Self-Portraits and Looking Glasses (or, the Self and its Egos)

From the Flemish Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin respectively in their “Arnolfini Wedding Portrait” (National Gallery, London; 1434) and “St. John the Baptist with a Donor” (Museo del Prado, Madrid; 1438), to the Italian Parmigianino in his “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; ca. 1524), mirrors were a frequent fascination in Renaissance painting. What's reflected in such convex mirrors and represented in both Van Eyck's “Arnolfini Wedding” and, of course, Parmigianino's “Self-portrait” are the portraits of the authors. Nay, in the latter self-portraiture grows the main and only subject. From the background, the personality of artists comes into the foreground, becoming one of the protagonists of European culture. That's early modernity too...

Later, in the Baroque age, sometimes convex mirrors were replaced by crystal balls or glass spheres, with the same function, of reflecting and somewhat deforming the specular image. In the photomontage above, we can see the mentioned “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror” by the Parmigianino; a detail from “Vanitas with Violin and Glass Ball” by the Dutch Pieter Claesz (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg; ca. 1628); the lithograph “Hand with Reflecting Sphere” also known as “Self-Portrait in Spherical Mirror”, first printed by Maurits Cornelis Escher in 1935. In this case at least, in part but reliably the nearly contemporary Dutch artist was inspired by both Parmigianino and Claesz.

In particular in the still life by Claesz, there is a small half-length self-portrait of the artist at his easel, reflected by the spherical surface of the glass ball. In the full painting, not only the glass ball and a violin are depicted, but also other objects as a watch and a skull, which better explain the belonging of this artwork to the pictorial genre of the Vanitas, in great fashion at those times and alluding to this world's caducity (let's remember the biblical “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”). In one sense, the reflecting sphere is also specular of the skull. Art and music, the artist seems to mean, may well soothe a chronic feeling of mortality in human existence and condition. They can't succeed in such a challenge, at last. Our will of representation, or self-representation, is exposed to a recurring frustration.

In the next double image here, on the left, we can also admire the reproduction of a painting by the Austrian Johannes Gumpp Roberto. He is known especially for two versions of the same self-portrayal: the former, “Self-Portrait with Mirror and Easel”, is dated 1646 and housed in the Peter Mühlbauer Gallery, Schloss Sch?nburg, Pocking, Germany; the latter, smaller, round version is in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. In reality, it's a triple portrait. There, twice the author appears frontally, in a mirror and in a canvas on the easel. Moreover he himself is seen from behind, while standing, holding a palette and brush, and completing his work. As odd details, with a probable symbolic meaning, to the left and right of the painter a cat and a dog are menacing each other. If the reflection in the mirror and the portrait on the easel stand respectively for the self and the ego of the painting subject, likely those dissident animals point out an instinctive conflict, inside the subject himself.

In his essay “The Gaze of the Portrait” (Le Regard du portrait, 2000), the French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy has paid special attention to Gumpp?s artwork, noticing that the external viewer, to whom the gaze of the portrait is directed, originally is none but the painter, whereas the specular gaze in the mirror is turned toward the depicted simulacrum of the artist. Yet, at present that real place is vacant, or we spectators have replaced the author. In other words, rather than an apparent splitting or dissociation, this somewhat redundant representation of the subject is a paradoxical defiance shouted by fine art – or by means of art – at the precariousness and impending absence of the subject himself, with his personal characteristics and individual limits. That is, Gumpp evolved his own work after the footsteps of Claesz. Along this way, nonetheless he fell into an incoherency of the subject “here and now”, even before a feared dissolution of his identity. No wonder, Descartes had elaborated his theory of the Cogito ergo sum in 1637: too rationalistic, for an artist.

According to modern psychology, notoriously the self – the unconscious, if we prefer – isn't a full transparent substance. Mostly, it resembles a reflecting surface, and usually our ego is but one of its possible reflections. Not by chance, old portraits were often titled “Portrait as...”, or “Portrait with...”. And this accessory symbolic object could be a looking glass, other times a skull, sometimes even a mask. However, Gumpp created a long lasting iconic cliché. Beside the “Self-Portrait with Mirror and Easel”, below it's shown a romantic and female variation on the same theme, although the author is male: “Portrait of an Artist Painting her Self-Portrait”, by the French Jean-Alphonse Roehn (private collection; ca. 1820). It's quite evident, the pattern for the composition is that invented by Gumpp so long before. What has changed isn't only a lady as protagonist, but also her elegant toilette and the comfortable studio interior. Neither cats nor dogs are visible around, this time.

In self-portraiture and surroundings, above all mirrors were functional instruments, before the invention of photography. Nevertheless, even when photography became complementary with painting in the representation of reality, exceptionally mirrors could be represented in the pictures as artistic objects. No longer nor so much a convex one or a reflecting sphere, as rather a simple looking glass, such as we have seen in the true or simulated self-portraits by Gumpp and by Rohen. This is the case of the Norwegian artist Gunvor Berg, later known as Gunvor Bull-Teilman, photographed by the Hungarian photographer André Kertész at Paris in 1926. The photo-portrait is described as “Gunvor Berg painting her self-portrait in front of a mirror” (Gunvor Berg peignant son autoportrait face à un miroir, Médiathèque de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont, France). Once again, the composition scheme is that first adopted by Gumpp in 1646.

In 1960 the North-American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell executed his own “Triple Self-Portrait”, as a cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post. The original is housed in the permanent collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA, U.S.A. Let's notice four small reproductions of self-portraits, attached on the upper right corner of his fictional canvas, within the real painting. They are by Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, and look like references inviting us to compare how seriously other artists of the past had tackled the problem of self-portraiture. Among the few chosen by the author, the scarce known Johannes Gumpp is absent. Indeed, we can well realize how much Rockwell's artwork is a satiric and auto-satiric revisitation of Gumpp's same old theme. More in general, Rockwell's humour looks ironic about that “vanity of vanities” which a “selfie” portraiture not seldom is.

Actually, if self-portraiture can be a means for self-exploration, introspection and consciousness, that may be else a superficial narcissistic expression, more “ego-portraiture” than self-portraiture. Yet, it's even true, that might be a kind of “alter-ego-portraiture”. Gumpp's scheme has opened the space for a pictorial research, a quest for the image of a wider, complex and dialectic self. As to the search for a personal alterity through the representation of or in a mirror, I'd like to mention two paintings at least: Konstantin A. Somov, Russian symbolist painter, “Self-Portrait in the Mirror” (location unknown; 1934); and Léon Spilliaert, symbolist and expressionist Belgian artist, “Self-Portrait in Mirror” (Museum of Fine Arts, Ostend, Belgium; 1908). Whereas in the former case what's suggested is some gender otherness, in the latter the emerging “alter ego” of the artist acquires a weird disquieting dimension, almost of one Mr. Hyde facing his Dr. Jekyll.

In “Self-Portrait in Mirror” from 1908, mirrors are two even if we can see only one; the portrayed subject is placed between them. The detail of a a clock, showing time ticking away under a glass-bell, may remind us of the afore mentioned “Vanitas with Violin and Glass Ball” by Pieter Claesz. The “Self-Portrait at Easel” by Spilliaert (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp; 1908) may remind of Gumpp's “Self-Portrait with Mirror and Easel”, as well. In other spectral self-portraits, painted by Spilliaert in the same period, the use and representation of mirrors is almost obsessive. He seems interested in deforming and even distorting effects on the reflected image, more than in reflection itself. We have already seen something like that in the artworks of Parmigianino, Claesz and Escher, but theirs is an optical artifice intended to excite wonder in the observers, at most to make them perplexed about their visual perceptions of reality. Instead, for Spilliaert such a deformation isn't only formal. It's a transfiguration and corruption of the self-image, in its understood essence.

Mirroring reflection and deformation may also be middle legs, on the path to a dissolution of the self-image. That's what we can watch, in the pictures of a woman photographer as the New Yorker Vivian Maier: particularly, above I have selected and reported one of her several self-portraits, untitled and dating to the late 1970s. Even more than a landing to abstraction, this strange photo looks like the tacit denunciation of a poor and anonymous life, dedicated to photographic passion without any personal profit or acknowledgement. Discovery and evaluation of Vivian as an original artist in her field occurred only in 2007, two years before her death in 2009. Grown up in France, she was born in 1926. Here, let's listen to these modest and moving words of hers: “Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever. We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end and so on.”

With Vivian Maier, we come to deal with women, who are self-portrayers and self-portrayed at once, with no mediators like we have seen in the cases of Jean-Alphonse Roehn and André Kertész. Among them, the German photographer Ilse Bing and her compatriot, the designer Ise Frank Gropius. Ilse's “Me in the Mirror with Leica” and “Self-Portrait in Mirrors”, both from 1931, are two of the finest black and white photo-self-portraits ever taken. “Leica” is the name of one of the best professional cameras, at those times. Like often painters had portrayed themselves with brushes, palette and easel, the photographer portrays herself with her own instruments. Nor does it matter, if the reflection is in a real mirror, or in a similar surface. If in the works of Ilse there is an intuition of the expressive potential of multiple refraction, this is the main focus in “Self-Portrait in the Bathroom Mirror of her Master’s House in Dessau” by Ise (ca. 1926-27). We can annotate, her self-image appears to be a source of as many possible egos, as the reflections captured in her photo.

Not always nor necessarily, the mirror or mirrors are represented inside the picture. For instance, in “Self-Portrait in Mirror” by Léon Spilliaert a virtual looking glass is also the surface which separates from but makes also communicate the self-portrayed author with the spectator (that's what the North-American Virgil Elliott wants to mean, with his “Self-Portrait with Two Mirrors”, private collection; 2002). The same we can say for the afore mentioned photograph by Vivian Maier, even if in the case that surface isn't a painted one. Nay, there aren't mirrors represented in this photo, what happens in most cases, where the reflecting surface is dissimulated in the surface of the picture or painting. Let's take in consideration a famed example: “Self-Portrait” by Joshua Reynolds, canvas on display in the National Portrait Gallery at London and dating back approximately to 1747-8.

There, Joshua shows himself as a young artist at work, hand to brow shading his eyes. In the other hand, he holds his distinctive brush and palette. Really, is he carefully surveying his subject, that's his own reflection in a mirror? Not only, at least. Rather, what he is striving to discern is none but ourselves, lost and unknown in our spacial and temporal distance. With an imaginative inversion of terms, he is the observer, we are observed. We are the image in the mirror, perhaps the mirror itself. It's like he is waiting for us, coming to visit him according to his will of representation or, better to write, of “re-presentation”. There is no distance, in fine arts. If history of art is diachronic, art in itself tends to be synchronous or even atemporal. Almost the space for a wider self, inclusive of our egos.

In her 1888 “Self-Portrait with Palette”, executed at age 37, the Dutch Thérèse Schwartze assumed the same pose made famous by Reynolds so long earlier. From its location in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence, also her painted self-image is still gazing at us, pensively and somewhat ironically, as if she had already read what written so long later by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in The Gaze of the Portrait, cited above. What's really important isn't so much a mutable image, as the persistent quality of the gaze. Through our critical gaze, justice ought to be “rendered to art”, and “to the singularity of the artist”. At the same time though, I would dare add, self-portraiture is self-likeness in a broader sense. It's the choice of and the focussing on an individual ego, amid all those the personal self is able to express, sometimes so many and varying that such a self might even appear an impersonal one.