But are we sure that Narcissus is the prototype of the self-portrait? What the exhibition in Forli looks like

Is the selfie the end point that closes the circle of the self-portrait as it has developed since the very attractive but also very false idea that an artist is hidden in every man? Riccardo Falcinelli, for example, has sought answers to the question by investigating the different “faces” of the problem in the voluminous essay Visus published by Einaudi a few weeks ago. And a contemporary Austrian intellectual, Thomas Macho, had called ours a “facial society,” which the most important living scholar of images, Hans Belting, took as a landing place for a “history of the face”(Faces, Carocci publisher) a decade ago. Belting argued that art, in our society, does nothing but produce “masks of masks.” This way of seeing the face for eighteenth-century Venetians generated “larvae,” theEidolon of the Greeks, or the ghost or shadow of someone (Longhi dusted off the memory of this by inventing the dialogue between Caravaggio to Tiepolo, and it is clear who is the creator of larvae).

The exhibition that the San Domenico Museums have recently opened (until June 29) dedicated to The Artist’s Portrait, “from Narcissus to the Selfie,” aims precisely to show how this particular gaze has changed along more than two thousand years of history. Seeing oneself in the mirror of water constituted perhaps the first landing place for self-awareness. Is this really me? Will I really look like this? How do others see me? In our modernity, the point of greatest advancement in self-image is in the “seeing oneself seeing oneself” that Proust attributes to Monsieur Teste seeing himself sleeping. Seeing ourselves and being aware that we are looking at ourselves: two different and complementary moments.

We are reminded of Leon Battista Alberti’s Narcissus as the terminus a quo for the artist’s look at himself. But is Narcissus really the prototype of the self-portrait? Tintoretto does not stop there; the source is the medium of a subjectivity that is seen in nature; while Corrado Cagli’s Narcissus, in the exposed tapestry of the Senate of the Republic, seems to reflect himself more in Gauguin than in himself and has little’has to do with self-portraiture; even the Narcissus until recently recognized to be by Caravaggio, but in recent decades attributed to Spadarino and now on display in the Roman exhibition devoted to Merisi, has little to do with self-portraiture. While his contemporary disciple, Artemisia, makes the laurel-crowned self-portrait the swaggering declaration of her achieved fame as a great painter. But not everyone likes to portray himself: Casorati claimed he never painted his own portrait. And there are artists who have studied themselves all their lives, Rembrandt, for example, of whom four etchings are exhibited in Forlì; or Chardin (not exhibited), De Chirico, or Ingres: some more, some less, all, perhaps, have enclosed their secret in the transformations of their faces over time, rather than in a precise portrait. As may be the one of Giulio Aristide Sartorio from 1905, on horseback and with a tiger at his feet; or the surreal one of Léon Frédéric from 1881, in the background of his studio, where objects collaborate to define the “face” of the artist. The comparison between the self-portraits of Thorvaldsen and Canova, on the other hand, is a challenge on the ability to make oneself an icon of different styles and different historical relevance.

The “contemplation of the self-image” that Cristina Acidini, one of the curators of the exhibition, poses as a viaticum for reflection, hides beneath the surface the different motives that move the artist: it may be precisely the desire to represent oneself among illustrious figures - the adjective Divine belongs to artists since modern times: see Raphael or Michelangelo - or as witnesses: Caravaggio represents himself in this way in the Martyrdom of St. Matthew or the Taking of Christ in the Garden, where he even holds the lantern that illuminates the scene, or deeper still, in the Borghese’s David where Goliath’s head is his j’accuse as both culprit and victim.

In modernity, as Fernando Mazzocca, also among the curators, points out, self-portraiture and autobiography are married in a kind of simultaneously physiognomic and abstract manifestation of the self, see the two very different self-portraits of Giacomo Balla, or Sironi’s rapt face. Among contemporaries, the self-portrait becomes the projection of the self that the artist seeks as a way of being in the world: Marina Abramovic’s triptych Ecstasy II, to tell the truth, is more an ironic mask than a confession of interiority, whileSelf-Portrait. Submerged by Bill Viola is a painful apnea.

One question remains: the Gianadda Foundation, has recently opened a retrospective devoted to Bacon, entitled Présence humaine that displays six self-portraits among the many the painter painted. To David Sylvester who asked him why he was so taken with self-portraits, Bacon replied that around him people were dying like flies and he had no choice but to paint himself. But, in fact, the disfiguration of the face, typical of Bacon’s portraits, was almost a psychological makeup (more so of himself). Like the actor when in the dressing room he removes his makeup and for an instant his face is a “monstrous” mask. Why, among more than two hundred works, however, in Forli did they not think of exhibiting even a self-portrait of Bacon? But in fact there is not even Giacometti’s. That is, two contemporary artists among the most evocative regarding the genre are missing.

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