Portraits, 2

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1983) defines 'Portrait' as "A figure drawn, painted, or carved upon a surface to represent some object: spec. (now almost always) a likeness of a person, esp. of the face, made from life by drawing, painting, photography, engraving, etc.". I believe that, even today, most people would agree with this definition while perhaps allowing for various other forms of more contemporary representation (such as, video). In our first look at portraits, entitled Three Painted Portraits, what we examined were examples which definitely fall under the dictionary definition but I wanted to point out that the word 'portrait' does, in fact, cover almost any representational image, of any thing. 

Adrian Stokes' 1955 essay on Michelangelo1 pointed out that he, Michelangelo, was not particularly interested in portraits per se, even though it is believed that several self-portraits are included in his works 2, as well as perhaps stylised or idealised portraits of some contemporaries, most notably Pope Julius II in the guise of Moses 3. But here, stylised is the key word; in my opinion, some of Michelangelo's stylised faces - as opposed to portraits - have become familiar to us in the same way that some portraits of historically real people have: the faces of his Eve in The Temptation of Adam and Eve, his Adam in The Creation of Man, and of the The Libyan Sibyl, for example, all in the Sistine Chapel. The faces of Mary in the Pietà of Saint Peter's in Rome, of Moses mentioned already, of David in the Accademia in Florence, are perhaps even better known and, in a sense, may be regarded as quasi portraits, so powerful is their impression on our collective memory; they exist there, in that memory, as do the real self-portraits of Leonardo da Vinci (a famous drawing), Rembrant or Van Gogh.

Michelangelo's work, directed as it was towards the expression of the universal and the sublime, as well as, inevitably, the personal, was not concerned, in a general sense, with the ephemeral, the particular, the contingent; so, portraiture per se, landscape, painted architectural environments and so on, were of no concern to him. But, to most of his contemporaries, portraiture was of great interest and, given this, it developed substantially. Let's start with a portrait by the Florentine master Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530).

Andrea del Sarto, Portrait of a Young Man, c.1518, oil on canvas

National Gallery, London (Photo: the author)

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of this portrait, compared with those we examined previously, is its pose: the sitter, whose identity is unknown, is positioned with his back to us and is caught as though being interrupted while engaged with the book (?) he holds in his hands; his head is turned quite sharply to look at us (or the artist) over his left shoulder. In our previous survey, Three Painted Portraits, two of the three sitters were facing us quite normally although with their heads turned slightly to meet our gaze; in the present case, the artist has composed his painting so that it appears as if the sitter has been momentarily interrupted while engaged in something quite different. In fact, we can even see the back of the chair on which the model is seated; both chair and sitter are facing away from the painter, and therefore, away from us, the anticipated viewers.

This point incidentally is pertinent as far as art in general is concerned; artists deal in time and ironically, although fixing in one particular moment in time a given event, are simultaneously anticipating the future - the potential viewers of the artwork - while recording, as in the portrait above, the present, or, imagining the past in such a way that it seems the present! A complex of temporal considerations, perhaps the most intriguing, that of anticipating our existence at some time potentially remote - in time and space - from the actual creation of the artwork.

Be that as it may, another salient element of this portrait is the beautiful violet-blue sleeve of the elegant shirt worn by the young man; the artist has drawn attention to it in several ways, the most obvious being its prominent position and size in the lower centre of the picture; but also by the placement of the almost black doublet and the dark neutral blueish-grey of the background. The large sleeve has been given special attention as well in the way Andrea has observed very closely the individual creases and folds of this garment. The overall tone of the image is a cool grey-blue which happens to contrast strikingly with the  warm and ruddy complexion of the sitter, a type of contrast we have noted previously. But one feature of this face, apart from its being turned to look over the shoulder, is the way the paint has been applied. Unlike the very fine, detailed application of the Perugino portrait we saw last time, here the painter has applied his paint almost roughly, almost as though he were in a hurry to fix this face before the sitter resumed his reading!

Andrea del Sarto has stressed the bone structure of his model, has accentuated the light and shade used to form the nose, the cheeks, the chin, the forehead; the eyes, in deep shadow, are as though sketched-in, there is very little specific detail here, in fact, there is much more explicit observation in the mouth. Our sitter's mouth possesses, more so than do the eyes, a wonderful ambiguity of expression; the full, large lips, perhaps on the verge of a patient smile, hint in their ambiguousness at calm intimacy and intelligent comprehension.

Our second portrait is also kept in the National Gallery in London and is very different in several ways from those already discussed. To begin with, it's a portrait of a woman, a beautiful young and apparently wealthy woman.

Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/4-1579), Portrait of a Lady, c.1556-60, oil on canvas

National Gallery, London (Photo: the author)

Moroni was a northern Italian artist, born near the city of Brescia where he apparently spent most of his working life. He is known especially for his elegant portraits, not only of the wealthy, but also of artisans (see his famous portrait The Tailor, also in London) soldiers, clergy and so on. Our painting is this time a full-length seated portrait of, as said, a young woman wearing a splendid - and splendidly painted - very fashionable dress. In this picture we see some features which were and remained characteristic of Venetian painting, such as the detailed and specific rendering of the fabric - in this case of the dress - the jewellery, the hair and, where appropriate, the fine aristocratic features of the sitter. The young woman is sitting in a solid wooden chair, apparently placed in some kind of alcove or passage-way, with what looks like a doorway on our right.

Where this portrait differs the most however from all those looked at so far, is in its principal focus: it is a portrait, there is the representation of a real individual but actually, the main subject would seem to be the dress! The dress is painted so finely as to be mistaken for a photograph, its tactile quality, especially in the gold underskirt and sleeves, is pronounced; the gold stitching, the lacework at the cuffs and the collar, the small bits pulled through the holes at the shoulders, all are represented as though so to say, 'touchable'. If we consider for a moment the cursory nature of the clothing in our Fayum portrait, and then compare it with the treatment here, the difference is immeasurable. However, as just now implied, while the Fayum was clearly and wholly - and only - an image if a particular individual, the Moroni is, we might say sarcastically, an image of a particular dress - with an individual inside it! In noting this, and the undoubted fact that the artist has made a lovely image of the sitter herself, we may observe that portraiture has shifted gear somewhat and is now, at least in this and similar works, more obviously at the service of reputation and status: in the sense that, while the sitter herself may fade from our memory, her dress will not!

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), Portrait of Don Andrés del Peral, before 1798, oil on poplar

National Gallery, London (Photo: the author)

The final work is by the most wonderful Spanish painter, Goya, a profound observer of the weaknesses and strengths of his fellow men and women. In the beautiful portrait we are considering at present, we see a return, in general terms, to a concentration on the sitter himself, albeit with his elegant and fashionable waistcoat and jacket skilfully noted. Without doubt however, the focus is on the sitter's intelligent and engaged face; Goya, like Andrea del Sarto above, has treated the features of the face in an apparently summary manner but, on close inspection, there is endless and most subtle notation of its 'topography'. What we see is a proud and alert man, staring confidently at his artist friend - and therefore, at us - sitting upright on a wooden chair in a controlled environment: designed by Goya so that the light (and shadow) played across Don Andrés' face to reveal its outside forms and, astutely observed, something of his inherent character.

Earlier, the word 'photograph' was used and we might consider photography at this point, given that it was invented roughly around the time that Goya died. The invention of photography did have an effect on portraiture, and painting in general, since it satisfied - or, appeared to satisfy - one of the main functions of art, that is, to record. Photography was able to record, not only what people looked like, but almost anything - except the past - more quickly and in some technical ways more simply, than painting was able to do. One of the eventual results of this was that artists towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, abandoned certain types of representational image-making in favour of an art which dealt more with, amongst other things, the social conditions of the day - and that in more or less abstract forms. Eventually however, people and artists in particular, began to realise that in fact, painting could do and reveal things which photography could not; so the painted portrait returned as a vital and important expression (Bacon, Freud, Giacometti, etc.); actually, in the field of so-called 'society portraits', it had never gone away but the reference here is to serious painting.

1 In The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Vol III, Thames and Hudson, 1978, and relevant footnotes.

2 For example, in the flayed skin of Saint Bartholomew in the Last Judgement, in the Sistine Chapel, and as the figure of Nicodemus in the Pietà, now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence; to quote Pope-Hennessy, "... and in 1564 the head of Nicodemus was already looked upon as an idealized self-portrait." John Pope-Hennessy, Italian High Renaissance & Baroque Sculpture, Phaidon, 1996 (Fourth Edition).

3 The marble figure of Moses (c.1516?) carved for the Tomb of Julius II (now in San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome), a project which caused endless problems for Michelangelo, resulting in a much-distorted final result.