Talk:Self-portrait/Autoportrait
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Very rare are the painters who did not at least once try self-portraiture. The genre is certainly very old, but it is with the Renaissance that it really arises, when the individual itself became a center of major interest.
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[edit] History
With the rise of self-portraiture in the Renaissance the creation of painting was brought back to the vision of Narcissus contemplating himself in a mirror (Alberti) which refers directly to the self-portrait. Beyond narcissism, the self-portrait was a convenient manner to exert a technique (the model most easily available being oneself).
One notes the appearance of early self-portraits in 12th century illuminated manuscripts.
Albrecht Dürer is without doubt a great creator in this genre of painting.
He drew at the age of thirteen in 1484, then painted three large self-portraits in 1493, 1498 and 1500. That of 1500 is particularly remarkable since Dürer painted the face at an angle of vision that few painters used to represent. Dürer is also the first artist to be represented naked (1503). He employs a method of artifice used before him by Sandro Botticelli and perhaps by Fra Angelico, that of painting himself among the characters of an event, leaving the visual signature of the table (This process was used as of 1359 in the Assumption of the Virgin by Andrea Orcagna. One sees Dürer with a friend traversing the landscape of Martyrdom of the 10,000 (1508, [1]) Finally he does not hesitate to draw himself with the features of Christ, in 1522 and 1523, about five years before his death.
The great Italian painters of the Renaissance made relatively few self portraits. The first is that of Pietro Perugino about 1500 (Collegio del Cambio of Perugia). There is also a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci (1512). Michelangelo gave his face to the skin of Bartholomew in the Last Judgement of the Sistine Chapel (1536-1541). Raphael we know better: he is seen in the characters of School of Athens (1510), or with a friend who holds his shoulder (1518). Also notable are two portraits of Titian as an old man in the years 1560. Paolo Veronese appears for his part as a violinist clothed in white in Marriage at Cana, also represented is Titian playing the double bass (1562).
With the possible exception of Annibale Carracci, the Italians were not that adept at the genre: Carravaggio undoubtedly painted himself in Bacchus at the beginning of his career, then appears incidentally in certain of his painting as a spectator. The head of Goliath held up like a trophy by David (1607) is Carravaggio's own. In the 17th century, the Flemings and Dutch are more exhibitionist: Anthony Van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens gave us numerous images of themselves, and Rembrandt accumulated self-portraits. In Spain, one encounters several self-portraits of Bartolomé Estéban Murillo or of Diego Velázquez. Francisco de Zurbarán represented himself in Luke the Evangelist at the feet of Christ on the cross (around 1635). In the 1800s, Goya painted himself numerous times.
In 17th century France, one encounters especially the self-portraits of Nicolas Poussin. In the 18th century, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin renewed the genre, not hesitating to paint himself on several occasions in bonnet and eyeglasses. Maurice Quentin de La Tour also left many self-portraits where he appears sometimes chemise (?) without wig, in the costume of pageantry.
Thereafter, one can say that each great painter left us at least one self-portrait, but the genre was dominated by the expressionnists at the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps under the influence of the self-portraits of Vincent Van Gogh. These in particular are the many self-portraits of Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka.
In sculpture, the self-portrait is marked in the Renaissance by Lorenzo Ghiberti placing his bust with the Gates of Paradise at the baptistry of Florence.
An example from the 21st century is Arnaud Prinstet, a contemporary artist who undertakes to paint his self portrait every day.
[edit] Techniques of representation
The self-portrait supposes in theory the use of a mirror, an instrument developed in the 15th century. But the first mirrors used were convex, introducing deformations that the artist sometimes preserved, with the image of one amusing painting realized out by Parmigianino in 1524 (Self-portrait in a mirror). Mirrors permit surprising compositions like the Triple self-portrait by Johannes Gumpp (1646), or more recently that of Salvador Dalí shown from the back painting his wife, Gala (1972-73). This use of the mirror has as an amusing consequence that the left-handed painters typically represent themselves as right-handed (and conversely).
For the representation proper, the painter can choose to show himself in bust, without particular attributes, sometimes of face but generally of three-quarter with shoulders. However the self-portraits with the palette or the brush are not lacking, and similarly, the representations of the artist in his workshop. In this category, the best-known example is perhaps L’Atelier du peintre by Gustave Courbet (1855) [2], an immense capharnaüm(?) of objects and variegated characters reminiscent of, although it does not show here of a workshop, Diego Velazquez's painting of Las Meninas (1656).
Sometimes the artist likes to disguise him- or herself, or at least to wear a costume other than his habitual dress. This is often the case with Dürer, and Rembrandt multiplied this kind of metamorphosis. He can also paint himself with friends, or yet evoke his family life. Rubens is represented with three of his close relations in les Quatre Philosophes (1615), but also with his first wife Isabella Brant in 1610, then with the second, Helene Fourment, in 1639.
Even if Ingres never painted himself with a violin, numerous artists put themselves in a scene with a musical instrument, for example Lavinia Fontana playing the clavichord (1578), Courbet the cello (1847) or Beckmann the saxophone (1930). Others preferred to evoke important moments of their life, in particular of their maladies: Goya shows himself being looked at by a doctor (1820), and Munch paints himself convalescent after having caught the Spanish flu (1919).
Finally, it is worth noting the many cases, already mentioned above, where the painter represents himself inside a scene of which he is not the principal element. The first unquestionable example is that of Benozzo Gozzoli in The Procession of the Magi (1459), his name inscribed on his bonnet. This is imitated a few years later by Sandro Botticelli, spectator of the Adoration of the Magi, who is diverted from the scene to look at us. (1475).
[edit] The great masters
The most famous and most fertile of the self-portraitists is without question Rembrandt; there are preserved a good hundred paintings, drawings or engravings in which he is represented. His first known self-portrait is dated 1627, his last 1669, some weeks before his death. The reasons for such a "frenzy" are unknown, each has his own interpretation. We can see him aging as the years pass, and under various disguises, from the 20-year-old man with the timid air who paints himself with back-light, to the tired, wrinkled old man with the budding nose.
No complaisance in the paintings of Rembrandt, or with Van Gogh, who painted himself thirty-seven times between 1886 and 1889 [3]. In all these self-portraits one is struck that the gaze of the painter is seldom directed at us; even when it is a fixed gaze, seems to look elsewhere.
Even though they are less known, the many self-portraits of Egon Schiele merit interest, because no others go as far in exhibitionism, representing hiself naked with many reprises, of face, of profile, kneeling, sometimes masturbating or erect as in Eros (1911), an enormous red erect penis.
With Frida Kahlo things are different. One knows that following a terrible accident she spent many years of bedridden, with only herself for a model. She made many self-portraits in bust, but also some nightmarish representations which symbolize her physical sufferings.
One of the most beautiful collections of self-portraits is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It was originally the collection by the cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici in the second part of the 17th century and has been maintained and expanded until the present time. It comprises more than 200 commanding portraits, in particular those of Pietro da Cortona, Charles Le Brun, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot et Marc Chagall.
[edit] Psychoanalysis
To represent oneself is a general tendency in the human being, starting from the first jubilation from which makes the baby exult in the discovery of it's own image, with and without a mirror, since the eyes of the mother are enough there. And later all the eyes! This tendency is the basis of the self-portrait of the painter who decides to represent him- or herself or to suggest their own image; or as it is in the mode of screen writers to be based in wink (blink?) of the eye like a simple figurant Alfred Hitchcock. This representation of oneself can be unconscious and appear many ways: one is seen as persona by Carl Jung. This form of self-portrait is at the base of makeup, of clothing, and the smallest gestures or attitudes that tend to reveal or mask a certain prerequisite image of oneself (direct image of the philosopher Ludwig Klages) who creates the autoportrait imaginaire before its model exists [4] impregnates permanently and without the knowledge of his author, all forms of expression.
[edit] Other meanings
Self-portraiture is also a literary genre connected with autobiography, but separated somewhat since it is not a narrative, properly speaking, but, rather, static.
[edit] Gallery
 Albrecht Dürer (1493) |
 Pietro Perugino (c. 1500) |
 Raphael (c. 1517-1518) |
 Hans Baldung (1526) |
 Lucas Cranach the Elder (1550) |
 Peter Paul Rubens (1623) |
[edit] Other artistic genres
[edit] Bibliography
- Bernard Auriol, L'image préalable, l'expression impressive et l'autoportrait, Psychologie Médicale, 19, 9, 1543-1547, 1987
- —, Rembrandt par lui-même, catalogue de l'exposition des autoportraits de Rembrandt à la National Gallery du 9 juin au 3 septembre 1999 avec des textes de Ernst van de Wetering, Volker Manuth, Marieke de Winkel, Ben Bross, trad. fr. Flammarion, Paris, 1999
- Joëlle Moulin, L'autoportrait au Template:XXe siècle, éd. Adam Biro, Paris, 1999
- Pascal Bonafoux, Les peintres et l'autoportrait, 1984
[edit] External links
Generalist sites devoted to painting generally offer a search engine. Typically, the search string "self-portrait" will produce good results:
One can also use the term "autoportrait" in the search engine of the [Joconde database], which describes the works of 84 French museums, including the Louvre:
Other links :
