Once upon a time, to depict yourself, you needed a paintbrush or a pencil; now, your phone’s front-facing camera will suffice. When untold millions of selfies bob across social networks each day, it’s natural to feel nostalgic for the old craft of self-portraiture, and the time and skill artists lavished on their own representations. But the old-school self-portrait and the newfangled selfie have common aims: Both are showcases of personal secrets, broadcasts of political allegiances, and, more than anything, great ways to grandstand.
Self-portraiture has long served as a promotional tool, and has rarely rewarded modesty. In 1433, Jan van Eyck painted himself with gemlike hardness wearing a red turban, then added the sarcastic caption “As Well as I Can,” as if anyone would doubt his skill. The even more conceited Albrecht Dürer, in 1500, went so far as to paint himself as a dishy, smoldering Jesus Christ. The Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, born on New Year’s Eve 400 years ago, also saw self-portraiture as a means to boast of his technical acuity. But later, for this artist of the Spanish Golden Age, the self-portrait became something else: a testimony to a life transformed.
Murillo painted two self-portraits, 15 to 20 years apart. One belongs to the National Gallery in London; the other joined the Frick Collection in 2014. They appear together for the first time in centuries in the fulfilling, tightly focused exhibition “Murillo: The Self-Portraits,” which also includes three other portraits, two complementary genre paintings, and a handful of related drawings and prints. (The show travels afterward to London, and its curators are Xavier F. Salomon, from the Frick, and Letizia Treves, of the British National Gallery.)
Murillo was the leading painter in 17th-century Seville, and most exhibitions of his work concentrate on his fleet-footed religious pictures, such as “The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables,” a vaporous image of the Madonna now at the Museo del Prado. Like his Madrid-based contemporary Diego Velázquez, he depicted saints and other holy figures as earthbound men and women, though Murillo’s religious works were tidier than Velázquez’s, more spectral, and (later in his career) more influenced by the soft curves and bright tones of Venetian painting.
Portraiture was a less common genre for him. Just over a dozen Murillo portraits survive. The younger self-portrait here, dated to around 1650-55, is among his earliest known works. The artist, aged 35 or so, appears in half-length semiprofile. His slightly kinked black hair hangs down to his shoulders, and his pallid skin is punctuated by arched eyebrows, a pencil mustache, and a graying goatee. The black jacket he wears has been slashed at the sleeves, revealing a puffy white undershirt, and a stiff collar known as a golilla peeks out from the neck. Most importantly, Murillo appears not in his studio or home, but within an oval cartouche cut out of a piece of chipped marble, of the sort you might find amid Seville’s many Roman ruins.
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What did it mean for Murillo to place himself in this wholly artificial marble box, and to undercut the naturalism he brought to depicting his own face? Mr. Salomon, in his catalog essay, notes that the false stone frame is wholly unique to this portrait, and neither his contemporaries nor later Spanish painters relied on such a device. (A separate technical essay attests that the background initially contained blue pigment; imagine, then, that Murillo first painted the block against an outdoor landscape.)
The marble has an ennobling function, sure — Murillo has literally inscribed his image onto the stones of the past. But the cartouche’s evident hollowness, not to mention Murillo’s modern dress, insists that the painter has invented this looking-glass marble object as a game or a provocation. It shows Murillo both as a self-conscious, thinking individual (in the manner René Descartes had theorized just a decade or so prior), and also as a relic of history, already worthy of the fame afforded to glories past.
This show offers two illuminating pairings for the youthful self-portrait. One is Murillo’s even earlier painting of Juan Arias de Saavedra, a young minister for the Spanish Inquisition, painted in 1650. Murillo painted Saavedra in an oval niche inside a gray stone frame. He appears stern and joyless, and the Latin inscription below affirms as much; he was “hard to the criminals” of the Inquisition, though also, once his day at the torture chamber was concluded, “a profound connoisseur of the liberal arts.”
The second, even shrewder pairing here is a print from around 1626 that depicts the Count-Duke of Olivares, the top dog at the court of King Philip IV. The printmaker drew on a portrait by Velázquez for Olivares’s likeness, but he set the portrait in a frame bedecked with fruit, palm fronds, torches and horns and designed by Peter Paul Rubens. The young Murillo would have encountered ornate frames like this in important books from northern Europe, and his self-portrait inside a marble block draws not only on traditions of antiquity but on the more contemporary practice of printmaking.
About 20 years after Murillo painted himself in that hunk of marble, he turned to the mirror again for a mature self-portrait that plays its own optical tricks. In the National Gallery’s self-portrait, circa 1670, the artist’s hair has grown thinner; the pencil mustache is flecked with white, and he’s developed a double chin. He appears fatigued, as if he has been working all night. Here, again, he appears in a stone cartouche, but this one, rather than pretending to come from antiquity, is smooth and round. Beneath the cartouche are a compass, a ruler, a palette, and paintbrushes, and his right hand sits on the bottom of the putative frame — a trompe-l’oeil show-off move of the first order.
This is one of many self-portraits in Western art history that showcases the painter’s talent by advertising the fact of its own making. You could place it beside Rembrandt’s nearly contemporary “Self-Portrait With Two Circles,” in which the Dutchman painted himself in front of two perfect, can-you-top-this discs; William Hogarth’s 1745 “The Painter and His Pug,” in which the Englishman depicts himself in a painting-in-the-painting; or even Philip Guston’s 1969 “The Studio,” in which a hooded painter paints himself. The use of trompe-l’oeil also makes this later self-portrait of a piece with Murillo’s genre paintings, including the delightful “Two Women at a Window,” lent to the Frick from the National Gallery in Washington, in which the principal figure appears to lean out of the picture frame.
But just as much, the later Murillo self-portrait is a rejoinder to that earlier one — a courteous but resigned epistle from an older artist to his younger self. Once, Murillo had dreamed himself as a gentleman in the lineage of Roman heroes. The repeated device of the stone frame reaffirms that the artist’s haughtiness had not fully abated by his 50s. But age, work, family, politics: These have taken their toll on Murillo, and his right hand extends toward us as if he is desperate to make contact. Immortality is a young man’s delusion. The older artist has more modest goals, but wiser ones: To see and be seen is enough.
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