Face and Mask by Hans Belting

Author:Hans Belting [Belting, Hans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691162355
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 67 Annibale Carracci, Self-portrait on Easel, ca. 1604 (Saint Petersburg, Hermitage)

This self-portrait also contains further meaning: Caravaggio suggests to us that through the very act of painting, he has already taken his own life. We must not ignore the tradition of the so-called identification portrait, in which the face portrayed could represent an allusion to a biblical figure.13 In this case, however, Caravaggio does not approach us as the young David holding up the severed head with an unexpected and inexplicably pained expression. David’s gaze and the position of his arm lead our eyes to the unusual self-portrait that has been separated from its own body. The fresh blood still seems to drip from the neck, and yet the painter has let it begin to flow thickly over the canvas, as if wishing to make us witnesses to the coagulation and drying of the paint. The beheading becomes a metaphor for the act of painting and thus for the withdrawal of life from the face through its transformation in painting. Beheading and disembodiment refer to each other in this self-portrait-like mirror image. In the act of being painted, a face stiffens into a mask.

A portrait suspends the flow of time, which constantly changes the expression of the face. It also brings facial expression to a standstill. Paradoxically, only when a face is freed from expressivity can it be reduced most vividly to the fundamental concept of itself. But this comes at a price: it becomes a mask and can never resemble a living face. Every portrait raises the dual challenge of reproducing an individual face while representing the face on a lifeless surface, the only thing it can offer for this task. Self-portraiture thus engenders a revolt against the mask. We all know the experience of the mask when we see ourselves stiffening in a mirrored reflection. This self-observation has the immediate consequence that we lose our spontaneous self-expression. For this reason, the mirror frequently invites us to make faces, if only to escape the mask that holds us at its mercy. This also explains why we often view photographs of ourselves with reluctance. A subject that seeks itself in a mirror finds another there. One can only identify with that other once the face in the mirror has been animated. The reflected image offers a painter not only many choices but also uncertainties, as when he must decide upon a single image. The portrait is grounded in a concept of the self that not even a painter can discover in the mirror.

Rembrandt created many self-portraits, making his own face available for studies of expression and character.14 Scholarship has naturally been fascinated by the question of when Rembrandt actually intended a self-portrait and when he was only using his face as a mask for a role, in the way one might costume a body. In Rembrandt’s lifetime, artists in the Netherlands were trained in the genre of “tronie,” or “trogne” painting. This colloquial term had been borrowed from the Old French.

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