Vanity Fair UK - 11.2019

NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON, UK / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES VAN EYCK ; GRAPHISCHE SAMMLUNG ALBERTINA, VIENNA, AUSTRIA / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES DÜRER ; © THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
DA PONTORMO ; PRADO, MADRID, SPAIN / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES VELÁZQUEZ MUZEUM ZAMEK, LANCUT, POLAND / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES ANGUISSOLA ; © THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON GENTILESCHI ; KHM-MUSEUMSVERBAND VAN RIJN ; © THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON LE BRUN

NOVEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR ON ART

the mind and their brushstrokes as visual confessions of their

inner and outer selves. No artist made as many confessionals

as Rembrandt, who recorded his journey through life from

youth to maturity in an extraordinary number of paintings,

drawings and etchings. Appearing in his own historical and

mythological paintings, studies, tronies (a popular category

of half-length gures in dierent guises) and intimate self-

portraits, he epitomised the tradition of expressive self-

representation that endures to this day, leaving something

of himself in each artwork—his style, his mark and his legacy.

I

f mirrors were the mythological tool of self-portraiture

from the 16th century onwards, it was the camera that

took over in the 19th century, redening representations

of the self and portraiture at large. The camera could capture

the exact likeness of a person, place or thing; painters were no

longer relied upon to depict the “truth”. The camera obscura

enabled, and necessitated, a new way of seeing.

Almost immediately after Joseph Nicéphore Niépce succeeded

in permanently xing the rst recorded photographic image, it

is understood that Robert Cornelius, an amateur chemist and

photography enthusiast, captured the rst self-portrait in 1839.

Notable early practitioners included Joseph-Philibert Girault

de Prangey in 1841–2, Francis Frith dressed in Turkish summer

costume in 1857 and Lady Hawarden in 1862. The early days of

photography were marked by a collective desire to create portraits.

Carte-de-visites, in the form of an albumen print, became the

popular calling card of the wealthy, traded among friends and

visitors. Today, these images can feel somewhat staged and

unfamiliar, but their importance cannot be underestimated.

place in society. It was only at the beginning of the 16th

century that painters began to a˜rm their position as “liberal”

artists of the mind, rather than simply manual labourers. The

biographer Giorgio Vasari, dubbed the father of art history,

lled the pages of his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors

and Architects (1550) with anecdotal tales of artists’ personality

quirks, mythologising masters like Michelangelo, Raphael

and Leonardo da Vinci as the mortal gods of artistic genius.

In Northern Europe, no one spread the idea of the artist as

genius as successfully as Dürer, who evolved from his Self-

Portrait at 13 to Self-Portrait at 28 (1500), visually likening

himself to Christ in a less-than-subtle declaration of his

divine artistry. The Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci,

meanwhile, associated himself with the Ancient Greek

painter Parrhasius, who painted a curtain so realistic that

it fooled viewers into attempting to lift it, by setting his

Self-portrait at the Easel (1604-5) against the backdrop of a

trompe l’oeil curtain so inconspicuous that it has evaded art

historical attention. From the late 16th century, artists like

Titian, Rubens and van Dyck elevated themselves to the

rank of their aristocratic patrons, achieving nancial success

and celebrity status in their lifetime, with ostentatious self-

portraits laden with pomp and circumstance.

By the mid-16th century, women began to occupy a more

visible place as artists and sought to assert their position by

depicting themselves engaging with their trade. Sofonisba

Anguissola, one of the rst great female artists and a prolic

self-portraitist, declared her mastery of her image and her

medium by working at an easel in her self-portrait of 1556.

Artemisia Gentileschi followed suit with her Self-Portrait as

Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c. 1615-17) and Self-Portrait as

the Allegory of Painting (c. 1638-9). This topos endured well

into the 17th and 18th centuries, from Judith Leyster’s recently

discovered second self-portrait (c. 1653) to Élisabeth Louise

Vigée Le Brun’s Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782).

As new sciences emerged in the 17th century, the world was

in a state of ¦ux. René Descartes forced people to re-evaluate

the relationship between mind, body and soul, describing the

painter’s studio as a model for the mind. No longer content

with mere imitation, artists viewed the hand as an extension of

No artist made as

many onfessionals

as Rembrandt

BY REMBRANDT

HARMENSZOON VAN RIJN

Large Self-Portrait, 1652

BY ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI

Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of

Alexandria, c. 1615-17

BY ÉLISABETH LOUISE

VIGÉE LE BRUN

Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, c. 1782

BY SOFONISBA ANGUISSOLA

Self-Portrait at the Easel,

c. 1556

11-19-Self-Portraiture-Through-the-Ages.indd 45 19/09/2019 17:07

45