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| Peter Lely Self Portrait ca. 1665 drawing, colored chalks private collection |
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| Peter Paul Rubens Self Portrait in old age ca. 1633-40 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Carlo Maratti Self Portrait ca. 1675 drawing, colored chalks Albertina, Vienna |
"It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many millions of faces, there should be none alike; Now contrary, I wonder as much how there should be any; he that shall consider how many thousand severall words have been carelessly and without study composed out of 24 Letters; withall how many hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabrick of one man; shall easily finde that this variety is necessary: And it will bee very hard that they shall so concur as to make one portract like another. Let a Painter carelessly limn out a Million of faces, and you shall finde them all different; yea lete him have his copy before him, yet after all his art there will remain a sensible distinction; for the patterne or example of every thing is the perfectest in that kind, whereof wee still come short, though wee transcend or goe beyond it, because herein it is wide and agrees not in all points unto its Copy. Nor doth the similitude of creatures disparage the variety of nature, nor any way confound the workes of God. For even in things alike, there is diversitie, and those that doe seeme to accord, doe manifestly disagree. And thus is Man like God, for in the same things that wee resemble him, wee are utterly different from him. There was never any thing so like another, as in all points to concurre; there will ever some reserved difference slip in, to prevent the Identity, without which, two severall things would not be alike, but the same, which is impossible."
– from Religio Medici (1635) by the celestial Sir Thomas Browne
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| Jonathan Richardson Senior Self Portrait ca. 1733 oil on canvas Yale Center for British Art |
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| Giovanni Battista Piazzetta Self Portrait 1735 drawing Albertina, Vienna |
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| Gaetano Sabatini Self Portrait ca. 1734 drawing Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Manuel Bayeu Self Portrait ca. 1780-90 oil on canvas Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona |
FAME
Fame like a wayward girl will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease –
She is a Gipsey will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her,
A Jilt whose ear was never whisper'd close
Who think they scandal her who talk about her –
A very Gipsey is she Nilus born,
Sister in law to jealous Potiphar –
Ye lovesick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn.
Ye lovelorn Artists, madmen that ye are,
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu
Then if she like it she will follow you –
–John Keats (1795-1821)
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Self Portrait at age twenty-four 1804 oil on canvas Musée Condé, Chantilly |
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| Moritz Daniel Oppenheim Self Portrait 1814-16 oil on canvas Jewish Museum, New York |
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| William Etty Self Portrait 1823 oil on paper, mounted on panel Yale Center for British Art |
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| George Richmond Self Portrait ca. 1840 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
KANT'S QUESTION ABOUT MONICA VITTI
It was hidden in her and it gave Kant pleasure.
L'Eclisse begins with a wind blowing Monica Vitti's hair. She is inside a room.
Kant's was a partly negative pleasure.
Where is that wind from?
Kant took pleasure in what he called Thing in Itself.
She is prowling the room with her eyes down, observed deeply
by a man in an armchair.
Thing in Itself was unattainable, insurmountable.
She keeps trying to leave the room.
Nor could Thing in Itself be represented.
Curtains are drawn, the room is full of objects, lamps are burning here
and there, who knows what hour of the night it may be? Her hair blows slowly.
Yet through the very failure of its representation, Thing in Itself might be
inscribed within phenomena.
She lifts a piece of paper, puts it down.
Kant noted a rustling aside of sensible barriers.
Her unquiet drifts in her, spills, drifts on.
A rotating fan is shown sitting on the table beside the man in the armchair.
Kant felt weak as a wave.
Now she can leave. The surface of the movie relaxes.
Kant let his soul expand.
She walks out into the filthy daylight.
Kant pulled his hat down firmly.
She is a little ashamed but glad to be walking.
Off into this more difficult dawn.
– Anne Carson, from Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York : Knopf, 2005)
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| Mary Cassatt Self Portrait ca. 1880 gouache, watercolor National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC |
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| Émile Bernard Self Portrait with Portrait of Gauguin 1888 oil on canvas Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam |
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| Lovis Corinth Self Portrait with Skeleton 1896 oil on canvas Lenbachhaus, Munich |
In Ebon Box, when years have flown
To reverently peer –
Wiping away the velvet dust
Summers have sprinkled there!
To hold a letter to the light –
Grown Tawny – now – with time –
To con the faded syllables
That quickened us like Wine!
Perhaps a Flower's shrivelled cheek
Among its stores to find –
Plucked far away, some morning –
By gallant – mouldering hand!
A curl, perhaps, from foreheads
Our constancy forgot –
Perhaps, an antique trinket –
In vanished fashions set!
And then to lay them quiet back –
And go about its care –
As if the little Ebon Box
Were none of our affair!
– Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)