Simon Abrahams, an art critic from New York, conducted a computer study of several hundred portraits of famous people and came to the conclusion that they often bear a great resemblance to the self-portraits of the artists who wrote them.
Portraits of famous people do not always reflect the actual appearance of the models. This is the conclusion recently reached by New York art critic and former filmmaker Simon Abrahams, who has conducted an interesting study. Using computer analysis, he compared several hundred portraits, ranging from the Renaissance to the present day, and came to the conclusion that the images of great people - French and British monarchs, as well as people standing close to them, and self-portraits of the artists who painted these paintings, are often very similar.
Abrahams was so impressed by the results of the study that he decided to publish his controversial theory on ArtScholar.org. On this portal, since July of this year, he has been publishing monthly excerpts of research, each of which is devoted to a different topic. In the first, he turned to painting by Renaissance artists such as Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus and Leonardo da Vinci. Abrahams writes that in the paintings of each master you can often see very similar, and even almost identical faces. For example, the image of Anna in the painting "The Virgin with the Child and St. Anne" by the great Leonardo is almost identical with the image of John the Baptist in the painting of the same name by the same da Vinci. And the Virgin Mary, the Archangel Gabriel and Madame Arnolfini in the works of Jan van Eyck can be called almost twins.
LEONARDO DA VINCI Anna. "The Mother of God with the Child and St. Anne." OK. 1508. Fragment.
LEONARDO DA VINCI St. John. "John the Baptist". 1513-1516. Fragment.
YAN VAN EIK Ms. Arnolfini. "Portrait of the Arnolfini Spouses". 1434. Fragment.
Abrahams does not give a clear explanation of this phenomenon, but develops this idea in the next part, which is devoted to portraits of Napoleon and other French monarchs. If we compare the paintings of Ingres, Gro and David, which depict the emperor Bonaparte, it is hard to believe that they are one and the same person. However, if each of the portraits is placed next to the self-portrait of the artist who executed it, as Abrahams did, then these differences become more understandable. The researcher explains this phenomenon as follows: these works are not historical documents, executed in a poetic spirit, but rather, on the contrary, poetic canvases that act as historical ones.
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Abrahams writes that the concept of alter ego, which is often used in literature, is for some reason very rarely applied to art, and especially to portrait painting. He suggests that this is not entirely correct, since the surprising similarity between the images of monarchs and artists is explained by the fact that the author in this case uses another person - alter ego - to convey his own "I". Thus, artists often depicted themselves as their patrons, invested with greatness and power. At the same time, complete similarity is not always necessary - sometimes even one characteristic feature is sufficient for self-identification. So, for example, Jacques-Louis David, wrote Napoleon with the same two curls on his forehead as he did on his own. The same two David's curls can be seen sticking out from under the turban on Marat's face in the artist's famous painting "The Death of Marat" (1793).
Interestingly, the process of bringing your own personality to the model works in the opposite direction. The court painter of Louis XIV, Iasent Rigaud (Hyacinthe Rigaud) initially transferred some features from his early self-portrait (in a turban) into the ceremonial portrait of his patron. And later, after the death of Louis, when Rigaud was asked to paint his self-portrait for the Uffizi gallery, he grew bolder and "tried on" the royal hairstyle, which completed the amazing similarity between the images of the monarch and his court painter.
Most clearly, Abrahams' theory appears in the gallery of portraits of British monarchs and self-portraits of the artists who created them, which he compiled. Often, the similarities in the depicted faces are so striking that additional comments are simply unnecessary. Abrahams re-writes that these depictions of kings and queens are nothing more than a reflection of the artist's alter ego. Abrahams even introduces the special term “face fusion” for this phenomenon, in which one or more of the author's features are combined with the model's features, as a result of which the final image becomes similar to the author and his model. Artists often use hairstyles, lighting and posture both to mask similarities and to emphasize those similarities.
The earliest examples of "face fusion" can be found in the works of the 17th century English painters Nicholas Hilliard and Isaak Oliver. They both created portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. According to Abrahams, one of the scholars of the time noted that Oliver's miniature of the Queen of England was "undoubtedly … painted from life" and "perhaps has the greatest resemblance" to its real prototype. However, today, thanks to the computer analysis of Abrahams, we ourselves can visually compare the images of Elizabeth and the artist who wrote her and make sure that this portrait also carries some of the features of its author.
The similarity in the images of the portraitist and the portraitist can be traced in British painting in the future. Court painter Godfrey Kneller (Gottfried Kneller, Godfrey Kneller) contributed his features to almost every portraits he worked on. One of his contemporaries said that two spouses who visited Neller's workshop had to ask which of the paintings depicts their son, because they could not recognize him. Something similar happens with the works of portrait painter Peter Lely. We can say that the people depicted on them resemble the author so much that their closeness to the real model even becomes doubtful. Abrahams writes that “at least two of Peter Lely's contemporaries expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that the faces in his portraits were too similar to each other. And one of them even suggestedthat the artist got too carried away with the study of his own traits. Famous artists such as Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds have also succumbed to the phenomenon of “face fusion”; the latter painted Kings George III and George IV remarkably similar to himself in his self-portraits.
Surprisingly, the question of similarities between the artist and the model depicted has been largely ignored. Although, as Abrahams said in an interview with The Observer, “it has always been believed that there are artists who are able to depict the world around them“as it is”, and there are“poetic”artists who depict the world as they imagine it … what we see around us, we in any case perceive through the prism of our consciousness. We can only interpret what we see with what we know. Great artists instinctively understood this, and deliberately painted their own faces when they were required to depict the real world around them. This is very reminiscent of how we look at our children - and see them as a reflection of ourselves."
ANTON VAN DYK Self-portrait with Sir Endymion Porter. 1623. Fragment.
Of course, Abrahams's theory can be called controversial. However, the many examples he cites on his website as evidence are truly amazing. One of these surprising comparisons is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, painted in 2001, and a self-portrait by artist Lucian Freud. When comparing, one can clearly see not only the similarity of faces, but it is also noticeable that Freud's hairstyle, both in form and in color, repeats the diamond cross on Elizabeth's crown. These pictures are especially striking also because they represent two living persons. In addition, both works were performed by one of the most famous contemporary artists. All this very clearly indicates that the desire of painters to display their "I" in the guise of the model being portrayed exists to this day.
Material prepared by Ekaterina Onuchina