Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist. . - book review

JOANNA WOODS-MARSDEN

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 295 pp.; 57 color ills., 110 b/w. $60.00

One's first reaction to this book's title is likely to be "Of course!" and to wonder why it was not written fifty or a hundred years ago. Ever since Jakob Burckhardt, the Renaissance has been virtually synonymous with a discovery of the self that looks forward to modern individualism. And from some perspectives Renaissance self-portraits, though relatively scarce, appear to be woven into the very fabric of the period's art. Independent, formal self-portraits are only part of the evidence. Time and again, portraitlike faces look out at us from altarpieces and frescoes, raising the suspicion that this is the artist and that his presence somehow makes narrative and the experience of the holy more direct, more personal, even more "modern." Sometimes, with the help of Giorgio Vasari, we can identify these faces. But can we trust Vasari, writing in the mid-16th century, sometimes several lifetimes removed from the works in question? More important, perhaps, can we trust ourselves not to read too much into a face or even into the notion of selfhood itself? Nowadays we have to contend with an increasingly lively, ongoing debate across the disciplines over just where to draw the lines between Renaissance and modern consciousness, not to mention arguments and counterarguments about whether the very concept of the self is a relatively recent period construct. Especially in light of art history's growing dread of anachronism, a subject like Renaissance self-portraiture inevitably seems trickier and more difficult than ever.

Faced with all the complexities and pitfalls her subject poses, Joanna Woods-Marsden has opted for a cautious approach. She tries not to stray too far from well-established facts, and from the first page she carefully narrows the scope of her inquiry so as to avoid questions of selfhood that might seem overly subjective or suspiciously modern. With few exceptions the book deals only with independent and mainly painted self-portraits from 15th- and 16th-century Italy, works "specifically created to mediate between the artistic self...and its Renaissance audience" (p. 1). For the most part, the audience in question is the Italian Renaissance court, and the pictures portray the artist as courtier, performing, or "fashioning," his or her self in this social theater. In other words, Woods-Marsden defines selfhood in social terms, as opposed to the Romantic view of an autonomous self, which has become such a deep-seated modern bias. Recent scholarship repeatedly has emphasized how communal, how public was Renaissan ce life, and this was especially true of the princely courts, competitive, status-conscious societies where an individual was literally always on view. Given the widespread belief in Renaissance Italy that aristocrats were not born but made, the courts offered considerable social mobility to artists, who often ranked no higher than lower-middleclass craftsmen in their native towns. To succeed at court, however, the aspiring artist had to create for himself a suitably persuasive persona, or social mask, and act it out with grace and panache. Plausibly enough, Woods-Marsden sees Renaissance self-portraits as extensions of this rhetoric. Most often, the persona involved is that of the artist as genius, a considerable step up from the status of mere artisan. In fact, the theme of the transformation of medieval craftsman into Renaissance genius provides the book's main subplot

This line of thought reflects contemporary scholarship's increasing attention to social context as the key to understanding Renaissance art in its own terms. Her excellent bibliography shows that Woods-Marsden has given almost as much attention to social and intellectual history as to the history of art, maybe more. And throughout the book she touches on a wide variety of subjects, from classical philosophy to the history of mirrors. Promising as her approach appears to be, however, it does not work as well as one might have hoped. Part of the problem is that the number of works is so limited. Woods-Marsden counts just twenty-five artists engaged in self-portraiture as she defines it, and she illustrates only about twice that number of the images themselves, few indeed for so long a stretch of time. Such thin evidence makes it harder to write a history of the subject in the usual sense: that is, to trace trends and influences, to establish traditions and conventions, and, in general, to show the circulation a nd transformation of ideas, Because there are relatively few overarching themes and patterns of development, the chapters remain relatively disconnected, at rest in themselves. In this respect Renaissance Self -Portraiture tends to be a slow read.

The book's organization has only compounded these problems. Much of the discussion of general questions of society, selfhood, and portrayal in the Renaissance takes place in the first four chapters. Basically, they represent a survey of the extensive scholarly literature on these issues and, insofar as Woods-Marsden smooths over most of the sharp disagreements and vigorous debates, a survey somewhat wider than it is deep. More important, though, all but one of these introductory chapters are almost entirely unillustrated. In effect, the ideas take shape in a vacuum, without the tangible interplay with the portraits themselves that might have strengthened our understanding of both.

Most of the subsequent chapters are more biographical than thematic, almost all of them devoted to single artists and what are seldom more than a couple of pictures, sometimes fewer. Frequently, the biographical details are fascinating, even morbidly so in the case of psychopaths like Benvenuto Cellini or Leone Leoni. But given the nature of these self-portraits as public performances, gaps between biography and portrayal are inevitable and often hard to close. Woods-Marsden does use iconographic interpretation to add substance to the images, more successfully in some cases than in others. Not unexpectedly, many of her best interpretations arise from the highly allusive, allegorical art of the 16th-centtiiy Mannerists, who were also the artists most deeply enmeshed in court culture and politics. In many ways, artists such as Vasari, Baccio Bandinelli, and Federico Zuccari represent the climax and perhaps the real target of the book. They show the essential pattern of self-glorification as self-aggrandizement that most interests the author. The unlikable Bandinelli might almost serve as a caricature of her argument, and his Self-Portrait in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, draws some of her most expansive interpretation.

Too often, however, Woods-Marsden gives less attention to the pictures than to the biographical facts, which are generally more abundant. A case in point is a chapter on Cellini, who produced no self-portraits at all but did leave behind his indispensable Autobiography. Here as elsewhere, she gives the impression of being less interested in the art than in the court life it reflects. There are too few attempts to connect one self-portrait to another or to set the works within larger conventions of court portraiture, which might be expected to shed light on the social norms and ideals in question. How, for example, does the image of the artist as courtier compare with the image of the courtier as courtier? Or, to take a specific case, what connection might there be between Titian's Berlin Self-Portrait, which she discusses at length, and his similarly composed Portrait of Pietro Aretino in Florence from a few years earlier? The two men were friends and archcourtiers, and in these works both seem to stand "offs tage", gazing intensely off to the right. Is there some common meaning here?

As Woods-Marsden leaves her introductory chapters behind, her sense of the purpose and motivation of Renaissance self-portraiture also seems to shrink. If one reads Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier or the writings of modern Renaissance scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, Wayne Rebhorn, Thomas Greene, or John Martin, to name just a few, the social meanings of "Renaissance self-fashioning," as Greenblatt calls it, appear exceptionally deep and rich. (1) All of them appear in the bibliography of Renaissance Self-Portraiture, and their ideas crop up in the first four chapters. Yet in the chapters that follow, the point of self-fashioning gradually tends to collapse into a narrow pursuit of social status alone. This is in no way to deny that status was critically important to these artists or to Renaissance society in general. In such an aristocratic culture, however, social rank represented more than just power and wealth; it carried meaning and ethical value in ways that modern democrats can find hard to comprehend.

Whatever Woods-Marsden's social or political sympathies may be, the main trouble here seems to lie in her cautiousness as a scholar and critic. In the first chapter she gives some consideration to the often ambiguous reciprocity between invention and discovery--between self-fashioning and self-knowledge--in Renaissance self-portraiture. But as she moves into discussions of the works themselves, she mainly tries to see them in relatively one-dimensional terms, as functions of outward situations and institutional constraints. This approach makes interpretation easier but leaves little room for ambiguous dialectics of the self. One of her more off-putting turns of phrase, which becomes ever more common as her argument unfolds, even implies that the selves represented in these portraits are not so much subjects as objects, in the sense that they are somehow separate from the inner being of their creators. Again and again, she speaks of the artist constructing, or fashioning, or confecting "the self" (emphasis add ed)--as opposed to himself or herself--in terms that manifestly suggest this kind of objectification and estrangement. The formula appears to arise from a misunderstanding of the notion of the courtier as actor, which, as she sees it, entails a chameleonlike ability to shift his roles at will as the play changes (p. 15). There is no question that the theater metaphor aptly describes life at court and much of Renaissance social life in general. And courtliness certainly involved making a good impression on one's audience, as courtesy still does today. Nevertheless, the self being played was supposed to remain constant. At least as Castiglione describes his art, contriving an attractive social mask always involves making visible inner qualities that the courtier truly possesses but would not be immediately evident without skillful acting, which is itself a praiseworthy accomplishment. He has nothing but scorn for deceit and affectation. (2) So the success of a self-portrait would appear to rest on the positive relationship it establishes between the self and its roles, and on the inner dialogue and self-knowledge that makes that performance possible. Woods-Marsden can demonstrate that some courtiers were indeed Iago types, but this does not entitle herto assume that self-fashioning implicitly amounted to mere self-fabrication. By her account--and Vasari's--Bandinelli was such a false courtier, but he was also widely despised by his peers.

Significantly, Woods-Marsden takes a similarly "functional" approach to the self-portraits as spectators in religious scenes. A single chapter devoted to quattrocento examples early in the book explains them as the artists' attempts to paint their way into heaven, as it were, by associating themselves with things sacred. Again, no element of reflection, no interior dialogue, enters into the act of selfportrayal. But from her point of view, this reading has the advantage of drawing a sharp and purely functional line between the two forms of self-portraiture, which obviates any need to talk about them together in terms of general issues and meanings of Renaissance selfhood. Like apples and oranges, they are simply different. Woods-Marsden concedes that the spectator self-portraits are important enough to deserve a book of their own, but they do not belong in hers.

Nevertheless, more complicated and subjective selves keep slipping into view, and this is at least partly because the contexts that supposedly define and determine them are less stable than the author tends to assume. One of the most interesting examples occurs in her chapter on Andrea Mantegna, an artist much given to self-portraiture and with a reputation for irony and wit. Woods-Marsden points out that his face appears in the ornamental moldings painted around the strikingly naturalistic scenes of Gonzaga family life in the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua. There, in her words, "Mantegna's painted features observe the observers observing his frescoes" (p. 85), which is itself a nice observation. It seems no less significant and more ironic, however, that the artist mediates here between so many different levels of artifice and illusion, all full of portraits: the landscapes and the interior on the walls, the view through the illusionary cupola, and the illusionary decorative reliefs and antique busts of Roman emperors on the vault. The room testifies to the experience of a many-layered reality, and to the reflexive nature of that experience, which occasions the self-portrait. It is tempting to compare these effects to Jan van Eyck's reflected presence in the Arnolfini Wedding's mirror or in Saint George's armor in the Van der Paele Madonna, where his reflection effectively parodies the embroidered saints on Saint Donation's cope. However much the Camera degli Sposi reflects on Mantegna's position at the Gonzaga court, his self-portrait there cuts deeper than his courtier's role could possibly explain by itself.

Moreover, Mantegna's idea of coupling self-portraiture with this sense of ontological instability, so to speak, seems to have been contagious. In another chapter Woods-Marsden discusses two frescoes by Pietro Perugino and Bernardino Pinturicchio from thirty years later in which the same kind of interplay takes place. The first, in the Sala dell'Udienza of the Collegio del Cambio in Perugia, shows a framed self-portrait of Perugino musionistically hanging against the decorative border between two classicizing lunettes of twelve antique heroes with the four cardinal virtues. In the other, Pinturicchio's self-portrait hangs in the lavishly classical chamber of an elegant Annunciation in S. Maria Maggiore in Spello. Woods-Marsden notes how incongruously realistic and down-to-earth these two self-portraits appear in these idealizing settings. To her the fact that the artists cast themselves as painted portraits means that they intended to illustrate "the concept of the constructed self" (p. 105), to show themselve s as fabricated identities. Yet while they certainly meant to play ironically on issues of reality and artifice, the faces in the two self-portraits are more than mere fabrications. What she fails to recognize is that the ironies here carry a double twist. The artists' images are both more artificial and, in a genuine sense, more real than the pictures or the inscriptions around them. Again, they seem to be calling attention to the relativity of art and reality and, in the process, reflecting back on their own role as mediators. This idea would seem to deserve more attention.

Other kinds of relativity also figure in Renaissance self-portraiture. A chapter on the double portrait in the Musee du Louvre, Paris, that used to be called Raphael and His Fencing Master represents an important missed opportunity in this regard. Woods-Marsden tries to read the two figures' relationship entirely in terms of court hierarchy and etiquette, interpreting the sword and the seated pose of Raphael's companion as evidence that he is an aristocrat and thus socially superior to the painter. A few pages later, she eventually concedes that at this point, toward the end of his life, Raphael enjoyed a quasidivine status that placed him quite beyond such considerations. In fact, the relationship of the two men is far too informal, dynamic, and personal to have justified this kind of ceremonious, symbolic interpretation in the first place. This is, after all, a friendship portrait, a genre of growing importance in the Renaissance. Although Woods-Marsden recognizes the type, she does not try to sort out its themes and conventions. Nor, evidently, has she looked into the humanists' notion of friendship as the highest form of human relationship, one in which the friends become one another's "other selves." What made friendship so lofty was that it was entirely personal and uniquely free of externally imposed, institutional constraints--unlike marriage or the family, for example. At least partly because of its reputation for nobility, friendship and friendship portraiture thrived at the Renaissance court, yet it was not and could not be a function of the court hierarchy as such. (3) All of which demonstrates that self-portraiture could operate in more than one social framework at the same time. Pictures like Raphael's show that even within the courtly milieu social relationships were more multifaceted than Woods-Marsden's paradigm seems to allow.

We might look at the spectator self-portraits in a similar way, as potential evidence of alternative forms of social and ethical identity, in this case religious ones, which could carry quite different social imperatives from those of the courts. Although Christianity and secular culture overlapped and intermingled often enough in the Renaissance, tensions always existed between their fundamental underlying values. For example, the self-glorification that Woods-Marsden sees as the primary cause and meaning of self-portraiture at court runs directly counter to the Christian demand for humility. Might not that demand partly account for the relatively low numbers of self-portraits in the Renaissance or, in subtler ways, for the ironic note in a work like Pinturicchio's Spello Annunciation? Some of the commonest subjects in which artists' self-portraits appear, like the Adoration of the Magi, also may tend to subvert Woods-Marsden's basic thesis. She sees the artists in the crowds at Epiphany scenes as social cli mbers, trying to associate themselves with royalty. However, the idea of kings humbling themselves before a baby constituted a profound reversal of the social order, and it was an integral part of "Christmas laughter" in medieval and Renaissance Christianity. Not for nothing was the Feast of Epiphany, Twelfth Night, also the Feast of the Beans, a major carnival celebration. (4) So some of these self-portraits actually might be making precisely the opposite kind of social statement. This is not to suggest that Christianity was a more powerful motivating force for Renaissance self-portraiture than the court, let alone to minimize the role of self-glorification. Rather, the spectator self-portraits and the other exceptions to Woods-Marsden's paradigm point to the multiplicity of roles and commitments that went into a Renaissance artist's social identity and sense of self. This "layered" quality of Renaissance selfhood lately has been the subject of several penetrating studies by Renaissance historians. As they p oint out, the inevitable tensions between one role and another bred an ironic awareness of the interval between outward behavior and the inward self as subject, as agent, that was the foundation of Renaissance individualism. That is to say, this individual's sense of personal unity--of his undividedness--derived from his awareness of an inner self rather than from a single outward persona. Or, more precisely (to avoid Romantic misconceptions), it lay in the dialogue between them. (5) The same recognition surely helps to explain the impulse to self-portraiture.

As a matter of fact, these creative frictions are implicit in Woods-Marsden's central theme, the change in the artist's image from artisan to intellectual. To be sure, this was only one of many problems of divided and conflicting identities confronting Renaissance artists. But as she suggests, this particular friction provides a nice focus for understanding the rise of self-portraiture, based on some pressing social realities and problems of creative self-definition. Here as elsewhere, however, she does not approach the issue as dialectically as she might have, which reduces the argument's effectiveness. As with her treatment of the dichotomy between social persona and inward self, her categories are too static. So for much of the book, artisanship becomes an inherently medieval quality, and the Renaissance image of the artist as genius almost requires that he appear not to work with his hands: that is, that he not look like an artist at all. Woods-Marsden considers any self-portrait that shows an artist with a paintbrush in his hand as a sign that he belongs to the category of artisan rather than that of gentleman and intellectual. Yet the very existence of such pictures demonstrates, of course, that not every Renaissance artist felt manual work was as "proletarian" as Aristotle or the courtly ethos decreed. Eventually, she admits as much, but by consigning such "anomalies" to a separate section at the end of the book, she diminishes the potential dialogue between the two conceptions of the artist's role and, with it, possible insights into the dynamics of Renaissance self-portraiture.

The lack of dialectical thinking in this book is partly a function of its narrow focus on courtly self-portraiture alone. Needless to say, an author has the right to draw her boundaries where she sees fit, especially for the purposes of making her subject more manageable, as here. I am also keenly aware that the cardinal sin of a book reviewer is to criticize an author for not writing a book other than the one she intended. The fact that Woods-Marsden repeatedly breaks her own boundaries by bringing in other types of self-portraiture, however, indicates the artificiality of those limits and the distortions they create. That she nevertheless sticks with this rather narrow agenda partly reflects an unstated set of theoretical assumptions that are grounded in the so-called New Historicism. Her view of the courtly persona as a pure fabrication seems to be rooted in one of that movement's seminal texts, Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning. The book replaces the traditional view of the Renaissance indi vidual as one who shapes his own identity with a more "divisible" being, largely shaped by external cultural forces. To be sure, when Greenblatt splits a fascinating figure like Sir Thomas More into two contradictory selves, inner and outer, public and private, he develops that dualism much more richly and dialectically than Woods-Marsden ever attempts to do. (6) She has borrowed not his mode of interpretation but, rather, his tendency to treat culture and society as totalizing phenomena, which at best severely constrict independent self-determination. (7) If this is so, then it only makes sense to look for the determining cause of a given group of self-portraits in their social and cultural context-in their audience, which is what Woods-Marsden has done.

Without question, good things have come out of this approach. One is a comprehensive view of courtly life. Another is a long section on the self-portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, 16th-century women artists who were forced purely by external social constraints to specialize in portraiture. There is also the not inconsiderable blessing of a reasonably short book. But if Renaissance culture was less monolithic than the New Historicists assume, and if self-portraits, and Renaissance consciousness in general, come from internal dynamics as much as from external ones, then WoodsMarsden's geographic and institutional boundaries become inherently arbitrary. Spectator self-portraits aside, where does a non-Italian like Jan van Eyck fit in this scheme of things? Where should we put Albrecht Durer's Munich Self-Portrait from 1500, surely the greatest and most provocative of them all. (8) It may well be that the book that could hold all these strands of form and meaning together could not be written, which also helps to explain why we have had to wait so long for this one. So despite its limitations we have reason to be grateful to Joanna Woods-Marsden for taking on the daunting task of turning Renaissance self-portraiture into a comprehensive subject and for laying out at least some of the terms in which it will have to be discussed from now on.

Notes

(1.) Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Waync A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione's "Book of the Courtier" (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978); Thomas Greene, "The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature," in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ad. Peter Demetz at al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 241-64; and John Martin, "Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe," American Historical Iteview 102 (1997): 1309-42.

(2.) Rebhorn (as in a. 1), 31-47.

(3.) See Harald Keller, "Entstehung und Blutezeit des Freundschaftsbildes," in Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolph Wiukower, ed. Douglas Fraser et al. (London: Phaidon, 1967), 161-64: and John Charles Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 75-84. On the exclusiveness of friendship, see asp. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, bk. 2, trans. George Bull (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967), 138-39; and Michel de Montaigna's essay "Of Friendship," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, bk. 1, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 135-44.

(4.) See M. Bakhtin, Rahelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984), 74, 79, 81, 219. My former student Liz Guenther, who is finishing her dissertation at Princeton, has looked into these carnival meanings in northern Renaissance Epiphany scenes and presented some of her findings in a paper entitled Hugo van der Goes's Holy Laughter" in a session chaired by David Levine and myself at the College Art Association annual meeting in Los Angeles in Feb. 1999.

(5.) Martin (as in n. 1), 1321-23, 1337-38: Ronald FE.. Weissman, "The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Social Relations, Individualism, and Identity in Renaissance Florence," in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F.E. Weissman (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 271-75, 279.

(6.) Greenhlatt (as in n. 1), 22-73.

(7.) For especially subtle and sustained criticisms of Greenblatt's practices and assumptions in this regard, see Martin (as in n. 1), 1311-23, 1338-42.

(8.) On this painting. see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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