3. Rol de la familia:
5.1 Aportes para el significado y significancia:
Let us return to Domenico’s anecdote. Not withstanding Preimesberger’s re- marks, it seems that the likeness of the figure plays a central role here. In fact, the apparent confusion between the marble and the prototype presupposes that the two look very much alike. But what does it mean to ‘look alike?’ What do we actually mean when we say that a portrait bust is a good likeness? It is tempting to assume that likeness indicates here a certain faithfulness to the ori- ginal, an equivalence as we might find when we compare a pair of twins: a strik- ing similarity not only in their appearance, their physique, but in the way they talk, they dress, the way they go about their lives. Yet such similarities are never found in art; works of art do not ‘go about their lives.’ Even when the sculptor could carefully trace the sitter’s features at a certain moment in time, he would capture only a fragment of his or her identity, a fleeting moment that is more likely to deny the sitter than to give him or her away. ‘To portray faithfully,’ Nelson Goodman writes, ‘is to convey a person known and distilled from a variety of experiences.’14 An impossibility, he argues.
12 Preimesberger 2006, p. 214: ‘…the criterion of “likeness” (somiglianza) […] comes second in
his [i.e., Domenico Bernini] esteem. It is preceded by another one which is “spirit.”’
13 Boselli/Torresi 1994, p. 110: ‘Opera, che ricerca similitudine manifesta a tutti, espressione
maravigliosa, artefizio squisito, ma la similtudine deve prevalare ad ogn’altra cosa.’ On Boselli see DBI, s.v. ‘Boselli, Orfeo’. On the importance of creating a likeness in funerary portraiture see Boudon-Machuel 2004, pp. 65-66. Cf. also Piles 1989, p. 127: ‘…la première perfection d’une portrait est une extrême ressemblance…’
14 Goodman 1969 gives an extensive critique on what he calls the ‘copy theory of representa-
Yet, as we will see, it is precisely this that sculptors have tried to achieve. Al- though for us it is impossible to verify the impression the bust, according to Domenico’s account, made on Barberini and his companions—Montoya’s ‘real likeness’, the man himself, is for us forever lost—the experience which seems to underlie the episode might not be all too unfamiliar. The nagging feeling of having seen a face before, the striking resemblance between two relatives, the picture of a friend that has captured him as he truly is: all these are experiences that we may have tried to voice one time or another. To explain such experi- ences, such responses, we must abandon the notion of likeness as an absolute measure. Ernst Gombrich has argued that the artist inquires not into the nature of the physical world, but rather into the nature of our responses, an idea that seems to conform to Pallavicino’s ideas discussed above, as well as to Lo- mazzo’s conception of the portrait likeness as ‘images of people similar to them, in such a manner that by whoever sees them they are recognized as the very same [quei medesimi]…’15 Likeness is in the eye of the beholder. Yet, whereas this
intuition has certainly found acceptance with regard to the art of painting, this is less so for the case of sculpture. Jennifer Montagu, to give an example, ar- gued in her 1985 study on Alessandro Algardi that this sculptor was primarily concerned with ‘reproducing the physiognomy of the sitter,’ creating ‘some- thing which is as near as possible to an objective image.’16 But, as Gombrich
and also Goodman, among others, have argued, such an ‘objective image’ does not exist.17 To understand the phenomenon of ‘likeness’, we thus have to turn
elsewhere. Following Gombrich’s intuition, we may argue that likeness in por- traiture is not the result of a perfect fit between sitter and portrait, but that ra- ther it is the spectator’s experience of familiarity that links them. There is, in other words, no likeness without a spectator.
Admittedly, the ‘spectator’s experience of familiarity’ is not something that can easily be pinned down, introspection and retrospection being notoriously problematic. An alternative approach, proposed by Gordon Lyon, may prove more fruitful. Lyon has associated the experience of perceptual familiarity of 15 Gombrich 1962, p. 45: ‘What a painter inquires into is not the nature of the physical world
but the nature of our reactions to it.’ As argued above, this point was already made by Pallavicino; cf. supra, p. 4. Lomazzo/Ciardi 1974, vol. 2, p. 374: ‘…ritrarre dal naturale, cioè di far l’imagini de gl’uomini simili a loro, sí che da chiunque gli vede siano riconosciuti per quei medesimi…’
16 Montagu 1985, vol. 1, p. 158 and p. 164.
17 Photography has been the ‘last bastion’ of objectivity, also in portraiture; for an overview of
discussions with regard to the objectivity of photography see Wells 2004, in part. chapters 2 and 7; for an early discussion of likeness in portrait photography see Arnold 1889.
faces with the fluency of the perceptual process, arguing that the sense of fa- miliarity is not an independent experience that follows perception, but some- thing inherent to the processes of perception itself.18 Lyon’s hypothesis has
found further reinforcement from a more recent study by Heather Kleider and Stephen Goldinger.19 They showed that the relative clarity of a portrait picture
might contribute to a sense of familiarity and even may result in false judge- ments of familiarity in recognition tasks. Thus, among a series of more dis- torted pictures, the portrait that shows a face more clearly is easily regarded as one we have seen before, even if this was not the case. Impaired processing by added noise, on the other hand, leads to false judgments of unfamiliarity, while, vice versa, memory for faces results in a overestimation of the clarity of the pic- ture. All this indicates that the memory of a face and the ease with which it is processed are not only interrelated but cannot be easily seen apart. This insight provides us with an opening for approaching the portrait bust and the problem of likeness, for, even if we cannot determine if this or that bust actually looked familiar to a seventeenth-century beholder, we may ask if there are ways in which the sculptor could have facilitated the ease with which it was perceptually processed.
In order to answer this question we should turn to the actual practice of the sculptor. An important source for our understanding of sculptural practice in seventeenth-century Italy is the treatise Osservazioni della scoltura antica by Orfeo Boselli, an erudite sculptor from the school of François Duquesnoy.20 It is in
fact the only extensive seventeenth-century text on sculptural practice by someone who actually practiced the art, and as such of high value. Compari- sons with other sources and visual evidence suggests that his text is valid en- ough and that it echoes in many cases the more general sculptural practice in seventeenth-century Rome. As we learn from this treatise, Boselli had some ex- perience with sculpting portrait busts; his Bust of Cardinal Girolamo Colonna (fig. 17) can still be admired in the family’s palazzo in Rome.21 In his treatise the
sculptor describes his method of creating a likeness in some detail. After having 18 Lyon 1996, pp. 83-100.
19 Kleider & Goldinger 2004.
20 The texts in Boselli/Dent Weil 1978 and Boselli/Torresi 1994; an annotated transcription is
currently being prepared by Anthony Colantuono. For Boselli see also DBI, s.v. ‘Boselli, Or- feo’. For further remarks on the treatise see Di Stefano 2002.
21 Cf. Boselli/Dent Weil 1978, Ms. Corsini, f. 119v and p. 37. For Boselli on portraiture see also
Dombrowski 1997, pp. 65, 83 and Boudon-Machuel 2004, p. 65: ‘…l’ouvrage d’Orfeo Boselli apparaît donc comme une, voir la source essentielle pour toute analyse du portrait sculpté à Rome au XVIIe siècle.’
determined the general shape and proportions of the head, he argues, the sculp- tor should search for the likeness in the particulars:
this is done by again observing which part is disproportionate in that face, that is, if the forehead is imperfect, or flawed in largeness or smallness, and so the mouth, if the nose is disproportionate in length or shortness, if the eyes are too much towards the outside or the inside, and that excessiveness of ever which part, should be worked which such an expression, that surely it will be recognized by all, for noth- ing does the portrait more good than knowing the line that deters from perfec- tion.22
Thus, Boselli suggests, the sculptor must focus on the disproportionate, on the flaws and imperfections. These disproportions, furthermore, should not be sought in the face as a whole but in its parts. Forehead, mouth, nose, and eyes are all regarded independently. A similar occupation belies also Chantelou’s notes on Bernini’s approach to his bust of Louis XIV (fig. 16):
The Cavalier said that in the last two days he had studied the King’s face intensively and had found that one side of his mouth differed from the other, and this was also true of the eyes, and even of the cheeks; these details would help him to get a re- semblance…23
And a few days later he notes:
The Cavalier told me this morning that, while working on the King’s nose, he had observed that he had one which was of a quite peculiar kind, being wider at the bridge than at the base where it joined the cheek, [and that] this might help [pouvait l’aider] him with the resemblance.24
22 Boselli/Dent Weil 1978, Ms. Doria Pamphili, ff. 41r-41v [=Boselli/Torresi 1994, Ms. BNCF,
c. 61]: ‘Doppo questa forma generale del tutto, e proporzione, voglio che discenda a cercare la similitudine nelli particolari e ciò farà di nuovo osservando qual parte è eccessiva in quel viso cioè se la fronte pecca, o difetta in grande o picciolo, così la bocca, se il naso è di sover- chio longo o corto, se gl’occj sono troppo in fuori o indentro, ed a quella eccessività di parti qualsiasi, lavorare con tanto espressione, che di fatto sia riconosciuto da tutti, perché il ri- tratto altra cosa non lo fa bene, che il conoscere la linea, che s’allontana dalla perfezione.’ Boselli paraphrases his conclusion in Ms. Corsini, f. 118v: ‘…l’esperienza costringe a diffinire il Ritratto non essere altro, che una linea mossa dalla perfetione…’
23 Chantelou/Stanic 2001, p. 120 [15 August]: ‘Le Cavalier a dit qu’il a observé ces deux jours le
visage du Roi avec grande exactitude, et avait trouvé qu’il a la moitié de la bouche d’une fa- çon et l’autre d’une autre, une œil différent aussi de l’autre, et même les joues différentes; ce qui aiderait à la resemblance…’ Trans. Chantelou/Blunt & Bauer 1985, p. 121.
24 Chantelou/Stanic 2001, p. 128 [19 August]: ‘Le Cavalier m’avait dit le matin qu’il avait obser-
vé, travaillant au nez du Roi, que Sa Majesté l’a d’une façon toute particulière, la partie d’en
In this fragmentary perception of the human face we may recognize an echo of the academic tradition, originating in the Bolognese school of the Carracci. Par- ticularly among the drawings of Agostino Carracci, we find analytical studies of independent features, such as eyes, ears, mouths, and noses (fig. 18), which, in their turn, have influenced the popular print series of independent features by such artists as Odoardo Fialetti and Il Guercino.25 It is, in the end, the sum of
these elements that determines what Boselli calls the ‘line that deters from per- fection,’ apparently seemingly being some fixed ideal. Thus, when Boselli speaks of the disproportionate in the sitter’s independent features, his point of reference is the ideal from which these details differ. As a rule of thumb such an approach is quite worth wile. Rather than having to reconstruct the whole head, the artist can rely on some fixed ideal, a scheme which functions as his point of departure. Indeed, as Gombrich has argued, the artist necessarily works from such general schemata.26
Next to the academic practice as instigated by the Carracci, Boselli’s ap- proach can also be related to the actual way we perceive the human face. In psychological research on face perception and face recognition the facial ‘frag- mentation’ we have found in Boselli, that is to say, the face’s analysis in differ- ent elements, is usually taken as a point of departure. In very general terms we may say that we recognize a face by its individual features. The manner in which these different features play a role can be further elaborated upon, though. Psychologists make a distinction between ‘featural processing’ and ‘configural processing’ of the face, the former referring to the processing of the individual features such as the nose, eyes, and so forth, whereas the latter refers to the relations between these different features.27 Within configural processing
a further distinction can be made between first-order and second-order rela- tions, where the first-order relations refer to the relative position of the differ- ent features in the head (that is, the nose above the mouth, the eyes above the nose, etc.) and the second-order relations to the relative distance to other fea-
bas qui confine à la joue étant plus étroite que le devant du nez, ce qui pouvait l’aider à la res- semblance.’ Trans. partly adopted from Chantelou/Blunt & Bauer 1985, p. 131.
25 See Gombrich 1962, pp. 137-139 and Akker 1991, p. 97. Cf. Alessandro Allori in Barocchi
1971-73, vol. 2, pp. 1941-1981, who teaches to draw first the individual features to compile a face. The link between the construction of the face from different parts by the artist and its recognition is suggested by a remark of Leonardo in Vinci/McMahon 1956, vol. 2, p. 109: ‘Se tu voi havere facilità in tenerti a’ mente un aria d’un volto inpara prima a’ mente di molte teste ochi nasi bocce menti e’ gole e’ colli e’ spalli.’
26 Gombrich 1962, pp. 67-78.
27 Featural processing is also known as ‘componential processing’, ‘piecemeal processing’, and
tures and to the side of the face.28 First-order relations, it is generally assumed,
play an important role in recognizing a face as such; in fact, as one may know from experience, the mere suggestion of a pair of eyes above a mouth is readily interpreted as a face. An artist such as the mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcim- boldo plays with this principle in his renowned ‘reversible portraits’ (fig. 19). Obviously, an artist such as Boselli takes them for granted; they are already in his ideal scheme.
For the actual recognition of an individual, both the independent features and second-order relations, as well as how they relate to each other, play an im- portant role.29 Thus, we recognize the individual both by the shapes of the in-
dividual features as well as the relative distances between these features. Re- turning to sculptural practice, we can see how also Boselli accounts for these aspects. Whereas a small mouth or nose can be considered as clearly identifi- able features, the distance between the eyes and the size of the forehead may be counted among the second-order relations. Furthermore, Boselli’s apparent re- ference to an ideal face can be compared with so-called norm-based models of face recognition. The idea of such models is that, given the preposition that dis- tinctive faces are more easily remembered and recognized than more average faces, they are somehow measured against a norm or indeed an ideal face.30 Al-
though norm-based models of face recognition have not been fully accepted and even criticized, they do account for a large portion of the experimental data. Boselli’s approach, then, indeed works towards creating a recognizable likeness.