you have compared giorgio vasari’s life of artists to a kind of renaissance version of facebook. in your work you analyze a key turning point in the history of art, when artists effectively went from being artisans -and most of them were men at that time- to becoming more like celebrities, as we would understand it, where the image of the artist became almost became public property. the artists themselves, their own bodies in some cases, seem to become public property. when we talk about our topic, the life of artists, what are we talking about?
The interesting thing about this historical period is that with Giorgio Vasari you have, for the first time, a large collection of artist biographies. and for vasari, he really is writing history. He is someone who operates in a circle of humanists like Paolo Giovio, who wrote biographies of famous men, including humanists, military leaders, and poets. One of the things Vasari does is take the profession of artist – which for him includes painters, sculptors, architects, but also engravers, medalists and other practices as well – and write a holistic history of art through the achievements of these men. yes, they were mostly men, although there is a biography dedicated to a bolognese sculptress (properzia de rossi), and sometimes women artists (such as sofonisba anguissola) appear in the lives of other male artists. then, even then, vasari had an eye on inclusion.
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“one of the immediate effects of the lives of vasari artists is that the artists begin to realize that their own lives become something they can heal”
The point, though, is that once your profession becomes something represented on that scale, then other people who share that profession find standards against which to judge themselves: their own sense of success or failure and their status within the profession. If you are a shoemaker and suddenly you find out about many other famous shoemakers, then you have to think, am I doing as well as that shoemaker or not? one of the immediate effects of vasari’s artists’ lives is that artists begin to realize that their own lives become something they can heal, and vasari reminds artists to take care of their own image. in “Life of Correggio”, for example, he is very critical of Correggio for not painting a self-portrait: since he never bothered to do so, that memory is lost.
vasari’s second stroke of brilliance was capitalizing on new technologies. the rise of the printing press not only allowed the circulation of printed biographies, but also of printed portraits. Vasari published the Lives of the Artists twice: first in 1550 as a text, and then again in 1568 with one hundred and forty-four portraits by as many artists as he could find. As it turned out, some of these were made-up portraits: faces taken from paintings by those artists, or simply faces found and used for that purpose, but these avatars created a visual pantheon of Renaissance art stars who were now famous. in name and ‘facially famous’.
You’re talking about artists selecting their own lives, and obviously artists were able to manage their own image in the work they created. but only up to a certain point. One artist, however, who did a very good job of curating his own life was Albrecht Dürer. that was due in part to his very astute use of print as a tool for self-promotion. here is an artist who really assimilated his life to his art, where his art is the image of his creator, literally. Which brings us to the first book on his list.
joseph koerner’s book, the self-portrait moment in german renaissance art (1997), was a very important book for me as an art historian because it showed me how to think about portraiture not only in terms of who was portrayed, but also how the artistic process works and what allows the artist to make a portrait. There is a drawing of six pillows that Dürer makes on the back (or back) of one of his earliest self-portraits now at the Met. Koerner asks us to reflect: did the artist approach his own face in the same highly objective way as the pillows? there is something wonderful about that moment when the artist uses his own body as an object, in a world of objects, as a site to study and a form to master. What I took to heart from Koerner’s book is the fine line between interiority and exteriority: how the artist takes the idea from his mind and transcribes it through his hand onto the sheet of paper. that becomes a somewhat existential phenomenon when that object turns out to be yourself. so where do insides and outsides begin and end?
dürer was a very shy artist. he constantly signed prints, watercolors and paintings of his with the monogram ‘announcement’ of his. he has portrayed himself in numerous self-portraits, and they are always very talkative self-portraits. There is often an inscription identifying him as Albrecht Dürer, so that later generations will not lose memory of his facial identity. as a hashtag or a status update on social networks, the dürer inscription will tell us that this is albrecht dürer, who is a german artist, who painted himself in 1484, 1493, 1497, 1500, 1506, 1508 , 1511, etc.
“dürer, without a doubt, was one of the first artists who really understood the potential power that artists have, as image-makers, to create that lasting image for themselves”
in the famous self-portrait, which is on the cover of koerner’s book, you have the monogram on the left, then you have dürer’s face, and then you have an inscription on the right announcing his name. there’s this remarkable triple dürer inscription, a “trinity” if you will, and the self-portrait becomes a very curated and self-aware affair. Sometimes Dürer appears in the background of his own paintings, as Hitchcock would appear in his own films, but he will almost always carry a sign or plaque identifying him for future viewers. that sense of speaking to posterity is very important in the renaissance. The Italian poet Petrarca wrote a “letter to posterity”, addressed to the future with this understanding of his fame as something that would live beyond himself. Dürer, without a doubt, was one of the first artists who really understood the potential power that artists, as image-makers, have to create that lasting image for themselves.
The image on Koerner’s book cover is arguably Dürer’s most famous work, and many readers would immediately recognize it as a familiar face, though some might think it is an image of Christ rather than a Northern Renaissance from germany painter.
People often misunderstand their self-identification with Christ as a form of artistic arrogance. On the one hand, there are all the earthly trappings, like the fur collar she’s wearing, all the elegant worldly trappings she can’t help but want to show off. on the other hand, there is also this calm and confessional mood. invokes the well-known classic adage nosce te ipsum (or know yourself). Therefore, it can be considered as a visual confession about self-knowledge and the truth before God. For Dürer, deeply Christian and a man of the coming reform, the imitation of Christ was a gesture of piety. it is a very intimate portrait, accentuated by the darkness of the background and the frontality of his pose. it reads like a man looking in the mirror at the image that stares back at him and pondering who he appears to be as opposed to who he wants to be, the ideal virtuous self he hopes to find in the features of his face. Dürer’s direct gaze is directed at three unknowns: God, his own reflection of him in the mirror, and the future viewer of the painting.
Stoichita, another of the writers you have selected, writes about the self-conscious image (1993), and that is undoubtedly what many of Dürer’s portraits represent.
perhaps we could think about book covers for a moment because the image in the first edition of stoichita’s self-aware image is rembrandt’s “the artist in the studio”. We are all familiar with Rembrandt’s incredibly searching self-portraits painted at various points in his life. But what I find so interesting about the painting in Stoichita’s book is that art historians sometimes identify it as a self-portrait and other times simply refer to it as “the artist in the studio.” this is very different from an ‘autonomous’ self-portrait, which focuses on the identity of the artist. For example, Stoichita refers to Dürer’s many cameo appearances in his own paintings, such as The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, as a “self-portrait as a visitor.” we know he is Dürer because he identifies as such and because he resembles the same face we find in his self-portraits. but with “the artist in the studio”, stoichita pushes us to think of painting as a site of self-awareness, where painting almost becomes a form and forum for visual philosophy. and so, in the image of rembrandt, even if the man in that painting is not an actual portrait of rembrandt, it is nevertheless a portrait of the process that rembrandt went through like any other artist to paint something. it becomes a portrait of the artistic self in action, rather than a self-portrait of rembrandt’s face.
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what is also happening both in the example of dürer and in that of other artists that stoichita talks about is a time of changing technologies. With Dürer, it is the introduction of engravings, which then leads to the spread of thoughts, ideas, and images in the early decades of the sixteenth century and, most crucially, during the Protestant Reformation. while, according to the self-conscious image, we witness the arrival of the portable canvas in the second half of the sixteenth century, an object that can be taken out of its original context and traveled to new ones, and that can speak for the artist in absence. the last section of stoichita on artists is influenced by the ideas and writings of descartes and montaigne, for example, which represents a different philosophical moment that is perhaps the eventuality or continuation of some of the ideas put forward earlier by thinkers like Erasmus, Calvin, Luther and, of course, an artist like Dürer.
“art was a form of visual philosophy written with brushes and chisels instead of pen and ink”
what’s inspiring about koerner and stoichita is that both authors are thinking about how changes and changes in the history of ideas coincide at a certain moment with changes in technology, and how that precipitates a modern form of portraiture that makes new questions. about the meaning of life: what is it to be a self, what is it to be here, what is it to be a mortal subject subject to time and what is an image, that is, what can it do? Historians of ideas have long traced the path from the confessions of Augustine to the confessions of Rousseau. Even at the time of Descartes, the notion of individuality was very tense; the idea of ”I” was closer to the modern notion of egoism than to more positive concepts such as self-sufficiency. “I think, therefore I am” is a phrase loaded with doubt and anxiety. artists also participated in these debates; art was a form of visual philosophy written with brushes and chisels rather than pen and ink.
Perhaps the sequel to this renaissance moment of self-awareness and self-design is our own image-obsessed culture. changes in the history of ideas, as you say, often coincide with or are precipitated by changes in technology. photography presents us with a range of very similar problems about the self and its representation. susan sontag goes so far as to say that in our time we almost prefer photographs to the real, that our modern culture is about producing and consuming images.
sontag’s lesson is that being photographed gives us the feeling of being real and also of existing. the rise of the selfie is eloquent testimony to how people continue to see themselves and how personal stories are now constructed primarily through the authority of the image. there’s a kind of weird moment where a memory is hard to confirm or corroborate if there’s no image to attest that you were here or there or with this or that person at a certain time and day, that says a lot about popularity from social networking sites like instagram, which are based on images. Sontag had such a prescient way of seeing the powers of photography when he came out on photography in 1977. Forty years ago!
the preference for the photo to the real thing is something that we find now perhaps more than ever. people don’t tell you stories as often as they used to, but instead pull out their phone and show you a photograph of the experience. sometimes that is a peculiar phenomenon because the image is then capable of determining the story that the person tells. there are all sorts of incidental details, like the length of a hem, the color of the sky, the pattern on a tea set, or the make of a car, that we don’t necessarily remember about lived experiences because they pass us by. by. but in a photograph, we can see and therefore remember oh so-and-so was there, he was wearing that necklace, he was coming with that man, he ate too much cake, etc.
“people don’t tell you stories as often anymore, instead they pull out their phone and show you a picture of the experience”
sontag and the barthes generation thought of photography as a kind of new medium. I’m simplifying a bit here as the photograph itself was over 100 years old by then. but thinking about it critically as art, as a medium with its own specificities, was not fully articulated, at least not in the way it has been so deeply theorized today. writing philosophically about photography and the power of that specific medium was still exploratory when they were writing in the 1970s and 1980s. this experimental critical spirit reminds me of things that artists of earlier periods were trying to do in their own work and with the media they had at your service. Obviously they could not have foreseen the eventuality of photography, but for someone like the sixteenth-century painter Sofonisba Anguissola, each self-portrait was in a way a kind of desire to capture and preserve that instance, that lived moment of her life, as an image. . obviously not through the same technological means as a photograph, but the underlying philosophical or existential desire was there. furthermore, even though the writings of sontag and barthes focus on photography, they have the potential to help us think differently about concerns (philosophical, existential, and otherwise) than artists of a different era, working on a different medium, they might have faced in their life. own imaging practices. sontag is also such a beautiful writer. I read about photography when I was a freshman in college and it continues to be a huge inspiration in my own work.
If the freeze frame or selfie is visual evidence that we’re here now, the photograph of course also denotes that we won’t be here for long, in the grand scheme of things. In Camera Lucida (1980), Barthes seems to regard each photograph as a memento mori and a memorial. I guess it’s poetic that this book was his farewell publication. it really reads more like a memoir than an academic treatise.
despite the deep admiration for the sontag I just expressed, now that you mention barthes, I must confess that camera lucida is perhaps my favorite book on art. Barthes’s identification of the ça-a-été (or ‘what-has-been’) as the essence of photography and his theorization of the punctum or accidental detail are two central ideas I return to again and again.
There is something so surprising about camera lucida, probably because it is so subjective and fragmentary; it feels like we’ve been invited into the author’s innermost train of thought. it was not a particularly well-received book when it came out precisely because it was considered too sentimental. there was too much pathos. he speaks in a confessional manner that avant-garde modernism wholeheartedly rejected. camera lucida is not the semiotic barthes of the “photographic message” but the most vulnerable barthes of a lover’s discourse. there’s this sense of wounded distraction and absorption that comes back to haunt the discussion.
but in the end, however, it offered us that lasting reflection on the difference between the moving image – the self captured in a photograph or the presence of a person captured in a photograph – versus the deep self that one is left with when one remains alone in lonely intimacy. In this sense, we could even say that it shares certain similarities with Dürer’s self-portrait. but it is also much more than that. At the time of writing, Barthes was still doing the work of mourning the death of his mother. Her thoughts about photography, memory and portraiture of her are framed by that melancholic sense of remembering her mother not only by looking at images -photographs- of her but also through a process of writing about those images. there is that evocative passage when she finds a photograph of his mother before he was born and writes “I could read my non-existence in the clothes my mother had worn before she could remember.” the portrait functions as a memento mori, to be sure, but it also functions as a portal to another historical moment, one that happened before us, but also has the power to survive beyond us.
When I look at portraits, I always have that sinking feeling: this person existed and now I’m looking at them. Barthes says this at the beginning of the camera lucida when she comes across the photograph of Napoleon’s brother and suddenly realizes that “I am looking at eyes that looked at the emperor.” Even with personal photographs of an unknown person, there is a sense that someone looked at that face, possibly with some affection, and took this photograph to preserve a memory of that individual, and that somehow that portrait has survived and found its way into life. way to us.
“one day, probably sooner than we anticipated, facetime, skype, and snapchat will seem extremely antiquated”
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I think painting, sculpture and even architecture can also create that for viewers. photography is something that we are very used to now as part of our lives, but if you think about oil painting, it was also once a new medium, once a new technology in the 15th century. all those translucent glazes reflected light and color in a way that made the image look much more alive and real than it had before with tempera or fresco. portraits rendered in oil paint were, for Renaissance viewers, the closest thing to an indexed stamp of the subject’s body that they could have imagined within the technological means available to them at the time. one of the important things to remember is that each historical moment has its new technology that will later become obsolete. someday, probably sooner than we anticipated, facetime, skype, and snapchat will seem extremely old-fashioned, but for now they are what we feel modern about.
it is so interesting to think as a historian about the writing of sontag and barthes in the late seventies, reflecting on the power of the image to be philosophical and to change the world and the way we think. the sontag allows photography to stop what it so beautifully coins as “the relentless melting of time”, while for barthes the process of wearing down begins from the moment the shutter is released. from that instance, everything becomes micro instances of loss. so you have a different drive behind the two authors, and yet they both have this way of thinking about the pathos of the image in ways that nonetheless allow for emotion and feeling in an art story.
Many renaissance artists were considered conjurers for the way they could draw a likeness, or even bring back the dead through the vividness of their portraits, granting their sitters a kind of immortality. another form of immortality is to become a rock and roll icon. Sometimes reading just for kids feels like looking at a collection of Patti Smith Polaroids: poetic glimpses of an ephemeral reality. it also reads like a 1970s New York version of artists’ lives, in which she has this pantheon of saints, people she’s very devoted to, all of whom are artists. in her memoir, the city, the time and the place, everything shines with this sense that she is part of this great trajectory: that she and her circle are connected to a lineage of great artists that came before.
yes, rock star as artist and artist as rock star! What I found so moving about this book is that it links the crucial elements of friendship and art with survival. the artwork stands as a memory of friendship, but also becomes itself a “friend” who outlives the people whose friendship it was preserving. so if you think back to that iconic portrait of patti smith by mapplethorpe, long after patti smith is gone, and long after we’re all gone, that portrait will continue to attest to the friendship shared between those two ‘kids’ in that moment. , on that day, when it was taken. And for generations and even centuries to come, every time someone looks at Mapplethorpe Smith’s portrait, the portrait will conjure up those people, reinstating both the moment of friendship and the moment of making that portrait.
“the work of art stands as a memory of a friendship”
patti smith’s book is wonderful because it is also a portrait of a particular new york that no longer exists. In a way, all the eccentric, ambitious, crazy, and unique characters the reader finds within the children can be compared to the various personalities in the lives of Vasari’s artists. Vasari writes the first edition in the 1550s, at a time when the art seemed to have reached its pinnacle and was perceived as in decline. i often think of that generation of artists in rome in the 1540s as being comparable to the one in new york in the 1970s. in 1527 rome is sacked and there is a whole generation of artists who have little work because the patrons are gone and there is little money left for big projects. In the 1540s, work begins to flow again, but Rome is not the artistic capital it was under Julius II during the High Renaissance. there’s this whole city full of artistic hopefuls who really have to rely on each other for friendship, guidance and work too. This is well reflected in Federico Zuccaro’s set of drawings of his older brother’s trip to Rome in the 1540s. These are now in the J. paul getty museum and capture, like patti smith’s newborn children, a portrait of a moment in history where there is extreme poverty and optimism, where art and friendship mitigate very real social and economic dangers.
“I often think that that generation of artists in Rome in the 1540s is comparable to New York in the 1970s”
smith also chronicles the uneasy relationship between artistic fame and artistic virtue. I think at one point she says about mapplethorpe “we were both praying to save robert’s soul, he to sell it and me to save it”. money and art sometimes mix very badly. you can also draw that conclusion by reading the lives of vasari artists. there is a lot of criticism, for example, of sebastiano del piombo, a venetian painter who comes to rome and gets this comfortable papal position, and then decides that he doesn’t want to paint anymore. he just wants to live a life of comfort. vasari is very, very critical of that. so again you have these contrasting positions and attitudes that different artists take towards the dream of becoming a famous artist. There is something so poignant about the way friendship and survival are somehow deposited in a work of art, be it a photograph, a painting, or, in the case of Patti Smith, a very moving memoir.
there’s a wonderful quote from the book: “robert was worried about how to do photography, and i was worried about how to be photography.”
yes. a portrait is a pact between the artist and the portrayed. it is a trust. for people who love to be photographed, that’s not a problem. I myself don’t like being photographed because, well, it’s that feeling of having to cohabit with this other self that represents me in the world. in this sense, the portrait is a very tense activity. the main betrayal that happens in portraiture, even now with the instant editing processes of digital photography, happens at that moment when you hold your breath before taking the picture and think to yourself, okay, I hope I look good on the picture. photography and maybe I even look better in the photo than I actually do in real life. Representation trumps reality! and I think that is also true for painted portraits. there’s always the desire to be a little more idealized in the portrait than in real life because of course the portrait will stand as a stand-in when you’re no longer there. and you don’t want to be remembered as a bum in sweatpants with no makeup. you want to be standing there with your best face looking forward, radiant and eternally young. as Dürer in his self-portrait. you want to be remembered as a superhero version of yourself.
or be immortalized by someone like robert mapplethorpe.
absolutely. the portrait of patti smith in mapplethorpe photography is one of the icons of casual cool. she couldn’t have wished for anything better. and that goes back to the theme of friendship and trust as well because, and this is especially true of artist portraits, for one artist to be portrayed by another is an act of trust. for example, michelangelo hated portraiture, so for him to allow himself to be photographed by daniele da volterra, who was his dear friend, was a true sign of friendship. becoming a subject is a small form of death in a way, especially for people who aren’t particularly fond of being made into images. the life of artists, therefore, is also about a life lived as images, for better and for worse.
perhaps all of us, in this day and age, should be a little more circumspect about the freedom with which images of ourselves circulate.
I know. i once found pictures of other people on google who were also called maria loh but they weren’t me and i was really pleased because i thought well maybe people think those other maria lohs are me and the real me (whoever that is ) can stay under the radar…in my sweatpants.
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