Sodoma was supposed to be painting the boy Benedict successfully praying that his nurse’s broken tray will be mended by divine intervention, and sure enough you see the tray and Benedict praying on the left, and then receiving congratulations on the right. But bang in the centre, far larger than anyone else, dressed in the Milanese cloak and the Florentine hose, is the artist. Around him flock the badgers, swans and raven, as if he were St Francis of Assisi. Way in the distance hangs the mended tray, to which Sodoma gestures – here, take a look at this! – as if he had performed the miracle himself.
It is impossible to view the painting without being completely distracted by Sodoma. He is not there because he believes, like Botticelli. He is not there as a witness so much as the main protagonist. This is simply an insane folly that the monks never managed to prevent, if they ever tried, worn down by his obstreperous presence.
One assumes piety in Renaissance artists because the alternative seems too heretical for the times, just as one assumes that any artist of any era appearing in a Bible scene must be on the side of right. But Caravaggio, in his early self-portraits, is among the dramatis personae of some very violent biblical incidents in which he is no simple onlooker, nor even on the side of virtue; never entirely innocent, he is always in some measure complicit.
Caravaggio is there, for instance, in The Taking of Christ in which Jesus is being arrested with appalling force in the garden of Gethsemane the night before Good Friday. The sense of motion, of figures gesturing and twisting in the darkness, is vividly proleptic, as if they might burst right out of the canvas. Christ is the only still figure, hands calmly clasped in the brutal onslaught, withstanding the terrible right to left motion as Judas and a rush of soldiers in jet black steel close in as if for the kill. Violent, crowded and tight, the event is caught in a flash-bulb glare – and at the far right is Caravaggio himself, holding up a lantern to illuminate both scene and picture.
Caravaggio has made it visible, brought this vision of Christ’s courage and suffering into the light. But the lamp is not some trite symbol, any more than the self-portrait is a signature.
The Taking of Christ is not just a revelation, it has the character of a revelation, of darkness suddenly vanquished by light. Caravaggio shows us the scene and his face in profile, craning to see over the heads of the soldiers, bearing the same expression of open-mouthed awe we all might wear before this violent kidnap. He is on the very outskirts of the picture, struggling to see and make the gospel story visible, this artist evangelist. But his light also aids the soldiers he appears to accompany. Is he not in some sense their accomplice?
‘Pinching himself from time to time, Messerschmidt would cut a terrifying grimace, scrutinise his face in the mirror, sculpt and after an interval of about half a minute repeat his grimace… He seemed afraid of these heads and admitted that they represented the Spirit of Proportion. The spirit had pinched him and he had pinched back… at last, the defeated spirit had left him.’2
Some people have seen mutiny in this self-portrait, a sort of take-me-as-I-am retort to a patron who may have been trying to control the contents of the image. Certainly, almost half of Caravaggio’s paintings were regarded as too independent for the Church. But even if it started this way, which seems a limited motivation – my vision as I have conceived and shown it – this self-portrait is profoundly uninterested in drawing attention to Caravaggio. It is a work of spiritual empathy; Caravaggio enters into the scene in every way.
Why do artists paint self-portraits? It is not a question prompted by portraits. One does not stand before images of monarchs, philosophers, aristocrats or popes trying to guess why they were immortalized in paint. The ruffed courtier, the periwigged anatomist, the uniformed soldier: their place in history, complete with details of occupation and status, and a discreet essay on personality, is pictorially assured. Even if the entire lives of anonymous sitters are lost, one thing is known about them: that somebody wanted their portrait; somebody paid an artist, or perhaps the artist himself wanted to record their image. But even this last possibility does not necessarily hold true in the case of self-portraiture, for many artists have dragged forth a likeness only under duress; at least one was painfully extracted in the mistaken assumption that it was required (see Chapter 12) and many more have been created, then rejected, in a state of heightened disgust.
The Taking of Christ, c. 1602 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1574–1610)
Some are made with nobody in mind, others for anyone or everyone. A select group was commissioned (and continues to be commissioned) for a very particular audience, namely visitors to the Uffizi self-portrait collection in Florence. This began as the private gallery of Cardinal Leopoldo Medici, who had become obsessed with images that embodied both artist and style. He started with Guercino in 1664 and amassed a hundred more, past and present, before his death. Now there are over a thousand including works by Titian, Rembrandt and (questionably) Velázquez, and the Uffizi has had to ban unsolicited donations from those ambitious to join the club.
Anyone managing to get an appointment to visit the Vasari corridor where a portion of the collection is displayed will see that Leopoldo did not always get much return on his interest in style. An early etching of the collection, hung three deep floor to ceiling, shows what is still apparent today: that it contains some of the dullest self-portraits ever made. Head and shoulders, facing the same direction, many are not much more than variations on a passport photograph. Formal to a fault, but rigorously avoiding anything personal, they end up in opposition to everything that makes self-portraiture interesting: no sense of self, or negotiation between the self and the world, no implied milieu, no distinctive stance, gesture, expression, intellectual or conceptual ideas, just a conformity to type. Of course, there are tremendous exceptions, many discussed here, and the sense of collegiality is strong and affecting. But the official honour appears to have crushed the independent spirit.
Self-portraits do have other coarse and uncomplicated functions. Sir David Wilkie, in a rush to complete his enormous tavern scene The Blind Fiddler, inserted his own face in the wig and mobcap of a tipsy woman as if it were no more than a handy set of asexual features. Francis Bacon said he painted himself only because ‘everyone else was dying off like flies’,3 although the idea that artists make images of themselves faute de mieux, being so compelled to paint a face that even their own will do, strikes a false note when one considers that the struggle to describe oneself is hardly a casual experience. Even Picasso, superfluent draughtsman, complained that he could never catch the look of himself on paper and would have to cut a hole in a canvas and put a mirror behind it in any case just to glimpse what he really looked like.
When an artist wants to join the great art club of tradition, the ambition can be outrageously flagrant. Sir Anthony Van Dyck reprised Raphael’s double portrait with friend; Rembrandt painted himself in the distinctive poses of Peter Paul Rubens and Titian; Otto Dix went right back to the purity of Hans Holbein, drumming home his claim to German cultural inheritance. James Whistler tried to paint himself in the pose of Velázquez’s Pablo de Valladolid and spent the last three years of his life intermittently trying to raise some trace of the Spaniard’s spirit in this ghostly failure of a seance. Even the smallest anthology of artists showing off royal gold chains would include Titian, never seen without Emperor Charles V’s special gift, Rembrandt, who probably had to buy his own, and above all Van Dyck’s Self-Portrait with Sunflower. Made when he was court painter to Charles I of England, this startling image is nothing less than an awards ceremony: Van Dyck, in scarlet satin, turns his head our way while lifting his important chain with one hand and pointing at the outsize flower with the other. The triangulation of hands, eyes and flower joins the dots – I got this royal gold for that painted gold – though