In his self-portraits, Michelangelo is always more concerned with the inner soul than the outer man. As the model for Nicodemus, helping to bear the body of Christ in a marble Pietà, he sculpts himself with head reverentially bowed and hooded, prayer embodied; as the flayed skin in The Last Judgement, he is not so much portrayed as disembodied. Yet each self-portrait has its distinguishing characteristic that alone might represent him; as Van Gogh has his wounded ear, as Dalí has his moustache, Michelangelo has his broken nose.
It was smashed in a fight with a fellow artist, Pietro Torrigiano, who finally lost his temper, it is said, after years of sharp-tongued provocation. Michelangelo often spoke of his ruined nose – though not the incident – and he alludes to its ugliness more than once in the long sequence of sonnets begun in later life. Of course, it seems to suit his physique, wiry and with a boxer’s build even into old age; but it also fits his temperament, this titan of terribilita who said he took in chisels and hammers with his nurse’s milk. Michelangelo’s nose is his emblem, and it is all he needs to stretch a self-portrait out of the nearly formless Sistine mask.
Michelangelo was in his late sixties when he finished The Last Judgement and much preoccupied by thoughts of dying, death and the resurrection of the body, the end of time and the punishment, or forgiveness, of sins. He often wrote about shrugging off the mortal coil, escaping his ugly and sinful body in hope of spiritual redemption, and in Sonnet 302, appealing to God’s grace, he recalls the sacrifice of Christ on the cross:
You peel of flesh the same souls you apparelled
In flesh; your blood absolves and leaves them clean
Of sin, of human urges, all that is mean.1
The self-portrait epitomizes this longing for absolution, the peeling away of the flesh in order to be reborn. It imagines the exact nature of this out-of-body experience and makes it visible to all. Here is Michelangelo as he once was, a remnant of his former self, spirit flown; and here is how he might be in the full-scale bodily resurrection, more like Bartholomew with his nose intact. For the point about the saint is that he is an ideal figure, a higher being compared to this discarded rag.
How one is to achieve this transfiguration was the great anxiety of Nicodemus, the elderly Pharisee who repented his sins the minute he heard Christ speak. In St John’s Gospel, Nicodemus asks Christ directly ‘how a man can be born again when he is old’, to which Christ gives no answer except that he has to be reborn. Michelangelo asked the same question in a late sonnet: ‘How might I find salvation, with death so near and God so far away?’ Like Nicodemus, uncertain of salvation, he must neither presume nor despair since both are sins against hope. And hope is all; hope and prayer.
The alleged relics of Saint Bartholomew lie beneath the altar of a church only a few miles from the Sistine Chapel, a shrivelled parcel brought to Rome in the tenth century. One imagines them folded like garments. Yet Michelangelo, who had dissected corpses and peeled back the skin to study the anatomy within, would have known that the membrane does not come away like a coat. The flayed skin in The Last Judgement is not remotely realistic, any more than the impossible pose of Adam reaching out that tentative forefinger to God; Michelangelo’s profound understanding of anatomy is not put to the service of knowledge, as with Leonardo, so much as passionate faith. As for the likeness, no Flemish artist would have called it a portrait. Yet this coat has a face, and this face has vestigial animation, the head turning dolefully sideways. It needs to look like Michelangelo, even in this unimaginably debased state, to be part of this vision of bodily resurrection, to personify the artist’s prayer. Michelangelo offers himself up to God not as Dürer has – in His divine image, perfectly beautiful – but as the shucked skin of a repentant sinner.
Nobody seeing this image in the Sistine Chapel could imagine that mere self-depiction was the artist’s object. Michelangelo is there at the last judgement, suspended between heaven and hell, appealing to God for redemption. One might add that the difference between saint and skin is also the opposition between Michelangelo the idealized artist and Michelangelo the broken-nosed mortal, a warhorse who wore the same dog-skin leggings for months on end until his skin came away when he peeled them off, an old man who had no use for his body other than to keep on working for the greater glory of God.
Nor would one imagine that anybody could construe this as simply a signature, and yet that is the received tradition of art history. Self-portraiture starts in the margins as a way of signalling authorship – painters should be seen as painters, not just anonymous craftsmen – and develops as a way of promoting one’s art in person. It becomes more prevalent with better mirrors, better paints, a bigger clientele, more competition and thus a greater need to promote oneself. Before self-portraits eventually break free of the crowd, becoming the image of I, myself and me alone, artists are generally there as witnesses – the self-portrait in assistenza – which is really a cover for signing the painting with one’s image. Histories of self-portraiture tell this originating myth over and again, beginning with Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel in 1425, his eyes on Christ (a giveaway), and ending a century or so later with Raphael chatting to Ptolemy and Zoroaster (another giveaway) in the School of Athens, as if these artists had no larger concerns than self-promotion. In between, of course, there is the troublesome precedent of Albrecht Dürer; but he is just freakishly early.
Whether Dürer was the first artist to paint an autonomous self-portrait can hardly be said for sure since so few works of art from this period survive. The tenacious idea that people never painted themselves alone before the Renaissance, or with any degree of self-consciousness, is in any case rather like the idea that people had no selves to paint, that a sense of self was something that had yet to be invented. This idea was promoted early on by the founding father of art history, Jacob Burckhardt. But Burckhardt’s vision of the Renaissance as the moment when the fully rounded modern self finally steps free of medieval mass-uniformity is challenged even by paintings themselves: lost masterpieces such as the legendary self-portrait of Apelles, famed as the greatest artist of Ancient Greece, or Van Eyck’s grave self-portrait in which he seems to be contemplating both himself and death. Conversely, the artist’s face among the crowd never really disappears; all self-portrait traditions come round again in perpetuity. Frans Hals is there among the Amsterdam burghers in the seventeenth century. Velázquez appears in The Victory of Breda. Edouard Manet listens pensively among the milling figures in Music in the Tuileries. The British sculptor Marc Quinn’s rubber cast of his own skin, still bearing his features, hangs upside down from a hook, flapping open like a skinned banana but completely empty as if Houdini had flown (its title is No Visible Means of Escape). Quinn is always trying to free the spirit in his self-portraits, like Michelangelo half a millennium earlier.
Even where conventions develop – the artist as witness, as religious adherent, as professional painter – self-portraits often have far more complex origins and motives. They are made as love letters, appeals for clemency, campaigns against specific people or the art world in general. They are made in revolt against one’s patron or to exorcize one’s demons, like Franz Xaver Messerschmidt with his stricken, gasping, grimacing bronze heads made to see off the Spirit of Symmetry. Sometimes they are made out of madness or fury.
Detail of St Benedict’s First Miracle, 1502 Giovanni Bazzi (‘Il Sodoma’) (1477–1549)
When the monks of Monte Oliveto hired Sodoma to paint a fresco of the first miracle of Benedict, their patron saint, he arrived with a menagerie of horses, dogs, guinea pigs, badgers, swans and a raven he had taught to shout amusing insults when people knocked at the door. Sodoma