The+Portrait.+Introduction


 * The Portrait **

There must be dozens, no hundreds of pictures of you, made by your parents and siblings, friends and class mates. There you are, a baby in the craddle, there you’re going to school for the first time, that must be you jumping off a chair, and this one shows the family on holiday near the sea, that one is is you on top of the bronze lion in front of a statute (whose is it, anyway?). You have given away or sent your photos to your friends and family. You, in turn, own a whole stack of pictures of your friends and relatives, stuck away in an album, or, more likely nowadays, saved on a hard disk. There’s your thumbnail portrait on your e-mail messages, on your buddy chatlist, on your friends’ mobile phone screen… your portraits are everywhere, but so are everyone else’s.

This was not always so. Photography, after all, is not even two centuries old. Until the advent of the small and cheap Kodak box camera at the end of the nineteenth century it remained a complicated procedure, best left to professional photographers. Most photos by far show people, particular people, acquaintances and relatives usually. And they can be recognized: ‘that’s you waving from the car window. And isn’t that your sister behind you?’ Recognizing people and being recognized in pictures is of the essence. ‘That does not look like you at all’ (but apparently she can still see it’s you), and: ‘Don’t look at this one, I look positively afwul here’. So, most photos are portraits, full length, half size, close up. They show an individual the way he or she ‘really’ looks. Photos are a realistic likeness of an identifiable person, an individual, different from everyone else. In this respect, photography continues a very old tradition: portraiture, the art of making look-alike portraits, usually painted on a linen canvas (or carved in stone, cast in bronze – a ‘bust’ – or drawn with an ink pen or lead pencil). But such a hand-made portrait was a costly affair: it took a skilled draftsman a long time and expensive materials. The subject had to sit for hours, often for several sessions. That way, you don’t get the action pictures that you like to shoot with your mobile phone camera. On the contrary, people stood or sat in a quite rigid posture, which conveyed their stature in life, they donned their most precious clothes (silk and gold embroidery) to display their wealth, they wore caps and robes indicating they were learned men or high clergy, or they posed with a sword (and quite often a hunting dog) as noblemen who were warriors and hunters. The women were portrayed in precious attire, with an elaborate hairdo and spectacular hats and dresses, often with their children, lovingly, or next to their husband, with adoration. But in many respects, these portraits were similar to modern pictures: they were meant to convey the likeness of the models, their individual traits, their place in society, and, in accomplished paintings, a hint of their character and personality. These portrait paintings became wide-spread in the 14th century. Of course, there were earlier examples: the bronze busts from Roman antiquity, for example, or the Greek and Russian icons with religious subjects. The first portrait painters worked in the cities of Flanders and Northern Italy. They painted princes and noblemen, scholars and ecclesiastics, and wealthy entrepreneurs or succesful warriors. As these painted portraits became more popular, more and more people commissioned them, ‘even tailors and butchers’ ordered their likeness painted on linen. The portraits of very famous people were copied as etchings or founded as medals and circulated in large numbers all over Europe. Thus, the likeness of the great scholar and humanist from Rotterdam, Desiderius Erasmus (after paintings by Holbein, Metsys and Dürer) could be found in homes all over the continent.. Wealthy burghers had medals made with their portrait to hand out among relatives and friends. Not only the portraits, on linen, in bronze or as engravings travelled wide and far across Europe, so did the painters. The Flemish painter Jan van Eyck travelled to Lisbon with a delegation from Phillip the Good, King of Spain. The Italian painter Gentile Bellini went to Istanbul (In 1479) at the request of sultan Mehmet II to have his portrait painted. The Estonian artist Michael Sittow studied with the Germnan born painter Hans Memmling in Bruges, Flanders, and worked at the courts of Spain, Burgundy, England,/??/ Catholic of Spain and Margaret of Austria (catalogo engl transl 443). Philip the Good even sent his portrait to the emperor of China (but it somehow never got further than Mexico) (cat 443). Nubile princes commissioned a painting of their royal fiancé at some faraway court (and sometimes were quite angry once they met her in person and she did not turn out as pretty as the portrait had suggested). In fact, portraits were routinely embellished quite a bit: we would say that they were being ‘photoshopped’. Then as now, the models wanted to be portrayed in the most flattering way and painters had to find a compromise between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’. Realism conveyed the illusion of real life likeness to a specific, individual person (but, of course, it was an artefact done on a flat surface with oil paint, ink or pencil and the painter had to change many real features in order to make the portrait look real). Artists even strove to suggest not only the outward appearance of their model, but also the ‘inner life’, the personality, the character traits (one might call this ‘psychological realism’). Idealism, on the other hand, traditionally made the portrayed person stand for an ‘idea’: courage, fidelity or piety, for example; or for the model’s stature in life, such as the sovereignty of kings, the authority of prelates, the noble descent of aristocracts; or it was meant to remind the viewer of God’s commandments, the inevitability of death, the joys of youth and fertility, or the temptations of sin. Realism in portrait painting was a rather new approach to the arts and it also expressed a change in mentality that spread across Europe at the time: ‘individualism’, the notion that all human beings are different, have unique characteristics of their own and that this uniqueness is something to cherish rather than hide. This European individualism has only increased in the course of centuries, bringing individual liberties and individual rights, but also egotism and self-absorption. But what about the pictures that you and your friends are making? Would you say they are intended to portray individual persons with their unique characteristics, that they are ‘individualist’ pictures in the European tradition?Are there pictures of your grand parents, or even your great grand parents in your house, photographs, or even paintings?

Let’s go to the museum in your area and see what portraits are displayed there. Who were the models? And where did they come from? Who were the painters and where did they come from, where did they learn their trade? How and when did portrait painting come to your area? Did a local student travel abroad to study with a great artist, or did a foreign painter come and visit your area? At the invitation of a prince or maybe a wealthy patron? In brief: how was your area connected to the rest of Europe through portrait painting? How were the painters connected to wealthy patrons and to other artists that taught them their art? How did the threads run that together made up the great fabric of European portrait painting?