SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

FACE VALUE: PORTRAITS AND MEMORY
David Dodge Lewis
Hamden-Sydney College
“There are two ways of disliking art... One is to dislike it. The other
is to like it rationally.”
9
—Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
Since there may be nothing quite so irrational in the arts as opera, I am going to begin my
presentation with a couple of brief interdisciplinary excerpts, one from Puccini and one from
Mozart, each having to do with portraiture.
Puccini_s opera “Tosca” opens in a church with Cavaradossi, a painter, working on a portrait of
Mary Magdalene. The model is a blonde and blue-eyed penitent who is so devout in her prayers
that she is unaware she is being painted. Unfortunately, Cavaradossi is executed by firing squad
later in the opera, another example of how portrait painters get no respect.
By contrast, in this aria from act one of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” handsome Prince Tamino
has been given a portrait of Princess Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night. He instantly
falls in love, for the bewitching portrait is a close likeness of the beautiful princess. Thus begins
the dramatic action, as Tamino tries to rescue his heart-throb from the demon who has
kidnapped her.
These two musical examples represent two different traditions in the history of portraiture: the
first involves creating a portrait type, often symbolic, with little regard for what the person
depicted actually looked like; the second is the observance of verisimilitude, a search to capture
an actual likeness and to immortalize an individual.
For the classical Greeks, the abstract concept was more important than the concrete reality.
They tended to sculpt their portraits of heroes, often long after their deaths, as part of
encouraging public virtue, and these instructive (as opposed to descriptive) portraits were
consequently designed for public places. As Richter said in his extensive analysis, The
Portraits of the Greeks,
The heroizing element remained inherent in Greek portraiture throughout its history. Even in
the realistic portrait of the Hellenistic age the feeling for the type as against the individual often
remained. 1
By contrast, Roman portraits were usually to be found in the home and were part of a more
private ritual of ancestral veneration borrowed from the Etruscans. In an essay on Graeco-
Roman portraiture, Kurt Gschwantler cites Polybius, a Greek historian, who described the
Roman funerary ritual:
This image consists of a mask, which is fashioned with extraordinary
fidelity both in its modeling and its complexion to represent the features