The Human Face Mirror

The theme of the cor­re­spon­dences between the real and the human face por­trait acti­vates a sys­tem of rela­tion­ships that are both per­son­al and linked to the rela­tion­al pat­terns we deal with on a dai­ly basis. It is about pro­pri­o­cep­tion and its coher­ent repro­duced image, but it is also con­nect­ed to the expec­ta­tion trig­gered by one’s own aes­thet­ic seen from some­one else’s eyes. This may be true for indi­vid­u­als rep­re­sent­ed in a pho­to­graph, in a paint­ing or in a draw­ing made by oth­er sub­jects than us, to whom we lend our phys­i­cal­i­ty in order to have it trans­ferred to the cho­sen sup­port frame; but what hap­pens when we con­struct a self-portrait?

If the term cor­re­spon­dence implies a rec­i­p­ro­cal relationship—in this case, medi­at­ed by the device in which the act of recog­ni­tion begins the graph­ic com­po­si­tion of a pre­cise idea of self—, then the prac­tice of self-por­tray­ing requires a con­tin­u­ous trans­fig­u­ra­tion process for which the face imprint­ed in the sta­t­ic image is the syn­the­sis of a mul­ti­tude of faces and pos­si­ble expres­sions, which often we are unable to rec­og­nize because we are made of our diachron­ic for­get­ful­ness and, despite liv­ing in the present, we are prone to wear and tear. In the light of these con­di­tions, when we are asked to make a self-por­trait, we face a cri­sis: we tend to attribute to our tech­ni­cal inca­pac­i­ty the non-ful­fil­ment of the task, some­times think­ing that the myth of Nar­cis­sus does not belong to us, some oth­ers pre­fer­ring to remain in the shad­ows. There­fore, it is the denial of per­son­al stag­ing, which is impar­tial in the cred­i­ble reflec­tion of the instilled image that also infus­es our essence. That is due to the belief that we can­not present our­selves at the best of our abil­i­ties, so it makes us aban­don the challenge.

Yet the design ​“is the abil­i­ty to ride a bike”, we all can mas­ter it and, as Bet­ty Edwards teach­es, we must learn to see. In this sense, the author pro­pos­es a series of exer­cis­es, includ­ing the self-por­trait, with the advice of using an invert­ed image to abstract the lev­el of recognition.

It is indeed very dif­fi­cult to iden­ti­fy the sub­ject rep­re­sent­ed in an upside-down pho­to­graph or illus­tra­tion. That is because “[…] What sim­ply hap­pens is that the left hemi­sphere [of the brain] in front of this task renounces to face it”1. There­fore, learn­ing to draw means to stim­u­late the right hemi­sphere and if it is true that to do so we must know how to see, the draw­ing of the self-por­trait requires the abil­i­ty to know how to watch and know our­selves. Accord­ing to Ste­fano Fer­rari, this learn­ing process goes hand in hand with the con­struc­tion of the ego to which the self-por­trait alludes, as ​“it calls into ques­tion our sense of iden­ti­ty in such a way that our ego (and the image that rep­re­sents it) must be—so to speak—refreshed and repro­grammed”2. More gen­er­al­ly, the artist’s self-por­trait has sat­is­fied the desire to con­vey a pre­cise idea of iden­ti­ty and, as Patrizia Magli claims, this impulse oscil­lates between see­ing and feel­ing them­selves3, as well as the need to leave to pos­ter­i­ty a trace of their pres­ence which can only be syn­the­sized in the per­for­ma­tive act of performing.

Through­out his­to­ry the self-por­trait has become a real artis­tic genre of which is very dif­fi­cult to date the ori­gin; but since the Mid­dle Ages authors’ fig­ures of the illu­mi­nat­ed codes have appeared, immor­tal­ized in the act of paint­ing the block ini­tial let­ter, con­cen­trat­ing and iden­ti­fy­ing them­selves in their work as amanu­en­sis and minia­tur­ists. Usu­al­ly they were monks who offered their cal­li­graph­ic art and were shown while per­form­ing acts of humil­i­ty and pros­tra­tion, as for exam­ple in the case of Mat­teo Paris lying at the foot of the Vir­gin Mary, with his name and sur­name writ­ten above the back and pub­lished on the fron­tispiece of the homony­mous His­to­ria Anglo­rum. Chron­i­ca majo­ra (1250−1259). [ 1 ]

They didn’t lack for nuns as well, and in some cas­es sec­u­lar women such as Clar­i­cia, who pub­lished the Psalter at the end of the 12^th cen­tu­ry, one can find a col­lec­tion of psalms now kept at the Wal­ters Art Muse­um in Bal­ti­more. The young woman is paint­ed in a grace­ful pose, her hair is combed in long braids and she wears a dress with bell sleeves accord­ing to the fash­ion of the time. Her fig­ure inte­grates the stem of the let­ter Q and prob­a­bly, as Fed­eri­co Fio­ra­van­ti notes, she was a copy­ist who did not take the vows and offered her ser­vice as an amanu­en­sis in the scrip­to­ri­um of the abbey of the Bene­dic­tine nuns of Augs­burg, in Ger­many4. [ 2 ]

This prac­tice of the incur­sion of the self con­tin­ued also dur­ing the Renais­sance. For exam­ple, Fra Fil­ip­po Lip­pi in the altar­piece of the Coro­na­tion of the Vir­gin (1441−1447 ca.), looks away from the scene rep­re­sent­ed to address it to the spec­ta­tor. Posi­tioned at the base of the com­po­si­tion on the left, he assumes a melan­cholic expres­sion and his right hand holds his face absorbed in thoughts. Accord­ing to Alber­to Boat­to, the artist’s choice is not point­ed to self-congratulation—as the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry accus­tomed us—but is rather linked to a ​“mea­sured asser­tion […]. What strikes and per­suades in these first self-por­traits is the absence of any vain­glo­ry and the calm sober affir­ma­tion of one­self as human beings”5. Con­verse­ly, the myth of Nar­cis­sus who reflects his own image in the obses­sive and con­tem­pla­tive act of look­ing from the shore of the spring is evoked by the pre­dom­i­nant use of con­vex mir­rors, which appear, for exam­ple, in the Andolfi­ni spous­es by Jan Van Eyck (1434), reveal­ing who is hid­den in front of the sur­face of the paint­ing, or in the self-por­trait of Parmi­gian­i­no (1524).

About this work, which became the iden­ti­ty card of the artist—because it was great­ly appre­ci­at­ed by Pope Clement VII who invit­ed the artist to imme­di­ate­ly join him in Rome—Giorgio Vasari speaks with great enthu­si­asm, defin­ing the Parme­san painter Francesco Maz­zo­la as a man with a beau­ti­ful face6. The artist por­trayed him­self by employ­ing a barber’s mir­ror in a small room with a sky­light. The por­trait suf­fers from the dis­tor­tions reflect­ed by the curved sup­port, includ­ing the left hand on the fore­ground. But the face of the young man remains intact: he has brown hair and eyes; the com­plex­ion is rosy, and the semi-closed mouth reveals a slight smile.

The mir­ror also appears in what James Hall defines as the first self-por­trait of an artist, con­tained in the 1403 French reis­sue of work which Boc­cac­cio ded­i­cat­ed to the biog­ra­phy of 106 famous women—De Claris mulieribus (1361–1362)—, where “[…] lt shows the ancient Roman artist ​‘Mar­cia’ sit­ting at a table in her lux­u­ri­ous­ly appoint­ed work­shop gaz­ing at the reflec­tion of her head in a small con­vex mir­ror. Boc­cac­cio prob­a­bly based her on Iaia, one of six women painters men­tioned by Pliny: Iaia’s self-por­trait […] is like­ly to have been paint­ed using a mir­ror made of pol­ished met­al. The cir­cu­lar image on Marcia’s mir­ror is being scaled up unto an over-life-size, flat, rec­tan­gu­lar paint­ing that includes her neck and shoul­ders. The tip of her brush touch­es her paint­ed red lips, as if to sug­gest that her sec­ond self will speak at any moment. The mise-en-scéne insists emphat­i­cal­ly that artists are per­fect­ly capa­ble of ampli­fy­ing and clar­i­fy­ing par­tial images derived from round and/or con­vex mir­rors, and adapt­ing them to a dif­fer­ent for­mat”7. [ 3 ]

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the name of the minia­tur­ist is unknown, how­ev­er, Mar­cia seems to know the scale rela­tion­ships that exist between the real and the mir­rored image: our face reflect­ed on a flat mir­ror is always half the size of the real one, regard­less of our dis­tance from the mir­ror. This assump­tion is eas­i­ly con­firmed and demon­strat­ed [ 4 ]. We can assume K as the pro­file plane of a mir­ror and AB the length of a face whose eye is in O. The dis­tance of AB from K is the same as the alter ego A’B’, beyond the mir­ror, thus the pro­jec­tion of AB and A’B’ in K is equal to half of each of them. The same applies to the CD seg­ment, which illus­trates the approach­ing of a face to the mir­ror and its vir­tu­al C’D’ clone.

Leonar­do Baglioni and Ric­car­do Migliari reflect on sim­i­lar con­sid­er­a­tions in a refined arti­cle ded­i­cat­ed to the ori­gins of per­spec­tive and the use of mir­rors as fun­da­men­tal tools for reduc­ing the real space in the plan. Start­ing from the con­cept of visu­al pyra­mid, they state that it is pos­si­ble to build two more: ​“with ver­tex­es that are hor­i­zon­tal and sym­met­ri­cal trans­po­si­tions of the ver­tex of the first pyra­mid. Hav­ing estab­lished the posi­tions of the ver­tex­es we can move the mir­ror back­wards and for­wards until, through tri­al and error, the oblique edges of the side pyra­mids coin­cide with the diag­o­nals of the squares reflect­ed in the mir­ror. The dis­tance between the observ­er and the mir­ror is equal to half the dis­tance between the observ­er and one of the ver­tex­es of the side pyra­mids. Or else we could main­tain the same dis­tance between the observ­er and the mir­ror and increase or decrease the dis­tances between the ver­tex of the main pyra­mid and that of the side pyra­mids until the rel­a­tive oblique edges coin­cide with the diag­o­nals of the square”8.

The mir­ror, there­fore, is an instru­ment to under­stand real­i­ty and deter­mined the birth of per­spec­tive, meant as the sci­ence of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Just think of the process that took the name of costruzione legit­ti­ma (legit­i­mate con­struc­tion), which is due to the empir­i­cal prac­tices of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi who, in 1413, employed a 30cm side square wood­en board, with a hole through which he could look at the image of the facade of the Flo­rence bap­tis­tery reflect­ed in a mir­ror par­al­lel to the board itself.

Between the fif­teenth and the six­teenth cen­turies there is a flour­ish­ing pro­lif­er­a­tion of trea­tis­es on per­spec­tive: Leon Bat­tista Alber­ti ded­i­cat­ed the trea­tise De pic­tura to Brunelleschi in 1435; Piero del­la Francesca wrote the De prospec­ti­va pin­gen­di and Libel­lus de quinque cor­poribus reg­u­laribus at the end of the cen­tu­ry; Luca Paci­oli drew much from this work by pub­lish­ing the De Div­ina pro­por­tione in 1509; Jean Pélerin com­plet­ed the De Arti­fi­ciali Per­spec­ti­va in 1505; Albrecht Dür­er built and exper­i­ment­ed with per­spec­tive machines and in 1484 paint­ed his own self-por­trait at the mir­ror by sil­ver-tip on paper [ 5 ]. He was only thirteen.

Far from want­i­ng to make a com­plete exam­i­na­tion of the many trea­tis­es pub­lished dur­ing the Renais­sance, it is still worth remem­ber­ing how the his­to­ry of mod­ern per­spec­tive is con­di­tioned by the use of the flat mir­ror and how this instru­ment has become an inte­gral part of por­trai­ture. In fact, the same authors of per­spec­tive trea­tis­es won­der about the human body mea­sure­ment, with par­tic­u­lar regard to the geom­e­try of the face. For exam­ple, Piero del­la Francesca ded­i­cates the third book of De prospec­ti­va pin­gen­di to the mea­sure­ment of bod­ies and focus­es on the most com­plex fig­ure to be rep­re­sent­ed in per­spec­tive, the face, and per­haps he even por­trays him­self as an exam­ple. The first oper­a­tion is the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the orthog­o­nal pro­jec­tions of the head, which is sub­se­quent­ly sec­tioned with par­al­lel and orthog­o­nal planes in order to obtain a grid of curves whose points become object of mea­sure­ment and are giv­en by the inter­sec­tion of the visu­al rays that depart from a pro­jec­tion cen­ter [ 6 ] [ 7 ]. The def­i­n­i­tion of the method allows him to obtain infi­nite con­fig­u­ra­tions, rang­ing from orthog­o­nal to oblique per­spec­tives, to draw far­ther faces, tak­en from the bot­tom up and vice ver­sa. In the pro­posed mod­el the front view appar­ent­ly adopts the laws of sym­me­try, clear­ing the ground to the study of human body pro­por­tions and har­mon­ic rela­tion­ships, intro­duced by Leonar­do da Vin­ci in Uomo vit­ru­viano (Vit­ru­vian Man) and in his Trat­ta­to del­la Pit­tura (Trea­tise on Paint­ing) (1498); by Luca Paci­oli in the study of head pro­por­tions in the afore­men­tioned trea­tise; by Albrecht Dür­er in Vier Büch­er von men­schlich­er Pro­por­tion (1528), and by many others.

It is easy to deduce that the meth­ods of archi­tec­ture rep­re­sen­ta­tion have gov­erned both the pro­por­tion­al and aes­thet­ic canons of the arte­facts, as well as the fea­tures of those who designed and expe­ri­enced them in dif­fer­ent eras. Thus, the pres­ence of the Vit­ru­vian man has dei­fied the con­cept of mea­sure­ment of the 16^th cen­tu­ry space, becom­ing a mod­el to which aim and relaunch­ing the inhu­man image of a per­fect­ly sym­met­ri­cal body.

The anthropocentrism—that influ­enced the Renais­sance universe—evolved into the self-ref­er­en­tial immen­si­ty of the Baroque artist, who used to mix with nobles and men of pow­er when por­tray­ing them in his rep­re­sen­ta­tions, unveil­ing the face of the scene direc­tor. This is the case of Diego Velázquez, who in 1656 por­trayed the Span­ish roy­al fam­i­ly in Las Meni­nas. This paint­ing leaves room for dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions, cer­tain­ly orches­trat­ed by the artist and announced by the decep­tive reflec­tions of the mir­rors in the room, which inter­ro­gate the view­er mak­ing him feel part of the fic­tion. In this way the self-por­trait lures the gaze of the oth­er, mak­ing him feel with­in this sort of tableaux vivant, in ​“a form of rep­re­sen­ta­tion that no longer finds its foun­da­tion in imi­ta­tion but is giv­en as pure rep­re­sen­ta­tion. A rep­re­sen­ta­tion that has a val­ue as it pro­duces pos­i­tive, pathet­ic or cog­ni­tive effects; capa­ble of find­ing an adhe­sion, and no longer for its ana­log­i­cal cor­re­spon­dence to a pre-exist­ing sta­ble real­i­ty”9.

Gen­er­al­ly, there are many 17^th cen­tu­ry artists who play to inte­grate their direc­to­r­i­al pres­ence in the works pro­duced, exalt­ing the work spaces in which they act wear­ing the best uni­form suit­able to be shown also from behind, as Jan Ver­meer does in The art of paint­ing (1666−1668). Regard­ing Vermeer’s oil paint­ing, James Hall recalls that the painter’s stu­dio was small and placed on the top floor of his house; and in any case the work clothes could not be ele­gant10. But yes­ter­day, like today, fic­tion ben­e­fits from self-esteem and under­goes the phys­i­cal­i­ty of the pro­tag­o­nist to the per­for­ma­tive act of the design of his image, which is dis­tort­ed by the mas­tery of the means avail­able to build it. When the face per­forms, both in a pic­ture or in a pho­to­graph, the author tends to mod­i­fy its con­no­ta­tions while main­tain­ing char­ac­ters of verisimil­i­tude. More­over, the artists and schol­ars of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry med­i­tat­ed on the canons of beau­ty and their objec­ti­fi­ca­tion in terms of size and proportion.

For exam­ple, Gino Sev­eri­ni, with­out claim­ing to make a real trea­tise of descrip­tive geometry—as he clear­ly said—focuses on the study of har­mon­ic rela­tions inher­ent in nature and draws the orthog­o­nal pro­jec­tions of his wife Jeanne’s face and bust, pub­lished in his Du cubisme au Clas­si­cisme in 1921. In terms of his method, he declares: “[…] Because each sec­tion is the result of a com­mon mea­sure, of a sin­gle rela­tion­ship that reg­u­lates the whole body, by mak­ing the same oper­a­tion for each sec­tion, in the end the parts must coin­cide per­fect­ly and [errors] are close to a frac­tion of a mil­lime­ter. So, I rotat­ed by 25° the head tak­en as an exam­ple, then applied same rota­tion to the bust and I had no trou­ble in putting the head on the neck, then the arms on shoul­ders and so on. In this way the body is built piece by piece, like a machine. When all the parts are arranged with love and pre­ci­sion, then they are reunit­ed, each hav­ing its func­tion, and every­thing is per­fect”11 [ 8 ] [ 9 ]. Severini’s final con­sid­er­a­tions echo the ratio­nal­is­tic mod­el of automa­tion, intend­ed as a solu­tion to every prob­lem. If, accord­ing to him, the con­struc­tion of a human body is like a machine, two years lat­er Le Cor­busier uses the same argu­ments but sub­sti­tutes the body with the house, intend­ed a machine for liv­ing, as argued inVers une Archi­tec­ture of 1923.

In his essay Il volto e l’architetto (2008) Luca Ribi­chi­ni focus­es on the cor­re­spon­dence between the geom­e­try of the face and the archi­tec­ture of the Savoye vil­la, demon­strat­ing how the Pla­ton­ic ide­al in the 1920s merged into the direct dia­logue between paint­ing and archi­tec­ture that, for Le Cor­busier, deter­mines the com­po­si­tion­al process­es in a con­tin­u­ous plot. The mod­ern human body syn­the­sized with­in the fea­tures of the mod­u­lor dic­tates mea­sure­ment and pro­por­tion­al rela­tion­ships. Ref­er­ences to pro­por­tion, the gold­en sec­tion and the prin­ci­ples of geom­e­try, are ascer­tained in the the­o­ries of Mati­la Costi­es­cu Ghy­ka, who in 1931 pub­lish­es Le Nom­bre d’Or. In his book, the Roman­ian mathematician—similarly to what Sev­eri­ni did—uses the image of his wife to legit­imize the foun­da­tions of his the­o­ries, in this case focused on the study of the gold­en sec­tion. The pho­to­graph of Miss Helen Wills Moody’s face is then sub­ject­ed to the geometriza­tion of a sys­tem of reg­u­la­to­ry lay­outs, which, accord­ing to Ribi­chi­ni, reminds one of the ground floor plan geome­tries of Vil­la Savoye. 

As for the sub­ject of this exper­i­men­ta­tion, Ghy­ka describes the face of his wife, stat­ing that ​“it has the rare prop­er­ty of reveal­ing a theme ​‘relat­ed’ not only to the gold­en sec­tion but rather offers an ​‘ide­al’ canon strict­ly mod­u­lat­ed for this pur­pose. It is not dif­fi­cult to find also in the liv­ing ​‘micro­cosms’ [of the pho­tographs and the geome­tries found in them], as in the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Olympic ten­nis cham­pi­oness, the Pla­ton­ic sym­phonies result­ing from the inscrip­tion in the sphere of reg­u­lar poly­he­dra and of the alter­nat­ing pul­sat­ing bud­ding of the star­ry poly­he­dra start­ing from the dodec­a­he­dron […], geo­met­ric par­a­digm of the har­mo­ny of the Cos­mos”12.

The geome­tries and math­e­mat­ic of the face are con­nect­ed in the Carte­sian research of aes­thet­ic per­fec­tion by Ghy­ka, how­ev­er the prin­ci­ple of total­iz­ing beau­ty, based on the rules of har­mo­ny and pro­por­tion, runs through the dif­fer­ent peri­ods of the his­to­ry of art and arrives to us, after the desire to take the fea­tures of the per­fect face pro­to­type. This is inde­pen­dent from our orig­i­nal fea­tures, because the cos­met­ic sur­geon can cer­tain­ly be more gen­er­ous than Moth­er Nature.

The Amer­i­can Cindy Jack­son13, for exam­ple, under­went fifty-two inter­ven­tions that allowed her join the Guin­ness World Records in 2011; her inspi­ra­tional source com­ing from the obser­va­tion of her Bar­bie col­lec­tion in 1977. Jackson’s trans­for­ma­tions have evolved, and are all doc­u­ment­ed on the Inter­net: they speak of a designed image that is in want of over­com­ing the wear and tear of time, propos­ing itself as a ref­er­ence mod­el, so much so that today she is a suc­cess­ful tes­ti­mo­ni­al and con­sul­tant for body care and risk pre­ven­tion of cos­met­ic surgery. Today, the body designed for its trans­for­ma­tion has to deal with an imag­i­nary self-por­trait that mir­rors an aes­thet­ic ide­al to be achieved and per­son­i­fied, since it is still a tem­po­rary image that does not rise to tem­po­ral steadi­ness. More­over, aside from social expec­ta­tions, we can say that tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments and inno­va­tions in the med­ical field sup­port the ref­er­ence aes­thet­ics and image with which we relate to oth­ers is pre­cise­ly what is brought in ques­tion. Thus, the aes­thet­ic per­cep­tion of the self and its per­for­mance can’t be con­ceived as the results of a path that nec­es­sar­i­ly leads to the def­i­n­i­tion of a uni­vo­cal syn­the­sis image. If in the past the ana­log­i­cal instru­ments allowed one to trans­late the con­no­ta­tions of a re-adapt­able face in bidi­men­sion­al draw­ings, the cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal wave aims on at phys­i­cal, and dig­i­tal, con­stant­ly evolv­ing pres­ence. Every self-por­trait speaks to the era when it was pro­duced and can be com­pared to ideas of tem­po­rary make­up and the pros­the­sis, to the design of the tat­too cov­er­ing the skin, to the tech­nolo­gies that coex­ist with the body, both exoge­nous and endoge­nous, to the sub­cu­ta­neous grafts, to more or less inva­sive trans­for­ma­tions to which we sub­ject it.

Body artists have worked in var­i­ous ways of trans­form­ing iden­ti­ty and the human Body, but since the 1920s a spe­cif­ic atten­tion to the bion­ic and post-human has paved the way for some extreme prac­tices. In 1991, the British artist Marc Quinn made self-por­traits with his own blood, frozen inside trans­par­ent casts, and every five years pro­duces a new sculp­ture to doc­u­ment the process­es of his aging; dur­ing the fol­low­ing decade the Aus­tralian artist Ste­larc has exper­i­ment­ed in The Third Hand project the inser­tion of an addi­tion­al mechan­i­cal arm, gov­erned by stom­ach and legs mus­cles in the act of writ­ing the word Evo­lu­tion obses­sive­ly; the French artist Orlan dis­tanced her­self from Body Art, under­tak­ing the road of Car­nal Art as a way to reflect on the con­cept of beauty’s slav­ery. For The rein­car­na­tion of Saint Orlan, since 1990 the artist has under­gone a long series of sur­gi­cal inter­ven­tions to per­son­i­fy the reas­sur­ing icon­ic mod­els’ aes­thet­ics of the fig­u­ra­tive arts, then she decid­ed to change course by hav­ing two sil­i­cone implants on the sides of her fore­head. This recon­sid­er­a­tion should denounce cer­tain intol­er­ances towards pop­u­lar beau­ty stan­dards, but the per­sis­tence of the pros­the­sis coex­ists with her cur­rent image, his­tori­ciz­ing a face that dis­plays many years less than her age.

Albeit ori­ent­ed towards per­form­ing arts, the young artist Marzia Aval­lone arrives at her 2017 work In Carne Sanc­ti through less inva­sive prac­tices. In this case the con­struc­tion of the self-por­trait is com­pared to the stag­ing of a pos­si­ble oth­er-than-self, in a wide-rang­ing project that includes sev­en inter­pre­ta­tions of the martyr’s fig­ure accord­ing to an inter­pre­ta­tive cod­ing oscil­lat­ing between clas­si­cal iconog­ra­phy and per­for­ma­tive action and is intend­ed as an act con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing the whole process.

In Carne Sanc­ti — St. Sebas­t­ian II moves from the assump­tion that in medieval texts the fig­ure of the mar­tyr was described as the one who raised our human con­di­tion [ 10 ] [ 11 ]. Stripped by a mul­ti­tude of arrows and there­fore sub­ject­ed to the suf­fer­ings of mor­tal life; San Sebas­t­ian is an exem­plum. As a sym­bol­ic image of the tor­ment­ed body, he is not only the exal­ta­tion of one’s own suf­fer­ing but also, he who mas­ters the resis­tance to arrows, pain and death. In the artist’s inter­pre­ta­tion, the stress is placed upon the con­cept of pain and its over­com­ing: it is not a suf­fer­ing body to be exposed but one that is an accom­plic and par­tic­i­pates in the action which frees itself from the nar­ra­tive pre­cepts that have accom­pa­nied it dur­ing the very long path for­mal­ized by Chris­t­ian iconog­ra­phy. In the per­for­mance, an arrow is sewn on the chest by expert hands, using nee­dles and suture thread. It is an iso­lat­ed, autonomous and osten­ta­tious embroi­dery that out­lines a short cir­cuit among body, enve­lope and imposed sign, which can be rec­og­nized as a dis­tant rein­ter­pre­ta­tive mem­o­ry trace.

In this sense, it is pos­si­ble to affirm that the self-por­trait, today as much as yes­ter­day, actu­al­izes the return of the repressed and is a mode of the uncan­ny, intend­ed as Sig­mund Freud defined it in Das Unheim­liche, in 1919. Thus, the image that we embody does not nec­es­sar­i­ly reas­sure us, and what we rec­og­nize as famil­iar can make us uncom­fort­able, because the face is ​“an instan­ta­neous occur­rence of mul­ti­ple het­ero­ge­neous events. In fact, its mor­pho­log­i­cal con­for­ma­tion is con­stant­ly test­ed by the inner move­ments that mod­i­fy its expres­sion”14. Accord­ing to Ste­fano Fer­rari, for the artist both por­trait and self-por­trait trig­ger a pro­jec­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion mech­a­nism in the cho­sen mod­el15. It comes back the prob­lem of self-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in the pro­duced image, of the oth­er-than-self-empathiz­ing, of the dou­ble and of the mir­ror of decep­tion or reality. 

Then, what does the self-por­trait mean to all of us?

Dur­ing the last twen­ty years we have found our­selves com­mu­ni­cat­ing with oth­ers through fil­ters, more or less truth­ful, capa­ble of speak­ing about us inde­pen­dent­ly from our phys­i­cal pres­ence. The act­ing skills that are prop­er for each of us are often con­veyed in forms of telep­res­ence that require all of our skills as builders of our dou­ble through dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion tools capa­ble of por­tray­ing us in a very short time. We can then inter­pret our role by means of 3D dig­i­tal avatars, immers­ing our­selves in the dif­fer­ent vir­tu­al worlds of the Inter­net. We gen­er­al­ly design them so that they assume our fea­tures, mold­ing them around desired aes­thet­ic ideals16.

Sec­ond Life and High fideli­ty17 are only two among many per­for­mance spaces where we can go on stage through mov­ing images that sim­u­late atti­tudes, pos­es: propen­si­ties to cred­it self-com­pla­cen­cy based on oth­ers’ approval. After all “[…] When an indi­vid­ual plays a part he implic­it­ly requests his observers to take seri­ous­ly the impres­sion that is fos­tered before them. They are asked to believe that the char­ac­ter they see actu­al­ly pos­sess­es the attrib­ut­es he appears to pos­sess, that the task he per­forms will have the con­se­quences that are implic­it­ly claimed for it, and that, in gen­er­al, mat­ters are what they appear to be”18.

As for the per­fectible three-dimen­sion­al clones, we can equip them with image-based mod­el­ing tools capa­ble of trans­lat­ing the spa­tial coor­di­nates of dif­fer­ent pho­tographs that can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly cap­ture a body to eas­i­ly gen­er­ate an avatar and pro­vide it with a high-res­o­lu­tion tex­ture19 [ 12 ]. But the pho­to­graph­ic por­trait, inter­pret­ed in the sta­t­ic fix­i­ty of the syn­the­sis image of the face, is one of the main busi­ness cards through which we intro­duce our­selves in social net­works and in oth­er con­texts. Those who assume to design the per­fect self­ie usu­al­ly employ his or her smart­phone accord­ing to a corol­lary of pos­tur­al atti­tudes that imme­di­ate­ly declares social sta­tus. The use of fil­ters and manip­u­la­to­ry tools for every shot reveals the fail­ure to accept one­self through the fea­tures we would like to assume, but do not pos­sess. In these cas­es the fic­tion­al manip­u­la­tion of a body, which is sub­ject­ed to the long­ing of show­ing itself, crash­es down through the exhi­bi­tion of the inef­fa­ble retouch­ing of its func­tion­al insecurities.

In con­clu­sion, we have seen how the sto­ry of the self-por­trait begins its nar­ra­tive from the desire to show one­self and to under­line the social sta­tus of belong­ing. If in the Mid­dle Ages the amanu­en­sis and minia­tur­ists felt the desire to immor­tal­ize them­selves in their works to empha­size the impor­tance of the craft—and the artists fol­lowed the script of reli­gious faith obse­quious­ly in the acts of pros­tra­tion of the self—, the Renais­sance man defined him­self by the mea­sure of his own anthro­pocen­tric uni­verse: phys­i­cal and spa­tial. Dif­fer­ent­ly, the 17^th cen­tu­ry counts upon the decep­tion of the acto­r­i­al mise-en-scene.

In all cas­es, the con­trol of one’s own image was entrust­ed to the reas­sur­ing pro­jec­tive rules of mir­rors capa­ble of con­trol­ling their mea­sure, but also of dis­tort­ing expec­ta­tions. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, Descrip­tive Geom­e­try, under­stood as a sci­ence of rep­re­sen­ta­tion able to describe the mor­phol­o­gy of arte­facts, inde­pen­dent­ly of its mere nom­i­nal 19^th cen­tu­ry ori­gins, has encod­ed in resti­tu­tions the con­no­ta­tions of some­one who has been sub­mit­ted to its rules.

Our con­tem­po­rary world has accus­tomed us to instru­ments of rep­re­sen­ta­tion capa­ble of sim­u­lat­ing the third dimen­sion of our real phys­i­cal belong­ing, and the con­struc­tion of the self-por­trait has become a desire with­in everyone’s reach. Today the verisimil­i­tude of the mir­ror image—and the desired one—has enslaved us to the man­i­fold iden­ti­ty trans­for­ma­tions that the body is able to realize.