A book’s title, especially when the author’s name has not been encountered before, generates expectations about what will be found inside. In the case of Lorne Camp bell’s Renaissance Portraits, what one dis covers upon first turning the pages is so remote from what could have been antici pated that one’s immediate response may be to dismiss it with irritation. The book leaves out many of the expected and perhaps obliga tory things, including, for extreme example, any discussion of the Mona Lisa, which is mentioned only twice in the context of other matters. Yet if one sticks with the book, one finds that its unusual treatment of its subject is well worth registering. Indeed, one dis covers that, despite its obvious quirkiness, it offers a well-based survey of some aspects of the subject that have been too little con sidered.
The large format and deluxe production raise certain other expectations, and one is surprised to find the book is anything more than a tastefully modest coffee-table item. (An odd illustration of this modesty is that the publicity material understates the num ber of the reproductions–there are 267 of them–by nearly fifty.) Of the many and supe rior color plates, a dozen constitute a distinctive subgroup, details of the heads from larger portraits, which are bled, i.e., printed all the way out to all four margins. The device creates a feeling of large scale, suggesting actual size, and also something near the trompe l’oeil effect that dominates a reproduction of a painting when it fills a television screen. In this case the device also seems to heighten the biographical effect of the portraits: it’s as if we were being given a social introduction to these people. All this is on top of the good evocation of the diverse brushwork as handled by the great artists represented in all these cases, from Holbein to Titian. Perhaps someone other than the author thought such images would have an instant appeal, for they are oddly concentrated near the beginning of the book, half of them in its first quarter, like good strawberries on the top of the box.
The credentials of the author set up yet another initial impression. The jacket flap describes him as Reader of Art History at the Courtauld Institute and the author previously of the catalogue of the Flemish paintings owned by Elizabeth II. He has also written impressive learned articles, chiefly on Flemish paintings. One therefore expects an art-historical text, most probably a chronological narrative with longer stops when the outstanding individual artists appear. It seems indeed that the traditional axioms of art history–which emphasize chronology and the importance of heroes as protagonists–have hardly been touched by the explosion of new methodologies in art history. Perhaps these axioms are unquestioned precisely by the people who make methodology their specialty, and so survive not so much surreptitiously as tacitly. The expected result would then be a book along the same general lines as the last well-known account of the same topic, produced by John Pope-Hennessy in 1966, perhaps emphasizing certain phases where the earlier author was held to have erred or left gaps.
To be sure, in the particular case of Renaissance portraiture, an objection to the normal scheme suggests itself, in that almost all the hero-artists discussed also produced non-portraits too, and in greater numbers. Hence to describe the series of their successive accomplishments without reference to the rest of their work tends to slice off a major part of each personality, unless so much reference is made to it as to undercut the theme. Campbell does not address any such procedural problems explicitly, but he does succeed in simply removing the issue in his own different scheme, downplaying both chronology and heroes in favor of the product–the portrait–as a special kind of made commodity. He also keeps a good deal closer to the visual specifics of the paintings than is usual either from biographers or users of the new procedures.
Campbell warns us at once that he will not give us “straightforward” history, and not very much about “chronological develop ments.” His account of what will replace them is somewhat disappointing, truisms or Good Things such as defining types of portraits and “who produced them and for whom.” We learn more when we observe particular cases. Among the nine short chapters, one surveys poses and another “settings, clothes and attributes.” In the former, a quotation from a sixteenth-century painter who wrote a manual (one of many admirable such citations) first tells us to sit two yards away and hold a conversation; the author himself then gives us more along the same lines. The main trouble with three-quarter views, it seems, “lies in placing the near eye, for its relationship to the nose cannot be conveniently mapped by following well defined contour lines and even a practiced draughtsman may place it too far from the nose.” We are given hints for minimizing this difficulty and the next one, that hands “are of almost exactly the same high tone as the face.” When we are told that “tables were serviceable for closing gaps in compositions,” we are dealing with a smaller issue that also seems tied to a period. The others, however, are presented just as if they would be useful now. Portraits are thought of as being produced today, in essence of the same sort as in the Renaissance. No proof, we are told in an aside, is needed for the “obvious” point that in Europe since classical times “the same gestures and expressions have always made the same emotional signals.” One may be skeptical about that when one thinks of how divergent they can be in the same era, our own, in different countries.
This book, first published in 1949, is evidently perceived by its publishers as having lost nothing of its practicality.
The author is very open about how he arrived at this approach. He grew up in the “portrait painter’s household” of his father, and from him got all kinds of experience, in cluding a sitter’s. Thus the book at once sug gested to me the kind of operator’s hand book I had seen shortly before advertised as “offering design professionals everything they need to know about”–in this case –“airport terminals.” Only after the above was written was I neatly rewarded with the perfect analogue, an announcement of the reissue of Practical Portrait Painting, a book by Frank Slater, a “distinguished British portraitist.” This book, first published in 1949, is evidently perceived by its publishers as having lost nothing of its practicality. Slater, the announcement tells us, will assist not only on technique but career planning and “first, second and third sittings.” Sure enough, so does Campbell. Taking up the problem of the bored sitter, whose facial expression may regrettably reappear in the portrait, he comes to the Mona Lisa, as mentioned. He cites the oft-quoted description by Vasari of how Leonardo brought in musicians and jesters to keep her cheerful, “and remove that melancholy which paint ing usually gives to portraits.” As usually quoted, Leonardo’s behavior seems peculiar and unmotivated, a token of his eccentric thoroughness. Campbell gives it context and sense, and this suggests how his apparently unhistorical approach can be enlightening, clarifying a dynamic circumstance in a way that neither the standard nor the trendiest methods would. One could continue be yond in Campbell’s line of thought, asking whether a still unstated cause of the Mona Lisa’s fame, especially the fame of her smile, may be that sitters hardly ever come before us with smiles, and, still further, whether that rare smile may itself have generated the story that the portrait painter Vasari told, to ex plain it, rather than the other way around. To be sure, one predecessor of Leonardo, Antonello da Messina, does present many smiling sitters; Campbell does not speak of these.
As Frank Slater is also English, Campbell’s book and this whole approach to portrait painting may seem to emerge from a unique local background. It is well known that in England Renaissance painting at its best was dominated by portraiture as it was nowhere else, most obviously with Holbein. The same pattern continued there with van Dyck in the seventeenth century and with Gainsborough and others in the eighteenth. Still later traces of this situation have been limited and peculiar but powerful. When one thinks about it, the existence of a National Portrait Gallery, as founded in 1857 in London, is quite peculiar. It has had no influence in other countries apart from close copies in Scotland and the United States. It does not contain the finest portraits produced in the nation, which would make it congruent with a book like Campbell’s, but specifically those representing publicly important people. It thus is a museum of historical documents, and other countries place such portraits in their history museums in company with other kinds of artifacts. But because it installs its paintings exactly as do other galleries, a portrait gallery uniquely claims them as art objects too. Such galleries are a survival from Campbell’s period; the lucky Renaissance art ist did indeed produce virtually all his work for non-aesthetic uses in his society, in this case to glorify important people, but at the same time could be the beneficiary of praise if he was judged to be at the top in the aesthetic quality of his products.
Today we have almost entirely lost the former function of painted portraits (even art ists are glorified in photographs) and keep only the aesthetic value in isolation. But there is a suggestion here that portraiture in England is a fossil exception. People who do official portraits there as their specialty, even in our century, are assigned a role in the world of art; following Gerald Brockhurst, there is Pietro Annigoni, who has nothing in common with Holbein, van Dyck, and Winterhalter other than the particularity that they were all foreigners whose fame turned on doing the English royal family. In America and I think elsewhere those who specialize in portraits of the prominent are outside the art world, declassed with com mercial artists. More interesting in England is the subtler case of a Graham Sutherland, who was called on because he was a prominent artist when especially important prominent portraits were wanted, and still more so the way in which many British modernists in our century intersect with the traditional schemata of portraits in their chief work: Gwen and Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, David Hockney. There is a thinner such tradition in Germany, and in both cases the basis is a continuum from the sixteenth century. Thus Campbell’s sense that his scholarship about that period, emphasizing Protestant north ern Europe, could involve a continuum to the present was a just instinct, though it would not have been anywhere else.
The only other case I can think of where portraits, publicly shown, have been isolated in their own gallery, is the Uffizi collection of self-portraits, acquired from artists since the end of the Renaissance. That brings us to the fact that self-portraits are entirely omitted from Campbell’s survey of portraits. When he gives us a list of types of sitters to portraits, it extends to the artist’s friends but not to the artist. What this confirms is Campbell’s slight interest in the individuality of those who paint portraits, and his focus on portrait painting as a “practical” functioning job. Even in dealing with other sitters, he is sparse on their psychology as it may be inferred from the images–a favorite theme of other writers on portraiture, so the omission, when psychology is most obviously involved, is not surprising.
The only two self-portraits that seem to be mentioned are both double portraits of the artist and his wife, thus at once involving another sitter, and they are typically brought up in a discussion of the problem of the market value of portraits when the sitter is not, or is no longer, the buyer. It is reason able indeed to be puzzled, as the author puts it, about “who the people were who bought” the engraving in which, around 1490, Israhel van Meckenem represented his wife and himself side by side. Campbell’s reasonable point is that this is, by far, the earliest self-portrait in a multiple medium, so implying that, unlike other self-portraits, it had an out side audience. Yet as today printmakers use their own art to produce Christmas cards for their friends, this engraving might have had the sitters’ personal circle as its audience; the double oddity of its being a print and including the wife would thus be explained, but perhaps this explanation is too non professional to appeal to the author. The second case involves the anonymous Master of Frankfurt, seen with his wife in an oil, one of a series of double portraits treated by Campbell as a class of their own. The author wants to show that the Arnolfini double portrait by Jan van Eyck is not so unusual as is generally thought, in several respects. Here his listed evidence seems uncharacteristically shaky.
Unlike portraits, narrative scenes present persons in an active interrelationship at a specific time.
Some of his examples are brief descriptions of lost works, and the two persons seen in them might well have had separating internal frames, while others, such as an image of Joan of Arc kneeling before the Dauphin, are only called portraits by dint of definitional generosity. Unlike portraits, narrative scenes present persons in an active interrelationship at a specific time; portraits consistently re semble religious icons in that they do not in volve a point in time but show an ongoing stable existence. The role of time in Renais sance imagery is rarely explored. For that mat ter, the author never tells us how he wants to define “portrait,” but only gives us thorough explanations of the inadequacies of many odier definitions, not including the one just suggested. Perhaps here again he is better on the particular than on theory. Yet it is odd that he does give us a clear definition for the other word in his title, “Renaissance,” which many people would find harder to do.
In general, Campbell impresses one with the equanimity of the sober craftsman. This equanimity deserts him on occasion, however, notably when he refers to those who since the time of Michelangelo and Vasari have been “saying or implying that portraiture is not a serious intellectual pursuit and that, as mere representation, it is scarcely worthy of being called an art form.” Their views are said to have had a “fatal” effect because they imposed Florentine theoretical standards on German and Netherlandish portraiture.
This judgment, recalling Svetiana Alpers, is a relatively rare appearance of an explicit form of the ethnic separatism which, I have been suggesting, is a major underlying force in the book. It surfaces again in the final short chapter, called “Italy and the North.” Floren tine ideas of what art ought to be are found to have dominated unreasonably, to the dis advantage of the different kind of art found in the Netherlands and Germany. The latter is not simply accumulative naturalism, but has its own expressive distortions for effect, perhaps more so than in Italy. These the author exemplifies beautifully. What he does less well here is specify what the evil Floren tine theory said. Indeed, Florentine theory is for Campbell and others a kind of straw man, a construct they invoke only to discredit.
Typically, the case is chiefly made by citing two individual portraitists, Titian and Anthonis Mor. Mor’s achievement “has been dismissed by art historians as a superficial and provincial” imitation “of Titian” by those who have “ignored or dismissed as irrelevant” Titian’s copying from northern portraits. Finding this reading not familiar, I checked a book of my own that discusses both artists. I find that I had, duly, recorded Titian’s taking of a portrait design from an Austrian colleague and had also, several times, including on that same page, praised Mor for his inventiveness and general distinction. I had also cited Mor’s base in Antwerp for its central, non-provincial, role at the time. Since my book is among rather few whose theme required it to address both painters, it would seem to provide a suitable check. No doubt someone has made the foolish remarks described, but to treat them as the norm does not seem wise.
Even if Campbell pushes a claim to a point unlikely to help his cause when he judges Mor to be “unjustly overshadowed by Titian,” he is welcome and well based in his urgent arguments that we look more keenly at Mor. A typical passage first describes such details as the narrow shadows, one, “between the ear and the near cheek, well defined and linear,” leading unexpectedly to the projection of “an incipient sneer,” while other equally specific technical means produce “an expression of subtle and aristocratic disdain.” When so much art history that claims a reforming mission sees its images only in large generalities, apparently because it needs them only instrumentally, Camp bell’s close looking puts other observers who will follow his pointers into his debt, even before he makes his evocative jumps to argue how the design generates the expression.
Typically, the case is chiefly made by citing two individual portraitists, Titian and Anthonis Mor.
Looking at his handsome plates of Mor, and at an original, I have been reinforced in an old formula of my own that one might define Mor’s triumph, especially in a “classic” like his Mary Tudor, as the making of the sort of image that is ideally suited for a frontispiece to a biography of the sitter. Titian’s are not, they are too breathing and of the living moment. Mor’s beautiful adjustment of his composed bodies inside their rectangles gives his people a stability, seasoned by refinements mentioned and the three-quarter view, that may persuade us that he has summed them up, both in their personal existence and their social slots. The slot, as the author observes, is usually one with power and wealth. He is careful to suggest that accidents of survival can have skewed the ratio of Renaissance portraits linked to powerful people, and that in a way that is not accidental at all since the less powerful are less likely to have survived. Yet portrait paintings were always expensive (a factor surprisingly only glanced at in the book), and may themselves have tended to be in the first place records made chiefly about the rich.
The Arnolfini portrait, as mentioned above, sets up another of the author’s few and thus conspicuous departures from equanimity. “With some confidence” he rejects the very frequent view that it contains many symbolic references and is anything but a “straightforward double portrait.” With growing emphasis, he calls it “inadvisable” to find a reference to marriage in it, “still more inadvisable” to compare it to a “pictorial marriage certificate,” and finally “an insult to van Eyck” to treat his picture as a puzzle to solve or a substitute for a contract. The reference, politely demoted to a footnote, is to a well-known essay by Erwin Panofsky, which really didn’t do that. Panofsky found symbols and found them puzzling, but did not reductively equate the picture with a puzzle or a paper document–in his phrasing a high charge belongs to the first word of the phrase “pictorial marriage certificate.” Certainly, less sensitive (and less learned) admirers of Panofsky have behaved in a way that could well be described in the author’s angry tones, making the image only an illustration of a cultural notion, but a case is not proved by scoring off its weaker proponents any more than by misgauging its stronger ones.
Renaissance Portaits, then, betrays its author’s idiosyncratic approach more con spicuously than most books do both because of Campbell’s blunt honesty–something of a John Bull bluntness at times–and because his biases aren’t the conventional ones of either standard or rebellious art history. It is probably this idiosyncrasy that generates the book’s exceptional usefulness.
