I”’. The following year he painted a BHM
with a large apple hovering in front of his face, masking it – and called it The
Son of Man (1964). It was a near copy of a gouache with a different title.
The biblical symbolism seems obvious: original sin led to the (metaphorical)
blinding and masking of man, and a loss of individuality. At the same time,
we are witnessing a miracle, a suspension of the (Newtonian) laws of
gravity: there is a kind of imaginative freedom and transcendence in this
weightless world where nothing is fully seen or known. Works such as this
would have a huge influence on Neo-Dada, Pop and Conceptual art in the
1960s and 70s. Magritte’s work chimed with an era in which concepts of
genius and authorship were routinely challenged – the so-called ‘death of the
author’.37
 René Magritte, The Musings of a Solitary Walker, 1926, oil on canvas

In retrospect, the Mexican serial self-portraitist Frida Kahlo (1907–54)

appears as a bridge between early twentieth-century masking culture and the
late twentieth-century obsession with the body of the artist. This, allied to the
fact that she is a woman exploring her own identity, is one of the main
reasons why she has loomed ever larger in the art world since being
‘rediscovered’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In her work, an
expressionless, mask-like face surmounts a body to which many things can
and do happen – mostly involving suffering. The face first appears in 1926,
and remains little changed or aged thereafter. A good parallel for this
radiantly beautiful and virtually shadowless face is that of Queen Elizabeth I,
the ‘Virgin Queen’, in her standardized bejewelled state portraits. Kahlo’s
face has the distinctly and defiantly modern touch of being that of a
hermaphroditic ‘wo-man’ with conjoined heavy eyebrows and moustache.
The face remains the same even when stylized tears are allowed to fall, and
even when in 1943 a round hole is opened up in her forehead to reveal a
skull and her husband Diego Rivera (frontal lobotomies were introduced in
the mid-1930s). Her face is a mask of stoicism and scientific objectivity as
well as of repressed feeling. Rivera and his friends called her ‘the great
concealer’. The action takes place beyond and especially below the face.
Kahlo’s art is aggressively autobiographical, with the main topics being
her complicated medical history; her intense, torturous relationship with the
muralist Rivera; her childhood and family, particularly her photographer
father who was steeped in German Romanticism. She initially trained to be a
doctor, and spent a great deal of time being treated by doctors. At the age of
six, polio left her right leg lame and deformed, and then in 1925 a tram
ploughed into the bus in which she was travelling, smashing her pelvis and
damaging her spine. She started painting self-portraits while recuperating,
with a mirror hung from her four-poster bed. All her life, she suffered
chronic pain, and had to have several further operations on her leg and spine.
Her right leg was eventually amputated. Through all this, she had a chaotic if
exciting love life. She married Rivera twice, and his infidelities – even with
her own sister – caused more anguish. Because of her damaged pelvis, she
was unable to give birth, and had several miscarriages. But it was only after
her marriage in 1929 that her painting came of age, and was exhibited and
sold.
Kahlo could easily have become a third generation Expressionist. Her
litany of woe is even more picturesque than that of Munch or Corinth. She
could have let it all hang out, in the manner of Irving Stone’s van Gogh,
immortalized in his bestselling biographical novel, Lust for Life (1934): ‘He
was spilling out a year of his life blood with every convulsive painting that
he tore from his vitals’. Kahlo said little about her work, but when she did –
in a letter of 1939 – she made her self-portraits sound straightforwardly self-
expressive, painted from deep inside: they were ‘the most sincere and real
thing that I could do to express how I felt about myself and what was in front
of me’.38 Yet what gives her best work its impact is not its transparency, but
its intricate play of polarities – between face and body, female and male,
European and Mexican.
The Two Fridas (1939), painted during her divorce, shows two mirror-
image versions of the artist, sitting on a bench, with a stormy backdrop. One
wears Mexican, the other European, clothes. Kahlo owned vast quantities of
clothes and jewelry, some of it Pre-Columbian, and three hundred garments
remain in the last house she shared with Rivera, now a museum. Apparently
Rivera preferred the ‘Mexican’ Frida, and the Mexican one holds his portrait
miniature. Frida’s heart is exposed – twice over. A vein passes from the
portrait miniature, elegantly winds round the ‘Mexican’s’ left arm in the style
of Elizabethan jewelry, before entering her heart; another vein passes like an
intercontinental telephone cable from her heart across to that of ‘European’
Frida. They do not simply rely on communication through the tongue or eyes.
Euro-Frida’s heart is cut open to reveal a cross-section and the vein that
trails down her arm is severed. She holds up the cut end with forceps, and
lets blood drip into the lap of her white dress. It is a variation on the mystical
Catholic cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was inspired by a female
mystic’s vision in which Christ held out his own heart to her. But here their
hearts are offered to each other.
We may see Kahlo’s vitals, but even here there is nothing convulsive or
out of control. She studied medicine, and in her self-portraits she is doctor as
well as patient. The blood flow is being managed. Her body is filtered
through the cool medical eye. The hearts are in no way individualized. They
are textbook illustrations. This conjoined body is a machine for living in. The
Dadaists had popularized the idea of the mechanized body, with works such
as Francis Picabia’s technical illustration of a spark plug drily entitled
Portrait of an American Girl in a State of Nudity (1915). But it is Kahlo
who imbues the idea with pathos. The overriding feeling of The Two Fridas
is of solidarity, stoicism and of transfusion: they hold hands, and look as
regally immovable as a seated statue of Queen Victoria.
 The potentially destructive and overwhelming aspects of female
biological functions are explored in My Birth (1932), one of a series of
childhood self-portraits, where her mother’s upper body is shrouded in a
Magrittean white sheet as she gives birth to a daughter in a desolate empty
room. This is one of her bleakest works. Another ‘decapitating’ work, What
I Saw in the Water (1938), is more exuberant. Here Kahlo is upstaged by her
own feet in a bird’s-eye view of the plug end of a bath. Her toes project
above the water, casting solid reflections. Her right foot had just been
operated on, and a long bloody scar travels down from the big toe. The foot
is deformed (from childhood polio) and blood drips onto it from two
capillaries projecting mysteriously from the overflow. Blood-red nail
varnish on the toes completes the raw yet exotic effect. It may be inspired by
Bonnard’s Nude in the Bath (1925; see Chapter 9), yet it also recalls The
Big Toe, an illustrated essay of 1929 by the dissident Surrealist Georges
Bataille in which, as part of his crusade to rehabilitate our low bestial
nature, he explored the mixture of disgust and desire elicited by the part of
our anatomy that is mired in the ground.
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939, oil on canvas
 Frida Kahlo, What I Saw in the Water, 1938, oil on canvas

Here Kahlo recasts the Narcissus myth. It is her toes, rather than her face,
that are reflected in the water. Floating around like so many bath toys are
miniature islands of incident, mostly over her right leg, where a bird is
impaled on a tree, and a skyscraper plunges into the mouth of a volcano.
Over Kahlo’s right knee, her parents pop up from behind some leaves,
cardboard cut-out figures in a Douanier Rousseau jungle (another self-taught
artist). She looks down into the water, and finds an almost Proustian flow of
memories and dreams.

THE WHOLE-BODY SELF-PORTRAIT

Where once full-length self-portraits were rare outside of group portraits or
multi-figure narratives, they are now commonplace. If we exclude works like
Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus, or Michelangelo’s ‘flayed-skin’ self-portrait
(see Chapter 5), where the artist gives his own features to another, nude self-
portraits were virtually non-existent before 1900, limited to a few drawings,
‘topless’ bust-length images, and a single full-length ‘topless’ painting.39
Only Dürer, in a full-length drawing, left us an image of his genitals (the
testicles possibly enlarged by syphilitic orchitis).40 It may be that similar
images by other artists have been lost, but it seems unlikely there would be
many missing, for self-portraiture is rarely the ‘experimental’ or
‘confessional’ art form of myth. But in the first decade of the twentieth
century, Munch and Schiele changed everything – for better and for worse.
Munch even took numerous nude self-portrait photographs, was the first artist
to make self-portraits holding the camera at arm’s length, and planned a
never-realized autobiography illustrated by his photographs.41 Modersohn-
Becker, in 1906, is the first female artist to depict herself naked – down to
the waist (see Chapter 9).
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is one of the seminal texts for
the modern body cult in its more brazen manifestations, and his influence
spans Freud and the whole of the twentieth century, especially from the
1960s when there was an upsurge of interest in his work. Here a new
‘Choice of Hercules’ is envisaged, with ecstatic alcohol-fuelled dancing
now seen as the virtuous option. Nietzsche rejects a cultural universe of
measured and calm restraint, as favoured by Winckelmann, and presided
over by the repressive sculptor god Apollo (or rather, by the veiled Queen
Victoria). Instead, he calls for ‘a new world of symbols’, orchestrated by
Dionysus, the Greek equivalent of the Roman Bacchus:

the entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the mere
symbolism of the lips, face, and speech but the whole pantomime of
dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic movement.42

There is, crucially, something depersonalizing about this emphasis on the

body, for it diverts attention away from the face and eyes, which are the
prime locus of individuality. So it is the corollary to the culture of masks, and
Greek tragedy was, of course, performed by masked actors. Nietzsche
exalted Dionysiac dithyrambic dancing because it involved a merging of the
self in a same-sex group of anything up to fifty dancers.
Although Nietzsche dismissed what he considered the shallow narcissism
of contemporary artists – ‘with fifty mirrors around you, flattering and
repeating your opalescence!’43 – the culture of the full-length mirror played a
big part in this new symbolism of the body. In 1870, a French book on
bathrooms by the Countess of Gencé said you could never have too many
mirrors because ‘one has to be able to see oneself from head to toe, in every
direction’.44 A formal photograph of Egon Schiele shows him standing
smartly dressed in his studio in front of a huge floor-to-ceiling mirror, staring
into it, like a dancer at the bar.45 His highly polished patent leather shoes
catch the light, upstaging his face. The photographer Eugène Atget and his
equipment are reflected in the glass windows of Parisian shop fronts and in
the mirror that fills a fireplace in the Austrian Embassy (his coat and hat are
also reflected). The final, catastrophic scene of Max Beckmann’s play The
Hotel (1924) takes place in a large room ‘with numerous large mirrors’ in
which the doomed hero sees himself multiplied from all sides.46 This
scenario seems to prophesy the cumulative impact of exhibitions by serial
self-portraitists.
A pantomimic form of self-portraiture centred on the artist’s body began
to emerge in some force in the mid-1950s, in reaction to abstract painting,
especially the large-scale American varieties. Abstract art was the most
prestigious art form in the non-Communist world from around 1950–65, and
associated with freedom of expression (the Nazis and Soviets had banned it).
The key catalyst was the photographs and films of Jackson Pollock at work,
crouching and scurrying over his vast canvases laid on the floor, flicking and
pouring paint straight from a can. The critic Harold Rosenberg, in a
celebrated essay ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952), claimed that the
canvas was ‘an arena in which to act’, and the picture the record of ‘an
event’: ‘A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the
artist….The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and
life’.47
For Rosenberg, this act was not a mundane daily diary, but a quasi-
mystical existential experience in which the ‘cosmic “I”’ achieves self-
realization. Attention was, however, shifting to the activities of individual
artist while actually making the work, and Pollock would become the only
artist more influential via images of him at work than for any of his actual
artworks.

Eugène Atget, The Austrian Embassy, 57 Rue de Varenne, 1905, albumen silver print

The images of Pollock, and Rosenberg’s essay, inspired a wide range of

art performance events in which painters and sculptors interacted with
artworks and environments. In the mid-1950s, members of the Japanese Gutai
group (meaning ‘body tool’) staged performances in which Saburo Murakami
jumped through a series of a paper screens; Kazuo Shiraga writhed around in
a pool of mud, wrestling with it, leaving the imprint of his body; and Shozo
Shimamoto made paintings by throwing and shooting the paint. The only
residue of these energetic performances tended to be documentary
photographs. Jiro Yoshihara’s ‘Gutai Manifesto’ (1956) praised Pollock for
revealing ‘the scream of the material itself’, and for allowing the ‘innate
beauty’ of the materials to re-emerge from behind ‘the mask of artificial
embellishment’. Ruins ‘welcome us unexpectedly with warmth and
friendliness’.48 They wanted to be, as it were, figures in a ruined landscape,
and felt alienated by the slickness of the Japan that was being rebuilt after the
war.
 The ritualized performances of the Vienna Actionists of the 1960s were
deliberately shocking and shamanistic, involving a Dionysian
disembowelling of animals, immersion in blood and entrails, and self-
mutilation. They too were intended as a protest against the repressive taboos
of modern society. For Self-Painting, Self-Mutilation (1965), Günter Brus
painted himself and his clothes white, with a jagged black vertical line down
the middle of his head and body like a fault line. He walked through the
middle of Vienna, a mummified yet grinning Frankenstein’s monster, before
being arrested for disturbing the peace. The next day he made a decidedly un-
comic collage documenting the Action, with photographs interspersed with
pins, razor blades and a penknife. In 1968, after performing obscene acts
while singing the Austrian national anthem, Brus left the country in order to
escape a six-month sentence.

Günter Brus, Untitled, 1965, mixed media on board mounted on wood

 The ‘cosmic “I”’ was less evident than the ‘bathetic “I”’. Allan Kaprow,
a pioneer of New York Happenings, wrote in 1958 that with Pollock ‘the so-
called dance of dripping, slashing, squeezing, daubing, and whatever else
went into a work placed an almost absolute value on the diaristic gesture….
Pollock could truthfully say that he was “in” his work’.49 This ‘diaristic’
ethos was taken ad absurdum in Jim Dine’s The Smiling Workman (1960),
which lasted thirty-two seconds and was performed in New York. Dine came
on stage dressed in a red smock with his hands and feet painted red, and
eyebrows and mouth painted black. He stood in front of a large canvas, on
which he had previously daubed a patch of white paint surrounded by his
own white handprints. Using three pails of blue, orange and red paint, he
scrawled ‘I LOVE’ (in blue) followed by ‘WHAT I’M’ (in orange). He then
drank the red paint (actually tomato juice), and hurriedly scrawled ‘DOING
HELP ’, before pouring the unused paint over his head and jumping through the
canvas.
Despite the documentation of artists’ actions, as late as 1970 the
American critic Max Kozloff could still begin an essay with an obituary for
self-portraiture: ‘Self-portraits are defunct in modern art. Liquidated along
with the larger idea of genre, they are among those subjects no one expects to
see any more.’50 Yet this apocalyptic opening was for dramatic effect, as
Kozloff was in fact announcing a revival that had begun in the early 1960s.
He entitled the essay ‘The Division and Mockery of the Self’, an allusion to
R. D. Laing’s influential book on mental illness The Divided Self (1960).
‘It’s surprising’, Kozloff wrote, ‘to find in the work of certain
undemonstrative Americans of the early 1960s distress signals that are
autobiographical in character…. an effigy, or occasionally an anxious
physical trace of the artist, haunts some recent painting and sculpture.’51
He was referring to the appearance of body fragments in a few works by
some Neo-Dada and Pop artists: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and
Robert Morris. In the early 1960s, Johns had made the so-called Skin series
of drawings and prints. He had applied baby oil to his head and hands, then
pressed himself up against a sheet of paper tacked to a wall, rolling his head
so that even his ears made a mark. He went over the oiled patches in
charcoal to create an impression. These works were to have culminated in a
hollow rubber cast of his own head, stretched out on a board, then cast in
bronze. Instead, he made a series of lithographs, and finally Diver (1962–3),
a large charcoal image in which impressions of his feet appear at the top, and
his hands at the bottom. The never-realized ‘stretched’ sculpture would have
been a kind of homage to Michelangelo’s flayed self-portrait, perhaps timed
to coincide with the fourth centenary of his death in 1964. Kozloff called it
‘the poignant imprint, the Marsyas complex’. Veronica’s sudarium also
comes to mind.
The body or trace of the artist was present in a variety of forms at an
exhibition in 1963 in New York by the sculptor and performer Robert
Morris, engaging wittily with identity, autobiography and virility. The best
known is the I-Box, a functional small painted plywood cabinet with a chalky
pink door in the shape of an ‘I’. The door opened to reveal a photograph of
the artist standing naked, with a broad grin and partial erection. Portrait was
a set of grey-painted bottles containing his own blood, sweat, sperm, saliva,
phlegm, tears, urine and faeces; Card File was a wall-mounted card index
system recording the protracted process of its own making: ‘On trip to find
file met Ad Reinhardt on corner of 8th Street and Broadway. Talked with him
until 5:30 by which time it was too late to continue trip….’; Self-Portrait
(EEG) was an electroencephalogram reading of his own brainwaves; and
there were three plaster casts of brains, presented in glass cases, one
covered in silver leaf, another in dollar bills, and a third in wax. In 1963–4,
Morris also made works involving casts of his own feet and hands, such as
Untitled (Stairs) where flaps lift up on the treads of a set of three wooden
stairs to reveal Morris’s footprints cast in lead.52
These kinds of self-referential relics are certainly a legacy of the cult of
the artist, with Dürer’s hair, death mask and hand casts, taken from his
exhumed body, being the first notable examples. Casts of artists’ hands and
faces had been included in one-artist museums during the nineteenth century,
and body parts had been preserved, such as Canova’s heart and right hand.
Two of the most famous living artists had recently made life casts taken from
their own body parts. Picasso had made Arm (1959/61), a bronze forearm
vertically raised with the fingers parted. It was an artist’s equivalent of a
saint’s arm reliquary – yet it is unclear whether he is ‘waving or drowning’.
Marcel Duchamp had made With My Tongue in My Cheek (1959), a plaster
cast of his chin, lips and cheek (bloated by a walnut), which was placed on a
profile drawing showing the rest of his head. In the early 1960s, the Italian
Neo-Dadaist Piero Manzoni (1933–63) sold limited-edition thumbprints, tin
cans of his own excrement, and balloons filled with his own breath and fixed
to a signed wooden base.
 All these works (perhaps with the exception of Picasso’s Arm) question
Romantic notions of artistic genius and individuality, while mining a deep
seam of mock-heroic self-portraiture, where the artist sets himself up as
clown, fool and martyr. For Max Kozloff, it was murder most foul: ‘enigma,
dismemberment, depersonalization, self-estrangement, cruelty and
dread….The idea of art as, in any sense, a personification of the artist, died
of murder’.53 At its most extreme, the Japanese Conceptual artist On Kawara
reduced – or refined – himself down to a series of dates, maps and
statements. Never photographed, never revealing his date of birth, he made
identical Date Paintings (1966–), simply inscribing the date; he made maps
of journeys, I Went (1968–9); and sent postcards and telegrams announcing ‘I
am still alive’ (1969–).
In 1963 Rudolf and Margot Wittkower published their coolly exhaustive
and now classic study of the artist, Born under Saturn: The Character and
Conduct of Artists, with topics like ‘misers and wastrels’, ‘weird hobbies’,
‘genius and madness’, ‘celibacy, love and licentiousness’, and ‘works as
keys to the character of artists’. It concluded with a brisk exposition and
dismissal of psychoanalytic approaches, and of the experimental
psychologist Ernst Kretschmer’s differentiation between pycnic,
leptosomatic and athletic physical types, and cyclothymic and schizothymic
temperaments. Artists such as Morris, Manzoni and Kawara might almost be
providing material for future students of the artist’s body, brain and
behaviour.
Increasingly during the 1970s, these conceptual games concerning the
‘death of the author’ were being played in deadly earnest. ‘Marsyas’
performances involving self-mutilation, feats of endurance, obscenity and
near-death would become widespread. The Yugoslavian artist Marina
Abramović (b. 1946) risked her life on several occasions. Like a latter-day
Christian martyr, she regarded her performances as ecstatic purification
rituals. She induced seizures after taking drugs for schizophrenia; she passed
out after lying inside a ring of burning petrol in the shape of a Communist star
into which she had thrown nail and hair clippings. In a Naples gallery, she
stood beside a table covered in seventy-two objects – many offensive and
poisonous – and invited spectators to use them on her ‘as desired. I am the
object’. After six hours, her clothes had been sliced off with razor blades,
and she had been cut, painted, pricked with rose thorns, and a loaded gun
placed against her head.
 For a decade, Abramović collaborated with the German performance
artist Ulay, and their work had a sadomasochistic edge. They attempted to
merge their identities hermaphroditically, and wore identical clothing. In one
work they joined their open mouths together and inhaled each other’s exhaled
breath until they collapsed unconscious due to lack of oxygen.

In 1976, the American critic Rosalind Krauss wrote an essay entitled ‘Video:
The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, in which she attacked the prevalence of video
art which was fixated on the artist’s body: ‘Self-encapsulation – the body or
psyche as its own surround – is everywhere to be found in the corpus of
video art’. She singled out video pieces by Vito Acconci in which he merely
pointed at the camera, and by Lynda Benglis in which profile mirror images
‘perform an auto-erotic coupling’.54 Later in the decade Christopher Lasch,
in his best-selling polemic The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an
Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), complained of pathological
narcissism in the ‘theater of everyday life’ where everyone is surrounded by
mirrors. He cited an account by the bewigged multiple self-portraitist Andy
Warhol of his daily encounters with his bathroom mirror:

Day after day I look in the mirror and I still see something – a new
pimple….I dunk a Johnson and Johnson cotton ball into Johnson and
Johnson rubbing alcohol and rub the cotton ball against the
pimple….And while the alcohol is drying I think about nothing.

Having covered the pimple with ‘flesh-coloured acne-pimple medication’,

Warhol looks into the mirror to find the trademark mask:

It’s all there. The affectless gaze….The bored languor, the wasted
pallor….The graying lips. The shaggy silver-white hair, soft and
metallic…. Nothing is missing. I’m everything my scrapbook says I
am.55
Narcissism had actually become a key concept in countercultural circles
since the publication of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization: A
Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955). Whereas in psychoanalysis,
narcissism was merely an early developmental stage that needed to be grown
out of, Marcuse made Narcissus the key to the liberation of the self (along
with Orpheus, who sang to the birds).56 Marcuse’s Narcissus challenges the
repressive capitalist culture of toil, progress and productivity (as well as
reproduction). He overcomes the opposition between man and nature, and
when he dies he continues to live as a flower; he does not love only himself
– he is not simply autoerotic – because he does not know that the image he
loves is his reflection. His libido is extended outwards, giving him an
oceanic feeling that overflows and extends to objects.57 Jasper Johns’s Skin
series, and especially Diver, may be an early attempt to capture the ecstatic
nature of narcissism.
Marcuse’s Narcissus would later become an icon for the flower-power
generation. The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, then based in New York, was
photographed lying voluptuously in her installations Narcissus Garden
(1966) and My Flower Bed (1965–6), the first consisting of some 1,500
reflective plastic balls (offered for sale), the second a pink biomorphic
environment made from mattress springs and stuffed fabric gloves. Even in
1974 the Italian critic and curator Lea Vergine could still write in her
catalogue The Body as Language (‘Body Art’ and Performance): ‘Narcissus
projects himself outside of himself in order to be able to love what is inside
of himself’.58 The desire for self-projection beyond the limits of the body
gave rise to a wide range of prosthetic clothing sculptures, none more
beguiling and bathetic than those of the German sculptor Rebecca Horn (b.
1944). After the ‘purifying’ experience of being hospitalized for a year due
to lung poisoning, Horn devised a series of outsize costumes in the early
1970s – Finger Gloves, Unicorn and Arm Extensions – that extended her
reach by several feet, while at the same time restricting other movements.
Both active and passive, gesticulating and swaddled, she hoped for an almost
mystical union with the macrocosm: ‘you crave to grow out of your own
body and merge with the other person’s body, to seek refuge in it’.59
 Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1979, dye diffusion print

What Kozloff called the ‘poignant imprint’ has been one of the most
important types of narcissistic self-projection (the ‘imprint’ includes
photographs as well as prints and casts). The most versatile exponent is the
Italian artist Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947). His earliest works were made in
1968 in the Garessio forest, near the northern Italian town where he was
born, not far from the French border. Maritime Alps – It will continue to
grow except at that point (1968–78) consisted of a steel cast of his right
hand placed around a tree trunk, as if grasping it. As the tree grew, it
gradually enveloped his hand. He eventually made an X-ray of the tree with
the hand hidden inside, like an alien foetus, or cancerous growth. Here, the
hand of the artist is and is not in control of his chosen medium, nature. In the
1970s, Penone projected slides of photographs of his skin, fingerprints and
eyelids onto gallery walls, massively magnifying them, sometimes tracing the
configurations in charcoal. His body, by virtue of being exploded and flayed,
was transformed into a dappled leafy landscape, giving an ‘oceanic feeling’.
He lived in Turin, and may well have been influenced by the full-length Turin
Shroud.
In Penone’s series Soffio (Breath, 1978), six large clay gourds were
modelled into what Penone imagined to be the balloon shape made by his
exhaled breath. At the top of each gourd projects a cast of the interior of the
artist’s mouth, to indicate the place where he ‘blew’. Bodily functions –
ingesting, biting and breathing – are emphasized at the expense of the face
and head. The indentation in the side of the gourd is the impress of his body
as he leaned up against it to breathe into it. The lumps flanking the river bed
made by his body, which resemble vertebrae in a spinal column, are meant to
represent the eddies of air bouncing off his body. Penone saw these
sculptures in primordial mythical terms, leaving the impress of his body in
mud: ‘Myth tells us that Prometheus made men of mud and water while
Athena blew into them the breath of life’.60
Ever since the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, however, life
casts have evoked imprisonment, suffocation and perverse eroticism as much
as the preservation and reproduction of the individual. As early as 1804, the
writer Chateaubriand observed of the impression of a young woman’s breasts
preserved in lava: ‘Death, like a sculptor, has moulded his victim’.61 Freud
took Pompeii as an analogy for repression, ‘by which something in the mind
is at once made inaccessible and preserved’. In his essay ‘The “Uncanny”’
(1919), he discussed the analogous fear of being buried alive, which is ‘only
a transformation of another fantasy which had originally nothing terrifying
about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness – the fantasy, I
mean of intra-uterine existence’.62 There is something wildly erotic about
Soffio: the bodily pressure, heavy breathing and presence of a mouth on an
initially wet object that becomes redolent of man-sized female genitalia; and
then there is the uncanny sense that Soffio is both a womb and a tomb for the
adult artist. It stands in a long line of ‘strange, nondescript monsters’ towards
which the ‘chaste’ artist directs his sexual energies. Only now, it is also the
artist’s double: ‘every painter rapes himself’.

Giuseppe Penone, Soffio 4, 1978, fired clay

The most successful of the ‘poignant imprinters’ is undoubtedly the

British sculptor Antony Gormley (b. 1950). His work is seen to best effect in
Another Place (1997), first installed on a pleasure beach in Cuxhaven,
northern Germany, and then re-sited permanently on a beach near Liverpool,
England. One hundred identical cast iron figures, standing bolt upright, line
the shore, between 50 and 250 metres apart (some 164 to 820 ft), and
anything up to one kilometre (over half a mile) out to sea. Each figure faces
the horizon and their heads are all aligned at the same height. At high tide, the
furthest of what he calls these ‘cloned foreign bodies’63 are almost
completely submerged. It perfectly evokes that quintessence of modernity –
the narcissistic oceanic feeling.
Like most of Gormley’s work, the figures are cast from his own body
(initially with his wife doing the casting). The end product conceals as much
as reveals his athletic and apparently well-endowed 6-foot-4-inch frame.
Gormley’s basic size and shape is registered, but the surface of the sculptures
is schematic, and the seams between the various welded sections are left
visible. When the cast is made, the artist is mummified in plastic sheeting,
cloth, plaster and clay, and when his head is cast, he uses a breathing tube
(the process recalls the self-swaddling and mummification performed by the
Vienna Actionists, but without the hysteria or violence). With these
sculptures, a double immersion and masking takes place – of the artist’s body
during the making process, and of the body casts in the sea.
Despite the manifest excellence of Gormley’s body, he claims for it an
‘average’ non-perfection that gives it universality:

This sculpture exposes to light and time the nakedness of a particular

and peculiar body, no hero, no ideal, just the industrially reproduced
body of a middle-aged man trying to remain standing and trying to
breathe, facing a horizon busy with ships moving blocks of coloured
containers around the planet.64

Here the medieval modesty topos is recast, and static meditation contrasted
with busy brash commerce. Yet reproduction on this industrial scale creates a
silent anonymous standing army, an ascetic new race, occupying the pleasure
beaches. The effect is analogous to the suspended armies of bowler-hatted
men populating Magritte’s late work.
 Antony Gormley, Another Place, 1997, cast iron, installation view, Crosby, Merseyside, UK

Many of the leading male purveyors of body art and of the ‘poignant
imprint’ had fine athletic figures; the self-portrait photographs of the critic
and curator John Coplans (1920–2003) were intended as a riposte and
antidote. Although their roots lie in beautiful body fragments, sculpted by
light, so beloved of Surrealist photographers, and in Performance art,
Coplans’s have a matter-of-fact quality and elephantine scale that is unique.
He is not just fat, he is old – and headless.
Born in London, Coplans moved to the United States in 1960, after seeing
a show of Abstract Expressionist painting. His first photographs were taken
in 1941, while serving in the Second World War. He took up photography
again in 1978, encouraged by his photographer friend Lee Friedlander, but it
was only when he started making naked self-portraits in 1984 that he came to
international attention.
Having struck a pose against a matt white background, his body was
scanned by a video monitor connected to a television set and having found a
view he liked, an assistant would take a positive/negative Polaroid picture.
The negative was used to make enlarged gelatin silver prints, often life-sized
and over, and often in series. Coplans twists, compresses and kneads his
rotund, sagging flesh and creased skin as though it were a lump of
recalcitrant clay. Each hair, each blemish, each bit of dry and cracked skin is
coaxed into visibility. Coplans made two books focusing on particular body
parts, Hand (1988) and Foot (1989), and in 1990 – probably as a riposte to
Jeff Koons’s Made in Heaven self-portrait series – he started to show
himself reclining as well as standing.
Coplans omits his head in order to ‘remove all references to my current
identity…I become immersed in the past…I travel down my genes and visit
remote ancestors, both male and female’.65 There is a primordial feel to
many of these images, especially works like the minimalist Self-Portrait
(Back with Arms Above) of 1984, where he reduces his back to a rectangular
flat-pack, with his clenched fists poking out the top. His incessant body
moulding is both comic and moving, as though he were raging against the
dying of the light, trying to begin his body again from scratch, trying to get a
snug fit: ‘I’m using my body and saying, even though it’s a seventy-year-old
body, I can make it extremely interesting. That keeps me alive and gives me
vitality’.66 Clenched Thumb, Sideways (1988), part of the Hand series, can
be compared with Rodin’s heroic ‘self-portrait’ Hand of God, a right hand
clutching writhing nude figures, perfect specimens. Coplans swaddles his
thumb with his swollen fingers, with only its dirty Caravaggio fingernail face
peeking out.
In the 1970s and 80s there had been a revival of interest in Rodin,
especially his fascination with fragments. Coplans’s cropped Self-Portrait
Three Times (1987) revisits Rodin’s Three Shades, while the front figure
recalls Rodin’s nude studies for Monument to Balzac. Two English
translations were published of the rhapsodic essay on Rodin by the Austrian
poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926).67 Partly inspired by Rodin’s Walking
Man (a headless version of his St John the Baptist), Rilke believed Rodin
had imbued the entire human body with an eye-like expressiveness. He refers
to a conversation about a scene in Dante where Pope Nicholas III, as
punishment for simony, is placed head first in a hole, with flames rising from
the soles of his exposed feet:

when he read of the weeping feet of Nicolas the Third, he found that
he already knew there could be weeping feet, that there is a weeping
of the whole body, of the whole person, and that every pore can bring
forth tears.
At the same time, Rilke downgrades, or defaces, the face:

Life showing in the face, full of reference to time and as easily read as
on a dial, was, when seen in the body, less concentrated, greater, more
mysterious. There it wore no disguise…leaving the stage of the face,
it let fall its mask.68

The artist’s relationship to their own sexuality has been a fertile theme for
self-portraiture since around 1900, and a major driver for full-length and
nude self-portraiture. From the 1970s there was renewed exploration of the
sexuality of the artist, but with a darker, harder and more sadomasochistic
edge than was always evident in the ‘swinging’ sixties. The mood was
informed in part by political disillusionment in the wake of the Vietnam war
and the protests of 1968, and by severe economic problems. Feminism and
gay activism were increasingly in the cultural mix, providing their own forms
of defiance and scepticism.
The world depicted by the career self-portraitists Gilbert & George
became progressively bleaker during the course of the 1970s, when they
made their finest work. They met while studying sculpture at art school in
London in 1967 – ‘it was love at first sight’. This was the year of Magritte’s
death, and they soon adopted a Magrittean garb of repressed anonymity –
tight-fitting grey flannel suits. Dubbing themselves ‘living sculptures’, they
were a brotherhood of artists, their doubleness, gayness and greyness in
marked contrast to the leading lights in the British school of sculpture,
Anthony Caro and Henry Moore. They made their name with The Singing
Sculpture (1969), a performance piece in which they stood side by side on a
wooden box and repeatedly sang a music-hall vagrants’ song, ‘Underneath
the Arches’, their faces and hands covered in metallic make-up, moving like
automatons. The song is about sleeping under the railway arches where ‘we
dream our dreams away’, so they remained within the Surrealist sleepwalker
orbit.
In their subsequent multi-part photo pieces, divided into a cage-like
minimalist grid, the two clerkish gents appeared with solemn or quizzical
expressions, or with mock outrage, surrounded by dystopian images of
London, and the male working-class youths near where they live in
impoverished East London. They are outspokenly conservative (admirers of
Margaret Thatcher and the Queen) and the frisson of their work comes from
being uncertain if they are voyeurs, cruisers or prurient moral policemen.
Unlike Wackenroder’s Raphael and Dürer, they never held hands or touched,
except in their less successful recent works. The Dirty Words Pictures
(1977–8), made in the year of the British Queen’s Silver Jubilee and the
heyday of punk, featured obscene graffiti found in doorways near where they
lived juxtaposed with images of London landmarks – policemen, soldiers,
beggars and youths – as in Are You Angry or Are You Boring? Women are
conspicuous by their absence. Despite the London settings, their particular
brand of localism has a distinctly Italian feel (Gilbert is Italian). Male-
dominated scenes on the impoverished periphery of a big city were the
preserve of the Italian Communist writer and film director Pier Paolo
Pasolini, who dubbed these youths ragazzi di vita (boys of life). Pasolini,
who was gay, idolized these youths in his films (and was eventually
murdered by one of them). Gilbert & George have instead remained – even in
1995, when they removed their suits – eccentric bystanders, unreliable
eyewitnesses.
Whereas Gilbert & George wore the same uniform, the careers of Sophie
Calle (b. 1953) and Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) have been built on endless
subterfuges and disguises. The Paris-born Calle began pursuing male
strangers in the street in 1979, surreptitiously taking photographs and jotting
down notes. The notes are woven into diary-form narratives, poignant,
pathetic, comic and menacing. The photographs are exhibited next to the text
and turned into books. For Suite vénitienne (1980) she followed a man she
briefly met at a party in Paris to Venice, where she trails him, wearing an
assortment of wigs and clothes and taking photographs. A typical entry in her
logbook goes as follows:

I’m afraid he’ll turn abruptly and see me crouching in the garbage. I
decide to pass silently behind him and wait a little further along.
Quickly, with head lowered, I cross the bridge. Henri B. doesn’t
move. I could touch him. [p. 48]
Calle provides maps of her journeys, and is private eye, groupie, stalker,
sado-masochist. In The Shadow (1981), her mother engaged a private eye to
follow her for a day, with his photographs and Calle’s narrative being
exhibited. The invasion of privacy – Calle’s as well as her victims – is
edgily embarrassing for the viewer/reader (one unfortunate victim whose
diary she found in the street sued her for invasion of privacy). But she thrives
on turning the tables, and testing the boundaries between genius and lunacy,
between a destructive narcissism and one that reaches out.
A more refined edginess pervades the contemporary work of the
American photographer Cindy Sherman. She became the darling of
Postmodernists and some feminists, her work seen as a critique of media
constructions of feminine identity (or a manifestation of them). She is
essentially an impersonator, inserting her disguised self into various
unpopulated settings. From small black-and-white beginnings, her
photographs have ballooned to over life-size, becoming more luridly glossy
in the process. The main attraction of the camera for Sherman is that it lies.
 Gilbert & George, Are You Angry or Are You Boring?, 1977, mixed media

Claude Cahun is an obvious photographic precursor, and so too is the

little known Gertrud Arndt who made of series of ‘masked’ self-portraits at
the Bauhaus in 1930.69 But we should not forget the monologues of the well-
known American impersonator Ruth Draper (1884–1956). Draper’s Three
Women and Mr Clifford (1929) was discussed and Draper depicted in action
by Ernst Gombrich in an essay first published in 1972, ‘The Mask and the
Face’, which Sherman could have read.70 The sketch consists of Draper’s
impersonations of a businessman’s wife, mistress and secretary, as they each
give a very different perspective on him. Unlike Draper, however, Sherman
resists the notion that she identifies with her characters. They are closer to
being dispassionate portraits rather than self-portraits.
Sherman made her name with a series of sixty-nine black-and-white
photographs, Untitled Film Stills (1977–80). She staged tableaux in which
she wore 1950s- and 60s-style make-up, wigs and clothes, and mimicked the
poses and scenarios from period films, generally those associated with the
New Wave. Despite the variety of costume and location, the similarities
between individual pictures are more discernible than the differences.
Sherman’s girls are always alone (except for one sleeping sunbather, her face
covered by a hat), and never on the phone. They are always clothed, even if
only in underwear. The presence of unseen others is implied either by the
intimate positioning of the camera, or by a sudden glance out of shot. The
prevailing mood is one of existential malaise or yearning, but it is rarely at
the expense of beauty, hygiene, neatness or morality. The young women are
too absent-minded to be deeply scared or depressed, and their vulnerability
is rarely less than sexy. It is highly controlled angst. No one works. None is
an addict. Only six cigarettes are being smoked, but each is a one-off: there
is no sign of a cigarette packet or a used ashtray. No inhaling is shown. Only
four glasses of alcoholic drink are present, and there are no signs of binge
drinking – except for two empty cans of Dr Pepper in a beach scene. Only
twice are tears shed, yet both weepers remain bolt upright. Sherman did go
on to make dirty and violent sex-crime tableaux after 1985, but she distanced
and abstracted everything by using glossy mannequins and artificial disco
lighting: in this later series she is the Arcimboldo of obscenity, always
managing to make it look fruity.
Sherman recently explained the almost classical restraint of her Untitled
Film Stills:

What I didn’t want were pictures showing strong emotion. In a lot of

movie photos the actors look cute, impish, alluring, distraught,
frightened, tough, etc., but what I was interested in was when they
were almost expressionless.71

They were not self-expressive either, as she pointed out in a 1983 interview:
 Once I’m set up, the camera starts clicking, then I just start to move
and watch how I move in the mirror. It’s not like I’m method acting or
anything. I don’t feel that I am that person…. And the one thing I’ve
always known is that the camera lies.72

In the mid-1970s, the American academic Stephen Greenblatt coined the term
‘self-fashioning’ to describe what he saw as the necessarily ‘theatrical’ way
in which Renaissance courtiers had to operate at court, adopting behavioural
‘masks’ to conceal their real feelings. It was an elaborate attempt to export
post-Nietzschean masking culture far back into history. Greenblatt claimed
that Castiglione’s great conduct book, The Courtier, ‘portrays a world in
which social frictions, sexual combat, and power are all carefully masked by
the fiction of elegant otium [leisure]’.73 In Sherman’s world, even angst has
become an elegant leisure activity, an exquisite commodity mask to wear.
In the 1990s two very different artists, Jeff Koons (b. 1955) and Tracey
Emin (b. 1963), made declamatory self-portraiture in which all masks and
taboos were supposedly off. It coincided with a glut of confessional
autobiographical writing and reality TV shows. Both had their own
sloganeering philosophies of love, a form pioneered by the messianic
German Performance artist and utopian preacher Joseph Beuys. Their work,
in its stridency and biographical explicitness, marked the climax of the post-
1960 exploration of the body and image of the artist.
In 1990, Koons announced in an interview:

My art and my life are totally one….I have my platform, I have the
attention, and my voice can be heard. This is the time for Jeff
Koons.74

His work of the early 1980s had not involved self-portraiture, but had both
celebrated and mocked consumer commodity fetishism, starting with brand
new Hoovers exhibited in perspex display cases. He moved on to luridly
coloured, life-sized porcelain sculptures of celebrities, such as Michael
Jackson and Bubbles (1988). The latter was reputed to be the largest
porcelain piece ever made: ‘it shrinks 17% when it’s fired and gives a kinda
tight sexual feeling’.75 He made ‘self-portrait’ posters for a themed show
called ‘Banality’, and included a youthful self-portrait: he is the cherubic
child pushing the pig’s bottom in Ushering in Banality (1988). From 1989–
91, in a series called Made in Heaven, we saw a naked adult Koons in
action again and again, with Italian porn star Ilona Staller (La Cicciolina).
Porn stars had taken part in Performance art during the 1970s, ‘highlighting’
the sex industry. Made in Heaven was a multimedia extravaganza consisting
of cheesy hyperreal posters, photo-paintings and sculptures (glass, marble,
polychrome wood and plastic). The happy and equally athletic couple, both
perfect and sweatless specimens, are a new Raphael and La Fornarina. They
explore what Milton, in Paradise Lost, termed ‘the Rites mysterious of
connubial love’ (they had a spectacular wedding in 1991, a son in 1992, and
parted soon after). Made in Heaven garnered oceans of publicity but – for
obvious reasons – did not sell as well as previous work.
Koons was evidently challenging the pained pieties of so much modern
‘body’ art, whereby the body tended to be fragmented, damaged (often
literally and dangerously) and/or masked. Even the bust-length self-portraits
of Koons’s biggest artistic forebear in embracing mass culture, Andy Warhol,
made sporadically throughout his career, tend to be fidgety exercises in
neurotic concealment (not just of acne, pimples and baldness). But this
studied awkwardness is true too of earlier male artists who have depicted
themselves with wives and mistresses: Munch, Corinth and Bonnard were
not exactly brimful with joy. In the 1980s, the Italian Neo-Expressionist
painter and serial self-portraitist Francesco Clemente (b. 1952) had been a
prominent figure in New York, depicting himself as a Schiele-style
malevolent clown ripe for sadomasochistic dismemberment. For Koons,
Modernism – by which he probably means modern art – is ‘a kind of
masturbation’ – sex without love: ‘Sex with love is a higher state’.76 He
insisted on the total lack of concealment and shame.77 So Koons is, at the
very least, doing something new: he’s a monogamous bacchanalian artist
selling a perfect lifestyle, with all the slick urbanity of Ralph Lauren.
The photo-paintings, despite being set in saccharine dioramas, and the
abundant use of lighting and make-up, are just too literal minded – and
pornographic – to be interesting. The sculptures are far more impressive,
because of their greater levels of abstraction and self-containment. Jeff and
Ilona (1990), a huge polychromed limewood sculpture nearly 3 metres long
and over 1.6 metres wide (some 9½ ft long and over 5 ft wide) was first
displayed at the Venice Biennale surrounded by garish photo pieces. In that
context, one could see it in the tradition of the Venetian ‘al fresco’ reclining
nude, with Jeff leaning over a swooning Ilona, with a satyr-like quiff. They
lay on a dark rocky ‘bed’, surrounded and seemingly protected by a giant
gilded serpent. It was carved and painted by German craftsmen. But it is not
viscerally sensuous or sinuous, in the manner of Rodin’s The Kiss, or even
Penone’s Soffio. The surfaces are shiny, hard and cold. The sex is mostly
staged on hard and/or abrasive surfaces. The glass versions are like ice
flows, and one of the white marble busts even sprouts crystals. It is a
rewriting of the Pygmalion myth. Instead of Galatea stepping off her pedestal
and coming to warm transitory life, Pygmalion has climbed onto to Galatea’s
pedestal to share her sterilely statuesque utopia.
The British artist Tracey Emin is in many ways the archetypal modern
career self-portraitist. She is self-conscious to a fault, almost from the start
treating herself as a historical figure, curating the bad, mostly sexual-medical
bits of her own life, half wanting what the psychologists would call
‘closure’, but doomed to repeat her mistakes endlessly – in prickly Schiele-
style drawings, text-laden embroideries and garrulous films. She stalks her
past in a Calle-like manner, but even more so than Courbet in his early self-
portraits, she is incessantly imagining her own death and her own
mausoleum, full of opaque yet moralizing inscriptions that will save the
world: ‘THE LAST GREAT MOMENT IS LOVE; DON’T DIE JUST KEEP LOVING’, etc.
Jeff Koons, Jeff and Ilona (Made in Heaven), 1990, polychromed wood
 Tracey Emin, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95, 1995, appliquéd tent, mattress and light
(destroyed 2004)

Her first gallery exhibition was entitled ‘Tracey Emin: My Major

Retrospective 1963–1993’, and in 1995 she opened The Tracey Emin
Museum in a disused shop near London’s Waterloo Station. In the same year
she made her finest work, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95
(destroyed 2004), a blue domed two-person tent – embroidered on the inside
with seventy-five names, male and female. It is Emin’s mobile Pantheon,
Tempio and kinship self-portrait. She did not, however, identify these people
as friends or family sharing a bed, lovers or strangers, welcome or
unwelcome. So we cannot say whether she is like the novelist Gabriel
García Márquez’s fourteen-year-old heroine Eréndira, whose grandmother
punishes her for accidentally burning down her house by setting her up as a
prostitute in a tent. Or whether she feels about these people what Marinetti
said about museums in the Futurist Manifesto: ‘Museums, cemeteries!…
Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you
hate or do not know’. But the tent’s transience is liberating, too. David
Hockney inscribed one of his ‘Love’ paintings: ‘I will love you at 8pm next
Wednesday’. Here Emin, so often bogged down by biographical and
emotional baggage, showed how to travel lightly, and stay elusive.
Since the Koons-Emin explosion of the 1990s (and Emin’s
autobiographical sloganeering continues unabated), there has been an
understandable lull in the production of self-portraits by gallery artists. The
Chinese artist Zhang Huan (b. 1965) is a case in point. He made his name
with militant initiation/endurance nude performances with shaved head; these
had photographic and sculptural residues. But in 2005 he gave up
performance, and started to produce giant paintings made from ash, with little
or no self-portrayal.
However, one of Huan’s best self-portraits, Foam (1998), may be a
pointer to a future direction in self-portraiture. In a series of photographs of
his foam covered head, Huan’s mouth is open to reveal family photographs,
old and new, stuffed between lips and teeth. He is like a drowning man
whose whole life passes before him, but in this case he only retains his
memories of his family.
Not much has been seen of the artist as ‘family man’ in the twentieth
century, but this anthropological type also appears in the recent work of
Japanese Performance artist Tatsumi Orimoto (b. 1946). When his mother,
who had always supported and subsidized his career in art, was diagnosed
with Alzheimer’s, he moved into her flat to look after her, and incorporated
her into his absurdist yet moving Art Mama performances. They may stand
together in Beckettian oil drums, or in a cardboard box shared with a
neighbour; more recently he holds and hugs her, and pushes her wheelchair.
The citizens of Nuremberg, who displayed Dürer’s self-portrait next to his
portrait of his elderly mother, might have understood if not quite approved.
Zhang Huan, Foam, 1998, performance photographs
Tatsumi Orimoto, Art Mama: In the Box, series, 1997–2007, colour photograph
NOTES
PRELUDE: SELF-PORTRAITURE IN ANTIQUITY
1 J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents, Cambridge, 1990, p. 54.
2 Ibid., p. 227.

1. MEDIEVAL ORIGINS
1 Rule of St Benedict, ch. LVII, ‘Concerning Craftsmen in the Monastery’; cited by J. Alexander,
Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work, New Haven, 1992, p. 5.
2 For a survey of these issues, S. Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture
in Late Medieval France, Chicago, 2009; J-C Bonne, ‘L‘Image de soi au Moyen Âge (IXe–XIIe
siècles)…’, in Il ritratto e la memoria, vol. 2, ed. A. Gentili et al., Rome, 1993, pp. 37–60; H. L.
Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art, Toronto, 2004, p. 33 ff. The lack of medieval portraiture is a theme of
the writings of E. H. Gombrich.
3 Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. S. MacKenna, London, 1991; E. Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art
Theory, New York, 1968, pp. 25–32; M. Barasch, Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann,
New York, 1985, pp. 34–42.
4 Plotinus, Enneads, V: 8.1, p. 411; this trans. by Panofsky, Idea, p. 26.
5 Ibid., I: 6.8.
6 Ibid., VI: 4.10.
7 K. Gschwantler, ‘Graeco-Roman Portraiture’, in Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Ancient
Egypt, ed. S. Walker, London, 2000, p. 19; The Greek Anthology, trans. W. R. Paton, London, 1917,
vol. 3, pp. 336–7, #605, ‘ ’ /painted.
8 Plotinus, Enneads, I: 6.9.
9 H. Belting, Likeness and Presence, trans. E. Jephcott, Chicago, 1994, p. 208 ff.
10 Ibid., p. 215 ff and pp. 541–4 (texts).
11 Perkinson, Likeness of the King, p. 68 ff.
12 By Lomazzo and Marino. G. P. Lomazzo, Idea del tempio della pittura, ed. R. Klein, vol. 1, pp. 65–
7; for Marino, J. Hall, The World as Sculpture, London, 1999, p. 43.
13 E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, London, 1953, pp. 83–5 and pp.
407–13.
14 Theophilus, On Diverse Arts, ed. and trans. C. R. Dodwell, Edinburgh, p. 14 ff.
15 M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, London, 1992, pp. 24–6.
16 Hugh of St Victor, Didascalion, trans. J. Taylor, New York, 1961, bk 1: 9, p. 56.
17 N. Coldstream, Medieval Craftsmen: Masons and Sculptors, Toronto, 1991, p. 16.
18 E. M. Jónsson, Le Miroir: Naissance d’un genre littéraire, Paris, 1995, 2nd edn 2004, pp. 165–8;
Mirror of the Church (1103–5) by Honorius Augustodunensis, cited in Jónsson; G. Evans, Alan of
Lille, The Art of Preaching, Kalamazoo, 1981, pp. 62–3.
19 V. W. Egbert, The Medieval Artist at Work, Princeton, 1967, p. 30.
20 R. W. Gaston, ‘Attention and Inattention in Religious Painting of the Renaissance’, in Renaissance
Studies in Honour of Craig Hugh Smyth, Florence, 1985, ed. A. Morrogh et al., vol. 2, p. 256.
21 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. P. Burton, London, 2001, p. 250, bk 10: 35.57.

2. A CRAZE FOR MIRRORS

1 See, from countless examples, A. Bond and J. Woodall, eds, Self Portrait: Renaissance to
Contemporary, London, 2005, pp. 18–19.
2 The bibliography on mirrors is vast. I have drawn especially on Miroirs: Jeux et reflets depuis
l’antiquité, Paris, 2000; S. Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, London, 2001; B. Goldberg,
The Mirror and Man, Charlottesville, 1985.
3 C. Harrison et al., eds, Art in Theory: 1648–1815, Oxford, 2000, pp. 557–8.
4 Pliny the Elder says glass mirrors were invented by the inhabitants of Sidon in Lebanon.
5 Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, pp. 13–15; Miroirs, p. 102 ff.
6 J. Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, New Haven, 1998, p. 31.
7 Jónsson, Le Miroir; Goldberg, Mirror and Man, p. 112 ff; H. Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-
Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, Cambridge, 1982.
8 Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, pp. 54–7.
9 D. Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy, New
Haven, 1998, p. 171.
10 Goldberg, Mirror and Man, p. 113.
11 Ibid., p. 7 ff.
12 Ibid., pp. 4, 6, 19.
13 M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, Oxford, 1971, p. 66 ff.
14 Ibid., p. 71.
15 E. H. Gombrich, ‘Giotto’s Portrait of Dante?’, in New Light on Old Masters, London, 1986, pp. 10–
31.
16 H. B. J. Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto, University Park, PA, 1997, ch. 1.
17 R. and M. Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists, New York,
1963, p. 8.
18 J. Pope-Hennessy, Italian Gothic Sculpture, London, 1996, p. 235.
19 M. Warnke, The Court Artist, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 4–6; A. Martindale, The Rise of the Artist in
the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, London, 1972, ch. 2.
20 Perkinson, Likeness of the King, p. 109 ff.
21 N. Mann, ‘Petrarch and Portraits’, in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance,
ed. N. Mann and L. Syson, London, 1998, pp. 15–20.
22 Gombrich, ‘Giotto’s Portrait of Dante?’, p. 30.
23 Dante, Convivio, 1: 2.
24 H. D. Austin, ‘Dante and Mirrors’, Italica, vol. 21, no. 1, March 1944, pp. 13–17. See also J. L.
Miller, ‘The Three Mirrors of Dante’s Paradiso’, University of Toronto Quarterly, no. 46, 1977, pp.
266–71; S. A. Gilson, ‘Light Reflections, Mirror Metaphors, and Optical Framing in Dante’s
Comedy’, Neophilologus, vol. 83, no. 2, pp. 241–52.
25 The first is Purgatory 25: 25 ff; the last Paradise 15: 113–4.
26 Genesis 29: 16 ff, 30: 17 ff, 49: 31.
27 Dante, Convivio, 4: 22: 10–11.
28 S. K. Scher, ed., The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance, London, 1994.
29 C. Grayson, ‘A Portrait of Leon Battista Alberti’, Burlington Magazine, xcvi, 1954, pp. 177–8.
30 See A. Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti, London, 2000, pp. 17–18.
31 Ibid., pp. 100–1.
32 Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. R. N. Watkins, Columbia, 1969,
pp. 110–15.
33 Grafton, Alberti, p. 220.
34 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. C. Grayson, London, 1991, bk 2, #25, p. 60.
35 Ibid., bk 2, #26, p. 61.
36 Hall, Sculpture, pp. 141–2.
37 Alberti, On Painting, bk 3, #52, p. 87 and #62, p. 95.
38 Philostratus, Eikones, bk 1, #23; cited by L. Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European
Literature up to the Early 19th Century, Lund, 1967, p. 29.
39 Alberti, On Painting, bk 2, #46, p. 83.
40 D. Lomas, Narcissus Reflected, London, 2011, p. 22.
41 G. Barbieri, L’inventore della pittura: Leon Battista Alberti e il mito di Narciso, Vicenza, 2000;
‘Dossier: les destins de Narcisse’, in Albertiana, vol. 4, 2001, with essays by H. Damisch and M.
Brock, p. 161 ff; C. Baskins, ‘Echoing Narcissus in Alberti’s Della Pittura’, in Oxford Art Journal,
no. 16, 1993, pp. 25–33.
42 P. Sohm, The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy 1500–1800, New Haven,
2007, p. 44 ff.
43 Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, pp. 71–7.
44 Ibid., p. 74.
45 Alberti, The Family, p. 266.
46 Cited by Sohm, Artist Grows Old, p. 45.
47 M. Eliade, Le Chamanisme, Paris, 1968, p. 179.
48 Alberti, On Painting, bk 3, #63, p. 95.

3. THE ARTIST IN SOCIETY

1 Martindale, Rise of the Artist, pp. 43–5.
2 M. Zink, ‘Les toiles d’Agamanor et les fresques de Lancelot’, Littérature, 38, 1980, pp. 43–51;
Perkinson, Likeness of the King, pp. 174–8.
3 K. M. Figg and R. B. Palmer, eds, Jean Froissart: An Anthology of Narrative and Lyric Poetry,
New York, 2001, pp. 565–7.
4 Perkinson, Likeness of the King, pp. 255–6.
5 Ibid., p. 163.
6 M. Keen, Chivalry, New Haven, 1984, p. 30.
7 C. M. Richardson et al., eds, Renaissance Art Reconsidered, Oxford, 2007, pp. 193–4; M. de
Montaigne, Essays, trans. M. A. Screech, London, 1991, p. 742.
8 Jacobus da Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. W. G. Ryan, Princeton, 1993, vol. 2, pp. 260–5.
He was also known as Jude and Lebbaeus.
9 P. Schmidt, ‘The Hand as a Mirror of Salvation’, in P. Parshall et al., The Origins of European
Printmaking, Washington, 2005, no. 92, pp. 292–5.
10 J. Hall, The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art, Oxford, 2008, pp. 218–
9.
11 Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 260.
12 Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, pp. 43–5.
13 M. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, London, 1976, pp. 121–
76.
14 Ibid., pp. 154–7.
15 Egbert, Medieval Artist, p. 72, illus. xxvi.
16 A. Kahn, ‘Rogier’s St Luke: Portrait of the Artist or Portrait of the Historian?’, in Rogier van der
Weyden: St Luke Drawing the Virgin, Turnhout, 1997, p. 20.
17 J. H. Marrow, ‘Artistic Identity in Early Netherlandish Painting’ in Rogier van der Weyden: St
Luke Drawing the Virgin, p. 53.
18 I. Severin, Baumeister und Architekten: Studien zur Darstellung eines Berufsstandes in Porträt
und Bildnis, Berlin, 1992.
19 E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, London, 1989 (15th edn), p. 215.
20 M. V. Schwarz, ‘ Peter Parler im Veitsdom’, in Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk, ed. M.
Winner, Weinheim, 1992, pp. 55–84.
21 M. Levey, Painting at Court, London, 1971, p. 24 ff, to which much of the following is indebted.
22 Martindale, Rise of the Artist, p. 37.
23 E. Panofsky, ‘Facies illa Rogeri maximi pictoris’, in Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies in
Honour of Albert Mathias Friend, Princeton, 1954, pp. 392–400.
24 C. Reynolds, ‘Self-Portrait and Signature in the Brussels “Justice Scenes”: Rogier van der Weyden’s
Fame and the Status of Painting’, in Rogier van der Weyden in Context, ed. L. Campbell et al.,
Paris, 2012, pp. 79–92.
25 J. Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism: Text, Translation and Interpretative Study
of De Visione Dei, Minneapolis, 1988, p. 117.
26 Perkinson, Likeness of the King, pp. 77–8, p. 83.
27 The Postilla of Nicholas of Lyra on the Song of Songs, trans. J. G. Kiecker, Milwaukee, 1998, pp.
37–9. Nicholas’s Bible commentary (1330s) was still the standard account in the fifteenth century.
Glossa Ordinaria: Pars 22 in Canticum Canticorum, ed. and trans. M. Dove, Turnhout, 1997, p.
98 ff.
28 Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson, London, 1957, pp.
106–13.
29 R. Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Princeton, 1982, p. 7.
30 G. Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. G. de Vere, London, 1996, vol. 1,
p. 306.
31 Hall, Sinister Side, pp. 215–6.
32 E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London, 1967, pp. 177–90.
33 Alberti, On Painting, p. 78.
34 G. W. McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism, Princeton, 1991, p. 108.
35 D. Landau and P. Parshall, The Renaissance Print, New Haven, 1994, p. 57.
36 J. Woodall, ‘Love is in the Air. Amor as Motivation and Message in Seventeenth-Century
Netherlandish Painting’, Art History, 19, no. 2, 1996, pp. 208–64.
37 Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, pp. 93–4.
38 F. Zöllner, “‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé”: Leonardo da Vinci and “Automimesis”’, in Der Künstler über
sich in seinem Werk, ed. M. Winner, Weinheim, 1992, p. 138.
39 A. Pellizzari, I trattati attorno le arti figurative, Rome, 1942, vol. 2, p. 130.
40 Zöllner, ‘“Ogni pittore dipinge sé”’, p. 147; Gasparo Visconti, I canzonieri per Beatrice d’Este e
per Bianca Maria Sforza, ed. P. Bongrani, Milan, 1979, pp. 117–8. The translation is mostly Martin
Kemp’s.
41 M. Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, New Haven, 1989, p. 120. See also M. Kemp, ‘Ogni
dipintore dipinge se: A Neoplatonic Echo in Leonardo’s Art Theory?’, in Cultural Aspects of the
Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. C. Clough, Manchester,
1976, pp. 311–12.
42 Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, p. 120.
43 Kemp, ‘Ogni dipintore dipinge se’, p. 311.

4. THE RENAISSANCE ARTIST AS HERO

1 D. Karl, ‘Il ritratto commemorativo di Giotto di Benedetto da Maiano nel Duomo di Firenze’, in
Santa Maria del Fiore: The Cathedral and Its Sculpture, M. Haines, ed., Fiesole, 2001, pp. 129–
47; A. Nagel, ‘Authorship and Image-Making in the Monument to Giotto in Florence Cathedral’, Res,
no. 53/54, 2008, pp. 143–51.
2 L. Syson and D. Thornton, Objects of Virtue, London, 2001, ch. 1.
3 Nagel, ‘Authorship and Image-Making’, p. 154.
4 J. DellaNeva, ed., Ciceronian Controversies, Cambridge, MA, 2007, p. 3.
5 Two in the destroyed Ovetari chapel and one in the panel Presentation in the Temple (Berlin).
6 Woods-Masden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, pp. 85–95.
7 Ibid., p. 90.
8 Ibid., p. 92.
9 J-C Klamt, ‘Artist and Patron: The Self-Portrait of Adam Kraft in the Sacrament House of St
Lorenz in Nuremberg’, in Showing Status, ed. W. Blockmans and A. Janse, Turnhout, 1999, pp.
415–43.
10 Alberti, On Painting, trans. J. R. Spencer, New Haven, 1966, p. 39; J. Hall, Michelangelo and the
Reinvention of the Human Body, London, 2005, p. 39.
11 R. Brandl, ‘Art or Craft?: Art and the Artist in Medieval Nuremberg’, in Gothic and Renaissance
Art in Nuremberg, 1300–1550, New York, 1986, p. 51 ff.
12 M. Rogers, ‘The Artist as Beauty’, in Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, ed. F. Ames-Lewis
and M. Rogers, Aldershot, 1998, pp. 93–106.
13 W. Stechow, ed., Northern Renaissance Art 1400–1600, Evanston, 1989, p. 112.
14 W. M. Conway, ed. and trans., The Writings of Albrecht Dürer, New York, 1958, pp. 53, 57–8.
15 Ibid., pp. 48–9.
16 J. L. Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago, 1993, ch. 5,
and passim.
17 Stechow, ed., Northern Renaissance Art, p. 112.
18 Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, p. 169.
19 Ibid., p. 170.
20 Translations taken from Dove, ed. and trans., Glossa Ordinaria.
21 J-L Chrétien, Symbolique du corps: La tradition chrétienne du Cantique des Cantiques, Paris,
2005, ch. 9.
22 Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, p. 70.
23 R. Kahsnitz cat. entry in Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg, p. 130.
24 J. Cage, ed. and trans., Goethe on Art, London, 1980, p. 137.
25 See J. Hall forthcoming article on ‘dramatized’ signatures.
26 J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 2, London, 1891, pt 3, ch. 5, p. 85.
27 E. Kris and O. Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, New Haven, 1979, p. 13
ff; I. Taddei, Fanciulli e giovani: Crescere a Firenze nel Rinascimento, Florence, 2001. There
was less interest in the achievements of girls.
28 E. G. Holt, A Documentary History of Art, vol. 1, Princeton, 1947, p. 153, ‘The Second
Commentary’.
29 C. Grottanelli, ‘Bambini e divinazione’, in Infanzie: Funzioni di un gruppo liminale dal mondo
classico all’età moderna, Florence, 1993, pp. 1–30.
30 The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. S. A. Barney et al., Cambridge, 2006, II, 1, XI, ii.
31 Taddei, Fanciulli e giovani, p. 68.
32 D. Hess and T. Eser, eds, The Early Dürer, London, 2012.
33 R. G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, Boston, 2003, p. 118; Hess and Eser, eds, Early
Dürer, pp. 276–9.
34 Taddei, Fanciulli e giovani, p. 37.
35 Hess and Eser, eds, Early Dürer, p. 262.
36 Vasari, Lives, vol. 1, p. 641.
37 Augustine, City of God, Harmondsworth, 1984, bk 16, p. 710.
38 Hall, Michelangelo, p. 93 ff.
39 J. C. Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love, New York, 1958.
40 M. Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. S. Jayne, Dallas, 1985, pp. 58, 66.
41 D. Ekserdjian, Parmigianino, New Haven, 2006, p. 130, figs 135–6.
42 The shadows round his chin and cheekbone are no different in appearance to those round his left eye
and forehead – they are not stubble.
43 Hall, Sinister Side, pp. 211 ff, 293–7.
44 Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraits, pp. 187–213.
45 F. Caroli, Sofonisba Anguissola e le sue sorelle, Milan, 1991, pp. 217–18.
46 Cited by B. Boucher, Italian Baroque Sculpture, London, 1998, p. 57.
47 Caroli, Sofonisba, pp. 37–8; first cited by Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie dei professori del disegno da
Cimabue in qua, vol. 1, Florence, 1681, pp. 624–7.
48 H. Sanson, Women, Language and Grammar in Italy, Oxford, 2011.
49 Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraits, p. 203.
50 Ibid.

5. MOCK-HEROIC SELF-PORTRAITS
1 Cited by L. Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, New Haven, 1990, pp. 195–6 and n. 20, p. 268. I
have translated the first part.
2 For earlier artist-entertainers, Martindale, Rise of the Artist, pp. 50–2.
3 G. Briganti et al., I Bamboccianti, Rome, 1983, p. 132.
4 Michelangelo, The Poems, trans. C. Ryan, London, 1996, nos 5, F3 and 4.
5 Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, pp. 38–9; Hall, Sculpture, ch 1.
6 L. Barkan, Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, Princeton, 2010, pp. 85–92.
7 Michelangelo, Poems, pp. 158–9, no. 173; pp. 194–4, no. 242.
8 Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic, p. 99 ff.
9 Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWillian, Harmondsworth, 1972, pp. 493–5.
10 Vasari, Lives, vol. 2, p. 741.
11 M. M. Ede, in Campbell et al., Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, London, 2011, p. 265.
12 W. Wallace, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times, Cambridge, 2010, p. 148; see also
p. 396, Subject Index, ‘Age / Old Age’.
13 Hall, Michelangelo, p. 210.
14 F. La Cava, Il volto di Michelangelo scoperto nel giudizio finale: un drama psicologico in un
ritratto simbolico, Bologna, 1925. A print of the Last Judgment (1564) inscribes Michelangelo’s
name next to the flayed face.
15 Voragine, Golden Legend, p. 115, quoting St Theodore.
16 Michelangelo, Poems, no. 94.
17 Ibid., no. 152.
18 Hall, Michelangelo, p. 205.
19 J. Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà, Princeton, 2003; Hall, Michelangelo, pp. 210–12.
20 L. Freedman, Titian’s Independent Self-Portraits, Florence, 1990; J. Fletcher, ‘“Fatto al Specchio”:
Venetian Renaissance Attitudes to Self-Portraiture’, Fenway Court, Boston, 1992, pp. 44–60;
Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, pp. 159–67.
21 The number and dating of self-portraits is disputed. Only two survive, in Berlin and Madrid. See D.
Jaffé, ed., Titian, London, 2003, cat. 28, for C. Hope’s dating and identification. Self-portraits seem
to have been painted for Paolo Giovio’s collection of portraits (by May 1549 – perhaps the one in
Berlin); for the patron Gabriel Vendramin (before 1552, when he died); for Emperor Charles V in
March 1550 (lost); for the future Philip II in 1552–3 (lost).
22 Sohm, Artist Grows Old, p. 3 ff, 53–7, 83–4.
23 J. Fletcher in Titian, ed. Jaffé, p. 188, n. 80; with other references to old age.
24 Ibid., p. 39.
25 Sohm, Artist Grows Old, pp. 87–8.
26 C. Campbell in Titian, ed. Jaffé, p. 158.
27 D. Benati, ed., Annibale Carracci, Milan, 2006, p. 72 ff; Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-
Portraiture, pp. 241–53.
28 Early commentators credit Annibale with the invention of caricature, but only caricatures by
Agostino have been securely identified.
29 Malvasia, cited in Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, pp. 113–5.
30 Ibid., p. 102 ff.
31 M. Winner, ‘Annibale Carracci’s Self-Portraits and the Paragone Debate’, in World Art: Themes of
Unity in Diversity, ed. I. Lavin, University Park, PA, 1989, p. 510.
32 Vinge, Narcissus Theme, pp. 149–50.
33 T. D. Kaufmann, Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting, Chicago,
2009.
34 J. Hall, ‘Still Alive: Arcimboldo’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 November 2010.
35 C. Hope, ‘Historical Portraits in the Lives and in the Frescoes of Giorgio Vasari’, in Giorgio Vasari
tra decorazione ambientale e storiografia artistica, Florence, 1985, pp. 322, 336.
36 W. Prinz, Vasaris Sammlung von Künstlerbildnissen, Florence, 1966.
37 Vasari, Lives, vol. 1, p. 29.
38 Pliny, 7: 205; 35: 15. R. Rosenblum, ‘The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of
Romantic Classicism’, Art Bulletin, December, 1957, p. 279, n. 6.
39 L. de Girolami Cheney, The Homes of Giorgio Vasari, New York, 2006.
40 L. Syson in Currency of Fame, ed. Scher, pp. 112–5, considers it a self-portrait.
41 E. Panofsky, ‘Erasmus and the Visual Arts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 32,
1969, pp. 200–27.
42 The Essential Erasmus, trans. J. P. Dolan, New York, 1964, pp. 35, 108–9, 126–7, 169.
43 G. Bora, ‘Towards a New Naturalism’, in Painters of Reality, New York, 2004, pp. 150–1.
44 R. Klein and H. Zerner, eds, Italian Art 1500–1600, Evanston, 1989, p. 131.
45 G. Mancini, G. Baglione and G. P. Bellori, The Lives of Caravaggio, London, 2005, p. 92. For the
autobiographical nature of his art, C. Strinati, ed., Caravaggio, Rome, 2010, pp. 21–2; M. Fried, The
Moment of Caravaggio, Princeton, 2010.
46 Lives of Caravaggio, p. 41. For debate as to whether the latter is a self-portrait, Fried, Moment of
Caravaggio, pp. 9, 247.
47 Dante, Convivio, pt 4, canto 3, v. 52–5.
48 H. P. Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity, Princeton,
1990, p. 20.
49 Another source is a figure in Raphael’s Judgment of Paris. K. Christiansen in Painters of Reality,
p. 169, no. 63.
50 For convex mirror symbolism, W. S. Melion, ‘Benedictus Arias Montanus and the Virtual Studio as a
Meditative Place’, in Inventions of the Studio, ed. M. Cole and M. Pardo, Chapel Hill, 2005, pp,
98–107.
51 Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, p. 102.

6. THE ARTIST’S STUDIO

1 See R. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London, 1973, p. 10; J.
Chipps Smith, German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance, Princeton, 1994, p. 37.
2 Hall, Sculpture, part 1.
3 Montaigne, Essays, p. lix; see also II: 18, p. 755, where Screech translates ‘peint’ as portrays.
www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/montaigne/, II: 18, p. 665.
4 Ibid., p. 742.
5 Ibid., p. 755.
6 Lomazzo, Idea del tempio della pittura, vol. 1, pp. 65–7.
7 J. Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Colour: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age,
trans. E. McVarish, Berkeley, 1993, pp. 130–5.
8 The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, Cambridge, 1931,
vol. 1, pp. 311–12.
9 N. Penny, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, vol. 2, London,
2008, pp. 224–7; R. Lauber, ‘Per un ritratto di Gabriele Vendramin’, in Figure di collezionisti a
Venezia tra cinque e seicento, ed. L. Borean and S. Mason, Udine, 2002, pp. 25–71; C. Whistler,
‘Uncovering Beauty: Titian’s Triumph of Love in the Vendramin Collection’, Renaissance Studies,
vol. 6, 21, 2011, pp. 218–42.
10 Fletcher, ‘Fatto al specchio’, pp. 54–5.
11 C. Whistler’s phrase.
12 M. T. Osborne, Advice-to-a-Painter Poems: 1633–1856, Dallas, 1949.
13 For the studio, S. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, Chicago, 1988; and
S. Alpers, The Vexations of Art, New Haven, 2005.
14 K. Christiansen and J. W. Mann, eds, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, New York, 2001, p. 322.
15 M. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art,
Princeton, 1989, pp. 141–71.
16 Christiansen and Mann, eds, Orazio and Artemisia, p. 420.
17 Ibid., p. 417.
18 R. M. Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England,
Philadelphia, 1987, p. 122.
19 O. Millar, ‘Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue of the Collections of Charles I’, The Walpole
Society, 37, 1958–60. See also F. Haskell, ‘Charles I’s Collection of Pictures’, in The Late King’s
Goods, ed. A. MacGregor, London, 1989, pp. 203–31.
20 Christiansen and Mann, eds, Orazio and Artemisia, p. 418; C. Ripa, Iconologia, ed. P. Buscaroli,
Milan, 1992, p. 357.
21 Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, pp. 201–2, 222.
22 J. Hall, ‘Look of Self Love’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 January 2006.
23 Michelangelo, Poems, no. 235, p. 191.
24 H. Brigstocke, Drawings by Nicolas Poussin from British Collections, Oxford, 1990, no. 24,
where it is accepted as autograph.
25 Hollar’s print of the supposed original, then in Antwerp, was published in 1650. R. Verdi, Nicolas
Poussin, London, 1995, no. 63, pp. 269–70.
26 The print is very rare, however.
27 Hall, Sinister Side, p. 304.
28 A. Mérot, Nicolas Poussin, London, 1990, p. 311.
29 T. Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, New Haven, 2000, p. 209, and for
Delacroix’s criticism of ‘miserable pictures’.
30 E. J. Sluijter, ‘Vermeer, Fame and Female Beauty: The Art of Painting’, in Vermeer Studies, ed. I.
Gaskell and M. Jonker, New Haven, 1998, p. 226 ff.
31 P. Sohm, Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, His Critics and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork,
Cambridge, 1992; M. Boschini, La carta de l navegar pitoresco, ed. A. Pallucchini, Venice, 1966.
32 Sluijter, ‘Vermeer, Fame and Female Beauty’, p. 268–9.
33 M. de Winkel, ‘The Interpretation of Dress in Vermeer’s Paintings’, in Vermeer Studies, ed. I.
Gaskell and M. Jonker, New Haven, 1998, p. 333.
34 J. Anderson, Giorgione, Paris, 1997, p. 74.
35 Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, p. 217.
36 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A. S. Smith,
New York, 1970, pp. 7–9.
37 J. Brown, ‘On the meaning of Las Meninas’, in Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century
Spanish Painting, Princeton, 1978, p. 94.
38 J. Elliott, ‘Appearance and Reality in the Spain of Velázquez’, in D. Carr, Velázquez, London, 2006,
p. 18.
39 Foucault, Order of Things, p. 4.
40 M. Kemp, The Science of Art, New Haven, 1990, pp. 104–5.
41 G. Bartram, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy, London, 2002, no. 18, pp. 89–90; K. Andrews,
‘Dürer’s Posthumous Fame’, in Essays on Dürer, ed. C. R. Dodwell, Manchester, 1973, pp. 88–90.
42 E. Harris, Velázquez, Oxford, 1982, p. 214.
43 S. L. Stratton-Pruitt, ed., Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Cambridge, 2003, p. 1.
44 C. Wright, Rembrandt: Self-Portraits, London, 1982, p. 26.
45 L. de Vries, ‘Tronies and Other Single-Figured Netherlandish Paintings’, Leids Kunsthistorisch
Jaarboeck, 8, 1989, pp. 185–202.
46 C. Ford, ‘Works Do Not Make an Oeuvre: Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits as a Category’, in Rethinking
Rembrandt, ed. A. Chong and M. Zell, Amsterdam, 2003, p. 122.
47 Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits, p. 46.
48 H-J Raupp, Untersuchungen zu Künstlerbildnis und Künstlerdarstellung in den Niederlanden
im 17. Jahnhundert, Hildesheim, 1984.
49 C. Brown, Anthony van Dyck, 1599–1641, New York, 1999, no. 1, pp. 94–5; it is dated later in S.
J. Barnes et al., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven, 2004, sec. I: 99,
but if so, he made himself look much younger than he was, and did so again in I: 159, 160 and II: 26.
50 Hall, Sinister Side, ch. 15, pp. 278–87.
51 De Winkel in Rembrandt by Himself, ed. C. White and Q. Buvelot, London, 1999, p. 62, and nos 11,
14a, 23, 25, 30, 31, 32, 38.
52 F. Baldinucci, Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua (1681–1728), Florence, 1975,
vol. 5, p. 308.
53 Bartram, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy, p. 266ff.
54 K. van Mander, Dutch and Flemish Painters, trans. C. van de Wall, New York, 1969, p. 40.
55 White and Buvelot, eds, Rembrandt by Himself, nos 63 and 65, pp. 187–8, 190–1.
56 C. Lloyd and S. Thurley, Henry VIII: Images of a Tudor King, London, 1990; X. Brooke, Henry
VIII Revealed, London, 2003.
57 O. Bätschmann and P. Griener, Hans Holbein, London, 1997, p. 200; Van Mander, Dutch and
Flemish Painters, pp. 86–8.
58 Montaigne, Essays, I: 39, p. 270.
59 Vasari, Lives, vol. 2, p. 746.
60 F. Baldinucci, The Life of Bernini (1682), trans. C. Engass, University Park, PA, 1966, p. 76; Hall,
Sculpture, pp. 22–3.
61 C. and A. Tümpel, Rembrandt: Images and Metaphors, London, 2006, p. 252 ff.
62 White and Buvelot, eds, Rembrandt by Himself, no. 82, pp. 216–19.
63 Hall, Sinister Side, p. 159 ff.
64 White and Buvelot, eds, Rembrandt by Himself, no. 85, pp. 226–8; E. van de Wetering, A Corpus
of Rembrandt Paintings, IV: Self-Portraits, Dordrecht, 2005, no. 28, pp. 578–87.
65 Hall, Sculpture, p. 42 ff; arguments put forward in pt 1.
66 M. Sframeli, ‘Consecrated to Eternity by Their Own Hands: Leopoldo de’ Medici’s Collection of
Self-Portraits’, in Artists’ Self-Portraits from the Uffizi, London, 2007, p. 25.
67 W. Prinz, ‘La collezione degli autoritratti’, in Gli Uffizi: Catalogo generale, Florence, 1979, pp.
766–8.
68 Prinz, ‘La collezione degli autoritratti’, p. 768.
69 F. Moücke, Serie di ritratti degli eccellenti pittori…, Florence, 1752–62, vol. 2, p. 147 ff; F. B.
Salvadori, ‘Carlo Lasino e gli Autoritratti di Galleria’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen
Institutes in Florenz, 27, 1984, pp. 109–31.
70 Moucke, Serie di ritratti degli eccellenti pittori, vol. 3, p. 85.

7. AT THE CROSSROADS
1 F. Borzello, Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits, London, 1998, pp. 81–2.
2 N. Penny, Reynolds, London, 1986, p. 22.
3 D. Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, New Haven, 2000,
no. 11, p. 48.
4 For example, engraving by Nicolas Dorigny, 1705.
5 Penny, Reynolds, p. 20.
6 J. Richardson, Essay on the Theory of Painting, London, 1725, pp. 248–63; S. H. Monk, The
Sublime, Ann Arbor, 1960.
7 An engraving by Gribelin after Matteis’s painting was included with the essay in the third volume of
the revised edition of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinion, Times (1714).
Most of the essay is in E. G. Holt, ed., A Documentary History of Art, vol. 2, New York, 1958, pp.
242–59.
8 Winckelmann would transform the Laocoon into Shaftesbury’s Hercules: J. J. Winckelmann:
History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. H. F. Mallgrave, Los Angeles, 2006, pp. 313–14.
9 Vinge, Narcissus Theme, p. 277 ff.
10 D. Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Edinburgh, 1739, 1: 4: 6.
11 W. Pressly, James Barry: The Artist as Hero, London, 1983, p. 34.
12 O. Bätschmann, The Artist in the Modern World, Cologne, 1997, pp. 26, 246, n. 69.
13 W. H. Curran. See Pressly, James Barry, p. 151.
14 J. J. Winckelmann, trans. Mallgrave, p. 323.
15 Ibid. The studies were in the drawing collection of Cardinal Albani.
16 He is only rivalled by the short-lived Raymond La Fage (1656–84).
17 Pliny’s Natural History was usually published as extracts, or in selected volumes. In 1772, a two-
volume French translation of the books on art was published with notes by the sculptor Falconet:
‘Tom 1’ may refer to this edition.
18 The coat appears to be made from sheepskin, with an attached fur collar.
19 R. de Piles, Cour de Peinture par des Principes, Paris, 1708, p. 265; English trans. (London 1743),
pp. 161–2.
20 M. Heard, Phantasmagoria, Hastings, 2006, p. 73.
21 A. Bostrom, Messerschmidt and Modernity, Los Angeles, 2012.
22 Heard, Phantasmagoria, pp. 41–2.
23 E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, Cambridge, 1995, p. 38.
24 Bätschmann, Artist in the Modern World, pp. 21–3; Hall, Sculpture, pp. 142–3.
25 F. Yates, The Art of Memory, Harmondsworth, 1969, pp. 155–62.
26 J. Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, London, 1978, p. 107.
27 W. Rehm, Götterstille und Göttertrauer, Bern, 1951, pp. 101–82.
28 He told Nicolai that animals kept their lips tightly pressed, and this gave them supernatural powers.
M. Pötzl-Malikova and G. Scherf, eds, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, New York, 2010, p. 210.
29 Diderot’s Selected Writings, trans. D. Coltman, New York, 1966, p. 325.
30 J. López-Rey, Goya’s Caprichos, Westport, 1970, vol. 1, p. 78.
31 Cited by Sohm, Artist Grows Old, p. 45.
32 ‘The author dreaming. His only purpose is to banish harmful ideas commonly believed, and to
perpetuate with this work of Caprichos the solid testimony of truth.’
33 A. Perez Sanchez and E. Sayre, Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, Boston, 1989, no. 38, pp.
84–5.
34 M-A Dupuy, Dominique-Vivant Denon: L’Oeil de Napoléon, Paris, 1999, nos 34 and 35, pp. 86–7.
35 British Museum inv. no. 1871,0812.2111.
36 Galerie du Musée Napoléon, Paris, 1807, vol. 4, no. 44, pp. 7–8 (J. Lavallée).
37 Ibid., vol. 2: Champaigne, Dujardin, van Dyck; vol. 3: del Sarto; vol. 4: Romain, Poussin, Rembrandt;
vol. 5: Rembrandt, Tintoretto; vol. 7: Dou; vol. 8: Bourdon; vol. 10: Garofalo.
38 H. Williams, A Historical Ethnography of the Académie Royale (1648–1793), PhD thesis,
Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2010, p. 239 and Appendix 9, p. 283.
39 Ibid., p. 239.
40 A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors, London, 1906,
vol. 6, p. 277.
41 F. Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum, New Haven, 2000, p. 46 ff.
42 Ibid., pp. 52–3. No. 79 was a painted design for a stained-glass window in which Reynolds is one of
the shepherds worshipping Christ; no. 84 – Portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds – was the RA self-
portrait.
43 J. Newman in Penny, Reynolds, pp. 344–54.
44 Forty-nine landscapes by Joseph Vernet were exhibited in Paris in 1783: Haskell, Ephemeral
Museum, pp. 15–19, 167 n. 40. William Blake exhibited sixteen paintings in his home in 1809; see K.
Stefanis, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/reasoned-exhibitions-blake-1809-
and-reynolds-1813.
45 L. Jordanova in Bond and Woodall, Self-Portrait, pp. 50–1.
46 Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Appendix 1, pp. 591–2.
47 1815: Dutch and Flemish Schools, no. 30; owned by the Earl of Ilchester. Nine Rembrandt self-
portraits are listed in C. White et al., Rembrandt in Eighteenth Century England, New Haven,
1983, pp. 106–7.
48 E-F Gersaint, P-C-A Helle and J-B Glomy, Catalogue raisonée de toutes les pièces qui font
l’œuvre de Rembrandt, Paris, 1751, xxiv–xxvi and no. 4; A. Bartsch, Catalogue raisonée de
toutes les estampes qui forment l’œuvre de Rembrandt…, Vienna, 1797, xxi and xxiii. See also A.
McQueen, The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt, Amsterdam, 2003.
49 E. Fromentin, The Masters of Past Time, trans. A. Boyle, Oxford, 1981, pp. 223–4.
50 1818, no. 48, ‘His own portrait in the character of Paris’ (now Wallace Collection); 1820, no. 73,
Royal Collection.
51 The change in sensibility would be maintained in the new catalogue of the Uffizi collection, Reale
Galleria di Firenze illustrata: Ritratti di pittori (4 vols, 1817–32). Although there are only a few
more illustrations than in the first catalogue (249 vs 220) eleven artists have more than one self-
portrait reproduced. Annibale Carracci has an astonishing five, all ‘varied in period and execution’
(vol. 2, p. 86).

8. COMING HOME: INTO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1 M. Whinney, Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, London, 1988, p. 319.
2 J. Dalloway, Anecdotes of the Arts in England, London, 1800, pp. 408–9.
3 Vinge, Narcissus Theme, p. 277 ff.
4 Hall, Sculpture, p. 45.
5 Cage, ed., Goethe on Art, pp. 103–12.
6 J. Traeger, Philipp Otto Runge und sein Werk, Munich, 1975, no. 345.
7 T. Lubbock, ‘Great Works: We Three’, The Independent, 4 December 2009 (online).
8 H. Honour, Romanticism, Harmondsworth, 1979, p. 253.
9 S. Symmons, Goya and the Pursuit of Patronage, London, 1988, pp. 94–6.
10 P. Fisher, Making and Effacing Art, New Haven, 1991, p. 17.
11 Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 170.
12 U. Kuhlemann, in Bartrum, Dürer and His Legacy, pp. 45–9; J. Bialostocki, Dürer and His Critics,
Baden-Baden, 1986, ch. 5.
13 E. G. Bouwers, ‘A Papal Pantheon? Canova’s Illustrious Italians in Rome’, in Pantheons, ed. R.
Wrigley and M. Craske, Farnham, 2006, pp. 132–60.
14 Antonio Canova, Venice, 1992, p. 341 ff; Antonio Canova: Arte e Memoria a Possagno,
Ponzano, 2004.
15 Information from Hugh Honour.
16 P. Chu, ed. and trans., The Letters of Gustave Courbet, Chicago, 1992, p. 122.
17 M-T de Forges, Autoportraits de Courbet, Paris, 1973.
18 D. de Font-Réaulx et al., Gustave Courbet, New York, 2008, pp. 412–13.
19 E. Billeter, Self-Portrait in the Age of Photography, Houston, 1986, p. 102. The first surviving
photographic self-portrait may be by the American Robert Cornelius (1839).
20 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on the Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1975, pp. 788,
813.
21 Font-Réaulx et al., Gustave Courbet, p. 214.
22 P. Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire, New Haven, 1987, p. 33 ff.
23 Font-Réaulx et al., Gustave Courbet, pp. 220–25; K. Herding, Courbet: To Venture Independence,
New Haven, 1991, pp. 45–61; H. Toussaint, Gustave Courbet 1819–1877, London, 1977, pp. 241–
77.
24 Herding, Courbet, pp. 55–6.
25 Chu, ed., Letters of Gustave Courbet, pp. 131–3.
26 A. Bowness, Courbet’s L’Atelier du Peintre, Newcastle, 1972, p. 11.
27 M. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, Chicago, 1990, p. 324, n. 22.
28 Ibid., pp. 159–61.
29 Canova’s tomb in the Frari, Venice, may also be relevant: allegorical figures representing the arts
proceed through a central door in a pyramid.
30 T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, London, 1973, p.
21.
31 Letter 119. References are to the letter numbers in http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters.html.
32 Letter 515.
33 Letter 288.
34 Letter 495.
35 Letter 811.
36 Letter 547.
37 See letter 681.
38 O. Boers, De gevelstenen van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1992, p. 291. I am grateful to Paul Taylor
for helping me unravel this print. For the house, J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of
the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French Painters, vol. 7, The Life and Works of
Rembrandt van Rhyn, London, 1836, p. 25 (note).
39 For Rembrandt self-portrait, see letter 649.
40 C. Vosmaer, Rembrandt: Sa vie et ses œuvres, 2nd edn, La Haye, 1877, p. 20.
41 Letter 578.
42 Letter 626.
43 C. Gere, The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior, Aldershot, 2000, p. 28.
44 Letter 677.
45 Letter 515.
46 Manet appears in Music at the Tuileries, included in the show.
47 Wilhelm Wackenroder’s Confessions and Fantasies, trans. M. H. Schubert, University Park, PA,
1971, pp. 81–2, 108–15.
48 Letter 719.
49 Letter 704.
50 Ernest Ponthier de Chamillard. Letter 698.
51 Letter 677.
52 D. W. Druick and B. Salvesen, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, London, 2001,
p. 210.
53 Cage, ed., Goethe on Art, pp. 31–7.
54 Letter 800.
55 R. Brettell et al., The Art of Paul Gauguin, Washington, 1988, pp. 125–7.
56 Did the name Prado also make him think of the museum – full of pictures of martyrdoms?
57 D. L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Finde-Siècle France, Berkeley, 1989, p. 21.
58 Ibid., p. 35.
59 B. Thomson, ed., Gauguin by Himself, p. 105, ‘Notes on Art at the Universal Exhibition’.
60 Druick and Salvesen, Van Gogh and Gauguin, pp. 279–81.
61 At this time Gauguin included the Self-Portrait Jug in a still-life painting, ‘infantilizing’ it by showing
it in profile, dwarfing it with a vase of blooms, and putting poppies in it.
62 J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1881–1906, vol. 1, London, 1991, p. 461.

9. SEX AND GENIUS

1 G. Tinterow and P. Conisbee, eds, Portraits by Ingres, New York, 1999, p. 107.
2 C. Lombroso, The Man of Genius, New York, 1984, pp. 13–14. See also J. Lethève, Daily Life of
French Artists in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1972, pp. 185–6.
3 Ibid., p. 36.
4 Ibid., p. 63 ff.
5 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York, 1968, nos
800, 807 and 815.
6 A. Sturgis et al., Rebels and Martyrs, London, 2006, p. 174.
7 É. Zola, The Masterpiece, trans. T. Walton, Oxford, 1993, pp. 124, 284.
8 Box of Notes 1914. M. Sanouill, ed., Duchamp du Signe: Ecrits, Paris, 1975, p. 37.
9 I. Müller-Westermann, Munch by Himself, London, 2005, pp. 26–33, cat. nos 4, 5, 10, 11.
10 D. Ades, ‘Duchamp’s masquerades’, in The Portrait in Photography, ed. G. Clarke, London, 1992,
pp. 94–114.
11 J. Michelet, Le Montagne, Paris, 1868, pp. 113–15.
12 C. Berend-Corinth, Die Gemälde von Lovis Corinth, Munich, 1958.
13 Ibid., p. 37, fig. 1.
14 B. Uhde-Stahl, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Stuttgart, 1989, p. 100.
15 J. Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, London, 1990, pp. 69, 72.
16 W. G. Fischer in Kallir, Egon Schiele, pp. 252–5.
17 S. Whitfield, Bonnard, London, 1998, pp. 9–10.
18 E. Jones, ‘The Influence of Andrea del Sarto’s Wife on His Art’, in Essays in Applied Psycho-
Analysis, London, 1951, pp. 226–44.
19 N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, pp. 11–14.
20 Whitfield, Bonnard, p. 27.
21 La Cava, Il volto di Michelangelo.

10. BEYOND THE FACE: MODERN ANDCONTEMPORARY SELF-PORTRAITS

1 S. Barron, Degenerate Art, Los Angeles, 1991, pp. 140–1. The auction included two self-portraits
each by Beckmann and Corinth, and one by Hofer, Modersohn-Becker and Schmidt-Rottluff. The
‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition had included self-portraits by Beckmann, Corinth, Freundlich, Hebert,
Hechrott, Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff and Kokoschka.
2 The OED first records its use of self-portrait in 1831, but Royal Academy catalogues and auction
catalogues never seem to use the term in the nineteenth century. Selbstbildnis and selbstporträt
appear in the late nineteenth century. Autoportrait appears in French dictionaries for the first time in
1928.
3 W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. M. Bullock, London, 1953.
4 M. Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, 2: From Impressionism to Kandinsky, New York, 1998, pt
2.
5 Hall, Sculpture, p. 190 ff.
6 W. Waetzoldt, Die Kunst des Porträts, Leipzig, 1908, p. 309 ff; Bätschmann, Artist in the Modern
World, pp. 115–16.
7 Waetzoldt, Die Kunst, p. 312.
8 Ibid., pp. 313, 343, 321.
9 N. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Harmondsworth, 1990, p. 49.
10 Waetzoldt, Die Kunst, p. 360 ff.
11 Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, 1968, #40, pp. 240–1.
12 S. M. Canning, ‘James Ensor: Carnival of the Modern’, in James Ensor, New York, 2009, p. 36.
13 F. Haskell, History and Its Images, New Haven, 1993, pp. 391–4.
14 Cited by L. Madeline in ‘Ensor is Eternal: The Painter and His Image’, in James Ensor, p. 114.
15 Ibid.
16 A. Baldassari, Picasso and Photography, Paris, 1997.
17 C. Harrison et al., eds, Art in Theory 1900–1990, Oxford, 1992, pp. 211–12.
18 E. Wind, Art and Anarchy, London, 1985, p. 30 ff.
19 R. Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets, New York, 1951, pp. 51–4.
20 Ibid., p. 43.
21 M. Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Words, ed. and trans. B. C. Buenger, Chicago, 1997, p. 187.
22 E. Gombrich, ‘The Mask and the Face’, in Art Perception and Reality, Baltimore, 1972, p. 3, n 8.
23 Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, 2, pp. 175–6.
24 C. Schulz-Hoffmann and J. C. Weiss, eds, Max Beckmann: Retrospective, St Louis, 1984, p. 239.
25 J. Burke in ibid., p. 68.
26 Beckmann, Self-Portrait, pp. 303, 305–6.
27 Schulz-Hoffmann and Weiss, Max Beckmann: Retrospective, p. 20, n 8.
28 R. Krauss and J. Livingstone, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, New York, 1985, p.
205, is one of the earliest. F. Leperlier, Claude Cahun, Paris, 1992; L. Downie, ed., Don’t Kiss Me:
the Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, London, 2006.
29 M. A. Caws, Surrealism, London, 2004, pp. 241–2.
30 Cited in Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, p. 98. See also I. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds,
Oxford, 2008, pp. 103–5.
31 Ades, ‘Duchamp’s masquerades’, pp. 98–9.
32 That is, until he made Boite-en-Valise.
33 D. Sylvester, Magritte, London, 1992, p. 150.
34 S. Whitfield, Magritte, London, 1992, no. 18.
35 Ibid., p. 28.
36 Ibid., no. 124.
37 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967); Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ (1969); J. Derrida,
Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. P-A Brault and M. Naas,
Chicago, 1993, p. 62.
38 Letter to Carlos Chavez, 1939. The Letters of Frida Kahlo, ed. M. Zamora, San Francisco, 1995,
pp. 104–5.
39 Drawings by Dürer and Pontormo; painting by Victor Emil Janssen (1828).
40 B. Sewell, Evening Standard, 13 Dec. 2002: http://www.standard.co.uk/home/the-genius-of-durer-
7428306.html.
41 C. Chéroux, in Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, London, 2012, p. 62.
42 Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 40.
43 F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, 1961, p. 142.
44 Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, p. 96.
45 Kallir, Egon Schiele, p. 6.
46 Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Words, p. 264.
47 H. Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, London, 1962, pp. 35–47.
48 A. Munroe, ed., Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky, New York, 1994, p. 370.
49 A. Kaprow, ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Berkeley,
1993, pp. 3–4.
50 M. Kozloff, ‘The Division and Mockery of the Self’, Studio International, January 1970, pp. 9–15.
51 Ibid.
52 K. Paice, in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, New York, 1994, nos 25–6, 40–4, 58–62.
53 Kozloff, ‘Division and Mockery of the Self’, pp. 9, 15.
54 R. Krauss, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October, 1, Spring 1976, pp. 50–64.
55 C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York, 1979, p. 93; A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy
Warhol, New York, 1975, pp. 7–10.
56 Lomas, Narcissus Reflected, pp. 121–5.
57 H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, New York, 1955, p. 158 ff.
58 L. Vergine, Body, art e storie simili. Il corpo come linguaggio, Milan, 1974, p. 33.
59 Rebecca Horn: Bodylandscapes, London, 2005, p. 190.
60 G. Celant, Penone, Milan, 1989, p. 90.
61 Hall, Sculpture, p. 318 ff.
62 The Pelican Freud Library, 14: Art and Literature, Harmondsworth, 1985, pp. 366–7.
63 A. Gormley, in Follow Me, ed. M. Goldner, Stade, 1997, p. 40.
64 Ibid.
65 John Coplans: A Self-Portrait, 1984–1997, New York, 1997, p. 138.
66 A Body: John Coplans, New York, 2001, p. 175.
67 W. Tucker, The Language of Sculpture, London, 1974.
68 R. M. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, London, 1986, pp. 10, 11. See Rilke’s essay on
‘(Faces)’ from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; R. Brilliant, Portraiture, London, 1991, p.
113.
69 E. Respini, Cindy Sherman, New York, 2012, p. 22.
70 Gombrich, ‘The Mask and the Face’, p. 9.
71 The Complete Untitled Film Stills: Cindy Sherman, New York, 2003, p. 8.
72 Respini, Cindy Sherman, p. 23, quoted from G. Marzorati, ‘Imitation of Life’, Art News, September
1983, p. 81.
73 S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Chicago, 1980, p. 162.
74 The Jeff Koons Handbook, London, 1992, p. 120.
75 J. Hall, ‘They Call It Puppy Love’, Guardian, 29 October 1992.
76 A. Muthesius, ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne, 1992, p. 156.
77 Ibid., p. 130.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
For particular artists, see relevant endnotes, and the artist entries in Oxford Art Online.
For visual databases, see collection websites of major museums.

GENERAL SURVEYS AND PICTURE BOOKS

500 Self-Portraits, introduction by J. Bell, London, 2000
Billeter, E., ed., Self-Portrait in the Age of Photography, Houston, 1986
Bond, A., and J. Woodall, eds, Self-Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, London, 2005
Borzello, F., Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits, London, 1998
Brooke, X., Face to Face: Three Centuries of Artists’ Self-Portraiture, Liverpool, 1994
Calabrese, O., Artists’ Self-Portraits, New York, 2006
Cumming, L., A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, London, 2010
Goldscheider, L., ed., Fünfhundert Selbstporträts, Vienna, 1936
Levey, M., The Painter Depicted, London, 1981
Moücke, F., ed., Serie di ritratti degli eccellenti pittori dipinti di propria mano…, 4 vols, Florence,
1752–62
Reale Galleria di Firenze illustrata: Ratratti di pittori, 4 vols, Florence, 1817–33
Winner, M., ed., Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk, Weinheim, 1992

CULT OF THE ARTIST

Kris, E., and O. Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, New Haven, 1979
Wittkower, R. and M., Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists, New York, 1963

THEMES AND THEORIES

Hall, J., The World as Sculpture: The Changing Status of Sculpture from the Renaissance to the
Present Day, London, 1999
Klein, D., St Lukas als Maler der Maria, Berlin, 1933
Martin, J. J., Myths of Renaissance Individualism, Basingstoke, 2004
Melchior-Bonnet, S., The Mirror: A History, London, 2001
Murray, P., ed., Genius: The History of an Idea, Oxford, 1989
Porter, R., ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, London, 1997
Sturrock, J., The Language of Autobiography, Cambridge, 1993
Taylor, C., Sources of Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA, 1989
Vinge, L., The Narcissus Theme in Western Literature up to the Early 19th Century, Lund, 1967

MIDDLE AGES
Alexander, J., Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work, New Haven, 1992
Belting, H., Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott,
Chicago, 1994
Egbert, V. W., The Medieval Artist at Work, Princeton, 1967
Martindale, A., The Rise of the Artist in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, London, 1972
Perkinson, S., The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France,
Chicago, 2009

1400–1700
Alpers, S., Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, Chicago, 1988
Ames-Lewis, F., The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, New Haven, 2000
Bartram, G., Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy, London, 2002
Campbell, L., Renaissance Portraits, New Haven, 1990
Fletcher, J., ‘“Fatto al specchio”: Venetian Renaissance Attitudes to Self-Portraiture’, Fenway Court,
Boston, 1992, pp. 44–60
Goffen, R., ‘Signatures: Inscribing Identity in Italian Renaissance Art’, Viator, no. 32, 2001, pp. 303–70
Koerner, J. L., The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago, 1993
Mann, N., and L. Syson, eds, The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, London,
1998
Prinz, W., Vasaris Sammlung von Künstlerbildnissen, Florence, 1966
Scholten, F., ‘Johan Gregor van der Schardt and the Moment of Self-Portraiture in Sculpture’, Simiolus,
vol. 33, no. 4, 2007/8, pp. 195–220
Sohm, P., The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy 1500–1800, New Haven,
2007
Warnke, M., The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, Cambridge, 1993
White, C., and Q. Buvelot, eds, Rembrandt by Himself, London, 1999
Woods-Masden, J., Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the
Social Status of the Artist, New Haven, 1998

1700–1900
BIALOSTOCKI, J., Dürer and His Critics, Baden-Baden, 1986
Lethève, J., Daily Life of French Artists in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1972
Lombroso, C., The Man of Genius, New York, 1984
Salvadori, F. B., ‘Carlo Lasino e gli Autoritratti di Galleria’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen
Institutes in Florenz, 27, 1984, pp. 109–31
Sturgis, A., et al., Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century, London,
2006

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY

Bätschmann, O., The Artist in the Modern World, Cologne, 1997
Bonafoux, P., Je par soi-même: L’Autoportrait au XXe siècle, Paris, 2004
La Cava, F., Il volto di Michelangelo scoperto nel giudizio finale: un drama psicologico in un
ritratto simbolico, Bologna, 1925
Jones, A., The Artist’s Body, London, 2000
Lomas, D., Narcissus Reflected: The Myth of Narcissus in Surrealist and Contemporary Art,
London, 2011
Waetzoldt, W., Die Kunst des Porträts, Leipzig, 1908
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am hugely indebted to everyone at Thames & Hudson, especially Jacky Klein. My agent Caroline
Dawnay made the project possible. Emma Barker, Emma Clery, John Gash, Paul Hills, Hugh Honour,
Alice Hunt, Sally Korman, Peter Mack, James McConnachie, David Owen, François Quiviger, Charles
Robertson, Paul Taylor, Marjorie Trusted, Paul Williamson and Alison Wright made valuable suggestions.
I hope that all other debts are acknowledged in the notes. The research was carried out courtesy of the
Warburg Institute, Winchester School of Art (Southampton University), Courtauld Institute of Art and
British Library.
My greatest debt is, as always, to my family: sadly my uncle André Syson (1936–2013) and my mother-
in-law Susan Salaman (1936–2012) are no longer with us. This book is dedicated to three wonderful
children – Benjamin, Joshua and Alice – who always keep me on my toes.
PICTURE CREDITS
By Page Number
Dimensions are given in cm followed by inches, height before length before width.

1, 107 Thomas Patch, Self-Portrait as an Ox, 18.5 × 34.9 (7¼ × 13¾). British Museum, London. 2
(detail), 208 Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait at the Easel, 65 × 50.5 (25⅝ × 19⅞). Van Gogh
Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). 6 (detail), 156 Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 112.1
× 81 (44⅛ × 31⅞). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo Austrian Archives/Scala Florence. 12
Bak, Self-Portrait with His Wife Taheri, 63.5 × 29.4 × 15.6 (25 × 11⅝ × 6⅛). Ägyptisches Museum
und Papyrussammlung, Berlin. 17, 26 Father Rufillus of Weissenau, Self-Portrait Illuminating the
Initial ‘R’, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny, Geneva (Cod. Bodmer 127). 20 Master of St Veronica,
St Veronica with the Sudarium, 44.2 × 33.7 (17⅜ × 13¼). National Gallery, London. 23 St Dunstan,
Self-Portrait Worshipping Christ, Bodleian Library, Oxford (Ms. Auct. F. 4. 32, f.1). 28 Hildebertus,
Self-Portrait with His Assistant Everwinus, Metropolitan Library, Prague (A. XXI/1, f.153v). 30
(detail), 41 Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 82.2 × 60 (32⅜ × 23⅝). National Gallery, London.
33 Marcia Painting Her Self-Portrait, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (Ms. Français 12420,
f.101v). Photo akg–images. 39 Giotto, Prudence, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. 42 Jan van Eyck, Portrait
of a Man (Self-Portrait?), 33.1 × 25.9 (13 × 10¼). National Gallery, London. 45 Leon Battista Alberti,
Self-Portrait, overall (irregular oval) 20.1 × 13.6 (7⅞ × 5⅜). National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Samuel H. Kress Collection (1957.14.125). 50 (detail) Taddeo di Bartolo, The Assumption and
Coronation of the Virgin, Duomo di Montepulciano. Photo Lensini, Siena. 54 Taddeo di Bartolo, The
Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, Duomo di Montepulciano. Photo akg–images/Erich
Lessing. 57 Rogier van der Weyden, St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child, 137.5 × 110.8 (54⅛ ×
43⅝). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 59 Peter Parler, Self-Portrait, St Vitus Cathedral, Prague. Photo
akg–images/Erich Lessing. 66 Lorenzo Ghiberti, Self-Portrait with Turban, detail of the north doors.
Baptistery, Florence. 67 Lorenzo Ghiberti, Self-Portrait and Portrait of His Son Vittorio, detail of the
eastern doors. Baptistery, Florence. Photo © Silva Danielsson. 69 Filarete, Self-Portrait with His
Workshop, relief on interior of doors to the porch of St Peter’s, Rome. Photo Archivio Vasari, Rome.
71 Israhel van Meckenem, Self-Portrait with His Wife Ida, 13 × 17.5 (5⅛ × 6⅞). British Museum,
London. 74 (detail), 84 Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 66.3 × 49 (26⅛ × 19¼). Alte Pinakothek,
Munich. Photo Roger-Viollet/Topfoto. 79 Andrea Mantegna, Self-Portrait, Mantegna Chapel,
Sant’Andrea, Mantua. 2013 Photo Scala, Florence. 80 Adam Kraft, Self-Portrait, St Lorenz Church,
Nuremberg. Photo akg–images/Erich Lessing. 83 Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 52 × 41 (20½ × 16⅛).
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. 87 Perugino, Self-Portrait between Famous Men of Antiquity,
Sala dell’Udienza, Collegio del Cambio, Perugia. 91 Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait at the Age of
Thirteen, 27.5 × 19.6 (10⅞ × 7¾). Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. 93 Michelangelo, Study
for a Bronze David, 26.4 × 18.5 (10⅜ × 7¼). Musée du Louvre, Paris. 94 Giorgione, Self-Portrait as
David, 52 × 43 (20½ × 16⅞). Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick. 96 Raphael, Self-Portrait,
47.3 × 34.8 (18⅝ × 13¾). Uffizi, Florence. 97 Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,
diameter 24.1 (9½). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 101 Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait
Holding a Medallion, 8.3 × 6.4 (3¼ × 2½). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 102 (detail), 127
Caravaggio, Self-Portrait as Sick Bacchus, 67 × 53 (26⅜ × 20⅞). Galleria Borghese, Rome. 106
Michelangelo, Sonnet with Self-Portrait Caricature, Casa Buonarroti, Florence. 109 Giovanni Caroto,
Portrait of a Red-Headed Youth Holding a Drawing, 37 × 29 (14⅝ × 11⅜). Museo di Castelvecchio,
Verona. 111 Michelangelo, Last Judgment (detail), Sistine Chapel. Vatican Museums, Vatican City. 113
Titian, Self-Portrait, 96 × 75 (37¾ × 29½). Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. 115 Titian, Self-
Portrait, 86 × 65 (33⅞ × 25⅝). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. 116 Annibale Carracci, Self-
Portrait, 13.5 × 10.8 (5⅜ × 4¼). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 117 Annibale Carracci,
Self-Portrait with Other Male Figures, 60 × 48 (23⅝ × 18⅞). Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. 119
Annibale Carracci, Self-Portrait on an Easel in the Studio, 42.5 × 30 (16¾ × 11¾). State Hermitage
Museum, St Petersburg. 121 Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Self-Portrait as a Man of Papers, 44.2 × 31.8
(17⅜ × 12½). Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Rosso, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Genoa. 122 Giorgio
Vasari, Self-Portrait, Sala Grande, Casa Vasari, Florence. Photo Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz –
Max–Planck–Institut. 124 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Self-Portrait as the Abbot of the Accademia
della Val di Blenio, 55 × 43 (21⅝ × 16⅞). Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. 129 Caravaggio, David with
the Head of Goliath, 125 × 100 (49¼ × 39⅜). Galleria Borghese, Rome. 130 (detail), 143 Jan
Vermeer, The Art of Painting, 120 × 100 (47¼ × 39⅜). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 135
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 98.6 × 75.2 (38⅞ × 29⅝). Royal
Collection, London. 139 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait, 78 × 65 (30¾ × 25⅝). Gemäldegalerie,
Staatliche Museen, Berlin. 140 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait, 98 × 74 (38⅝ × 29⅛). Musée du Louvre,
Paris. 146 Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 318 × 276 (125¼ × 108⅝). Museo Nacional del Prado,
Madrid. 149 Lucas Kilian, Double Portrait of Albrecht Dürer, 44.2 × 27 (17⅜ × 10⅝). British
Museum, London. 153 Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Curly Hair and White Collar, 5.6 × 4.9 (2¼ ×
1⅞). British Museum, London. 159 Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 114.3 × 94 (45 × 37). Kenwood House,
London. 162 (detail), 171 James Barry, Self-Portrait with Dominique Lefèvre and James Paine the
Younger, 60.5 × 50 (23¾ × 19¾). National Portrait Gallery, London. 164 Angelica Kauffman, Self-
Portrait Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting, 147 × 216 (57⅞ × 85). Nostell Priory,
Wakefield. 166 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self-Portrait, 71.5 × 58 (28⅛ × 22⅞). Uffizi, Florence. 2013
Photo Scala, Florence/courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali. 167 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self-
Portrait, 63.5 × 74.3 (25 × 29¼). National Portrait Gallery, London. 168 Jonathan Richardson, Self-
Portrait Wearing a Cloth Hat, 30.3 × 23.2 (11⅞ × 9⅛). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 173
Johan Zoffany, Self-Portrait with Hourglass, 87.5 × 77 (34½ × 30⅜). Uffizi, Florence. 175 Franz
Xaver Messerschmidt, The Vexed Man, 39.4 × 27.3 × 26 (15½ × 10¾ × 10¼). The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles. 180 Francisco Goya, Self-Portrait, frontispiece of The Caprichos, 21.9 × 15.2
(8⅝ × 6). Private collection, USA. 182 Dominique-Vivant Denon, Memories of Vivant Denon Evoked
by Father Time, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 186 (detail), 198, 203 (details) Gustave
Courbet, The Painter’s Studio, A Real Allegory Defining Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral
Life, 361 × 598 (142⅛ × 235⅜). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 188 Anne Seymour Damer, Self-Portrait,
height 60 (23⅝). Uffizi, Florence. Photo Gabinetto Fotografico. Courtesy Ministero per i Beni e Att.
Culturali/SSPSAE/Polo Museale, Florence. 191 Philipp Otto Runge, We Three (destroyed 1931), 100 ×
122 (39⅜ × 48). Hamburg Kunsthalle. Photo akg–images. 194 Francisco Goya, Self-Portrait with Dr
Arrieta, 117 × 79 (46⅛ × 31⅛). Institute of Arts, Minneapolis. 197 Antonio Canova, Self-Portrait,
Fondazione Canova, Possagno. Photoservice Electa/Universal Images Group/SuperStock. 200 Gustave
Courbet, The Desperate Man, 45 × 54 (17¾ × 21¼). Private collection. 201 Gustave Courbet, The
Meeting, 129 × 149 (50¾ × 58⅝). Musée Fabre, Montpellier. 206 Rembrandt’s Woning, 24.4 × 17.8
(9⅝ × 7). Amsterdam City Archives. 208 Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait at the Easel, 65 × 50.5
(25⅝ × 19⅞). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). 210 Vincent van Gogh,
Van Gogh’s Chair, 93 × 73.5 (36⅝ × 28⅞). National Gallery, London. 211 Vincent van Gogh,
Gauguin’s Chair, 90.5 × 72 (35⅝ × 28⅜). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh
Foundation). 213 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait Jug, height 19.5 (7½). Design Museum, Copenhagen.
214 Paul Gauguin, Head with Horns, 22 × 22.8 × 12 (8⅝ × 9 × 4¾). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles. 215 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait Jar, 28 × 23 (11 × 9). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 216 (detail),
223 Lovis Corinth, Self-Portrait with His Wife, 101 × 90 (39¾ × 35⅜). Kunsthaus, Zurich. 220 Edvard
Munch, Salome-Paraphrase, 46 × 32.6 (18⅛ × 12⅞). © The Munch Museum/The Munch–Ellingsen
Group, BONO, Oslo/DACS, London 2014. 221 Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait in Hell, 81.6 × 65.6 (32⅛
× 25⅞). © The Munch Museum/The Munch–Ellingsen Group, BONO, Oslo/DACS, London 2014. 225
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait, 101.5 × 70.2 (40 × 27⅝). Kunstsammlungen
Böttcherstrasse/Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen. 226 Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait in Black
Cloak, Masturbating, 47 × 31 (18½ × 12¼). Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. 229 Pierre
Bonnard, Nude in the Bath, 103 × 64 (40½ × 25¼). Private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2014. 235 James Ensor, Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat (My Portrait Disguised), 76.5 ×
61.5 (30⅛ × 24¼). Stedelijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ostend. © DACS 2014. 237 James Ensor,
Self-Portrait with Masks, 117 × 82 (46⅛ × 32¼). Menard Art Museum, Komaki–City, Aichi, Japan. ©
DACS 2014. 240 Man Ray, Self-Portrait Assemblage, 9.5 × 7 (3¾ × 2¾). The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014. 241 Max Beckmann, Self-
Portrait, cover of the portfolio Hell, 87.3 × 61.2 (34⅜ × 24⅛). Museum of Modern Art, New York. ©
DACS 2014. 244 Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait. Courtesy the Jersey Heritage Collections. 245 Käthe
Kollwitz, Self-Portrait with Hand to Her Forehead, plate size 15.4 × 13.4 (6⅛ × 5¼). Photo courtesy
The Whitley Art Gallery, www.thewhitleyartgallery.com. © DACS 2014. 248 René Magritte, The
Musings of a Solitary Walker, 139 × 105 (54¾ × 41⅜). Private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2014. 251 Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 172.7 × 172.7 (68 × 68). Museo de Arte
Moderna, Mexico City. © 2014. Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico,
D.F./DACS. 252 Frida Kahlo, What I Saw in the Water, 91 × 70.5 (35⅞ × 27¾). Private collection. ©
2014. Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./DACS. 255 Eugène
Atget, The Austrian Embassy, 57 Rue de Varenne, 22.1 × 17.6 (8¾ × 6⅞). The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles. 256 Günter Brus, Untitled, 77 × 77 (30⅜ × 30⅜). National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh. Photo courtesy Heike Curtze Gallery. © Günter Brus. 261 Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 81.9
× 55.9 (32¼ × 22). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 263 Giuseppe Penone, Soffio 4, 148 ×
72 × 65 (58¼ × 28⅜ × 25⅝). Photo Paolo Mussat Sartor. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014.
264 Antony Gormley, Another Place, 100 elements: each 189 × 53 × 29 (74⅜ × 20⅞ × 11⅜). Crosby,
Merseyside, UK. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube. 269 Gilbert & George, Are You Angry or Are
You Boring?, 241 × 201 (95 × 79). © Gilbert & George. Courtesy White Cube. 273 Jeff Koons, Jeff
and Ilona (Made in Heaven), 167.6 × 289.6 × 162.6 (66 × 114 × 64). Edition of 3 plus AP. © Jeff
Koons. 274 Tracey Emin, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95 (destroyed 2004), 122 × 245 ×
215 (48 × 96½ × 84½). Photo Stephen White. Courtesy White Cube. © Tracey Emin. All rights
reserved, DACS 2014. 275 Zhang Huan, Foam, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. © Zhang Huan.
276 Tatsumi Orimoto, Art Mama: In the Box, 60.5 × 75.6 (23⅞ × 29¾). Series of 3. Edition of 20.
Courtesy DNA, Berlin. © Tatsumi Orimoto.
INDEX
All page numbers refer to the 2014 print edition
Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations

Abgar, King of Edessa 8, 19, 54

Abramović, Marina 259
Acconci, Vito 259
Achilles 138
Akhenaten 13–14
Alberti, Leon Battista 9, 44–9, 56, 59, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 89, 103, 104, 122, 123, 131, 147–8; De Re
Aedificatoria 76; On the Family 46, 92; On Painting 46, 47, 69, 81; On Tranquillity of Mind 45;
Self-Portrait 45, 45, 48
Alciato, Andrea, Emblemata 120, 125
Alexander the Great 15, 78, 103, 147
Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 228
Ancram, Duke of 136, 151
Andrea del Sarto 218, 227
Anguissola, Amilcare 98–9
Anguissola, Lucia 99
Anguissola, Sofonisba 98–101, 134; Self-Portrait Holding a Medallion 100–1, 101
Apelles 14, 15, 36, 78, 103, 147
Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 271; Self-Portrait as a Man of Papers 120–2, 121
Aretino, Pietro 98, 112
Aristotle 24, 118; Ethics 76
Arndt, Gertrud 270
Arnolfini, Giovanni 40–1, 41, 43
Arp, Jean 239
Atget, Eugène, The Austrian Embassy, 57 Rue de Varenne 254, 255
Augustine, St 18, 29, 34, 95; City of God 27, 29; The Confessions 28–9, 38
Aurier, Albert 218
Bacon, Francis (philosopher) 128
Bacon, Roger 25
Baglione, Giovanni 126, 127
Bak, Self-Portrait with His Wife Taheri 13, 13
Baldinucci, Filippo 154, 160–1
Ball, Hugo 239, 247
Baltasar Carlos, Crown Prince of Spain 145, 148
Barry, James 169–72, 185; Self-Portrait with Dominique Lefèvre and James Paine the Younger 163,
170–2, 171
Barthélemy d’Eyck 53
Bartolommeo, Fra, Carondelet Altarpiece 204
Baruzzi, Cincinnato 196
Bassano, Jacopo, Purification of the Temple 114
Bassano, Jacopo (?), Titian and his Mistress 112
Bataille, Georges, The Big Toe 252–3
Baudelaire, Charles 203, 205; Les Fleurs du mal 235; ‘Le Masque’ 235
Bayard, Hippolyte, Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man 199–200
Beardsley, Aubrey, Portrait of Himself in Bed 221
Beaumont, Sir George 188
Becket, St Thomas à 21
Beckett, Samuel 220, 276
Beckmann, Max 240–2; Carnival, Double Portrait 242; Hell portfolio 241; The Hotel 254; Self-
Portrait 241, 241; Self-Portrait with Champagne Glass 242; Self-Portrait as a Clown 242; Self-
Portrait in Smoking Jacket 242
Bede, Venerable 85
Beheim, Lorenz 85
Belli, Valerio 98, 133
Belliniano, Vittore 133
Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 126, 141
Belvedere Torso 170–1
Benedetto da Maiano 75
Benedict, St 17
Benglis, Lynda 259
Benvenuto da Imola 36–7
Berend, Charlotte 222–4
Bernard of Clairvaux, St 24, 27
Bernard, Émile 209–10
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 152, 157–8, 188; St Lawrence and David 126
Biender-Mestro, Louise 243
Blake, William, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 181
Boccaccio, Giovanni, The Decameron 107; On Famous Women 32
Boccioni, Umberto, I-We-Boccioni 246
Böcklin, Arnold 234
Boldù, Giovanni 45, 78
Boniface VIII, Pope 37
Bonnard, Marthe 227–9
Bonnard, Pierre 219, 227–9, 272; The Boxer 228; Nude in the Bath 228, 229, 252
Borghese, Cardinal Scipione 128
Boschini, Marco, La carta del navegar pitoresco 142
Bramante, Donato 125
Brancusi, Constantin, The Newborn 244–5
Braque, Georges 232, 233, 234, 238
Breda, Carl Frederik von 184
British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts 183, 185
Bronzino 136
Browning, Robert 225; ‘Andrea del Sarto’ 218
Brunelleschi, Filippo 31, 44, 72, 76, 78, 81
Brus, Günter, Self-Painting, Self-Mutilation 256; Untitled 256
Bruyas, Alfred 198–9, 201–2, 203, 235
Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Inquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 170
Cahun, Claude 243–5, 270; Carnaval en chambre 244; Self-Portrait 244
Calle, Sophie 274; The Shadow 268; Suite vénitienne 268
Campe, Friedrich 196
Campi, Bernardino 101
Canova, Antonio 196–7, 231, 258; Self-Portrait 196, 197
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 8, 126–9, 152; Bacchus 128; Conversion of the Magdalen 128;
David with the Head of Goliath 128–9, 129; The Martyrdom of St Matthew 128; Self-Portrait
as Sick Bacchus 103, 127, 127, 253; The Taking of Christ 128
Cardano, Girolamo 115
Caro, Annibale 99
Caro, Anthony 267
Carondelet, Ferry, Bishop of Besançon 204
Caroto, Giovanni Francesco, Portrait of a Red-Headed Youth Holding a Drawing 108, 109
Carracci, Agostino 115–16, 117–18
Carracci, Annibale 115–20, 161; Self-Portrait 116; Self-Portrait on an Easel in the Studio 118–20,
119; Self-Portrait with Other Male Figures 116–18, 117
Carracci, Ludovico 115
Carstens, Jakob 190
Castiglione, Baldassare, The Courtier 95, 97, 103, 104, 271
Castiglione, Fra Sabba da 34
Cavalcanti, Andrea, bust of Brunelleschi 76
Cavalieri, Tommaso dei 110–11
Cellini, Benvenuto 10, 43
Celtis, Conrad 86
Cennini, Cennino 36, 89; A Treatise on Painting 32
Cerquozzi, Michelangelo 104–5
Cézanne, Paul 224
Champfleury (J. F. Fleury-Husson) 203, 205
Chantelou, Paul Fréart de 138, 141, 142
Chaplet, Ernest 213
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, Tête d’étude 183
Charlemagne, Emperor 60, 61
Charles I, King 134–6, 148, 151, 153
Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor 59, 60–1
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 113
Charles VI, King of France 52
Charlotte, Queen 172, 173
Chateaubriand, François-René de 262–3
Chaudet, Antoine-Denis, Napoleon 190
Cimabue 36, 89–90
Clement VII, Pope 97, 98
Clemente, Francesco 272
Clio (Muse of History) 142, 144–5
Cock, Hieronymus 143
Colonna, Vittoria 138
Condivi, Ascanio 105
Constantine, Emperor 61
Coplans, John 265–6; Clenched Thumb, Sideways 265–6; Foot 265; Hand 265; Self-Portrait (Back
with Arms Above) 265; Self-Portrait Three Times 266
Corinth, Lovis 222–4, 227, 231, 250, 272; The Artist and His Family 222; Self-Portrait with His Wife
217, 223–4, 223; The Victor 223
Cosimo de’ Medici (the Elder) 72
Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany 160
Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany 134
Cosimo III de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany 160
Courbet, Gustave 7, 197–205, 212, 223, 231, 235, 236, 274; A Burial at Ornans 198, 202; The
Desperate Man 200–1, 200; The Meeting 201–2, 201; The Painter’s Studio, A Real Allegory
Defining Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life 187, 197–8, 198, 202–5, 203; Self-Portrait
with a Pipe 199, 215; Self-Portrait at Sainte-Pélagie 199; The Stonebreakers 198
Cromwell, Oliver 205
Cubism 233, 238, 239
da Costa, Felix 150
Dada 239–40, 250
Dalloway, James, Anecdotes of the Arts in England 189
Damer, Anne Seymour, Self-Portrait 187–90, 188
Dante Alighieri 36–40, 44, 52, 126, 189, 202, 266; Convivio 38; The Divine Comedy 36–7, 38–40, 77
de Kooning, Willem 232
de Matteis, Paolo, Hercules at the Crossroads between Virtue and Vice 168
Decamps, Alexandre-Gabriel 202
Delacroix, Eugène 202; Journal 204
Democritus 174
Denon, Baron Dominique-Vivant 181–3, 185, 215, 223; Memories of Vivant Denon Evoked by Father
Time 182–3, 182
Descartes, René 11, 133; The Search after Truth by the Light of Nature 132
Dickens, Charles 210
Diderot, Denis 204; Paradox of Acting 178–9
Dine, Jim, The Smiling Workman 256–7
Diocletian, Emperor 22
Donatello 133
Dou, Gerrit 157
Draper, Ruth, Three Women and Mr Clifford 270
Du Camp, Maxime 202
Duchamp, Marcel 226, 228; as Rrose Sélavy 221; Bottle Rack 246; The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 219; Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp 246; Fountain
219; With My Tongue in My Cheek 258
Ducreux, Joseph 182
Dunstan, St 8–9, 11, 21–4, 34, 103; Self-Portrait Worshipping Christ 22–3, 23
Duquesnoy, François 139
Dürer, Albrecht 10, 21, 70, 81–6, 100, 108, 122, 133, 136, 148–9, 155, 157, 196, 209, 224, 253; and
Raphael 209, 268; casts of body parts 258; ‘Dürer Renaissance’ 154; engraving of Veronica’s veil
84; portrait of mother 86, 276; tercentenary 206; Apocalypse series 82, 83; Portrait of Dürer’s
Father 136; Salvator Mundi 133; Self-Portrait (1498) 82, 83, 148; Self-Portrait (1500) 83–6, 84,
91, 190; detail 75; Self-Portrait at the Age of Thirteen 90–2, 91; The Sick Dürer 109; Temptation
of the Idler 179; The Whore of Babylon 82
Dürer, Albrecht, the Elder 91–2
Elizabeth I, Queen 249
Elizabeth II, Queen 267; Silver Jubilee 268
Emin, Tracey 274–5; Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 274–5, 274; ‘Tracey Emin: My Major
Retrospective 1963–1993’ 274; The Tracey Emin Museum 274
Ensor, James 234, 235–6, 247; Calvary 236; The Dangerous Cooks 236; The Man of Sorrows 236;
Self-Portrait with a Flowered Hat 235, 236; Self-Portrait with Masks 236, 237
Erasmus, Desiderius, In Praise of Folly 125, 239
d’Este, Isabella 88
Everwinus 27, 29
Farnese, Cardinal Odoardo 116
Farra, Alessandro, Settenario 119
Ficino, Marsilio 118; Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love 96
Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino) 45, 67–9, 75, 131; Self-Portrait with His Workshop 68–9, 69;
Treatise on Architecture 68
Fildes, Luke, The Empty Chair 210–11
Flaxman, John 190
‘flayed’ figures 110, 122, 174, 200, 228, 253, 257, 262
Fontana, Lavinia 134
Fox, Charles James 188
François II, King of France 11, 53, 132
Freud, Sigmund 227, 235, 253; ‘The “Uncanny”’ 263
Friedlander, Lee 265
Froissart, Jean 75; Chronicles 52; Méliador 52–3, 89
Gabburni, Francesco 161
Gaddi, Taddeo 37
Gallienus, Emperor 18
Garrick, David 163, 172, 177, 178–9
Gauguin, Paul 207, 209–15, 221, 224, 231; Head with Horns 214, 214; Self-Portrait Jar 215, 215;
Self-Portrait Jug 212–15, 213; Yellow House 207
Gautier de Coincy 55
Gencé, Countess of 254
Gentile da Fabriano 106
Gentileschi, Artemisia 134–8; Allegory of Natural Talent 137; Self-Portrait as the Allegory of
Painting 134–6, 135
Gentileschi, Orazio 134, 137; Allegory of the Arts under the English Crown 137
George III, King 165, 172–3
Ghiberti, Lorenzo 37, 68, 75, 109; bronze doors for Florence Baptistery 65–7, 68; Commentaries 66–7,
89–90, 92; Self-Portrait and Portrait of His Son Vittorio 67; Self-Portrait with Turban 65–6, 66
Ghiberti, Vittorio 65, 66
Ghirlandaio, Domenico 95
Gilbert & George 266–8; Are You Angry or Are You Boring? 268, 269; Dirty Words Pictures 268;
The Singing Sculpture 267
Giorgione da Castelfranco 92; painting of St George 35; Laura 144, 145; Self-Portrait as David with
the Head of Goliath 94–5, 94, 139; circle of, Shepherd with a Flute 123
Giotto di Bondone 10, 31, 36, 37, 38–40, 52, 66, 69, 75, 80, 88, 89–90, 107, 123, 159, 183; memorial in
Florence Cathedral 75–7, 78, 160; Prudence 39
Giovio, Paolo 104, 143, 148
Girard d’Orleans 51
Giulio Romano 136
Gloeden, Wilhelm von 243
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 86, 199; The Collector and His Circle 211–12; Elective Affinities 195; On
German Architecture 190–1; Sorrows of Young Werther 178
Goncourt, Edmond de 214, 217, 218, 219; Maison d’un artiste 214
Goncourt, Jules de 214, 217, 218, 219
Gonzaga, Federico 77
Gonzaga, Cardinal Francesco 78
Gonzaga, Ludovico 78
Gormley, Antony, Another Place 263–5, 264
Goya, Francisco 150, 179–81, 185, 190, 192–5, 199, 234; Caprichos 179; Conde de Floridablanca
192; The Family of the Infante Don Luis 192; Self-Portrait (1783) 193–4, Self-Portrait (1799)
180–1, 180; Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta 194, 195; Self-Portrait in the Studio 194; The Sleep of
Reason Produces Monsters 179–80
Greenblatt, Stephen 271
Gregory I (the Great), Pope 56, 61, 62, 85
Guillaume de Machaut 53
Guinizell, Guido 36
Gutai group 255
Gutenberg, Johannes 35
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 10; The Marble Faun 234
Hegel, Friedrich, Lectures on Aesthetics 201
Hennings, Emmy 239
Henrietta Maria, Queen 134
Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor 61
Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor 60
Henry VIII, King of England 155, 156
Hercules, choice of 163, 168–9, 170, 178, 179, 181, 192, 218, 223, 253
Hildebertus, Self-Portrait with His Assistant Everwinus 8, 11, 27–9, 28, 34
Hippocrates 49, 180
Hockney, David, ‘Love’ paintings 275
Hogarth, William 168, 184, 236; The Rake’s Progress 183
Holbein, Hans, the Younger 157; King Henry VIII 155
Hollar, Wenzel 94
Holy Mandylion of Edessa 20, 54, 84
Holy Shroud (Turin Shroud) 21, 132, 182, 195, 220, 262
Hone, Nathaniel, The Conjuror 184
Horn, Rebecca, Finger Gloves, Unicorn and Arm Extensions 262
Hostius Quadra 35
Houdon, Jean-Antoine, John the Baptist 174; Napoleon 190
Huan, Zhang, Foam 275, 275
Huelsenbeck, Richard 239, 240
Hugh of St Victor 25
Hume, David 179; Treatise on Human Nature 169
Iaia of Cyzicus 14
Ibsen, Henrik, When We Dead Wake 224, 227
Imhoff, Hans 79, 80–1, 133
Imhoff, Willibald 133
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 202, 217
Isabelle of Bavaria, Queen of France 52
Isidore of Seville 90
Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend 54–5, 56
Janco, Marcel 239
Jean II, King of France 51
Jerome, St 27
John the Baptist, St 204
John, King of Bohemia 60
John of Salisbury 35
John of Troppau 56, 61
Johns, Jasper 232, 257; Diver 257, 260; Skin series 257, 260
Jones, Ernest 227
Jung, Carl 242
Kahlo, Frida 249–53; My Birth 252; The Two Fridas 250, 251; What I Saw in the Water 252–3, 252
Kahnweiler, Daniel 233
Kaprow, Allan 256
Kauffman, Angelica 190; Self-Portrait Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting 164, 164
Kawara, On 259; Date Paintings 258; I Went 258
Kilian, Lucas, Double Portrait of Albrecht Dürer 149–50, 149
Kollwitz, Käthe 245; Self-Portrait with Hand to Her Forehead 245
Koons, Jeff 271–3, 275; Jeff and Ilona (Made in Heaven) 272–3, 273; Made in Heaven series 265,
272; Michael Jackson and Bubbles 272; Ushering in Banality 272
Kozloff, Max 258, 262; ‘The Division and Mockery of the Self’ 257
Kraft, Adam, Self-Portrait 79–81, 80, 103
Krateuas 19
Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’ 259–66
Kretschmer, Ernst 259
Kusama, Yayoi, My Flower Bed 260; Narcissus Garden 260
La Cava, Francesco 228
Labille-Guiard, Adélaïde 190
Laing, R. D., The Divided Self 257
Lang, Cosmo Gordon, Archbishop of Canterbury 242
Laocoön 174
Larsen, Tulla 219, 220
Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing
Expectations 259
Lasinio, Carlo 174
Laval, Charles 209
Le Brun, Charles 176
Lefèvre, Dominique 170
Leonardo da Vinci 52, 72–3, 76, 81, 97, 105, 108–9, 120, 121, 131, 136, 144; caricatures 125; Last
Supper 72; Mona Lisa 8, 98
Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor (earlier Grand Duke of Tuscany) 173
Leopoldo de’ Medici, Cardinal 160
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 177
Lievens, Jan 152
Lippi, Filippino 76
Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 132; Self-Portrait as the Abbot of the Accademia della Val di Blenio 123–
5, 124, 127; Trattato dell’arte della pittura 99
Lombroso, Cesare, Genius and Madness 218
Longinus, On the Sublime 167
Lorenzo de’ Medici (the Magnificent) 75–7, 88, 96, 98, 105, 113, 133, 160
Lucca 60, 61; Volto Santo 61, 110
Luini, Aurelio 125
Luke, St 56–8, 61, 75, 89, 90, 134, 144–5
Lysippos 15
Lysippus the Younger 45
Macpherson, Giuseppe 172
Magritte, René 246–9, 252, 267; figure of Bowler-Hatted Man 247, 265; The Musings of a Solitary
Walker 247, 248; The Son of Man 247
Malherbe, Suzanne (Marcel Moore) 243
Malvasia, Carlo Cesare 116
Man Ray, Self-Portrait Assemblage 240, 240
Manet, Édouard 209
Manetti, Giannozzo 69; On the Dignity and Excellence of Man 69
Mantegna, Andrea 77–9, 104; Self-Portrait 78–9, 79; Triumphs of Caesar 77
Manzoni, Piero 258, 259
Marcia Painting Her Self-Portrait 32–3, 33, 38, 40
Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud 260
Margarita María, Infanta of Spain 145–7, 148, 150
Mariana of Austria, Queen 145, 147, 148
Marie Antoinette, Queen 214
Marie de’ Medici, Queen of France 134
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Futurist Manifesto 275
Márquez, Gabriel García 275
Martin, St 27
Mary, Virgin 69; cult of 34, 55
Master of St Veronica, St Veronica with the Sudarium 20
Matisse, Henri 232
Matteo de’ Pasti 45, 49
Matthias of Arras 59, 60
Maturanzio, Francesco 86–7
Medici collections 161, 174, 231, 234, 246
Melzi, Francesco 122
Messerschmidt, Franz Xaver 174–9, 185; ‘grimace-heads’ 175–9; The Artist as He Imagined Himself
Laughing 176; Beak Heads 176; A Man Vomiting 176; The Vexed Man 175, 175
Michelangelo Buonarroti 10–11, 92, 103, 109–14, 116, 122, 123, 157; drawings 165; ‘flayed’ figures 110,
200, 228, 253, 257; Picasso and 233; poetry of 138; Sistine Chapel 127; statues of Lorenzo de’
Medici and Moses 113–14; and Artemisia Gentileschi 136–8; attributed figure 200; and Belvedere
Torso 170; burlesque poem 121; credo of 159–60; David statues 105; Dying Slave 243; Last
Judgment 110, 111, 128, 228; Pietà 111; Sonnet with Self-Portrait Caricature 105–8, 106; Study
for a Bronze David 93, 93, 95; Taddei Tondo 188
Michelangelo the Younger 137–8
Michelet, Jules, The Mountain 222
Michiel, Marcantonio 53
Millet, Jean-François 205; The Sower 205
Milton, John 167; Paradise Lost 181, 272
mirrors 8–9, 14, 15, 29, 32–49, 246; full-length 254
Modersohn, Otto 224
Modersohn-Becker, Paula 224–5, 253; Self-Portrait 224–5, 225
Monchat, Renée 228
Montaigne, Michel de 53; Essays 11, 132; On Presumption 132; On Solitude 157
Montepulciano, Cathedral 53
Montpellier 201, 203
Moore, Henry 267
Mor, Anthonis 145
Morris, Robert 257–8, 259; Card File 257–8; I-Box 257; Portrait 257–8; Self-Portrait (EEG) 258;
Untitled (Stairs) 258
Morris, William, Red House 207
Moücke, Francesco 161
Munch, Edvard 7, 219–22, 224, 231, 250, 253, 272; Androgynous Self-Portrait 221–2; The Human
Mountain 222; Salome-Paraphrase 220, 220; Self-Portrait in Hell 221, 221
Murakami, Saburo 255
Mussato, Albertino, ‘Whether His Birthday Ought To Be Celebrated or Not’ 92
Mytens, Daniel 134
Napoleon I, Emperor 188
Napoleon III, Emperor (Louis Napoleon) 198, 199, 202, 205, 213
narcissism 48, 226–7, 254, 264, 268
Narcissus 18, 35, 44, 46–8, 66, 71, 72, 118–19, 120, 123, 138, 189, 253, 260
Nazis 243, 254; and ‘degenerate’ art 232, 242
Nelson, Lord Horatio 188
Nicholas of Cusa, Cardinal 64; On the Vision of God 62
Nicholas III, Pope 266
Nicodemus 110, 111–12
Nicolai, Friedrich 176, 178
Nieto, José de 147, 148
Nietzsche, Friedrich 218, 223, 226, 238, 242; Beyond Good and Evil 235; The Birth of Tragedy 11,
253–4
Northcote, James, Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds 184
Nossis of Locri 19
Orcagna, Andrea, Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin 55
Origen 18, 64
Orimoto, Tatsumi, Art Mama: In the Box 276, 276
Orpen, William 242
Osbern 21
Ovid, Metamorphoses 46–7, 48
Paine, James, the Younger 170, 172
Palomino, Antonio 147, 150; El museo pictórico y escala óptica 145
Paris, Matthew, Historia Anglorum 22
Parler, Heinrich 59
Parler, Peter 65, 79; Self-Portrait 52, 58–60, 59, 61
Parmigianino 98, 100; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 96–8, 97
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 268
Patch, Thomas, Self-Portrait as an Ox 107, 107
Penone, Giuseppe, Maritime Alps – It will continue to grow except at that point 262; Soffio 262–3,
263, 273
Pericles 14–15
Pertusato, Nicolás 147
Perugino, Pietro 95; St Sebastian 88; Self-Portrait between Famous Men of Antiquity 86–9, 87
Petrarch 37, 38, 46, 60, 105; ‘My Secret’ 83
Phidias 14–15, 18, 36, 60, 150
Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy 65
Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy 41
Philip II, King of Spain 98, 150
Philip IV, King of France 37
Philip IV, King of Spain 145, 147, 148
Picabia, Francis, Portrait of an American Girl in a State of Nudity 250
Picasso, Pablo 215, 232–3, 234, 246; and tribal masks 238–39; Arm 258; Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
233; Raphael and La Fornarina series 233; Self-Portrait with Palette 233
Piles, Roger de 174
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 177
Pirckheimer, Willibald 82, 85
Pisanello 45
Pisano, Giovanni 37
Pisano, Nicola 37
Plato 18, 49, 118, 125, 221; The Republic 15
Pliny the Elder 1–4, 44, 103, 123; Natural History 14, 15, 174
Plotinus 9, 18–19, 23
Plutarch, Life of Pericles 14–15
Pointel, Jean 138, 141
Poliziano, Angelo 76–7
Pollock, Jackson 254, 255
Pompadour, Jeanne, Marquise de 214
Pordenone 136
Possagno, Gipsoteca 197; Tempio della Trinità 196, 197
Poussin, Nicolas 138–42, 212; The Gathering of Manna 142; Moses Discovered in the Waters of the
Nile 141; Ordination 141; Self-Portrait (1649) 138–41, 139; Self-Portrait (1649–50) 138–9, 140,
141–2; Seven Sacraments 141, 142
Prado, Louis 213
Proust, Marcel 253
Prynne, William, The Unloveliness of Love-Locks 153–4
Raphael 81, 97–8, 98, 103, 104, 108, 120, 133, 218; and Dürer 209, 268; engravings of the life of 182–3;
and La Fornarina 217, 218, 225, 272; and Picasso 233; tomb 196; La Fornarina 225; Self-Portrait
96, 96, 160; The Transfiguration 166
Rauschenberg, Robert 232, 257
Reinhardt, Ad 258
Rembrandt van Rijn 7, 10, 98, 126, 131, 136, 150–61, 154, 193, 233–4, 235; Baldinucci on 156; Denon
and 181–2, 183; in early exhibitions 183, 185; and narcissism 227; and Reynolds 165; The Painter in
His Studio 152; Self-Portrait (1652) 7, 155, 156; Self-Portrait (c. 1665) 158–60, 159; Self-
Portrait with Angry Expression 152; Self-Portrait with Curly Hair and White Collar 153, 153;
Self-Portrait with Easel 206; Self-Portrait Open-Mouthed 152; Self-Portrait with Pen, Inkpot
and Sketchbook 158; Self-Portrait with Plumed Beret 152; Self-Portrait as a Young Man 154;
Self-Portrait as Zeuxis 158; van Gogh and 206
Rembrandt’s Woning 206
René, King of Anjou 11, 53, 132
Reynolds, Sir Joshua 7, 164–8, 172, 183–5, 234; and Zoffany 173–4; Garrick between Comedy and
Tragedy 163; Self-Portrait (1747–9) 165–8, 167; Self-Portrait (1775) 165, 166
Richardson, Jonathan 169, 181; Essay on the Theory of Painting 167; Self-Portrait Wearing a Cloth
Hat 168
Richter, Hans 239
Riepenhausen, Johannes and Franz, engravings of the life of Raphael 183
Rilke, Rainer Maria 224; Auguste Rodin 266
Ripa, Cesare 178; Iconologia 136, 137, 142, 154
Rivera, Diego 249, 250
Rodin, Auguste, Hand of God 265–6; The Kiss 273; Monument to Balzac 266; St John the Baptist
266; Three Shades 266; Walking Man 266
The Romance of the Rose (Roman de la Rose) 35, 47, 48
Rosenberg, Harold, ‘The American Action Painters’ 254–5
de’ Rossi, Properzia 99
Rousseau, Henri ‘Douanier’ 253
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 48; Narcisse, ou l’amant de lui-même 189
Rubens, Peter Paul 25, 134, 147, 161, 192; Self-Portrait with Isabella Brant 71; The Straw Hat 236
Rudolf II, Emperor 120
Rufillus of Weissenau, Father 34, 103, 108; Self-Portrait Illuminating the Initial ‘R’ 17, 25–7, 26
Runge, Philipp Otto 190–2, 199; The Times of the Day 190–1; We Three 191–2, 191
Ruskin, John 89
Sarmiento, María Agustina 145
Sartori, Bishop Giovanni Battista 196, 197
Savonarola, Girolamo 92–3
Scheyb, Franz von 176
Schiele, Egon 226, 231, 253, 254, 272, 274; Self-Portrait in Black Cloak, Masturbating 226; Self-
Seers I 226
Schongauer, Martin 70
Schwob, Marcel 243
Scrovegni, Enrico 37
Sebastiano del Piombo 104
Seneca 34–5
Seurat, Georges 210
Sforza, Bianca Maria 72
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of 179, 181, 189; A Notion of the Historical Draught
or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules 168–9
Shakespeare, William, Hamlet 177; Henry VIII 155; Macbeth 123; The Merchant of Venice 100
Sherman, Cindy 268, 270–1; Untitled Film Stills 270
Shimamoto, Shozo 255
Shiraga, Kazuo 255
Siddons, Sarah 189
Sigismund, St 60
Simonides 132
Smith, George Joseph 229
Socrates 34
Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) 55, 64, 85
Spencer, Stanley 219
Staller, Ilona (La Cicciolina) 272–3
Statius, The Thebaid 22–3
Stone, Irving, Lust for Life 250
Strozzi, Clarissa 112
Stuart, Gilbert Charles 184
Taddeo di Bartolo, The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin 51, 53–5, 54, 56
Taenarum, Mount 22–3
Thaddeus (disciple of Christ) 19, 54–5
Theodoric, Master 61
Theodorus 14
Theophilus, An Essay on Diverse Arts 23–4, 25
Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ 44
Thorvaldsen, Bertel 190, 196
Titian 10, 86, 103, 109, 122, 133, 134, 140, 145, 150, 193, 196; Bravo 144; Ecce Homo 133; Flaying of
Marsyas 114; Self-Portrait (1560s) 114, 115; Self-Portrait (c. 1546–7) 113–14, 113
Tolomei, Claudio 104
Trajan, Emperor 62, 64
tronies 151
Tzara, Tristan 239
Uccello, Paolo 133
Ulay 259
Ulloa, Marcela de 147
van Bleyswijck, Dirck, Description of the City of Delft 143
van der Weyden, Rogier 65, 75; Braque Triptych 64; St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child 57–8,
57; Scenes of Justice 61–4
van Dyck, Anthony 86, 134, 152, 161, 185
van Eyck, Jan 31, 32, 59, 69, 236; The Arnolfini Portrait 31, 40–3, 41, 44, 48, 145; Madonna of
Chancellor Rolin 57; Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?) 42, 43–4, 48–9
van Eyck, Margaret 43, 44
van Gogh, Theo 207, 212
van Gogh, Vincent 205–15, 218, 221, 224, 231, 238, 250; Gauguin’s Chair 210–12, 211; Self-Portrait
Dedicated to Paul Gauguin 232; Self-Portrait at the Easel 206, 208; Van Gogh’s Chair 210–12,
210
van Hoogstraaten, Samuel 126
van Leyden, Lucas 154
van Mander, Karel 86, 155, 157, 159–60; Schilder-boeck 154
van Meckenem, Israhel 70–1, 73, 81; Couple Seated on a Bed 70; Self-Portrait with His Wife Ida 70,
71
van Mieris, Frans, the Elder 157
van Uylenburgh, Saskia 155
Vasari, Giorgio 32, 34, 35, 45, 89, 94, 95, 97, 104, 106, 108, 111, 122–3, 217, 218; Lives of the Artists 10,
67, 98–9, 122–3, 209; Self-Portrait 122, 123
Velasco, Isabel de 145
Velázquez, Diego 145–50, 193, 198; Las Meninas 11, 18, 145, 146, 192–3; Surrender of Breda 148
Vendramin, Gabriel 133, 140
Vergine, Lea, The Body as Language (‘Body Art’ and Performance) 260
Verhaeren, Émile 234, 236
Vermeer, Jan, The Art of Painting 131, 142–5, 143; The Astronomer 144; The Geographer 144; Girl
with a Pearl Earring 144; The Procuress 144
Vernet, Horace 202
Vernet, Joseph 204
Veronese, Paolo 125–6, 148
Veronica, St, sudarium of 8, 20–1, 20, 64, 84, 86, 182, 220, 257
Verrocchio, Andrea del 76
Victoria, Queen 253
Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth 190, 236
Vighi, Giacomo, Charles I of Savoy as a Child, Accompanied by a Dwarf 129
Villafranca, Marquise of 195
Villani, Filippo 38–40, 52, 75; On the Origin of the City of Florence and on Its Famous Citizens 36
Virgil, Aeneid 78, 99
Visconti, Gaspare 72
Vosmaer, Carel, Rembrandt: Sa vie et ses oeuvres 206–7
Wackenroder, Wilhelm 268; Confessions from the Heart of an Art-Loving Friar 209
Waetzoldt, Wilhelm 233–4, 242
Wagner, Richard 226
Walpole, Horace 188
Warhol, Andy 260, 272; Self-Portrait 261
Webb, Philip 207
Wilde, Oscar 207, 234, 236; The Critic as Artist 238; Salomé 243
William IX, Duke of Aquitaine 53
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 178, 253; History of Ancient Art 170, 172
Wittkower, Rudolf and Margot, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists 258–9
Worringer, Wilhelm, Abstraction and Empathy 232, 234, 242
Wraxall, Sir Nathaniel 177
Yoshihara, Jiro, ‘Gutai Manifesto’ 255
Young, Edward, The Complaint, or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality 189–90
Zeuxis 36, 158
Zoffany, Johan 172–4, 185; Self-Portrait with Hourglass 173, 174; Tribuna of the Uffizi 172
Zola, Émile, The Ladies’ Paradise 246; L’Œuvre 218–19
Zuccaro, Federico 163
 First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 as
The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History
ISBN 978-0-500-23910-0
by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181a High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX
and in the United States of America by
Thames & Hudson Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10110

The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History © 2014 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
Text © 2014 James Hall

This electronic version first published in 2014 by

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ISBN 978-0-500-77206-5
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Half-title page: Thomas Patch, Self-Portrait as an Ox, 1768–9

Title page: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1887–8 (detail)