To be frank, I'm not at all sure of how to justify the general thesis of this article: the difference between painting, understood as art, and illustration, understood as literal description or imitation - in particular of photographs of human faces - which, together with the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, I don't see as art as such. In the broad sense in which the term 'art' is today used (and abused) of course illustration and related fields such as design are arts; but in the specific sense in which the work of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Vasari, Bernini and Caravaggio and many others are classed as 'art' as opposed to other appellatives, illustration is not included. It is therefore hoped that in what follows, the gist of what I mean will become evident even if, as I suspect will be the case, many readers will not agree with me.
Many young painters start-off, as children or teenagers, copying from photographs, whether those images are of other artists' paintings or drawings, or are photographs per se, for instance, of fashion models. Today, perhaps more than ever since their development, photographs are a ubiquitous source of images for artists, young and old (including the present writer).
Photographs of models, that is, of subjects for portraits, are commonly used today as this relieves the hapless sitter of sometimes hours of tedium while, on the other hand, providing the painter with a perfectly fixed pose; no need for breaks so that the model can relax and stretch their legs, no need for the sometimes difficult task of getting the model back into exactly the same position. Many painters will make use of photos and then perhaps, when the picture is nearing completion, get the model, the subject, back into the studio for the finishing touches.
Using photographs is fine providing the painter in question already has experience with working from the live model, has already some knowledge of anatomy and is aware that photographs not only distort what they represent but, for a number of reasons, do not 'reveal all'. This is particularly so with regard to anatomy; due to what photographs do (register light), important indicators of the underlying bone structure for example, clearly visible in the live model, are often obscured or missed altogether in photographs.
This aspect of picture making has, as it were, come into sharp focus recently, at least for me, as I am daily receiving (unwanted) promotions on social media for art schools and art classes of all sorts. One of the things that the more skills-orientated of these have in common is their use of the photograph. Although some do seem to offer 'traditional' (read: academic) drawing techniques as a foundation to their courses, the photograph also is often to be seen, somewhere in the promotion, sometimes indeed pinned to the easels of painting students, or otherwise displayed, for them to copy from. Why is this a problem?
Not too long ago I happened to wander into an exhibition of portraits all, or nearly all, of which were clearly derived from photographs. While trying to work out why there was something unsatisfactory about those paintings the answer suddenly struck me: the figures as represented in the paintings had no bones! The painter had copied more or less exactly what could be seen in the photographs used, ending up with, especially as far as the body was concerned - as opposed to the face - a sort of stuffed puppet effect. Most things were in their right places, the lights and shadows had been copied adequately well, but there was no underling structure, no skeletal scaffolding to those figures.
And here is the problem, one which incidentally had been observed a good 400 years before the advent of photography: this because the problem is often not the photograph per se but rather the use of an already resolved 2-dimensional image. When Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) published his treatise Della Pittura (On Painting) in 1436, he warned students against copying from other paintings: this is because the difficult work of translating 3-dimensional reality into 2-dimensions on a flat surface has already been solved by the author of the painting being copied. All the student has to do is put all the marks in the right place on the canvas and he or she will end-up with a faithful copy of the original. The difficult job of really seeing and understanding what one is looking at (the same subject in real life) has already been done by someone else! In fact, for Alberti, it was better for a student to copy a mediocre sculpture than a good painting; at least here, copying a 3-dimensional sculpture, the student still had to grapple with that fundamental problem.
As a result of the growing dependence on photographs, therefore, we today see many pictures of the human face and figure which are substantially flat - in effect - like the photo from which the image was copied. Another related problem is one which is fairly typical of the work of students who rely on photos and that is the tendency towards a graphic representation as opposed to a painted picture. Many young and autodidact painters admire, quite rightly, the work of their art heroes and do their best to imitate the pictures of these usually older artists. Naturally they use photographs from which to copy; in many cases however, it is extremely easy to get a quite erroneous idea of what a given (old master) painting or drawing actually looks like 'in the flesh'. One of the problems with photos of artwork in books say, is that they give an entirely false impression of the size of works of art while at the same time, especially as regards paintings, fusing the colour transitions and the brush strokes, giving the unfortunate copyist a quite misleading idea.
In the Renaissance period, beginning around 1400 in Tuscany, drawing - which of course included the outline - was of paramount importance and, due to this Tuscan predilection for the outline, it became a sort of common-place that the difference between Florentine painting and that of Venice for example, was that in Venice colour was the more important thing. To my mind this has always seemed a questionable dichotomy or distinction, because of course, in both cities, colour and line were important and the weight given to each depended on the attitude and aims of a given painter. There are many examples of absolutely beautiful colour-work in Florentine painting of the 15th and 16th centuries just as there are examples of beautiful line-work in Venetian painting. Nevertheless, in a sense there is a technical difference between the work that was being done in these two cities and this is due not so much to the preponderance of line over colour or vice versa, but instead it is due to the method of applying the paint itself.
The use of canvas was particularly common in Venice, perhaps less so in Florence where there was a strong tradition of fresco painting and also the persistence of transportable images being painted on wood as opposed to canvas; this is a generalization of course as both fresco and wood panels were used in Venice as well. But once canvas took over, the Venetians made particular use of its being a fabric with a warp and weft which meant a texture, one quite distinctly different from the completely smooth surface of a wall, or a prepared wooden panel. This natural texture of the sometimes heavy weave of Venetian canvas allowed painters such as Titian and Tintoretto to drag their paint-laden brushes across the weave, thus enabling subtlety and texture of brush-stroke (impasto) quite different from the often smoothly painted surfaces of their Florentine colleagues.
What I have observed in the many figurative works now available on the internet, both from painters promoting themselves as well as in publicity for art classes, is the very common leaning, deliberate or unconscious, towards basically flat areas of 'filled-in' colour: filled-in because there is obviously a careful drawing made before starting with the paint to which the 'neophyte' painter then adheres as though their very life depended on it. In fact, in relation to a 'painted' picture and a 'coloured-in' drawing, it may be noted that many artists, as they age - Titian being a prime example - become less and less concerned with 'colouring-in' and more and more involved with (the pleasure of) manipulating the stuff, the paint, and with allowing the real materiality of that paint to speak, giving thereby their pictures yet another layer of meaning and intensity, related to but independent of the 'illustrative' or narrative function of their images.
The kind of work one so often sees on the internet is, generally speaking, illustration by another name, illustration 'dressed-up' as what used to be called 'fine art'. The fact that a painted (or drawn) artwork simply looks like the photo from which it derives does not therefore qualify it as 'painting' in the art sense: unless there is more to it, it is and remains an illustration. Painting is as much about the stuff itself, the material paint, the belle matière; that substance has a life of its own, a life quite different from its illustrative capacity or usefulness. If that is all that the paint is doing, that is, merely illustrating a photograph, then the result falls into the category of 'illustration', or design work, or graphic art, but, in my opinion, should not be misunderstood as 'painting' as the term is used in an art historical sense. Of course, art history contains many ways of painting including Western book illumination, Japanese and Chinese ink painting, fresco painting on the walls of Pompei, and the sublime illuminations of the holy works of Islam - and many more. A close study of the wall decorations at Pompei indeed, will perhaps point-up the difference between illustration and painting in the sense in which it is used here; a great number of the wall paintings at Pompei are in fact illustrated narrative - of architecture, mythological stories, nature - but the way of applying the paint itself (although, being in fresco it has no active texture) - is 'painterly' as opposed to being coloured-in drawing. These pictures in fact resemble in their looseness and dexterity certain types of Japanese work, with an obvious 'feel' for the flow of the brush-stroke.
I do not wish this opinion to be mis-interpreted; I, since my beginnings as a young boy drawing pictures without any guidance, and later at art school (with minimal guidance!), have fallen into these traps myself, many times. I have made drawings especially, which I was very happy with only to look back on them some years later and realise their shortcomings in 'art' terms. Some were actually passable efforts, some still work as illustrations but they're not, so to say 'real' painting. To understand this, it is extremely important to see, in person, as many recognised (old) master paintings as possible, which means visiting serious public art galleries and museums, getting away from art books and reproductions (as useful as these might be at the right time), and learning to 'separate the wheat from the chaff' amongst the thousands and thousands of pictures which we might encounter in local art shows, in art classes, on the internet and, especially, in museums of contemporary art. 1
Some might here object that, for instance, much of what is called Pop Art is in fact flat - and derived from photos - and deliberately so (as was much early 20th century art); this is completely true and so it can be said that Pop Art relies on the currency, in magazines, posters, commercial art, of the flat images used; in other words, the public knows how to read the source images even if they are assembled in novel ways by the artist. So yes, generally, one of the peculiar technical/formal qualities of this kind of art is its flatness, this quality being directly derived from the source material (various forms of graphic art and photography), nearly all of which was flat - which therefore goes to my point! For me, some of the least successful modernist images are, for example, the screen prints - as flat as you like - of the Pop artist Andy Warhol, no more 'art' than the photographs from which he made them; and not to be mentioned in the same breath as Titian, Velazquez, Rembrandt, et al!
Discussing the taste and influence of the Grand Prince Ferdinand de' Medici (born 1663) in his wonderful book on Baroque painters and patrons, Francis Haskell says that the painters Crespi and Ricci had in common " - a looser brush stroke, a more painterly and spirited manner, a greater display of individual temperament ... ."2 In this quote are mentioned two of the elements - apart from my theme of painterliness - I feel are often missing from the type of 'illustrative' work this article is discussing, and those are a 'spirited manner' and 'a display of individual temperament'. Very frequently, this kind of, so to say, 'default illustration' is marked by the absence of just these qualities: little or no 'spirited manner' or individuality (that is, the independent character of the painter). One of the hallmarks of commercial graphic design and illustration is that they are produced more or less despite the personality of the particular artisan 3; much graphic work is obsessed with the accuracy of fine detail and, usually, this trait is the only one also ascribable to the maker of the work. It is this insistence on the graphic skill of copying 'exactly' what one sees (in a 'fine art' context) which is, to my mind, a major part of this problem.
It would also appear that the common opinion of this type of painter, visible on the Net, is that the more one's paintings resemble the object or image (photo) in front of them, the better artisan they are and so the better their work is; a point of view perhaps related to the mistaken art historical notion of 'perfection'. Simply because the appreciation of art is such a personal matter, the concept of perfection is redundant; certainly, in the terms just mentioned, a given painting or drawing may be more or less similar to its model, in the same way that a given piece of paper may be perfectly rectangular or not. But that perfection has nothing at all to do with the 'art' aspect of a 'work of art'. Works of art have within them the character of the painter (or sculptor for instance) and that character is one of the ingredients which help to distinguish one work from another, one painter from another, one style from another and so on. But 'perfect' illustration of a given object, whether from a physical model or from a photograph, is the same whenever and wherever it is made; there is little or no personality there - as excellent illustrators and copyists are to be found the world over - if the measure of excellence is the exactness of the reproduction, of the imitation.
Interestingly, recognised 'great' artists did not draw or paint 'perfect' pictures; their paintings and drawings are admired, yes because of the great skill they embody, but more because the artist in question has given us a point of view which is not only unique but also instructive. Painters who aim at a sort of technical perfection, by which I mean an ability to exactly imitate what they see - a residual of academicism -, are I think often misled by the admiration of those who view their work. Still today, even after the revolutions of the first part of the twentieth century, many lay people admire this ability to imitate - certainly worthy of admiration, agreed - but mistake that ability for art 4; unfortunately, so do many artisans skilled in this type of imitation.
The use of the living model enjoys the imprimatur of historical tradition and of great artists, portraitists and history painters alike. Even leaving aside the ancient Greeks, the Greek painting tradition may be at least intuited from the so-called Fayum portraits of Hellenistic Egypt, most obviously painted from the living model; contemporaneous these with ancient Roman portrait sculpture. After the fall of that empire and a rather long gap, during which portraiture as such was so stylised as to be something quite different from our modern understanding of the word, it (portraiture) was revived in Italy as the Renaissance approached, from which point it has continued to be an important branch of the figurative art of the West. Modern portraitists include such people as Lucien Freud, Alberto Giacometti, and Graham Sutherland for instance; these three all worked with the live model (with results that are all quite different) and the first two are famous - or infamous - for having required the model to sit on dozens and dozens of occasions; Giacometti especially working and re-working his faces, be they in paint or clay, scrubbing off his day's work only to start all over again - possibly to the immense frustration of the model in question!
The great Baroque sculptor, architect and painter, Gianlorenzo Bernini, in discussing his attitude to the live model, is reported as saying that " ... tenne un costume dal comune modo assai diverso, e fu che nel ritrare alcuno non voleva ch'egli stesse fermo, ma ch'e' si movesse, e ch'e' parlasse; perche in tal modo, diceva egli ch'e' vedeva tutto il suo bello, e lo contraffaceva com'egli era; asserendo che nello starsi al naturale immobilmente fermo egli non è mai tanto simile a se stesso quanto egli è nel moto, in cui quelle qualità consistono che sono tutte sue e non d'altri, e che danno la somiglianza al ritratto."5 [' ... (he) maintained a habit that was very different from the usual, and that was that in portraying someone he didn't want him to keep still, but (rather) that he should move and speak; because in that way, he said that he saw all his (the sitter's) beauty, and he portrayed him as he was; asserting that in keeping motionlessly still he is never so similar to himself as when he is moving, in which (movement) those qualities consist that are his and no-one else's, and which give the likeness to the portrait.' (translation my own and bracket insertions)].
Here we should note that Bernini was principally a sculptor (and architect) and really an 'amateur' painter and so his remarks apply perhaps more to making a portrait sculpture than to painting a portrait and for that reason are even more pertinent. One imagines that when making a portrait sculpture he first started, apart from drawings, by making a clay model of his sitter rather than risk ruining a piece of marble; compared with making a mistake on the marble, repairing or changing something on a piece of clay is a hundred times easier (although not impossible, witness the substantial changes made by Michelangelo to his marble statue of Moses)! Be that as it may, the point of the remarks quoted above is that, not only is the living model to be in front of the artist but also that the model is to move and talk more or less freely (things a photo cannot do) while the artist works (note that this procedure is described as being quite unusual for the time). It is for this reason that the works of artists as different as Bernini, Giacometti and Freud have in common certain qualities of life-likeness which are almost impossible to achieve by the use of photos alone. As must be obvious, an artisan working from a photograph is at least one step removed from the living model and the more that artisan depends on the photo - that is, attempts to imitate exactly what can be seen in the photo - the less the finished work is going to be a painting with 'life' and the more it will simply resemble, so to say, a hand-made photo.
From my own experience I would say that the use of photographs is quite alright so long as they are regarded as guides and not as a 'canon', that is, it is neither necessary nor desirable that they should be slavishly copied; the result of slavishly copying a reference photo is very often a 'dead' image; unfortunately, this is not to say that portraits painted from 'the life' cannot also be quite 'dead' or, ironically, 'lifeless'. And yes, the copied result may look exactly like the photo but, in that case, if that is the finished product, why bother copying it? The use of photographs as stimulus, as guides, as reference points is I think acceptable and useful, even if one is painting a portrait of a living person, but the living person must be the ultimate reference, not the photo.
To some extent, this can be explained more clearly by looking at Renaissance techniques; these involved, especially when painting pictures of historical, mythological or religious subjects, the use of studies of real people made from life, that is, drawings of living models: these drawings, very often quite small, were then scaled-up to the required size of the painting in hand. Such drawings from life would most usually be quite definitely generalized or stylized in the finished panel-picture or fresco as portraits as such in a religious or historical picture were not the point - unless of course, an actual portrait was required, possibly in the portrayal of an historical event in which a certain individual had really taken part. This was so much the case that when a genuine portrait appears in say, a mythological painting, it is at once obvious. Sometimes actual portraits were included in religious pictures and these represented the donors, the (rich) people who paid for the religious icon; however, in these cases, the donor(s) was nearly always set apart somehow, commonly positioned in one of the corners or at the very bottom, away from the main subject of the image 6. But if a portrait of a living person appears as a protagonist in such a picture it is, shall we say, painfully obvious. This is, again, a generalization as artists did sometimes insert their own likeness, or those of colleagues or important locals, into all sorts of pictures (Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, Vasari, etc.) A glaring example of this is Ghirlandaio's Sassetti Chapel frescos in the church of Santa Trinita, in Florence: there are in fact several obvious portraits in his ahistorical rendering of Saint Francis Receiving the Approval of His Order from Pope Honorius; the artist has set the scene in Florence with members of the Medici family present, whereas in fact the event took place in Rome, and certainly not with Lorenzo de' Medici in attendance!
And here possibly is the crux of the matter, portraits suggest the reality of an individual experience, they fix a point in a given person's life, their time here revealed by the signs of that life lived as a human being and therefore influencing a personality; other images of the human face, and I would include much of what was described at the beginning of this article, as well as heads such as the Aphrodite above, suggest a form of what we all know to be a human likeness but without a personality: expression, emotion perhaps, but no internal life. Both the black stone sculpted head above and the painted portrait below have a personality, and a strong one at that.
At this point, let's have a look at a portrait from the Vatican Museums, the extraordinary portrait of Pope Clement IX by the portraitist Carlo Maratta. This portrait of the Pope was clearly made from the living model, so much so that we have the sense that the Pope is listening to the artist while he talks and works and is possibly about to say something in response. The very lively gaze of the sitter supported by the equally lively and beautiful handling of the clothing (and hands) contribute to our impression of having the man sitting in front of us! Maratta lived during the Baroque period at the height of Bernini's fame and virtual domination of the Roman scene; both artists were influenced by the naturalistic realism of Caravaggio's revolution. This revolution consisted, partly, in his insistence on painting directly from live models in a sort of, for the time, 'warts-and-all' approach; this contrasted and collided with the time-worn concept - from the early 1400s onwards - of 'selection'. That is to say, from at least the time of Leon Battista Alberti, artists were encouraged to 'select' the best parts of their models and so to speak, 'cobble them together' so as to create an ideal face or figure, this ideal stemming from an adherence to neo-Platonic theories, classical canons of beauty, and from stories about the working methods of famous ancient artists.
The distinction I am attempting to make in this article is a difficult one to express as it depends on a certain awareness of and familiarity with a wide range of Western art, and to a large extent, art history. There have been many great graphic designers and illustrators, in the normal sense of the word, the commercial sense let's say, and there have been many wonderful artists who worked in various graphic mediums in the 'fine art' sense; people such as Dürer and Rembrandt, although it should be remembered that both of them were also painters.
Many artists at the beginning of the 20th century were in fact also commercial designers, the Bauhaus for instance being a kind of hot-house of graphic design of a very high level, as well as fostering the overlap of various fields of artistic production. Photography was also important there and in early 20th century art of various kinds, Dada for example. If a work of painting in particular is avowedly illustrative - as were many of the public murals made in the 1930s and '40s - I see no problem with that; but, on the other hand, if a work of painting is pretending to the status of 'fine art' while obviously being in reality a work of cold hubris merely demonstrating the artisan's skill, then that is where I see a problem. The scene is further complicated by the common confusion of functions or results; in the just-mentioned murals of the 1930s and '40s there is clearly a high level of technical 'fine art' skill and a broad awareness of art history put to the illustrative purpose - especially in the US and the USSR - of propaganda of one sort or another. The astute reader will of course remark that much of the art produced in Europe, and in Italy and Spain particularly, in times gone by was also (religious) propaganda. At this point however, we might compare, using our favourite art history books (the ones with the great photos), the Renaissance or Baroque periods with some of the things I have discussed here, those things to be found on the internet, and ask ourselves: is there a qualitative difference, is there a function difference?
As an aside, by now that same reader will have noticed my use of the terms artisan or painter as opposed to the more conventional - and ubiquitous - artist; this is because that word, the description 'artist', is nowadays a much abused term. So much so that it seems to me that we need to invent another expression for those people contriving all manner of installations full of political and social messages - and for those practising the illustrative forms discussed here - and perhaps reserve the term 'artist' for those still working in the methods and with the materials and aims of the 'traditional' painter (sculptor, printmaker, etc.), keeping in mind that technical ability equals neither understanding - nor art!
At the very beginning of this article I mentioned the name of Roberto Longhi; in his book entitled simply Caravaggio, he discusses the difference between Caravaggio and some other painters working in Rome at that same time (early 17th century), saying: "In the over-fastidious and morbidly refined description of the 'ecclesiastical and civil portraits' of (Scipione) Pulzone, perhaps even with the window (of the studio) depicted in the pupil (of the sitter); ... it is always an almost mystical form of mental abnegation before the (tiny) detail, the particular, ... ." 7 (insertions in brackets my own). In this passage Longhi was contrasting the meticulousness of certain contemporary Baroque painters with the, may I say, more genuine, the more ad hoc realism (or naturalism?) of Caravaggio. The distinction between these two terms, realism and naturalism, is one of the themes of Longhi's book and need not concern us here; what is relevant is the observation that certain forms of figurative art are obsessed with an accumulation of detail at the expense of a more solid, robust and 'natural' depiction of the real world; a distinction the present article is also at pains to illuminate.
1 "... esercitare l'occhio, preferendolo ai libri." [ '... exercise the eye, preferring it to books.'] So said Guglielmina (Mina) Gregori, highly respected Italian art historian who has just celebrated her 101st birthday. She further told how: "... she had learned to pass whole days in museums and art galleries, looking for hours at the works on view ..." (translations my own). Both quotes taken from an internet article regarding in fact her recent birthday. (March, 2025).
2 Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters - Art and Society in Baroque Italy, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1980; p237.
3 A distinction needs to be made here: in this article we are not discussing graphic work as understood in the manner of someone such as Dürer or Rembrant or Piranese or even Picasso; their work was graphic art in the 'art' sense, not in the imitative sense in which those words (graphic, illustration, illustrative, etc.) are being used in this article.
4 I realise that I am potentially wading into deep waters here as, for some, as a way of course of derailing the argument, such statements introduce the (as they know) unanswerable question: what is art? At this point, in my experience, such people enjoy side-tracking the argument at hand with that all-winning rejoinder thus, in their humble (?) opinions, destroying the validity of the points being made in the said argument. If, on the other hand, they feel that their 'art' is being belittled or dismissed, perhaps they might offer the much-sought answer to that vexed question, what is art? By what definition is their work automatically 'art'?
5 Tomaso Montanari, La libertà di Bernini - La sovranità dell'artista e le regole del potere, published by Einaudi, 2016, p179. The quote apparently comes from one of the well-known biographies of Bernini written by the Florentine Filippo Baldinucci: Vita del Cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernino, Scultore, Architetto, e Pittore, MDCLXXXII. N.B. Bernini's surname was often spelled Bernino as opposed to Bernini in texts written at that time, that is, during the Baroque period and later.
6 As if to confute all that has just been said, I should here mention a picture painted by Giorgio Vasari (about whom see various articles in this blog) in which a large number of portraits made from life - as well as one based on a papal portrait (of Clement VII, 1531) by Sebastiano del Piombo, and another based on an earlier portrait by Vasari himself of (then dead) Duke Alessandro Medici - feature in what is ostensibly a religious subject: The Feast of Saint Gregory the Great (c1540) which is in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. The Pope Clement portrait did work in this picture as the face of Pope Gregory while the numerous other portraits were of people somehow connected with the commission itself (monks, abbots, etc.).
7 Roberto Longhi, Caravaggio, 1968 Editori Riuniti, the second edition of his book originally published in 1952 under the title Il Caravaggio. The quotation is to be found on pp12 and 13 of Caravaggio (1968) and the translation is my own; "Nella preziosa e accurata descrizione dei 'ritratti ecclesiastici e civili' del Pulzone, magari con la finestra ricamata nella pupilla; ... è sempre una forma, quasi mistica, di abnegazione mentale di fronte al particolare, ... ."
