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Some of Art's Mysteries

Why does each of these five portraits of Napoleon resemble the artist?

Why has no-one noted that great portraits so often resemble the artist, thus making more sense of the saying Every Painter
Paints Himself? There are dozens of examples in the Galleries while Who’s Who, a series of short papers (below), explains why.
Visual interpretations of Edouard Manet's art and Michelangelo's too also help demonstrate the theme.

Artists, it should be recognized, have always been "educated" by looking at past art and are far more influenced by the visual thinking
of artists than the written thought of writers. Indeed part of the mystery is that few outsiders ever "see" the artist's intention as
these comparisons prove. We see something else entirely: a painted "photograph". Yet by simply changing viewpoint, from spectator
to artist, new revelations abound. Indeed the results are so striking that any art lover with an independent mind ought to question
conventional understanding. Why were these similarities not seen before?

The answer: the possibility was never imagined - except by artists.

Who's Who: Problems in Great Portraits are short papers on how artists paint themselves:

#1  Early Netherlandish Portraits
#2  Napoleon and the French Kings
#3 British Monarchs
#4 Renaissance Faces
#5  The Artist's Wife


Why do Mantegna's shepherds face the "wrong" direction?

    Mantegna's Adoration of the Shepherds          Two works by Durer

Have you ever wondered why Joseph sleeps so much, and through the most important moments of his wife's life?
In Mantegna's Adoration in New York's Metropolitan Museum, he is fast asleep just as the shepherds come. Why?

The probable answer is that Joseph is an alter ego of the dreaming artist whose imagination brings forth the "painting"
behind him: "Mantegna's Virgin and Child". Thus the Virgin and Child are "a painting" in a different reality to Joseph and
the shepherds. However, even Mary and Jesus, the two figures in the "imagined" painting, are in turn visual metaphors
for the artist and his painting. Here's how. The Virgin gives birth to divine perfection just as the artist does. Indeed the
Italian word for conception also meant idea, as it does in English too. Thus Mantegna, like the Virgin, has had an
Immaculate Conception. The visual proof for this interpretation is that the shepherds bow not to Christ, as spectators
and even art scholars imagine, but to Joseph, the dreaming artist. Look carefully. It’s a visual trick. If you think the
shepherds face Christ, you cannot see that they do not. Once you imagine the truth, their direction, facing the
"artist"/Joseph, becomes obvious and you can never see them facing Christ again. (Click image to see for yourself.)

Contemporary viewers, like ordinary museum visitors today, would not have understood this. Only artists would have.
For instance, in two early works by Durer illustrated above, the sleeping Joseph/Durer also imagines his image of the
Virgin and Child next to him.

The Galleries contain many more examples of portraits that resemble the artist.

Simon Abrahams comments on academia in The Art Newspaper

Useful Links: The Art Newspaper
                       Web Gallery of Art (the best site for images of art)
     Old Masters New Perspectives
     Napoleonica
       Virtual Library: Museums Pages

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A website of revisionist art history for museum curators, museum visitors and art lovers of all kinds. From Renaissance criticism of painting and sculpture to the modern theories of Panofsky, Goffen, Rosand, Barolsky and 
Leo Steinberg, great art has been misinterpreted by all but the great masters themselves. Among other astonishing discoveries, artscholar.org reveals how Michelangelo used his knowledge of inner anatomy, gained through
dissections, to depict brains,a kidney, phallus and even a clitoris on the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Using an unfamiliar form of visual perception, we also demonstrate how Michelangelo used portraits and 
caricatures of Lorenzo Medici and Savonarola in his masterpieces as aspects of his own artistic identity, as king, prophet and androgynous God.