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Michele Di Monte

Having the Face. The Portrait in Person*

According to the most widely held view portraiture is not so much a matter of physical likeness, for in the portrait – and

all the more in a “great” portrait – we would see rather the inner essence, the psychological attitudes, the moral character or

the public official role, the symbolic status of the subject portrayed. That amounts to say that the iconic portrait aims at

representing a “persona”, in the etymological sense of the word, in which individual identity is inextricably entangled with

type or model identity, private singularity is inseparable from public theatricality. In this way, the fictionality of the mimetic

work shifts from the physical to the psychological and social order, so entailing exposure and concealment. But if the

portrait image only pretends to display an identity, if representation is a fiction, we have to question the real addresses of that

mis-en-scène, for if all the players of such a pretence game make the very fiction possible, then who can actually believe in it?

It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

1. The two faces of mimesis

That pictorial portrait, in its different forms, is a field of often conflicting forces in dynamic tension

is far too obvious a remark. But the kind of tension I want to emphasize here deals especially with two

seemingly opposite yet complementary aspects of the same phenomenon, that of mimesis. It seems

even superfluous to highlight the pivotal role of mimesis in the critical history of the pictorial portrait

and in what follows I will try to narrowing a more specific point of view and its implications. In fact,

mimesis has two faces.

On the one hand, the mimetic feature involves a factor of spontaneity and pragmatic effectiveness,

which understandably arises at a very primitive level of cognition, from both ontogenetic and

phylogenetic developmental perspectives. A very simple visual pattern, a minimal and even extremely

bare scheme is anyway enough to trigger a process of individuation, perceptual organization,

recognition and then a fitting orientation and behavior. No marvel that things go this way within the

animal world as well, and it doesn’t take a neuroscientist or a complicated experimental setting to

ascertain such a state of affair: our common everyday experience is more than enough. As Hans Jonas

once said, nobody teaches the cat, properly speaking, to recognize the face of her owner and to focus her

gaze on that particular part of the body in order to get a specific kind of information1. There is nothing

like a form of “inculcation” here, just to use the term of Nelson Goodman, yet the cat “knows” where

to look, spontaneously. Indeed, the preeminence of the face, and particularly of the eyes, has a

perceptual salience that is of vital importance.

Just for that reason, on the other hand, the mimetic cognition reveals also a second aspect which

overturns, so to speak, its pragmatic benefit. It is the problem of simulation and dissimulation, as

strictly correlated phenomena. If a minimal stimulus is sufficient to produce a guaranteed effect, then it

is well possible that such a stimulus could be replicated for economic and instrumental “purposes”.

This is also a well-known phenomenon in nature under the name of mimicry. There are several types of

mimicry, but this is not the place to discuss them in detail, except to point out at least three options

* This is a revised version of a paper originally given at the international conference, “L’immagine che siamo, faccia,

persona, ritratto e identità”, Rome, 20-22 October 2011, forthcoming in G. Boehm, O. Budelacci, M.G. Di Monte, M. Renner (eds), Gesicht und Identität. Face and Identity, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, München 2014. 1 See H. Jonas, Wandel und Bestand. Vom Grunde der Verstehbarkeit des Geschichtlichen, Frankfurt a. M. 1970, p. 15. See also, on

the power of animal gaze, n. 4.

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that are fundamental for our present purpose. We can distinguish a 1) cryptic mimicry, in which the

subject – also called mimic – conceals its own presence resembling the visual patterns of the

surrounding environment or some aspects or objects of that environment. But there are also forms of

2) phaneric mimicry (the typical Batesian mimicry) in which the mimic shows and exhibits characteristic

features of other subjects (called models), more or less aposematic, noxious or unpalatable to predators,

in order to appear both easily recognizable and mistakable for the models. Furthermore, the two types

can combine, so that in some species the phaneric mimicry “concentrated” in specific parts of the body

seems to maximize the cryptic effect of other parts. That is the case, for a well-known example, with

the “false eyes” which appear on the wings of some species of the order Lepidoptera or on the caudal

ends of several types of tropical caterpillars. In fact, the evolutionary explanation and the adaptive value

of such structures are a much debated topic, as it is not always clear what the proper functional

advantage guaranteed by particular mimetic forms could be, though the a priori anti-teleological

arguments of certain biologists seem not so consistent from an overall formal point of view2. Indeed,

an evolutionary approach often overlooks that the recognition and the right understanding of the finalistic

relationships holding between a structure and its (inferable) functions can be independent of the

knowledge of the phylogenetic history of that very structure3. Be that as it may, what we have to stress

above all is the undeniable visual and gestaltic salience of the phenomenon, which calls for an

immediate recognition, irrespective of its real or alleged adaptive benefit. From this point of view, some

cases of visual simulation and dissimulation seem even more interesting, let’s call them a kind of 3)

automimicry, that is the third type that we have to consider here (fig. 1)4.

Fig. 1. Northern Pygmy Owl (Glaucidium gnoma)

2 For a recent theoretical discussion see K. Kleisner, “Homosemiosis, mimicry and superficial similarity: notes on the

conceptualization of independent emergence of similarity in biology”, in Theory of Bioscience, 127, 1 (2008), pp. 15-21. 3 As Kubovy and Epstein pointed out, “in the history of biology few discoveries rival Harvey’s discovery of the function of

the heart which Harvey made without the help of evolutionary theorizing or a self-conscious functionalist stance. […] The

matter at issue here is in what way does speculation concerning the origins of a function in the remote past (Pleistocene)

contribute to an understanding of the process that subserves the function?”. See M. Kubovy, W. Epstein, “Internalization: a

metaphor we can live without”, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 4 (2001), pp. 618-625, esp. p. 621 4 Among the most striking cases there are those of several birds of prey, like the pygmy owls of the genus Glaucidium, (fig. 1),

which have false eyespots on the back of the head, so that in certain conditions it is difficult for an observer to decide which

is the real position of the bird. About the different functional interpretations of such features, see, for example, J.J. Negro,

G. R. Bortolotti, J. H. Sarasola, “Deceptive plumage signals in birds: manipulation of predators or prey?”, in Biological Journal

of the Linnean Society, 90 (2007), pp. 467-477. It can be noteworthy that exactly the same “tactic” has been intentionally

adopted to safeguard the honey gatherers working in the Sundarbans mangrove forests, in the delta of Ganges, from the

attacks of tigers. The officials of the reserve asked the workers to wear masks looking like human faces on the back of their

heads in order to bewilder the tigers, which preferably attack their prey from behind. The statistical data seemed to confirm

the effectiveness of the intuition, although it has been observed that after some time tigers realized the trick. R. Brilliant

(Portraiture, London 1991, p. 44) has commented on the case, rightly observing that “there is power in the likeness that even

a hungry tiger can recognize”. For a more detailed account, see V. Rishi, “Man, mask and maneater”, in Tiger Paper, 15

(1988), pp. 9-14.

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2. Producing, reproducing, counterfeiting appearances

Mimesis implies, already at a sub-human level, not only a receptivity, a passivity, but also an activity,

a somehow purposive and nonetheless spontaneous behavior. The most important point, however, is

that the more the mimesis is successful the more it is deceitful, the more its effects seem reliable the

more they are (or can be) misleading. Mimicking, reproducing, portraying mean also counterfeiting. In

Italian, until relatively recently, the term “contraffare” had normally this double meaning, “to imitate

somebody with the face or gestures”, but also “to forge, as with metals and alike”, according to the

entry of the Vocabolario della Crusca5. As far as visual arts are more specifically concerned, then, we need

only look up the artistic literature written between 15th and 17th centuries or, more simply, flip through

the pages of Vasari’s Lifes. In a sense, the often overused topos of the illusionistic yet paradoxical ideal of

the mimetic image originates just from that doubleness, so that the most mimetic image, at its climax,

as in the famous platonic challenge of the Cratilus, denies and forgets itself just as an image – a

“schwache Bild”, as Gottfried Boehm labeled it, which has in itself an inherent source of self-

destroying iconoclasm6.

But to discuss the general epistemic conditions of iconicity is not my main concern here, and I want

rather to focus on the specific object of the mimetic reproduction/counterfeit, in the double sense we

have just pointed out. In fact, what is counterfeited in the mimetic process? And what can one possibly

counterfeit? A first and simple answer could be the following, the appearances of the things, or, perhaps,

with a more rhetorical emphasis, the mere appearances. Nonetheless, the status of appearances as such, for

example as opposite to reality, according to the suggestion of ordinary language, is pretty uncertain as

well, and if we took literally such a façon de parler we then should deprive the appearances of real

substance, with the very odd result that the thing to be imitated or counterfeited would be something

unreal. Even restricting that dichotomy only to the topic of portraiture, we would be in a rather

puzzling situation, for, if images can merely imitate the appearances of the person portrayed, then we

have to conclude that pictorial appearances are even less “real” than those we usually oppose to reality.

So, where should we locate something like appearances of appearances? Not to mention even more

tortuous cases, like the famous Parmigianino’s self-portrait in a mirror, in which, strictly speaking, we

should say to see the (painted) image of the (mirror) image of the appearing image of a person. Under

those conditions either portraiture is simply impossible or, in the best case, it cannot be but

metaphysically dubious, as Plotinus thought, who coherently with his platonic faith – according to

Porphyry – was “ashamed of being in the body”7.

Furthermore, the problematic relationship between pictorial portrait and visual likeness no doubt

crucially affects the definition and extension of the portrait genre itself, at least as it is traditionally

understood. Usually, we tend to assume that a portrait depicts an individual with a well-defined identity,

“living or once living people”8, but though this seems a minimal plausible characterization, actually it

5 Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, Venezia 1612, p. 216: “Imitare, fingere, far come un altro, per lo più, ne' gesti, o nel

favellare. Lat. imitare aliquem vultu, vel gestibus”. 6 G. Boehm, Die Bilderfrage, in G. Boehm (ed.), Was ist ein Bild, München 1994, pp. 325-343. 7 Porphyry, On the Life of Plotinus, in Plotinus, Enneads I, ed. by A. H. Armstrong, Cambridge MA, 1989, p. 3. 8 This is, for example, the synthetic yet clear definition proposed by Richard Brilliant, Portraiture, cit., p. 8. Too often the

extension of the concept of portrait is taken for granted, as if it was obvious. To talk about “individuals”, for example, is still

too ambiguous and some authors would criticize the exclusion of animal pictures from the genre of portraiture, as suggested

by Brilliant. Cynthia Freeland has recently proposed a more inclusive definition: “a portrait is a representation or depiction

of a living being as a unique individual possessing (1) a recognizable physical body along with (2) an inner life, i.e. some sort

of character and/or psychological or mental states”. See C. A. Freeland, Portraits and Persons. A Philosophical Inquiry, Oxford

2010, p. 5. Another debated topic concerns the position of fictional entities, like imaginary characters, which according to

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turns out to be unexpectedly lacking in order to get a strict identification of portraits in the proper sense.

How do you know if the appearing likeness that you see in an alleged portrait really matches that of a

living or, worse, once living individual you don’t know directly? How can you tell apart “false” portraits

(seeming or fake portraits) and “real” ones? The question, inevitably, opens a rift between the

ontological and epistemological planes. Not surprisingly, some scholars invoked in this respect the

criterion of authorial intentions, which would secure the genetic-causal link between the image and the

subject represented, thus ensuring what Gadamer called the outstanding "occasionality" of the portrait9.

But filling the gap is not an easy work, for the portrait is properly constituted from an epistemological

point of view, it is therefore not enough that an image represents an individual or his/her likeness,

instead such a likeness must necessarily be discriminable and identifiable in actu10. A little drop of paint

on a painting, say, by Canaletto is not a portrait viewed from afar, nor is it a portrait in potentia, simply it

is not a portrait at all. If, therefore, “it is the artist who establishes the category” of the image11, then his

or her intention must be publicly explicit in a way recognizable by the observer, and if the imitation of

outward appearances is not enough we have to resort to some other element of discrimination and

certification, preferably to an external or extra iconic criterion.

One may think that the giving of a name – directly or indirectly – would be “the simplest and most

infallible”12 solution, but this move too is not free of difficulties, all the more if nominal ascription is

not further delimitated by some other normative constraint. Does the sheer presence of a title assign an

image the status of a portrait? As already rightly remarked by the medieval authors of the Libri Carolini

– who faced analogous problems from a cultual point of view – “if the simple inscription of the name

bestows on images the honor that is due to the saints bearing that name, then anything on which the

name of a saint is inscribed will rise to the same honor”, no matter if things are “lapides, ligna, vestes

sive animalia quaedam”13. The problem is less speculatively abstract than it may seem to be at first sight,

not only for the debatable position of the usual liminal cases, as the Portrait of Tristan Tzara by Hans Arp

– which, despite the claim of the title, is hardly recognizable as a depiction of a defined individual. Also

where a name is associated with lifelike or even hyper-realistic likeness there might be some uncertainty,

the portrait of the Prince d’Orange René de Chalon, sculpted by Ligier Richier little after 1544 (fig. 2),

surely depicts the physical body of the portrayed subject, but in such a way that the same name could

some authors could well be the subject of a portrait. See, for example, J. Wirth, Introduction, in A. Paravicini Bagliani, J. M.

Spieser, J. Wirth (eds.), Le portrait. La représentation de l’individu, Firenze 2007, pp. 9-16, here p. 9. 9 H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, London-New York, 2004, p. 139. “Occasionality in the sense intended”, Gadamer writes,

“clearly lies in what the work itself claims to mean […]. A portrait asks to be understood as a portrait, even when the

relation to the original is practically crushed by the pictorial content specific to the picture”. 10 For this aim, we might establish a stricter causal-genetic connection in technical terms, so that in comparison with

painting and sculpture photography – at least a non-digital photography – would vouch a priori for the presence of a real and

individual model, which certainly, as Barthes said, “has been”. But, also putting aside the need to exclude from the genre all

not strictly photographic portraits, the problem of identification is anyway unavoidable in terms of the recognition of the

representational content of images, even more so if such a content is defined by nominal or iconographic information. 11 Brilliant, Portraiture, cit., pp. 7-8. 12 J. Wirth, Introduction, cit. p. 10. According to Wirth portraits can be made in three ways: by the assignment of a name, by

the selected presence of conventional iconographic features, or through “physical resemblance” (p. 11). Nonetheless, it is

not clear, from Wirth’s argument, if these three conditions are to be taken independently sufficient or conjunctively

necessary. It seems obvious that the physical resemblance condition cannot strictly apply to portraits of “imaginary”

individuals, that Wirth however takes to be possible, and surely it cannot always apply in the case of “iconographic”

portraits, like that of Saint Peter, for example, at least as far as we know. 13 A. Freeman, P. Meyvaert (eds.), Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (Libri Carolini), Hannover 1998, p. 528, 32-37: “Si nominis

tantummodo inscriptio eas ad eorumdem sanctorum, quorum nomina superscribuntur, honorem deducit, ergo quaelibet res,

cui sancti cujusdam nomen superscribitur, ad ejusdem sancti honorem conscendit. Ergo: lapides, ligna, vestes, sive animalia

quaedam quorumdam sanctorum nominibus superscripta, ad eorumdem sanctorum honorem transeunt, quorum sunt

nominibus prenotata”.

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be likewise associated with the figure of any other skeleton or dead body en transi, and not even a

coroner could establish otherwise.

Fig. 2. Ligier Richier, Funerary Monument of René de Chalon (part.), 1544 ca.

Saint-Étienne, Bar-le-Duc

But just for a much less extreme example, how can we decide about the famous marble head of

Homer now in the Louvre (known as Homer Caetani)? Even though Homer himself had never existed

in the flesh, it would be difficult to rule out the possibility that according to the intention of the

sculptor (or the copyist) the image "asks to be understood as a portrait" of the great poet, whose

alleged historical identity would make the actual likeness of the statue at most merely instrumental in an

imaginary way. But, if so, we should see in one and the same image two different portraits of two

different individuals: on the one hand, the historical Homer, and on the other hand the anonymous

sitter whose physical appearances the artist chose to portray. We may also speak of two distinct

pictorial actions, “representation” and “rendering”, adopting the terminology suggested by Nicholas

Wolterstorff14, but in any case the relevant thing is that in view of an appropriate attribution we have

here two conflicting definitional criteria, a nominal one and a mimetic one, but then which of the two

possible portraits, as so defined, is a portrait in a more proper sense?

It should be clear that the more you take the name-giving as a sufficient condition for portrait

identification the more you risk to overlook the specific and tangible presence of the image, that in fact

could be paradoxically replaced with any other image salva identitate15. The same holds, after all, also for

an iconographic or typological criterion, though we have to acknowledge that of some “characters”,

real or imaginary, there can only be purely iconographic portrayals16 (fig. 3).

14 N. Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art, Oxford 1980, pp. 18-20. 15 The presence of a name can not only multiply but also exclude an identity which might otherwise be obvious from a

mimetic or physiognomic point of view, for example in the case of common or generic names. The famous photo taken by

Dorothea Lange in 1936, The Migrant Mother (also known under a more informative title, Destitute pea pickers in California.

Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California), according to the attribution of the name, could have portrayed

another woman as well, in the same conditions, without any loss of meaning. In fact, only forty years later the subject who

actually posed for Lange was identified as Florence Owens Thompson. Does such a discovery substantially modify the

categorical status of the image or is simply nesting into it a “subsidiary”, “accidental” yet certainly more individuating

portrait dimension? 16 While it is obvious, as we pointed out above in n. 12, that an imaginary character (a fictive entity) cannot be depicted with

its “real” physiognomy, which in fact doesn’t exist, if not in a very schematic way, it is however possible that, under specific

conditions, also a really existent “character” undergoes a similar iconographic “reduction”. A portrait of, say,

Subcomandante Marcos surely denotes a particular individual, but only within the limits of his iconographic features and

identity, so to speak, in the same way as a portrait of Spiderman (if existing). Thus, a photo of an impostor pretending to be

Marcos would be a portrait of the Subcomandante (it would have Marcos as its own intentional content) as much as (if not

more than) a photo of the “real” Marcos unmasked and therefore actually unrecognizable, just in the same way as a photo

of a false Spiderman compared with a portrait of Peter Parker (fig. 3).

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Fig. 3. Left, Spiderman, Este Castle,

Ferrara 1996 – right, Jose Villa, Subcomandante Marcos, 1996

In any case, even assuming that all the attributes of a canonical type conjunctively identify a single

individual in an univocal manner, the mimetic physiognomic element, if present, would still interfere

with them, possibly producing misleading results. Otherwise, comparing a portrait of Napoleon by Paul

Delaroche with, say, a publicity photo of Marlon Brando (fig. 4) no one would notice any difference in

content nor would suspect that the latter could equally be a portrait of the actor in Napoleon’s clothes.

For the same reasons, the attempt to expand the semantic field of the notion of portrait in a typological

or stereotypical direction – aiming at including art-historical styles and ages traditionally disregarded

from the point of view of the history of portraiture – turns out to be unconvincing, if not inconsistent.

If, as it has been recently suggested, “in medieval portraiture, the individual likeness was deliberately

assimilated to type or group, and attributes and costume were understood as reinforcing resemblance to

the individual even in the absence of specific physiognomic features”17, then it is clear that such

“portrait-like” images, qua images, could not perform any individuating function, except in relation to a

type, a group or a role, that obviously, by definition, are not the particular individual18.

17 T. E. A. Dale, The portrait as imprinted image and the concept of the individual in the Romanesque period, in Le portrait. La représentation

de l’individu, cit., pp. 95-116, for the quote, p. 97. Even supposing that in medieval portraits “individuality is expressed

through alternative conventions”, among such conventions there cannot be “standard facial types”, on the risk of

contradiction, nor is it very consistent to suggest that in the Middle Age the “discovery” of individual “pertained not so

much to a particular personality, as to the discovery of a universal human nature made in the image of God” (p. 101). Even

passing over the problem of “discovery”, it would seem odd to call “portraits” images representing the same universal

nature of the human being as a creature of God. 18 More generally, the problem concerns every kind of pictorial representation for which it is difficult to find what we have

called a mimetic-physiognomic criterion, resting on a physical resemblance. For a useful theoretical discussion of the case

with Mesopotamian and Assyrian art, see the recent essay of I. J. Winter, “What/When is a Portrait? Royal Images of the

Ancient Near East”, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 153, 3 (2009), pp. 254-270, where, however, the author

firstly defines “an intention to reference a particular individual” as an “essential” condition of portraiture (p. 267, italics

mine), but shortly afterwards she rejects it, claiming that the portrait of the king “may not be an individualized portrait of the

king; but it is certainly the ‘portrait of a king’”, or even, more precisely, “of an Assyrian king” (p. 268).

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Fig. 4.

Left, Paul Delaroche, Napoleon at Fontainebleau, 1840, Musée de l’Armée, Paris – right, Marlon Brando as Napoleon, publicity

photo from the movie Desirée, 1954

3. Mimicking mimesis

Therefore, the often tacitly shared idea that “a portrait looks to us like a portrait […] even if we do

not know the person portrayed”19 is, at the least, a bit too optimistic. And the consequences are not

only of categorial order, particularly if one want to ascribe to the portrait image – as Gadamer himself

in fact does – a power of literally ontological increase, a real “Zuwachs an Sein”. Wouldn’t it be odd

indeed to experience such an “increase in being” in an image about which we don’t know whether it

really depicts an individual actually “in being”? And yet, exactly the same iconographic conventions that

normally make a portrait recognizable to us, even before discovering the personal identity of the

portrayed, can be used to create an imaginary or a false portrait, one that could well arouse a compelling

“desire of the name” – as Louis Marin put it20 – but could also be, just for that reason, much more

insidiously deceptive. Likewise, there is nothing preventing a painter from lending a very particularized

likeness to a completely imaginary figure, nowhere seen before; not to mention that also seemingly very

idealized physiognomic features could be perfectly real. In fact, once again, how can we rule out the

possibility that, for instance, Titian’s Venus of Urbino claims to be understood as a very realistic portrait

of a real woman, historically identifiable, dressed – or, better, undressed – like a goddess?

Thus, mimesis turns out to be both the minimal essential condition for the image’s claim to

portraying and the main reason of its possible failure. Not because visual resemblance would be

allegedly a vague and indeterminate criterion, as it has been too often uncritically repeated, but on the

contrary, just because of the counterfeiting power of the mimesis itself, since the factum, in the image,

can always be a fictum. What do we see indeed in a portrait other than a particular configuration of

aspectual properties? But such properties can have multiple instantiations, distinguishable solo numero,

otherwise there simply could not be different portraits of the same person, which, all their differences

notwithstanding, will be always identifiable as portraits of that unique person. Perhaps it is true that “an

individual is nothing fixed”, to quote a rhetorical formula of Benedetto Croce, and it “shows endless

19 Gadamer, Ttruth and Method, cit., p. 140. 20 L. Marin, Problèmes du portrait, à partir de Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674), in A. Gentili, P. Morel, C. Cieri Via (eds.), Il

ritratto e la memoria. Materiali 3, Roma 1993, pp. 205-216, for the quote, p. 212.

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aspects”21, but this very fact, as everyone knows, by no means prevents an individual (or its portraits)

from being normally identified and re-identified, nor does it preclude the possibility to identify and

recognize the same physiognomic expressions and aspects on otherwise very different faces, even those

of animals.

To put it in ontological terms – and reversing the sense of customary lexicon – we may say that in

reality the portrait is the model (or a model) of the person portrayed, in that it instantiates or exemplifies

a number of salient sensory properties that are relevant for the identification, recognition or for any

other more specific aesthetic-cognitive approach22. In other words, no matter how oversimplified it

may appear, the portrait image works like “miniature vehicles and ships in bottles, what in the

‘bricoleur’s’ language are called small-scale models”23: after all, and not fortuitously, it has been

suggested, just taking the example of a portrait, that “the vast majority of works of art are small-

scale”24. From this point of view, if nothing else, it would seem reasonable to claim that in the portrait

one can actually recognize the “real presence” of the model, or in the model the presence of the

portrait – a question often dealt with in a rather whimsical manner – since the modellized (or projected)

properties of the subject are literally present within the image25. Nonetheless, it is clear that models and

small-scale models can also be useful to represent non-existing or not yet existing things, precisely in

order that one can “velut oculis subjectas contemplare”, as Leibniz observed26. If therefore an image

can imitate the likeness of a real individual, it can equally pretend to imitate, for the same reason and at

least in principle, an individual who doesn’t exist and never existed. And that brings us back again to

our central epistemological problem, which however has a wider bearing on the theme of portrait than

that considered so far.

4. Pretending (to believe) in order to be

We may even admit that the problem of “false portraits” is a marginal case, from a practical point of

view, and it is of mainly theoretical interest, but from the perspective we have outlined what is likely to

be unreliable is the constitutive connection, too often taken for granted, between the portrait of the

outward features, the face, and the “image” of the individual inner life. The idea that the face and its

image is a window open on the soul, a visual index of the mental states, character, personality,

experiences and even biographical history of the subject is a deeply rooted belief, especially within the

art-historical disciplines, and it has a venerable tradition, which is hard to dismiss, but just for that

reason is likewise hard to discuss. Furthermore, the physiognomic seduction, so to speak, has become a

distinctive merit in evaluating portraiture, so fostering something like a Lombrosian approach,

21 B. Croce, Il ritratto e la somiglianza, in Problemi di estetica, Bari 1949, pp. 261-266. Croce himself, however, establishes an

“empirical concept” of individual, thanks to which “a natural or normal likeness” is given (p. 266), one that can be an object

of a more or less resembling portrait. Then, it is obvious that, although that likeness is “vague and wavering”, it is so only

within certain limits. 22 The kind of model I have in mind here is to be define more precisely as a “homeomorphic iconic model”, according to

the classification proposed by R. Harré, Modeling. Gateway to the Unknown, ed. by D. Rothbart, Amsterdam 2004, esp. pp. 5-

20. Such a model too, as any other kind of model, requires a selection of properties of the “source”, and thus, beside the

reproductive dimension, also a certain reduction and a prevailing pragmatic directionality. See, in general, H. Stachowiak,

Allgemeine Modelltheorie, Wien 1973. On the heuristic resources of models from the point of view of image-making, see the

recent essay of G. Boehm, Ikonisches Wissen. Das Bild als Modell, in Id., Wie Bilder Sinn Erzeugen, Berlin 2007, pp. 114-140. 23 C. Levi Strauss, The Savage Mind, London, 1966, p. 23. 24 Ibid. 25 For an interpretation of the notion of “presence” see the sober and pondered discussion of A. Harrison, What is ‘presence’?,

in R. Maniura, R. Shepherd (eds.), Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects, Aldershot 2006, pp. 161-

172, in which Harrison draws on the concept of exemplification and suggests an explicatory analogy with the model. 26 G. W. Leibniz, Pacidius Philalethi (Prima de Motu Philosophia), in Philosophischen Schriften, III, Berlin 1980, p. 532.

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sometimes, unfortunately, on a purely auto-suggestive basis. Thus, it is not surprising to read, for a

telling example, that the so-called head of Teodolinda, a 7th-century sculpture formerly held in the

Museum of the Sforza Castel in Milan (fig. 5), would be a portrait “of tragic, obsessive intensity”, an

image appearing as “a scream made rock, without losing the immediate urgency of a straightforward

address, hic et nunc, to the emotions of anyone who is able to understand it”27, an evaluation possibly

driven, in perfectly good-faith, by the aim to redeem the art of the Barbarian West from a negative

aesthetic prejudice.

Fig. 5. Head of Teodolinda, 7th century A. D., formerly Civic Museum of the Sforza

Castle, Milan

Sometimes we go too far. As might be expected, such a passionate kind of rhetoric was harshly

criticized, and Harry Berger has even labeled it “physiognomic fallacy”28. Nonetheless, it is symptomatic

that even when the shortcomings of a somehow mantic metoposcopy are plainly acknowledged, it is

however difficult to give up that very model. Jean-Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, for

instance, dealing with the Histoire du visage, have warned against the unhistorical and scientistic

oversimplifications “according to which, beyond cultural differences, human beings are similar

everywhere”, and have rather insisted on “this essential fact, a face, an expression cannot be

transparent, a joyful face can express sadness and the sweetest smile can disguise hate”29. Still, the

authors themselves don’t seem to take really into account that “essential fact” – which would be, as

such, a trans-historical fact, at any rate – and though they firmly believe that in the Modern Age the

“passionate”, “spontaneous” and “expressive” human being is “progressively disappeared behind the

dispassionate” one, they want to dig for the traces of that spontaneity “into the deepest” of the

seemingly unemotional modern subject. Not surprisingly, they take the portrait to be “surely the major

index of the new mental and social structures”30. In other words, it is not so easy to content oneself

with the opacity of images, even when one manifestly claims that opacity is inescapable, because, on the

contrary, images are really compellingly transparent, only we often overlook that such a transparency is

fictional, and this too is an effect of image’s functioning.

However, the problem does not only affect the nature of pictorial representation, with its

psychological, historical and social contents, nor does it simply concern the fact that the modern

portrait, as Berger claims, is essentially the output of a bargain between the work of the painter and the

no less crucial expectations of the sitter, to such an extent that the image would pretend to portray

above all the very willful act of posing. In my view, the problem is more deeply connected to the

27 A. M. Romanini, L’arte medievale in Italia, Firenze 1988, p. 184. 28 H. Berger, Fictions of the Pose, Stanford 2000, p. 107. 29 J.-J. Courtine, C. Haroche, Histoire du visage, Paris 1988, pp. 17-23 30 Ibid., pp. 19-20.

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double fictional nature of mimesis, which is both an iconic and a pre-iconic phenomenon. In this sense,

there is a threshold under which it is unavoidable to imitate aliquem vultu, vel gestibus. To the extent that

our behavior draws on an even minimal public dimension, it is defined within a “dramaturgic” or

“theatrical” scenario, as Erving Goffman would have said31. Thus, in order to elicit some reaction from

an audience our behavior needs a “front”, that is properly something that one can acquire, shape, use

and also, obviously, imitate and counterfeit, in the double sense noted above. And it is likewise clear

that such a duplicity concerns the identity of the subject as well. Identity, from this point of view,

means literally “to be identical with” something or someone, and not simply to be an absolutely

particular and self-contained individual. Hence, the public interaction involves a strategic value and the

possibility to opt for a cryptic, phaneric or auto-mimetic mimicry, as needed. Within social interactions

the subject is therefore an actor, who displays a façade, and the portrait, just bringing into play an

ostensive dimension (i.e. public, in the most general sense of the term), is always the portrayal of an

actor.

If that is the constitutive role of mimetic pretense, a too much confident interpretation of the

alleged self-revealing nature of portraiture turns out to be suspicious from the very beginning. In fact,

we have already noted that several authors warned against a bona fide construe of the representation of

the self that portrait publicly stages. Just because the portrait image is a representation of a

representation, it aims not so much at revealing as at “constructing” the public image, the shared

identity of the persona, in the ancient etymological sense of the word. Portraiture would thus become

what Norbert Elias called a “prestige-fetish”32, a means to define the position of an individual within an

ordered system of obligations and preferences, dominated by the preclusive device of membership and

distinction. But this is a matter for sociologists (a well-known matter, indeed), though, again, a simply

instrumentalist interpretation of such phenomena is not without difficulties33.

We might rather ask, if the constraints we have dealt with above define the terms of a make-

believing game, and if the mimicry of the façade is an essential part of this game, what is the difference,

in terms of beliefs and competencies, between players and beholders, between the authors of the make-

believe and their addressees? The dramaturgic metaphor is bound to reach a limit here, because the

strategic interaction involves reciprocally both actors and their audience. But also an interpretation

based on a critique of ideology aiming at demystifying the mystification has the same limits and seems

too simplistic, if only because that critique is in turn founded on the same logic of the make-believing

process, that is to say on the opposition between appearances and reality, or “bad” and “good”

appearances, inside and outside, authenticity and falsehood. Not to mention the necessity to subscribe

to a kind of epistemological paternalism, according to which the modern historian or critic would be

able from their distance point – and thanks to a somewhat mysterious divinatory faculty – to “see”

behind the mask, probing “into the deepest” of the “social individual”, better than the actors

themselves. It seems a rather unlikely claim.

However, we have to take seriously the inner boundaries of the concept of pretense. On the one hand,

there is a conceptual limit, which depends on the way we define the identity of specific phenomena.

For example, and referring once more to Berger’s argument, I can perhaps pretend to have a certain

demeanor, but then how could we say that the very demeanor – which I really parade, possibly even in

a portrait – is not my own demeanor, but only a fictional one? Or, for another case, how exactly to

understand the idea that I could pretend to be an art historian, without really being an art historian?

When precisely is an art historian “real”? If I do, say and write what art historians normally do, say and

31 E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York 1959. 32 N. Elias, The Court Society, Oxford 1983, p. 85. 33 For a critique of the idea that the norms of etiquette serve the function of confirming one’s identity or membership within

exclusive social groups, see J. Elster, The Cement of Society, Cambridge 1989, pp. 140-141.

11

write, if mine is thus a perfect case of Batesian mimicry, where is the difference? To be sure, we may

need a legal document, say a “license”, but such a document should certify the real presence of

substantial or behavioral properties. If we suppose, as Austin rightly suggested34, that the pretending

behavior, when publicly exhibited, implies, in general, the concealing or the dissimulation of some other

reality or behavior, we could conclude that the fiction (of the portrait) of the pose is useful to hide

something or to divert attention from an unwanted or unsuitable state of affair, for instance of social

nature, like humble origins, modest condition or so. Similarly, one could be an art historian only “to

cover” one’s real activities as a secret agent, just like Clint Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction, or, for e less

fictional example, like the eminent scholar Sir Anthony Blunt, curator of the Collection of Her Majesty

the Queen at Windsor Castle, but also a spy for the Soviet intelligence. In any case, none of this would

compromise the intrinsic authenticity of the covering behavior, real or only mimicked, any more than

acting as a double agent affects the competence of an art historian.

There is, secondly, a pragmatic limit which tends toward the counteraction of the strategic role of

the pretense itself. If within the ritual order, including also portraiture, expressive communications “can

be by-passed, withdrawn from, disbelieved, conveniently misunderstood”, as Goffman put it35, and if all

the actors participating in the ritual are perfectly aware of that, which are then the benefits of

pretending? Who is the ideal addressee? If the real purpose of portraiture had been to build a deceptive

yet effective image of the self, perhaps with the hope that people would swallow it, the portraiture itself

would have become an obsolete means long before sociologists and critics of ideology became aware of

those alleged purposes.

Thus, should we conceive of the ritual as a game in the most common sense of the word, where

players not only stage a role, but also pretend to believe in the roles staged by the game itself? So the

portrait would be a sort of extension of the game or, better, it would be really a toy, even more than

Levi-Strauss admitted, a prop in a make-believing game36. That is a hard case, and we cannot deal with

it any further here, but if so, a final question remains: what defines the boundaries of the game? Or, in

other words, what breaks the circle which Derrida called “the closure of the representation”?37 Theater

can certainly stage the staging itself, it can be meta-theater, like, typically, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but in

so doing it cannot help but be theater, at any rate, it cannot do without the stage. Likewise, portrait can

pursue a Verfremdungseffekt “from inside”, exhibiting the fiction of the face, but only by exhibiting

another face, still as a fiction, indeed. Just as Velázquez made in The Surrender of Breda, a perfect meta-

drama of portraiture, in which we see a pictorial representation (the picture) of a theatrical

representation (the play of Calderón) of the ritual representation of deference and respect (of the

winners and the losers), that is to say an image of an image of an image. Triumph of mimesis, of

pretense, of truth.

34 J.L. Austin, Pretending, in Philosophical Papers, ed. by J.O. Urmson, G.J. Warnock, Oxford 1970, pp. 253-271. 35 E. Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, New York 1967, p. 43. 36 The reference here is obviously to the work of K. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Cambridge, Mass., 1990. 37 J. Derrida, Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation, in L’écriture et la différence, Paris 1967, pp. 341-368.