Art History Today

The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. Slides

1. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait in a Fur-Collared Robe, 1500, oil on lime panel, 67,1 x 48,7 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

2. Albrecht Dürer, Young Hare, 1502, watercolour and gouache on paper, 251 x 226 mm, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

3. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait at 13, 1484, silver-point on paper, 275 x 196 mm, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

4. Two shot of Dürer's Self-Portrait and (attributed to), Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi.

5. Giorgione, Self-Portrait as David, Self-Portrait as David, c. 1510, oil on canvas, 52 x 43 cm, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig.

6. Giorgione's Self-Portrait as David, 1650, engraving, British Museum, London.

7. Antonio Pollaiuolo, Martyrdom of St Sebastian,, 1473-75, oil on panel, 292 x 2023 cm, National Gallery, London.

8. Jan Saenredam, after Hendrick Goltzius, An Artist and his Model, engraving, British Museum, London.

9. Hendrick Goltzius, Self-Portrait, 1592-94, drawing, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

10. Cesare Ripa, Disegno, Iconologia, 1603.

11. Bernardo Licinio, Portrait of an Architect with a Self- Portrait of Bernardo Licinio in the background, 1520-1530s), oil on canvas, measurements unknown, Martin von Wagner Museum, Würzburg.

12. Giovanni Lomazzo, Self-Portrait as the Abbot of the Accademia della Val de Blenio, 1568, oil on canvas, 55 x 43 cm, Brera, Milan.

13. Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, oil on oak, 82 x 60 cm, National Gallery, London.

14. Detail: mirror.

15. Attributed to Loyset Liedet, Charles the Bold surprising David Aubert, Histoire de Charles Martel. Brussels, c. 1470, Biblioth6que Royale Albert Ier, MS, 8, fol. 7.

16. Petrus Christus, St Eligius in His Workshop, 1449, oil on panel, 98 x 85 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

17. Detail: mirror.

18. Quentin Metsys, The Moneylender and his Wife, 1514, oil on panel, 71 x 68 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

19. Detail: coins on table.

20. Detail: Self-portrait in mirror.

21. Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524, oil on convex panel, diameter 24.4 cm, Kuntshistorisches Museum, Vienna.

22. Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait, 1649, 1649, oil on canvas, 78 x 65 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

23. Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of the Sculptor Duquesnoy, 1627-29, oil on canvas, 77,5 x 61 cm, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.

24. Bernini, Self-Portrait as a Young Man, c. 1623, oil on canvas, measurements unknown, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

25. Bernini, David, 1623-24, carrara marble, height 170 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

26. Detail: David’s face.

27. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, Wide-Eyed, 1630, etching, 51 x 46 mm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

28. Johannes Gump, Self-Portrait with Three Views, 1646, oil on canvas, 34.84 x 35.04 inches, Uffizi, Florence.

29. Norman Rockwell, Triple Self-Portrait, 1959, oil on canvas, 44 ½ x 34 ¾ inches, Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

30. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait at 26, 1498, oil on panel, 52 x 41 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

31. Rembrandt van Rhyn, Self-Portrait, 1652, oil on canvas, 112.4 x 81 cm, Kuntshistorisches Museum, Vienna.

32. Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait, Self-Portrait in front of the Easel, January 1888, Paris, oil on canvas, 65 x 51 cm, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam.

33. Wilhelm Bendz, A Young Artist Examining a Sketch in a Mirror, 1826, oil on canvas, 98 x 85 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

34. C. W. Eckersburg, Woman before a Mirror, 1841, Hirschsprung collection, Copenhagen, Denmark.

35. Giovanni Bellini, Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror, 1515, oil on canvas, 62 x 79 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

36. Detail.

37. Gustave Caillebotte, In a Café, 1880, oil on canvas, 153 x 114 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen.

38. Gustave Caillebotte, Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1879-1880, oil on canvas, 90 x 115 cm, Private Collection.

39. Édouard Manet, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1879, oil on canvas, 83 x 67 cm, Private Collection.

40. Diego Velásquez, Self-Portrait, detail of Las Meninas.

41. Manet, Bar at Folies-Bergère, 1882, oil on canvas, 96 x 130 cm, Courtauld Institute, London.

42. Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec, Self-Portrait, 1882-1883, oil on canvas, 32.4 x 40.3 cm, Toulouse Lautrec Museum, Albi, France.

43. Edgar Degas, At the Mirror, Pastel on paper, 49 x 64 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

44. Jorge Luis Borges mirrored.

45. Jorge Luis Borges: “It only takes two facing mirrors to form a labyrinth.”

46. Hans Memling, Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (front), c. 1485, oil on oak panel, 22 x 15 cm (each wing), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg.

47. Detail: Vanity.

48. Hans Baldung- Grien, Three Ages of the Woman and the Death, 1510, oil on limewood, 48 x 33 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

49. Hans Baldung-Grien, Death and the Maiden, 1518-20, oil on panel, 31 x 19 cm, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel.

50. Still from Citizen Kane, 1941.

51. Escher, Magic Mirror, 1946, lithograph print.

52. Sir John Tenniel: Illustration from “Through the Looking Glass,” Lewis Carroll, 1871:.

53. Salvador Dali, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937, oil on canvas, 50.8 x 78.2 cm, Tate Modern, London.

54. Auerbach reflected in Francis Bacon’s dresser mirror.

The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 9

Monsters in the Modern Mirror.

“We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Cesares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.” Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”¹

“It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.” Jorge Luis Borges, “Nightmares” lecture.²

Unbeknownst to the legendary Argentine writer Borges, the idea of placing mirrors reflecting into each other had already been practiced by Leonardo da Vinci who in his notebooks said the reflected image went on to infinity.³ For Borges this infinite regress was comparable to a labyrinth because the viewer could easily get lost in the maze of reflections resulting in a nightmare search for identity. Mirrors were “monstrous” to Borges and in her book on the mirror Bonnet notes the horror of the mirror/labyrinth to Borges. Bonnet also uses the word “monstrous” to describe Parmigianino's magnified hand achieved by optical trickery. When this optical deception including doubling of the self is associated with religious ideas such as the mirror as a source of vanity or sin, the distortion is thought to be caused by supernatural evil entities. The history of the mirror shows that supernatural beings, sprites, imps, and especially the Devil were connected with reflections which with their distortions, reversals and crossings could almost be seen as demonic in origin. There was a legend that if one looked into a mirror late at night the devil could be seen, which might be what Borges is hinting at in the quotation from his short story “Tlön” above. Though Leonardo took a purely scientific and empirical attitude to the mirror, quite a lot of renaissance paintings show the mirror juxtaposed with the Devil as in Memling’s Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (1485). As for Borges, he was writing in the 1940s, a decade in which the mirror appeared in psychology, science, visual art and film, though it was concerned less with the “monstrous” in folklore and more with the monsters in one’s mind as in the mirror sequence in Citizen Kane (1941). If there is counterpart in visual art to Well’s optical grandeur or Borges’s mirrored nightmares it is arguably Escher who was fascinated with mirror images, and indeed mathematical labyrinths. Escher’s Magic Mirror lithographic print of 1946 (above) which shows mythical creatures- gryphons- produced by a mirror, form a procession and then form into a tessellated pattern. The link between mathematics and mirror magic had already been forged in the home-grown surrealism of the mathematician Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll) books, Wonderland reached via the mirror, and this kind of visual trickery is present in Escher too. Completing the circle by taking the mirror and self-image back to the classical age is Salvator Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) which is based on his own poem about the beautiful, self-regarding youth who drowns in his own reflection. Sigmund Freud who coined the word “narcissism” for psychoanalysis was a huge influence on Dali’s “paranoiac-critical method.”

1Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, (Penguin, 1964), 27.

2“My other nightmare is that of a mirror. The two are not distinct, as it only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth. I remembering seeing, in the house of Dora de Alvear in the Belgrano district, a circular room whose walls and doors were mirrored, so that whoever entered the room found himself at the center of a truly infinite labyrinth.”

3Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, 106.

The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 8

Manet & the Mirror of Society.

During the nineteenth-century artists continued to mine the iconography of mirrors and self-portraits, e.g. Eckersbug’s Woman before a Mirror (1841) which is reminiscent of Bellini’s allegories of vanity. The mirror still figures in the image of the artist working as in Wilhelm Bendz’s Young Artist examining a Sketch in a Mirror (1826), but these are private spaces and the century marks the appearance of more paintings of mirrors in large, public arenas. The industrial revolution and the growth of the cities with their music halls, theatres, operas, bars, all marking the new leisure culture provided a new public space for the mirror which painters were not slow to exploit. This is is especially conspicuous in impressionist art which took the city as a major topic including the spectacle of bars and cafes. Works like Gustave Caillebotte’s At the Café shows a man planted stolidly before a mirror in which is reflected other members of his type, possibly journalists or men of letters;¹ he seems too scruffy and coarse to be a dandy or boulevardier, but all social classes were to intermingle in the streets and bars of Paris. This painting has been linked to Manet’s much more famous Bar at the Folies Bergère where a whole panorama of social class is on the view in the mirror at the back of the melancholy barmaid.² If there is such a thing as a mirror of society, then this is it.

1Various, Gustave Caillebote: The Unknown Impressionist, (Royal Academy, 1996), no. 25, 127..

2Ibid.

The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 7

Three Views of a Self-Portrait,

Poussin’s Self-Portraits are examples of the inventive uses of genre in the seventeenth-century. Many baroque artists were fascinated by expression, thus we have Bernini basing the face of his David on his own features; according to sources, he had a friend hold up the mirror so he could observe his own expression as he put his hand in the fire. In the Netherlands we have Rembrandt peering into a mirror in order to observe his expressions which in some cases gives him the look of a disturbed person. We never actually see mirrors in Rembrandt’s self-portraits or pictures of other artists; but we do have a striking exception to the rule in Northern Europe: the Triple Portrait by the Austrian painter Johannes Gumpp, executed in 1646 (above).  In this extraordinary image Gumpp shows himself three times: in person, in his studio painting, in the mirror and on the canvas. Here the distinction between the physical mirror in the studio and the “mirror” of the painting is made; the artist has to continually look into the former in order to realize the latter. The difference between the two is also seen in relation to doing and seeing. Gumpp regards himself in the mirror, a purely optical strategy and uses his hands to paint the image he sees, a mechanical activity. The skill needed in realising the Triple Self-Portrait is to negotiate between hand and eye, which inevitably leaves a gap, a blind spot which is neither painting nor the artist’s studio. The historian of the brush and the mirror would wait until 1959 when the American illustrator and artist Norman Rockwell produced his own Triple Self-Portrait which with its pinned copies of Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso seems to suggest that Rockwell wanted to add himself to the pantheon of great portrayers of the self. Rockwell has made a good start with a massive delineation of himself and an equally unmissable signature which may indicate the self image has been “inscribed in advance.” ¹

1Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, 31.

The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 6

The Sinister Side of the Self-Portrait.

“Think of Da Vinci/ His ambidextrous arts

Hendrix's guitar sang/ Sweet feedback lightnin' from Mars

And in reflection We see the stars.” PFM, “Left-handed Theory” 1977. ¹

In using the word “sinister” we open up another dimension of the self-portrait, particularly the function of the hands which are, of course, reversed in the mirror. The word “sinister” comes from a Latin word meaning “left.” Since antiquity the right hand has been privileged over the left since the latter has accumulated negative associations. In the history of art “left-handedness” has been ignored to a large degree with several notable exceptions such as Leonardo’s “ambidextrous arts” immortalised in the song above.² The sinistral aspect has even been linked with love: James Hall has re-titled Parmigianino’s convex portrait Self-Portrait of My Loving and Lovely Left Hand linking it with the adage “all lovers are bound to keep their love hidden” suggested by the concealment of the signet on the artist’s ring, the whole arrangement conveying the secret love of the beautiful young painter.³ Another instance of curious hand symbolism occurs in Poussin’s Self-Portrait of 1649 (above), done for his patron Pointel in which a right-handed Poussin holds the chalk-holder in his left which has been seen as disobeying classical injunctions of not gesturing with the left.⁴ It seems reasonable to assume that Poussin was making some special point by- to use Louis Marin’s description- by the “crossing of the hands like birds’ wings, but what could it be?⁵ Behind him is a tomb done in the style of his sculptor friend François Duquesnoy, so could the foregrounding of the hands in front of a tomb allude to the mancini of Duquesnoy needed to make the tomb?

1From PFM’s album Jet Lag, 1977. There is a school of thought that left-handedness does indeed come from the stars! See for example Roger Highfield, “Earth's sinister beginning: the origins of left-handedness, “ Daily Telegraph, 6^th April, 2008 which looks at how left-handedness could have been carried by asteroids and incorporated into genetic structure!

2The only book length study of left and right in art history is James Hall’s The Sinister Side: How left-right Symbolism shaped Western Art (Oxford University Press, 2008).

3Ibid, 213.

4Hall cites Michel Faucheur’s 1657 Traité de l’action de l’orateur who insists that only the right hand should be used for gesturing, Hall, Sinister Side, 307.

5Louis Marin, “Poussin’s Self-Portraits 1649-1650” in Sublime Poussin, trans Catherine Porter, (Stanford University Press, 1995), 183-208, 190.

The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 5

Looking into Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait.

Is Parmigianino’s famous Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror a “witty visual conceit, typical of its century” or a “troubling tête-à-tête, in which seeing means giving oneself over to hallucinations,” or even yet another variation on the beautiful youth Narcissus admiring his own reflection?¹ Vasari had no doubt that the self-portrait was a cosa rare (rare thing) which was achieved by a special dispensation to a turner to make “a ball of wood” divide it in half in order “ to make it the same shape and size as the mirror” all of which Vasari sees as a form of counterfeiting (contrafare per suo capriccio). Vasari goes on to say: “Now everything that is near the mirror is magnified, and all that is at a distance is diminished, and thus he made the hand engaged in drawing somewhat large, as the mirror showed it, and so marvellous that it seemed to be his very own.”² Vasari characterised Parmigianino’s counterfeiting as as a way of amusing himself; but other commentators see a more darker motivation in which Narcissus borders on the megalomaniacal invoking Vasari’s statement that Parmigianino died a madman, “a wild and melancholic mind.”³ Whilst there is certainly a sinister undercurrent in this self-portrait we should guard against interpreting it in the light of Vasari’s Lives since he distorted the facts to suit his own view of the artists.

1Respectively, Cecil Gould, Parmigianino, (Abbeville Press, 1994), 53; Bonnet, The Mirror, 226; Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, 136.

2Vasari, “Life of Parmigianino” quoted in Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, 133.

3Bonnet, The Mirror, 226.

The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 4

The Merchant’s Mirror: The Arnolfini Portrait.

One of the most famous convex mirrors to appear in a surviving renaissance painting is the large one at the back of the Arnolfini couple in Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait. Interpretations of this painting, let alone its mirror, abound; but one interesting avenue of approach will be pursued here, namely the concept of the mirror as the “merchant’s mirror.”¹ According to Margaret Carroll, Van Eyck’s mirror should be read in the context of the preacher Bernardino of Siena’s lectures on how merchants and businessmen can accumulate wealth whilst avoiding damnation, a connection seemingly providing an interpretative key to the Arnolfini Portrait. This would make Arnolfini “Bernardino’s ideal type: the mirror of a just and wealthy merchant, pleasing to God and celebrated amongst men.”² Another way of linking the Arnolfini Portrait with mercantile culture would be the notarial signature of the painter which is thought to have been inspired by Loyset Liedet’s painting, Charles the Bold surprising David Aubert, Histoire de Charles Martel which shows the workshop of the calligrapher which includes a large cursive signature above a convex mirror.³ Within both images, it might be argued that the mirror functions as a notarial document since both contain a signature near a mirror, and the second has two figures in a mirror witnessing a contractual agreement, two witnesses needed to validate a marriage.⁴ In this connection, it may be significant that mirrors appear frequently in paintings of merchants and tradesmen, for example Petrus Christus’ St Eligius in His Workshop (1449) which shows the goldsmith in his shop and a mirror reflecting a smart young couple in the street outside. To take another example, there is Quentin Massys’s The Moneylender and his Wife (1514) which brings us back to the self-portrait as it shows the painter himself reflected in a large convex mirror silvered like the mirror in the Arnolfini Portrait.⁵

1What follows owes much to Margaret D. Carroll, “In the Name of God and Profit: Jan van Eyck’s Arnofini Portrait” in Representations, No. 44, (Autumn 1993), 96-132.

2Ibid, 96. Amusingly, long before his presidential days, Carroll reproduces a photograph of the Trumps with a similar handclasp as the Arnofini, two power couples of different epochs!

3Craig Harbison, “Sexuality and Social Standing in Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Double Portrait,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), 249-291, 277f.

4On turning the portrayal into a document, Alpers, The Art of Describing, 178-179.

5Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, 15.

The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 3

The Painter as Mirror.

Hidden at the back of Saenredam’s engraving after Goltzius is an old man with a pair of compasses which usually indicate what the renaissance called disegno. In the seventeenth-century, the figure of Disegno was usually shown holding a pair of compasses as in the illustration in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (above); but here Disegno also holds a mirror in his other hand. Disegno and composition was also linked explicitly with the object of the mirror. A good example of this is Leonardo da Vinci who in his Treatise on Painting compared the mirror to a painter: “the mind of a painter should be like a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is filled by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.”¹ And Vasari also included the phrases alla sphera and alla specchio, connected with the mirror into his remarks on self-portraiture.² But Vasari also linked the painter’s mirror with the hand: “this morning I made my face, portrayed in the mirror, with my hand.”³

1Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks, (Oxford University Press, 1952, rep 2008), 206.

2Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, 31.

3Cited in ibid.

The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 2

Reflecting on the Body: Giorgione’s Missing Mirror.

One of the most famous examples of the use of a mirror in a Renaissance's painter’s studio is only known through written accounts because the painting itself has not survived. This is Giorgione’s lost painting of a nude who was represented with its back towards the viewer and its other sides visible by Giorgione’s clever use of reflections: one side was imaged in a mirror; another in shining armour; finally, the front was turned away from the viewer and reflected in a pool. The loss of such a dazzling configuration of reflections is much to be deplored, as is a similar painting of nudes by Jan van Eyck. As Svetlana Alpers notes in her survey of Dutch art in the seventeenth-century- where Giorgione's last masterpiece is mentioned by Dutch art theorists- the Italian’s method deconstructed the body rather than showing it unified, the body being something Italian artists were reluctant to chop up into reflections as they wanted to keep a unified view; however, one way of preserving the unity of the figure was simply to double it as in the example of the bowmen in Pollaiuolo’s Martyrdom of St Sebastian, a device known as figura come fratelli.¹ Giorgione’s nude is mentioned in the Netherlander artist Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Academy of Painting where he also references a print a(above) after a lost painting by Hendrick Goltzius showing Venus looking into a mirror. This image contains three images of Venus: her body, her reflection in the mirror, and the image of her that the artist is depicting.² As we shall see this week, in addition to conveying limpidity and accuracy, the painter’s mirror also distorts and produces monstrosities. It is an ambivalent aid to representing the self.

1Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth-Century, (University of Chicago, Penguin, 1983), 59.

2Ibid.

The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 1

Face to Face with Dürer's Self-Portrait.

Dürer's self-portrait of 1499 announces a whole new era in art; it also, in the words of Joseph Koerner, is a symbol of the “moment of self-portraiture in German renaissance art.”¹ Dürer painted himself literally confronting the viewer as he shows his self-image looking directly out at his beholder. But what is more startling is the Christ-like portrayal that Dürer selected for this self-portrait. This was the culmination of a series of self-portraits starting from the age of thirteen in 1484, with even on one occasion Dürer showing himself completely nude, something completely at odds with the modesty of the Protestant culture which produced the artist. As the historian of the mirror Sabine- Melchior Bonnet says, Dürer's “dialogue of self with self comes to pass through a dialogue with God.”² By adapting the pose of Christ in such conventions as the Salvator Mundi, Dürer broke with tradition and completely revolutionised the genre of self- portraiture. What is remarkable is how Dürer fused this assertion of the painter’s self-identity with religious associations. According to Bonet, Dürer “precisely illustrates here” two verses of St Paul’s: “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and more appropriately for this week’s topic, “We all, with faces unveiled, reflect, as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord.”³ Perhaps it was inevitable that Dürer would be encouraged to paint himself with the use of the mirror as his home town was Nuremberg, a place where mirrors were manufactured; and he visited Venice on two occasions which was equally famous for its mirror and glass industry.⁴

---

1Joseph Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

2Sabine Melchior Bonnet, The Mirror: A History (Routledge, 2002), translated by Katharine H. Jowett, originally published in French in 1994 as Histoire du Miroir, 124.

3Ibid.

4Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (Yale University Press, 1998), On Venice and mirrors, Bonnet, The Mirror, 136. 9-34, 39-41