VANITY FAIR ON ARTof the empire. Chairman Mao would lat-
er adopt the same approach.
None of the Roman emperors left be-
hind likenesses we can trust. I remember
lming some busts of Hadrian once in
Naples. They all looked slightly dier-
ent, but the curator was certain it was
him because the fail-safe sign of Hadrian
was a tiny incised line on his earlobe. No
other Roman emperor had it.
In the early days of Christianity, a
similar process forwarded the evolving
face of Jesus through various stages. To-
day, we happily assume that the swarthy
Jesus with long hair and a beard is the
unmistakable face of Christ. But the rst
Christians would not have had a clue
who he was. Their Jesus was a symbol, a
large P crossed with an X, the Chi Rho,
from the rst Greek letters for Christos.
But worshipping a symbol is counter-
intuitive, and unlikely to garner oating
voters, so the next Christian generation
flagrantly stole the likeness of Apollo
from the Romans, and began carving
him onto the sides of their sarcophagi
as a curly-haired youth—blond, beard-
less and happy—complete with halo and
sunbeams. That worked for a while, but
it didn’t speak across the sexes, so, brief-
ly, a boy-girl Jesus made his appearance,
blond and youthful, but with girlish
swellings on his chest.N
ot until most of the millennium
had passed did Christian artists
nally come up with the tradi-
tional image of the Byzantine emperor,
long haired and bearded, and recast him
as the all-powerful Jesus. Later still, they
hung him up on a cross and made him
suer like a common criminal, and that,
perversely, is the image that proved to
have the longest legs. One of the reasons
we can be certain the Turin Shroud is a
medieval fake is because the Jesus it
shows was such a late invention.
My point is that the evocation of a
presence has only recently relied on
the accurate recording of appearances.
For most of the story of art it has been,
rather, a case of prompting strong as-
sociations in the mind of the viewer.
Caravaggio included his own face in
several of the crowds gathered around
his sweaty religious scenes, but his
most resonant moment as a portrait-
ist was to scrawl his own name in the
pool of blood spilling from the
severed neck of John the Baptist, in thetangible contact with our ancestors is
just as unarguable. The fact that a hand
is all there is doesn’t decrease the inti-
macy of the contact. It increases it, as
Michelangelo was later to emphasise
when he dangled the hand of Adam so
close to the hand of God on the Sistine
Ceiling. From the beginning—long be-
fore we began rolling down the low-road
of description—signs, marks and sym-
bols had been set the task of representing
us. Do you think Ramses II really was
a Flash Gordon lookalike with a hipster
beard, like the 60-foot statues of him
left behind by the Egyptians? Of course
not. The task of Egyptian statuary was
to evoke his presence, not to describe it.
The ancient Romans, cunning col-
onists that they were, preferred the
Picasso approach of giving their au-
dience something human to cling to.
The image of Julius Caesar they sent
out around the world, and relentlessly
repeated, feels like somebody real. But
it isn’t. He’s a fabrication whose mass-
produced task is to mark the boundariesPRICKLY CHARACTER
Above: The Beheading of St John, 1608, by
Caravaggio Below: Abstract Portrait of Marcel
Duchamp, 1918, by Katherine DreierTHIS PAGE: AKG/MPORTFOLIO/ELECTA CARAVAGGIO; PETER HORREE/ALAMY DREIER. OPPOSITE PAGE: PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART, PENNSYLVANIA, USA/PURCHASED WITH FUNDS CONTRIBUTED BY C.K. WILLIAMS, II, 1999/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES ©ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2019 TANNING; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MARLBOROUGH GALLERY, NEW YORK AND LONDON ©CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD 2019 AUERBACHNOVEMBER 2019A nasty
spike
penetrating
a delicate
hole.
Yup, that’s
Marcel
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