Face values

CULTURE SHOCK:What do portraits tell us about their subjects? And what do they tell us about the societies that produced them? A breathtaking exhibition of Renaissance art in New York showcases a revealing artistic form

TAKE AWAY HIS HAT and his gorgeously flowery and bejewelled tunic and just look at his face. The floppy fringe and long, inward-curling waves of light hair would place him in the era of high psychedelia – at Woodstock, perhaps. But these are details. What marks him as one of us, a modern man, is the way he presents himself to the viewer. His big oval eyes look straight into ours, confidently and a little quizzically. His face is strong and handsome, but the light reveals its imperfections casually and without apology: the dark bags under his right eye; the crinkles in his full, sensual lips. He seems, in our terms, comfortable in his skin, happy to be seen as he is. We might even find him in one of our photograph albums, as one of our earlier selves.

It doesn’t matter all that much that he’s Francesco Gonzaga, an Italian nobleman, drawn by the great Andrea Mantegna in the 1490s. That we should recognise him so easily as an individual, a vibrantly real self, seems obvious. That is what portraits do, and our world is saturated with them. This is also what we do, all the time, when someone takes our picture: we present ourselves full-on, trusting implicitly in the individuality of our features.

But flip back just half a century before Mantegna did this drawing and you can find something utterly different. Consider a work that's considered seminal in the development of Italian portraiture: Filippo Lippi's Portrait of a Woman and a Man at a Casement, from around 1440. It is so different that it makes you wonder whether the same word, portrait, should be applied to both pictures. And it's not because Lippi's work is old and traditional.

On the contrary, it is startlingly innovative: the first double portrait, the first to place a woman in a (notional) domestic interior, the first to have a landscape in the background. But this piece of 15th-century avant garde seems a world away from us, while Francesco Gonzaga seems close.

Why? Because the two people in Lippi’s picture, and especially the woman who is the more prominent, look more like sculptures. The painter could have been realistic: he lavishes vibrant detail on her clothes and headgear. We feel we could touch the pearl-and-gold embroidery on her ermine sleeve. But her face is a mask, utterly smooth and untroubled by expressions, wrinkles, blemishes, laughter lines – indeed by anything human. It is architectural, the arc of the forehead aligned to the curve of the jaw. Above all, it is seen in profile. She does not present herself to us full on – or, indeed, at all.

And this is not because she is a woman or a private citizen. There are lots of images like this of powerful, self-conscious men, who were actually in the business of presenting themselves to the public. Around the same time as Lippi made his painting, the ruler of Ferrara, Leonello d’Este, who was enormously interested in the way he was seen, commissioned a competition between two of the star painters of the Renaissance, Jacopo Bellini and Pisanello (Antonio di Puccio Pisano), to see who could portray him best. Pisanello’s portrait shares much with Lippi’s. Leonello is seen in profile, looking into the distance. Again, there is much more detail in the clothes – a velvet and gold doublet trimmed with green and white and studded with big pearls – than in the face, which has the same impassive, sculptural qualities.

In this case, we can get some sense of just how much the painter has chosen to stylise the ruler’s features. Pisanello also did a series of medals with Leonello’s face on them. The images are not very different – a telling fact in itself that a painted portrait should look so like a metallic cast – but we can see that the painting is even more stylised. His nose has been shortened, his brow made less sloping, his jaw less heavy. The portrait, in other words, is very carefully and deliberately unlifelike.

These images of are part of the sensationally opulent show The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini,at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until next weekend. It is one of those once-in-a-lifetime surveys, gathering together 160 paintings and sculpture from a breathtaking variety of sources, including the very best collections in the US, Germany, France, Italy and the UK. (The National Gallery of Ireland contributed the fabulous Mantegna drawing with which we began, which was displayed in an earlier version of the exhibition in Berlin.) As a survey of a period of art it is stunning. But it is also something else: a kind of drama. It shows, with thrilling clarity, the sudden emergence of something that is so much a part of our culture: the visual presentation of the individual self.

ONE OF THE QUESTIONS it prompts is why something we take for granted, the direct gaze of a Francesco Gonzaga, should be so revolutionary. Or, from our perspective, why previous portraits look so strange and stylised. Why did it take so long for eyes to look out at us from a picture? In one sense, what we see with Pisanello’s highly sculptural portrait of Leonello is actually not all that unfamiliar to us. Some of what’s going on in it does indeed connect with something we recognise today. It is not that different from the airbrushing of images of models or movie stars in celebrity magazines. People with power want to look good – or at least not look too bad.

Consider this rough guide to Renaissance slimming techniques: the ruler of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, was a very powerful man. He was also a very fat and intensely ugly man, so overweight that he could not walk unaided. The future Pope Pius II met him and described him as “hugely obese with a deformed frightening face and large restless eyes”. Visconti was deeply sensitive about his appearance, but his position demanded that he project an image of himself. The solution to this dilemma lay with Pisanello – the only painter he allowed to make his portrait.

In the exhibition, there are two of Pisanello’s images of Visconti, both from the early 1440s. They are almost exactly the same. In one, on a bronze medal, he is seen in profile, looking to the right. The artist shows him with a tall, elaborate hat on his head, placed so as to distract from his bull-like bonce. His nose is finely etched and his visible eye is given a nobly determined stare. But his triple chin is gently suggested and there is a roll of fat at his neck – much reduced, perhaps, but visible nonetheless. The compromise is superbly achieved: Visconti’s bulk is turned to potency, his frightening face transformed into a formidable effigy. Yet there is just enough of his defining feature – his obesity – to make the portrait convincing.

But the second portrait, made through the subtler medium of charcoal and chalk on paper, is even more miraculous. All the essentials of the image are the same – the hat, the pose, the piercing eye – but some of the details have been more exquisitely refined. The nose is made a little longer, so that the face seems that bit less bulky. The chin is just a little tighter. The roll of fat at the back of the neck is gone. Visconti doesn’t really look obese, just solid and stately.

The genius lies in the subtle editing of the face. If you knew the image of the ruler from the bronze medal, you would immediately recognise him in the drawing. The changes are subtle, the lie insidious. Visconti is still able to feel that the artist has shown him as he is. Pisanello is still capable of being regarded as a great realist. (A contemporary poem praises him as one who “portrays a man in such a fashion that he lacks not even life, since he appears lively and feeling”.) But the second “portrait” is still a double illusion, a refinement of an image that is itself a fiction.

So this is one of the things that’s going on. The profile image is easier to manipulate to flattering effect than the more revealing full-on image.

It also harks back, in true Renaissance style, to classical precedent: Roman emperors looked like this on coins. The combination of these two factors endures today: look at the portrait of Queen Elizabeth on a British coin.

But there is a gulf between the head of the queen on a coin or a stamp and even the most flattering portrait of her to be hung in a gallery.

THE EXTRAORDINARY THING is that, over the course of about 50 years in the second half of the 15th century, the ways of presenting the human face changed so dramatically into something that seems to us a natural representation of individual humanity. How did it happen? One factor is that the whole business of painting individual portraits is itself new, so even what look to us like the old-style images can be seen as experiments in representation. For 1,000 years before the 15th century the purpose-made individual portrait from life barely existed in Europe. It was the new wealth of rulers, and their humanistic desire for eternal fame, that fuelled the demand for medals, busts and, eventually, painted portraits.

Italian artists, going where the Flemish artists had already gone, became incredibly skilled at meeting these demands, developing a coded visual language in which images of the face carry social, political and cultural meanings. But you can see them gradually go farther. There’s no one-off leap from these codified images to modern portraiture. Instead, we get images that seem to look both ways at once: backwards to the highly formalised style and forwards to a vivid humanity.

The great examples on display in New York are Botticelli’s three portraits of Giuliano de Medici, who was assassinated in 1478. They are not, in our sense, portraits at all: they were made shortly after Giuliano’s death, as acts of commemoration. But they hover hauntingly between death and life, between the frozen quality of a death mask and the revivifying act of bringing the subject back to life through art. Giuliano is seen in profile but half turned towards us: not yet full-on but moving in that direction. His eyes, likewise, are half-open, not yet looking out at us but not looking off to the side either. Rather, they look downwards into some mysterious interior space.

From this haunted halfway house it is a shorter distance to the kind of vividness that we recognise in Mantegna's Francesco Gonzaga, 4th Marquese of Mantua. Or to perhaps the most astonishing painting in the show, Domenico Ghirlandaio's Portrait of an Old Man and a Boy, from around 1490. The old man sits at a window, gazing tenderly at a young boy, presumably his grandson, who gazes back into his eyes. The image is warm, intimate, human, its humanity actually enhanced by its embrace of some ordinary ugliness, in the burgeoning shape of the man's deformed nose. Here, beauty is found not in classical perfection but in tenderness.

What makes the painting all the more startling is that when it was made, the old man was already dead; Ghirlandaio sketched his corpse on his death bed. Perhaps, after all, the beginning of humane portraiture lies not so much in being lifelike as in the deep desire to conquer death.