Savonarola, apocalyptic preacher, burner of vanities and scourge of Florentine corruption who would later count Botticelli among his followers, railed against the shocking preponderance of secular portraits in religious frescos in those days. The churches were becoming a social almanac, a portrait gallery for local mafias. There they would be, witnessing martyrdoms, watching miracles, gazing at the Crucifixion – anything to appear in the picture. At least Botticelli did not cast himself as a wise man, but he does not play the family retainer either. His presence, his look, has a far greater purpose: to intensify the whole meaning of the painting.
The Adoration of the Magi, 1475 Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510)
Eye-to-eye portraits were comparatively unusual in fifteenth-century Italy and congregations rarely saw a recognizable face looking directly back at them from a church fresco. Patrons generally appeared in worshipful profile. The sitters in independent portraits – paintings you could hang on the wall at home – were commonly presented in profile too, like a head on a medal, distanced and aloof, partly because they were often transcribed directly from frescos in the first place but also perhaps because profiles are so precise and economic, an enormous amount of information condensed and carried by a single authoritative line. The compiler of an inventory of paintings in Urbino in 1500 is surprised to come across a portrait ‘with two eyes’.1
Until Flemish portraits by Van Eyck and others started to arrive in Italy, with the revelation of a three-quarters view, it was unusual for a portrait to show more than one eye. This shift towards the viewer, this turning to communicate, was beginning to happen when Botticelli painted the senior Medici as Magi, but they still have the idealized remoteness of dead legends, whereas a singular vitality radiates from his eyes. The eyes are the strongest intimation, of course, that this is a self-portrait.
But Botticelli is not just putting in a proprietorial appearance, the painter painted. In The Adoration of the Magi, the self-portrait activates both the scene and its meaning. Just by turning and looking so challengingly at you, he shifts the tense so that the nativity no longer seems like ancient history but an incident of the moment, its significance forever urgent. There is fixation in that look, not just born of strained relations with the mirror, but perhaps of the kind that made Botticelli labour for twenty years over his never-finished illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, or that would eventually drive him to destroy his own paintings in Savonarola’s notorious bonfire of the vanities. At any rate, the stare is a deliberate pressure, almost a demand or accusation. You who look so complacently upon this scene that I have envisaged for you – how deep is your adoration, your love?
Self-portraits catch your eye. They seem to be doing it deliberately. Walk into any art gallery and they look back at you from the crowded walls as if they had been waiting to see you. The eyes in a million portraits gaze at you too, following you around the room, as the saying goes, but rarely with the same heightened expectation. Come across a self-portrait and there is a frisson of recognition, something like chancing upon your own reflection.
This is self-portraiture’s special look of looking, a trait so fundamental as to be almost its distinguishing feature. Even quite small children can tell self-portraits from portraits because of those eyes. The look is intent, actively seeking you out of the crowd; the nearest analogy may be with life itself: paintings behaving like people.
Eye-to-eye contact with others – a glance, a stare – is the purest form of reciprocity. Until it ends, until one of us looks away, it is the simplest and most direct connection we can ever have. I look at you, you look at me: it is our first prelude, an introduction to whatever comes next; if we smile, shake hands, converse, get married, it will always be preceded by that first glance. We talk of eyes meeting across a crowded room, of recognizing each other immediately even though we had never met; we speak of love at first sight. Conversely we could not stand the sight of each other. Just one look was enough.
Since painted faces cannot hold your interest by changing expression, much depends on the character of that look. It is the first place we go, as in life, and if it is too tentative or blank or disaffected it might also be the last; the overture rebuffed. Some artists are disadvantaged from the start because they cannot get a fix on their eyes in the mirror, an aspect of excruciating strain that shows up in the picture exposing the pretence that they were ever looking at anyone but themselves. Others have to deal with spectacles or myopia or some insurmountable affliction, although the Italian painter Guercino movingly transformed the brutal squint he suffered from birth (Guercino means squinter) into a sign of unimpaired imagination by painting his eyes so deeply shadowed that one understands that this man’s vision turns inwards. His self-portrait shows, by concealment, what it might be like to have partial sight; mutatis mutandis, one sees what he sees. This is in the gift of self-portraits with perfect sight too of course. Whenever the look that originates in the mirror stays live and direct in the final image then the viewer should have a vicarious experience of being the artist – standing in the same relation he or she stood to the mirror, and the picture.
Self-Portrait, c. 1546–1548 Jacopo Comin Tintoretto (15I8–1594)
This sharpening of vision is very marked in a self-portrait Jacopo Tintoretto made in his late twenties. The Venetian turns to look our way and there is inquiry in his dark-eyed stare, a hook so strong you cannot immediately pull away for the sense of being held in his sights. The look is charged, the intensity meant, and abetted by other aspects of the image: the turning to stare over one shoulder, the gathering frown, appearing to cast a cold eye upon oneself in the encroaching darkness – no illusions, no fears – not to mention Tintoretto’s burning good looks.
It is an obvious and much-remarked fiction of self-portraiture that the viewer, rather than the artist, is the focus of all this intense interest. Tintoretto perfects the illusion. He has not gone right through the looking glass the way some artists do, their eyes worn blank by staring; he is not lost in self-contemplation, not caught in some infinite regression of looking at himself looking at himself, and so on. He is all attention.
The eyes are unusually large as if they dominated the other senses. Light catches the upper lid of the left and the lower rim of the right so that one has an uncommon sense of their spherical form within the socket. Perhaps these are the red rims of a man who painted with insomniac drive right through the night, creator of the tumultuous murals that cover wall after wall of the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice. At any rate, the eyes have their own special force of character and they have the reciprocal effect of making the viewer stare hard in return. It is no stretch of the imagination to feel you are both equally intent upon the other, but that you have also slipped into his position, seeing what he saw, entering into his self-knowledge. Centuries before anyone discovered how the eye actually works, Tintoretto has hit upon a true metaphor, for the eye is indeed an extruded part of the brain, drawing whatever it can of the outer world in through the retina to be transformed into neural images. Nowadays some specialists consider the eye a part of the mind itself, its freight of information modified by individual cognition, and even in Darwin’s day its curious status was enough understood for him to have written that ‘the thought of the eye makes me cold all over’.2 But Tintoretto, without any knowledge of the mechanics of seeing, senses the connection between mind and eye: to see is to know.
Look at me when I am talking to you, we say in pain or exasperation to those who have turned away – putting us out of sight and by implication out of mind. The simplest way for anyone to thwart our attentions, to