Yet no self-portraitist actually needs to meet our gaze directly to exert continuous pressure or keep our eyes upon his. This is nowhere more apparent than in an etching by Francisco Goya that speaks as powerfully with the eyes as Botticelli even though it does not even have the advantage of two and never fixes fast, or unequivocally, upon the viewer.
Goya turns slightly out of formal profile, throwing a sidelong glance out of the picture. The look is withering, as pungently directed outward as inward. It is an opening shot; it is the etching with which he prefaced Los Caprichos.
This volume of prints, unsurpassed in their terrifying visions of human violence and folly, avarice and cruelty, their riddling captions like the overheard speech of mysterious offstage commentators, goes so far beyond explanation into nightmare that it is often perceived as purely a figment of the artist’s tormented imagination, no matter that the voice of the captions declares ‘I saw this’ or ‘I was here’. Goya originally opened the volume with that deathless image of a man slumped over his desk, the air thronged with bats and evil critters that might indeed be issuing from his nightmares; and ‘The Sleep of Reason’ has been taken as an allegorical self-portrait depicting the source (and modus operandi) of all that follows. But Goya replaced it, significantly, with this likeness of himself as a top-hatted man of the world casting a cold eye upon the viewer.
Self-Portrait, pub. 1799 Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828)
It is an acerbic pastiche of the conventional famous-author portrait that has prefaced so many books, then and since. The profile puts the self-portrait straight into the third person: there is the author, Señor Goya, his name written below, corresponding precisely with Goya’s verbal description of himself throughout as el autor, or el pintor. And yet he breaks out of that profile, as if coming alarmingly alive. Facing left, he appears to turn his back upon what follows as if in disavowal; but then again, isn’t he rather like the kind of figures who occasionally turn up in the book? Goya may be the maker, or the narrator, but he is not above the vileness depicted herein.
We always say that in his images of sexual corruption, torture, war crimes, bullfights, Goya is the master of modern documentary, that whatever he had to say about the Spanish Inquisition or the horrors of the Napoleonic invasions of the early nineteenth century applies to Afghanistan or Abu Ghraib. The priest lusts, the paedophile rapes: the artist has seen it all and brought it back to us in its absolute horror. But it is very hard to read the tone of Goya’s art, to know who is speaking, who saw what, whether the talk is ever straight.
Look at that telling eye: it seems to swivel between there and here, then and now, between immediacy and distance. Pose and eye, taken together, make Goya both an observer and a man observed, the creator but also the subject. Yet the look is insinuating, and deviously incorporates the viewer. That left eye, half obscured by the heavy eyelid and nearly disappearing out of view, has you snared in its sights, for you and I are part of this too.
‘You make us to thyself and our hearts are restless until we find rest in thee.’
St Augustine
Self-Portrait, 1500 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
One winter’s day in 1905, a museum guard was meandering through the galleries of the Alte Pinakotech in Munich when he noticed that one of the paintings had changed since the last time he looked. The eyes of Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait, the most famous eyes in the museum – the most famous eyes in German art – had somehow lost their piercing charisma. The right eye appeared dim and the liveliness of the left severely diminished, as if they could no longer see, and when the painting was taken down, ferocious little rips were discovered in the irises and pupils that had most likely been made, it was agreed, with the tip of a hatpin. The man – or woman – who assaulted the painting may well have used such a weapon, swift, efficient and very conveniently produced and concealed, for it appears that nobody noticed the attack. Somebody unseen, somebody who was never caught, had tried to put out Dürer’s eyes.
Dürer’s eyes – this is how we put it, not bothering to distinguish between the painter and his self-portrait; and we do the same with portraits too. Mona Lisa is what we call both the picture and the young lady from Milan who sat for Leonardo da Vinci. But it feels more natural with self-portraits since artist and sitter are one and the same, being in some profound sense related, image to person. And in the case of Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, as never before in the history of art, the one would become the counterpart of the other in unique and mysterious ways.
The impact of this painting cannot be overstated: so immediate and yet so remote. At a distance it seems to transmit an unearthly glow that draws viewers across the gallery, and the power intensifies the nearer one gets, not least because the picture is such an unqualified close-up. Dürer presents himself front on, waist up, formidably fixed, immediate and erect. One of his hands is just out of view, as if under the counter, the other fingers the tufts of his fur lapel in a curious gesture that draws attention to both the garment and the wearer, so present and correct, this man who is representing himself. His long moustache is waxed in two scimitar curves that echo the fine arcs of his eyebrows. The hair streams down over his shoulders, a triangle of metal-bright locks, not a single tendril out of place. The face is closed and eerily symmetric. Above all, the eyes transfix.
Even if you knew nothing about German society in 1500, or this period in art, you could assume that Dürer’s contemporaries were amazed by this self-portrait because it still astonishes today. No gold is used in the paint, apart from the inscription, and yet the picture has this peculiar golden radiance. The face appears exceptionally precise and distinctive – strong nose, more of a limb than a feature; slight cast in the eyes; blemish on the left cheek – yet the evidence, for all its heightened clarity, is bizarrely impersonal. What colour are those pale eyes? How old is this person? What is the expression in his look, so pertinacious and yet so withheld? The picture seems both immeasurably more than – and yet strangely unlike – other self-portraits.
It is a double take so improbable one hardly believes it at first. The long hair, centre-parted, the beard and moustache, the gesture of the fingers, the symmetry and stillness and remoteness of countenance, out of time and out of this world: the resemblance startles, incredulity immediately sets in and yet the thought builds like a quake. Is it just chance, a coincidence of fate, or could this man actually have meant to make himself look like Jesus?
People attack portraits when they no longer see, or want to see, them as pictures so much as surrogates or even real people. This is especially true of statues, which are abused exactly as if they were alive, their noses broken, their genitals mutilated, heads and hands brutally severed. Painted people ought to be less vulnerable, safe indoors and protected by guards, but they are victimized too and the connection between people and pictures is held to be so much closer that unlike statues – sightless objects, things apart – we commonly class them together. Nobody would dream of correcting a child who points to a baby in a book, and calls it a baby instead of a picture, and the same is true of our portraits. Even grown-ups plant kisses on images, carry them like champions through the streets, worship them, savage them out of spite or fury, become excited by them as we are excited by people in reality. What is so singular about Dürer’s image, in this respect as in so many others, is not that it has been adored or loathed but that it has excited both extremes of passion and to a greater degree than any other portrait.
This old painting of a man with prodigious hair and alarming eyes has been kissed and excoriated, worshipped