PORTRAIT OF REENACTMENT

The unknown lady below sat for this luminous portrait in the middle of the fifteenth century. Her cone shaped henin is fastened with a velvet loop beneath her chin and pushed back to reveal the high, plucked forehead so much admired in her time. Aloof and tranquil, she gazes obliquely at her painter, the Flemish master Petrus Christus. The painting is entitled ”Portrait of a Young Girl”. Modern portrait painting is a lot similar and different as well. Still, it involves the age-old contest between artist and sitter.

Petrus Christus. ''The surface has the brilliance of porcelain and the purity of the overall effect looks forward to Vermeer. The lively expression of the girl and her oblique glance, suggesting that something or someone just outside the frame has caught her attention, contrasts with the frontal composition.''

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was the most brilliant portrait painter of his day. Napoleon sat for him; so did the Duke of Orleans and the intellectual elite of Italy and France. But his agony over these commissions was famous. An apocryphal story is told about a distinguished editor, Monsieur Bertin, whose sessions before the master had dragged on for months. Finally, Ingres slammed down his crayon, announcing that he washed his hands of the whole business. ”Quoi” croaked Bertin, clapping his hammy hands to his knees in exasperation. ”Tiens!” cried the artist, ”The pose at last!” And thereupon he finished the picture, one of his greatest, in no time at all.

The question that beset Ingres is at the very heart of modern portraiture. What is likeness, they ask, and how can it be found? if it is only the face, then any educated painter can set it down.Ingres threw away hundreds of respectable sketches en route to the last. Upon technical know how, pure and simple, a quite lucrative modern portrait industry is built.

Ingres, Monsieur Bertin, 1832.

But if likeness includes the breath of life, and all the vaporous ghosts which modern psychology has flushed out; if it includes even the face of a nation and an epoch, then something more than technique is called for. These are artists who share very little with commercial portraitists. Classical portraiture depended on an amiable kind of truce between the artist and his sitter. The subject refrained from making finicky demands, and the painter agreed that his first job was to present the facts. He squinted along his brush to size up the body, mixed and remixed colors to match the precise hue of the eyes. Then, once he had set down a skeleton of reality, he was more or less free to make his own comments, as Goya did with his devastating Spanish portraits.

But when classical principles break down, the confusion about likeness can erupt. Michelangelo, as the Rnaissance world was crumbling, scornfully turned his back on portraiture. Reproached for not making his Medici tomb figures into correct likeness, he scoffed that in a century no one would know the difference. Three hundred years later, Ingres trumpeted a new era of revolution. All his brilliant classical draftsmanship only helped him along the way. The ”moment juste” had to be pounced upon, lie an enemy agent.

Salvador Dali, 1958. Portrait of Chester Dale, one of America's foremost art collectors.

The French Revolution had sapped classical portraiture of its lifeblood of rich, rather narcissistic noblemen with time on their hands. Another blow to the art was given, only five years after Ingres had painted Bertin, by the invention of the Daguerreotype process. The camera quickly became the rage of the nineteenth-century. It was ingratiatingly cheap and quick, and in its tricky kind of truth, a revelation. Delacroix, a bitter enemy of Ingres’ classicism , said that beside a photograph of the naked human body even a raphael looked out of kilter.

Suddenly, artists realized that no brush could copy a true likeness. The very eye of the painter lied to him; his heart swerved his brush. This shocking insight was like a reef on which the art of portraiture broke into pieces. At first, even the conventional portrait industry foundered. In the New World, country limners and ”fancy painters” lost their trade to the photographers. In Europe, there were soon no more customers for those fastidious miniatures on ivory or wood that had been family heirloms since the time of Elizabeth I.

Pietro Annigioni. Portrait of Salvatore Ferragamo