Fayum portraits

If you haven't seen the latest issue of Smithsonian magazine (and really, how many people do get this rather light-weight but always interesting magazine of our own national museums in DC?), then you might not know about fayum portraits, those absolutely exquisite head portraits produced upon a person's death and fixed onto their coffin, or into their mummy wrappings.

See what a small section it is!

I would encourage you to go to the Smithsonian website and look at more examples, or if in New York City go to The Met where the young boy show in the middle above is currently on display in Gallery 38. They are also on display at the Louvre, British Museum and the small and often neglected Brooklyn Museum has one too!

The portraits seem to be largely produced in the 3rd Century AD in Egypt's Fayum region (see map to the left) and blend Greco-Roman portraiture style into their own technique of using beeswax and pigment. Analyses of the pieces have revealed the use of a plant-derived red pigment used for much of the clothing and a combination of a lead white and a blue pigment to create the striking eyes. Gold leaf can also be seen in the portrait above on the far right.

Having just seen the Renaissance portraiture show at the Met, I am amazed at how striking these portraits are. We tend to think of the Renaissance as the time of high-art. This is reasonable given some of the innovations (perspective, anatomy studies), the political support for the arts by the Church (Sistine Chapel) and families (the Medici), as well as the constant energy of the artists (Michelangelo, Botticelli). Nevertheless, these portraits remind us that powerful artistry is present even when least suspected.

Renaissance Portraiture

At the end of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini show there is a marble head by Antonio Rizzo of the Doge Christoforo Moro that is one of the most striking works of art I have seen since I saw the Chardin pastel of an old man sleeping in their pastel show last summer. I wish I knew more about marble to explain why this marble is slightly yellow and yet to perfect effect for this creased, aged face. Rizzo, who was utterly unfamiliar to me before, uses the natural lines of the stone to produce the lifelines in the face of the Doge. I would return to the show just to spend more time looking at this one head, which was once attached to the rest of a statue of the Doge, kneeling at one of the three altars of S. Marco that Rizzo was commissioned by the Doge to produce.

The show is extensive and for the casual viewer so many portraits can seem a bit repetitive, but that is all the more reason to wander, moving towards any one that strikes your eye. The first room includes several women by Botticelli, which I had expected and was the reason that I intended to see the show. Botticelli's Zipporah is the reason that Swann, in Proust's Swann in Love, becomes enamored of Odette de Crecy. The way she holds her head bring Swann into immediate contact with the blond beauties of Botticelli's pre-Savonarola days. Though we are all familiar with Birth of Venus, I wanted to familiarize myself with more of his work to imprint the style of his women which could then inform my reading of Swann's desire. As Venus has no shoulders, neither do any of these other women, is one among a number of other trite facts that I discovered in looking at his ladies.

For women, beauty was a sign of virtue and the pressure was thus great to be exquisite. The ladies are largely painted in profile, boxed by walls and ceiling, or a window, within the frame. It gives an extraordinary sense of constraint that given the absolute stillness of all these portraits begins to feel a bit claustrophobic. The men had no need of such beauty though their vanity also had them request artists to minimize their flaws, according to a few of the placards about particular paintings. How they know this remains unclear to me, but we shall assume/hope that this is not sheer fabrication. Such concerns about physical representation for posterity seems likely after all.

A 1475 portrait of an unknown man believed to be by Antonio Crevalcore struck my eye precisely because of its ornate details, including a red internal frame with colored, marbled sections in each half section, an utterly phony background scene, a book and a gold ring with a red stone that looks just like one I have. The painting was so rich in ornament that it naturally stood out in contrast to the other more staid portraits of important men looking serious with monotone backgrounds. My companion mentioned that she rather missed among these the type of portrait that displays some secret feature or characteristic of the sitter. Indeed they were all diligent commission portraits by artists who well knew who was paying the bill. But, just then we rounded into another room where we discovered a painting of a very interesting looking man whom we discovered was the doctor Battista Fiero of the painter, Lorenza Costa. He has a knowing look in his eye, as well he might since he treated the painter for syphilis.

There are of course marvelous works by famous artists that are worthy of appreciation and study. There are paintings and drawings, medals and metalpoint (which I discovered I enjoy a great deal and more on that some day), but of course the whole thing is faces. So if you want a good look at the faces of the financiers, religious leaders, and aristocrats who made the Italian Renaissance the foundational period that influenced the modern world, this show is well worth a wander. And if you could care less about the history or the name-brand artists, then before the show closes on March 18, 2012 go stare at these men and women with Oscar Wilde in mind: "A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her fiction."

Initiations

This image is part of what made me go to back to school in order to study Proust. I learned as I proceeded that this image had absolutely nothing to do with the passage of Proust in which Botticelli is mentioned. But I got started because I thought it did.

Last week, I was reading the text again and laughed at the following passage. "And yet I should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of old papers," says Odette de Crecy in "Swann in Love" within Swann's Way by Proust. Of course, she has no desire to study because it is frightfully dull and the irony was too exquisite for me not to make a note of it. I started graduate school full of enthusiasm to study Proust and have found in the years since that I shall not study Proust (nor always be full of enthusiasm). But I started school because I thought I would.

Initiations point towards an end that they very often to do not succeed in attaining, not from failure but rather from an interest spawned by it. Today, I had a meeting with a woman I admire absolutely, completely, utterly, for her intelligence, her humor, her warmth...I do indeed find it impossible to understand that she is anything less than perfect, though knowing that she has children I can imagine that there must be some who conceive of her as less than I do. Responding to my questions and hopes, she suggested that I not try to focus or produce limitations yet. Perhaps for now, I might create a list of readings more loosely defined than I had been considering to date.

Her willingness to work with me initiates me into a field of study suggested by the Botticelli painting and then Proust but different in some very important ways. Her encouragement to avoid the cages of categories is the most important guidance she could offer at the beginning. Like the painting that started this process for me, I am only just rising from the waters, only just being born into this new land and I should walk forward with all the innocence available to love.

Picture Love

In Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Swann famously loves Odette de Crecy by seeing her as Jethro's Daughter in the Botticelli painting The Trials of Moses. Later, in Volume II, Marcel, the narrator, will likewise love Albertine through "those Michelangelo figures which are being swept away in a stationary and vertiginous whirlwind". These examples of love refracted through art reminded me a year or so ago of some of Barthes' writing on the imaginaire, the manner in which we superimpose our own imagining onto our thus selected desire and I wrote about it a little. Perhaps these works of art are indeed merely tropes, no different from other literary stylings, on which Proust could express his characters' love. How nice these flourishes remain, and how true to the grandiose impressions we have of our new loves.

Valentine's Day, despite how lucky I have been in love, has nonetheless generally made me uncomfortable and I find art an honest yet still distracting way of expressing or enjoying it. Last year, I went to The Tempest with my new love, my aunt and her partner, which solved the need to speak for several hours and allowed the rest of the evening to be focused on the play rather than this still uncertain relationship. Other years, I have largely tried to avoid the heart-shaped, chocolate-covered celebration, always unsuccessfully, not because I do not feel love for one or many, but rather because I am not sure how to express it on demand. I do not proclaim well. I am more spontaneous in my desire and appreciation, believing, as I do, that Love is truly important, fundamental even.

In Greek mythology, specifically remembering my recent reading of Hesiod, after Chaos the first creation is Eros. How this occurs Hesiod does not explain, but only after Eros do Gaia and Okeanous, and the others, appear. Eros remains an independently created entity, though one who produces progeny with some of those first created. Similarly, when Zeus overthrows the Titans, Aphrodite, rising from the castrated penis of Kronos, becomes the first personification of the previous abstracted deities. The rest of the Olympians then appear. Love is always the first in the new world.

Perhaps because there is something static in Love, a kind of ever presence, Love is difficult to describe. Lust moves us and so words more easily build on each other in an attempt to convey the passion, the way we 'fall' for someone, 'tumble' into bed together, 'stoke' the fires of desire. Love is simply there, present. Though Love may share traits with the other passions such as being inopportune, undeniable, there is something undefinable about it that is different from the others. Having started speaking of Proust, I must here intervene to say that both Swann and Marcel discover their own jealousy in coveting the women they desire, a jealousy that overwhelms and undermines any other feelings, including any fascimile of love they might have created for themselves. They each believe they love, but maintain desire through jealousy. Swann finds a picture of Botticelli's painting to keep on his desk to remind him of Odette. Does he love? There is only the question.

I am sometimes asked if I would love the man I love any less if I did not like the works of art that he creates, or if he were not an artist. The question is dumbfounding because, as I know too well, he can not help but paint or draw and is compelled to return to it if he spends too much time away. I love his pictures–it is true–and perhaps had I not liked his paintings as much as I did when we first met, I might not have bothered getting to know him better. Who knows? He admits he let his feelings grow upon seeing my home and approving of my aesthetic sensibility. Did I picture him when I closed my eyes as a young girl? Not exactly. Did he me? I sincerely doubt it. And yet the pictures mutate to fit the one standing in front of us...if we are lucky, imaginative, both. The art of love is, for me at least, a picture I will see tomorrow, when he smiles at me sitting at a communal table in a crowded, loud dumpling house in Chinatown, where we meet because I still can't stand Valentine's Day and where there is no art on the walls to distract either of us from a ritualized acknowledgment of love. Love, then, is not always a pretty picture, picture perfect as it may be.

Picturing Proust

Proust uses so many artists in his grand work that there was recently published a book, Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles, providing the images Proust directly mentions, or offering possibilities for the ones to which Proust only alludes. Swann loves Odette through Botticelli. The pregnant kitchen maid is Giotto's Charity. Bloch is seen as Mahummet II. Charlus likens his young friend Morel as a Bronzino. The list continues so that all characters are eventually attributed a pictorial relation. Even his perfect mother.

There are even wonderful academic articles on Proust's mention of art...and that is astounding and a joy because scholarly journals are not known for their prose style.

Proust translated Ruskin into French (with the help of his mother) and wrote articles in the Gazette des Beaux Arts on artists and shows, in Paris or abroad. He wrote poems as a young man based on paintings. He was always passionate about art, going to see his favorite Vermeer when it was being shown in Paris despite his current illness. He transformed his museum visit into the scene in In Search of Lost Time where Bergotte (the novel's author character) must see Vermeer’s View of Delft because of a critic’s having written about a little patch of yellow. The color is indeed perfect and Bergotte dies in the gallery, wishing he had written with a few more layers of color, like this little patch of yellow. Proust would die shortly thereafter, having already been ill and having gotten worse from the trip to see the painting.

Proust is largely depicted as a homosexual with an Oedipal complex, compulsively writing alone at night, after years of being a social climber. But there is a Proust who can not appear in any photographs because he is only visible in his writing on the arts. There he is glorious, strong and secure in his own passion. For this reason, among others, I prefer to avoid psychological readings of his work, dismayed at how easy it is to debase the heights he climbs with language.