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Exhibition: ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine’ at the Hayward Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 11th October 2023 -⁠ 7th January 2024

Curators: Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is curated by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff with Assistant Curators Thomas Sutton and Gilly Fox, and Curatorial Assistant Suzanna Petot.

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Rachael Smith
Hiroshi Sugimoto in the Hayward Gallery with his ‘Seascapes’ series
2023

The world is a reality,
not because of the way it is,
but because
of the possibilities it presents

Frederick Sommer

Almost real

I have an ambivalent relationship with the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto.

On the one hand I truly admire the beauty and presence of Sugimoto’s photographs; how his images “contradict the medium’s conventional tasks – to record reality as precisely as possible”; and how his work, through an investigation of “fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality” push at the boundaries of what a photograph is and can be through an exploration of the very nature of photography.

Through this erudite, conceptual, scientific and creative investigation, Sugimoto’s staged images proffer a reorientation of the referent – of the world, in the world – unsettling the certainty of the truth of the photograph as a visual record of the world.

In my favourite series – such as the movie in a moment Theaters (1976 – ), the stuffed animal Dioramas (1974 – ), some of the wax works dead pan Portraits (1999 -) (particularly Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria and Princess Diana), and the Seascapes (1980 -) – I feel released from the bounds of reality as we perceive it. The artist takes me out of myself and into a new plane of existence. He has reanimated the in/animate through an alchemical process, a mystery of mysteries, to create new life – a transubstantiation of the elements earth, air, water, fire.

On the other hand I am less impressed with bodies of work that simply do not work for me… that leave me feeling cold, lifeless. Series such as Revolution (1990/2012), Lightning Fields (2009), Photogenic Drawings (2009), Architecture (1997 – below) and the recent Opticks (2018 – below), while not derivative, owe a great debt to other artists that have already strode that golden path… and have done it better.

As I have observed in another review of Sugimoto’s work: “I’m not saying Sugimoto is derivative but because of these other works, they don’t have much room to move. Indeed, they hardly move at all. They are so frozen in attitude that all the daring transcendence of light, the light! of space time travel, the transition from one state to another, has been lost. The Flame of Recognition (Edward Weston) – has gone.”

Taking his work as a whole, we observe in Sugimoto’s work a slightly malevolent aura – follow my argument here – not in the sense of the work “showing a wish to do evil to others” but through the photographs unsettling ability to confound the reality of others. The artist’s work is very male/volent, very masculine and in the Latin etymology of the word “volent” (present participle of velle to will, wish) very much (reality) constructed at the will and wish of the artist.

While Sugimoto’s volition (from Latin volo ‘I wish’) creates beautiful and subversive images of true presence and power, it is the artist’s ability to will into existence images that engage with mystical forces beyond the apparent and the factual but which live as completely real and part of the total world of man and nature … that is his most impressive attribute as an artist. Through his photographs he brings to consciousness things only a small portion of which most of us experience directly.1

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Adapted from Ansel Adams’ essay for The Flame of Recognition 1964 in “Edward Weston’s The Flame of Recognition” on the Aperture website August 12, 2015 [Online] Cited 22/12/2023

Many thankx to the Hayward Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“All my life I have made a habit of never believing my eyes.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto

“Sugimoto’s unique accomplishments in his genre contradict the medium’s conventional tasks – to record reality as precisely as possible. In Sugimoto’s work, one is confronted with the formal reduction of conceptual images, in which he addresses fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality. “I was concerned,” noted the artist in 2002, “with revealing an ancient stage of human memory through the medium of photography. Whether it is individual memory or the cultural memory of mankind itself, my work is about returning to the past and remembering where we came from and how we came about.” His pictures, which leave a lasting impression through their beauty and their auratic effect, interweave Japanese traditions with Western ideas. This East-West dialogue remains characteristic of his work today, which is captivating in its exceptional craftsmanship and strong aesthetic presence, and can exercise an almost magical effect on viewers.”

Anonymous. “Hiroshi Sugimoto. Revolution,” on the Museum Brandhorst website February 8, 2013

Hiroshi Sugimoto | curator tour with Ralph Rugoff | Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto: ‘My camera works as a time machine’ | Hayward Gallery

‘A camera can be able to stop the world, in that we stop the world and then investigate what is there, carefully.’

~ Hiroshi Sugimoto

Ahead of the opening of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine at the Hayward Gallery – the largest survey to date of the Sugimoto’s works – we travelled to meet the photographer at the Enoura Observatory in Japan. Situated against the outer rim of the country’s Hakone Mountains, the observatory was designed by Sugimoto as a forum for disseminating art and culture.

In this short video interview Sugimoto considers the impact of the invention of the camera – with this new ability to pause the world around us – and explains how his own photography, such as his Seascapes series, draws on this idea of the camera’s ability to distort linear time.

Dioramas (1974 – )

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dioramas (1974 – ) Silver gelatin prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

‘My life as an artist began the moment I saw that I had succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film,’ said Sugimoto about his 1976 work Polar Bear. The image is of an Arctic diorama in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but through clever use of framing and exposure, Sugimoto was able to make the scene appear real. As well as revisiting the museum, and others across the US, to expand his Dioramas series, Sugimoto later took a similar approach to the waxworks of Madame Tussauds in his Portraits. By removing the figures from their staged displays, and photographing them against a black backdrop with sympathetic lighting, the artist gave the impression that these famous faces had themselves modelled for his portraiture.

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Polar Bear, 1976. Silver gelatin print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Polar Bear
1976
From the Dioramas series
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

“Polar Bear” (1976) shows the majestic white animal roaring over a fresh kill: the bloodied body of a seal whose inert form is bulky and dark against an Arctic white background that stretches into the distance. Look closely and behind the bear – with its luscious coat of fur, its big paws so heavy in the snow you can almost hear it crunch – the line between two and three dimensions is just visible: a jagged crevasse in the ice floe beneath the two animals merges almost seamlessly with a painted backdrop of receding icy peaks.

The eye judders between these realities. The dead bear, momentarily brought to life by the vividness of the photograph, dies again, and is preserved again, a copy of a copy, frozen between past and present. Similar fates await a pair of ostriches defending their new hatchlings against a family of wart hogs (“Ostrich-Wart Hog,” 1980) and a placidly floating mother manatee and her calf (“Manatee,” 1994).

Emily LaBarge. “What Is Photography? (No Need to Answer That),” on the New York Times website Nov. 21, 2023 [Online] Cited 23/11/2023

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Manatee
1994
From the Dioramas series
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Earliest Human Relatives
1994
From the Dioramas series
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery

Theaters (1976 – ) and Abandoned Theaters (2015 – )

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
UA Playhouse, New York
1978
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Theaters series (1976 – ) Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Goshen Indiana, 1980. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cabot Street Cinema, Beverly, Massachusetts 1978. Gelatin silver print

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Abandoned Theaters series (2015 – ). Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Kenosha Theater, Kenosha
2015
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Union City Drive-in, Union City, 1993. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Union City Drive-in, Union City
1993
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

The largest survey to date of Hiroshi Sugimoto, an artist renowned for creating some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time. Over the past 50 years, Sugimoto has created pictures which are meticulously crafted, deeply thought-provoking and quietly subversive.

Featuring key works from all of the artist’s major photographic series, this survey highlights Sugimoto’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into our understanding of time and memory, and photography’s ability to both document and invent.

The exhibition also includes lesser-known works that reveal the artist’s interest in the history of photography, as well as in mathematics and optical sciences.

Often employing a large-format wooden camera and mixing his own darkroom chemicals, Sugimoto has repeatedly re-explored ideas and practices from 19th century photography while capturing subjects including dioramas, wax figures and architecture. His work has stretched and rearranged concepts of time, space and light that are integral to the medium.

Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, Hiroshi Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City. Over the past five decades, his photographs have received international acclaim and have been presented in major institutions across the globe.

While best known as a photographer, Sugimoto has more recently added architecture and sculpture to his multidisciplinary practice, as well as being artistic director on performing arts productions.

Text from the Hayward Gallery website

Seascapes (1980 -)

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seascapes series. Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Bay of Sagami, Atami
1997
From the Seascapes series
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Architecture (1997 – )

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Chrysler Building 1997. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Chrysler Building
1997
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
World Trade Center
1997
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Eiffel Tower
1998
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Over the past 50 years, Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time: pictures that are precisely crafted and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalisingly ambiguous. Featuring key works from all of the artist’s major photographic series, this survey highlights the artist’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into our understanding of time and memory, and the ambiguous character of photography as a medium suited to both documentation and invention.

The exhibition also includes lesser-known works that illuminate the artist’s interest in the history of photography as well as in mathematics and optical sciences. Often employing a large-format wooden camera, mixing his own darkroom chemicals and developing his black-and-white prints by hand, Sugimoto has repeatedly re-explored ideas and practices from 19th century photography, including subjects such as dioramas, wax figures and architecture. In the process, his work has stretched and rearranged concepts of time, space and light that are integral to the medium.

Hiroshi Sugimoto says: “The camera is a time machine capable of representing the sense of time… The camera can capture more than a single moment, it can capture history, geological time, the concept of eternity, the essence of time itself… The more I think about that sense of time, the more I think this is probably one of the key factors of how humans became humans.”

Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, says: “Hiroshi Sugimoto is a brilliant visual poet of paradox, a polymath postmodern who embraces meticulous old school craftsmanship to produce exquisite, uncanny pictures that reference science and maths as well as abstract art and Renaissance portraits. Juggling different conceptions of time, and evoking visions ranging from primordial prehistory to the end of civilisation, his photographs ingeniously recalibrate our basic assumptions about the medium, and alter our sense of history, time and existence itself. Amidst all his peers, his work stands apart for its depth and striking originality of thought.”

Time Machine commences with a selection of Sugimoto’s black-and-white photographs of natural history dioramas, a series he began in the mid-1970s. The Dioramas photos draw attention less to the natural world than to its theatrical representation in museums, whilst at the same time conjuring what the artist has called the ‘fragility of existence’.

The subject of time is also explored in two subsequent bodies of work featured in the exhibition: shot in movie palaces as well as drive-ins, Sugimoto’s Theaters (1976 – ) capture entire films with a single long exposure, thus compressing all the dramatic action that appeared on screen into a single image of radiant whiteness. His renowned Seascapes (1980 -), which depict evenly divided expanses of sea and sky unmarked by any trace of human existence, are equally beguiling in their temporal reference, evoking the immediacy of abstract painting even as they speak to Sugimoto’s interest in focusing on vistas that, as he remarks, “are before human beings and after human beings.”

For Architecture (1997 – ), a series of deliberately out-of-focus studies of iconic modernist buildings – ranging from the Eiffel Tower to the Twin Towers – Sugimoto displays the expansive ambiguity that informs his art, at the same time conveying a sense of the visual germ of an idea in an architect’s imagination, as well as fashioning ghostly images of what he has described as “architecture after the end of the world.” For his subsequent Portraits (1999) series, meanwhile, the artist focused his camera on wax models of famous historical figures from Madame Tussauds; rendered more life-like in black-and-white, figures ranging from Queen Elizabeth II to Oscar Wilde and Salvador Dali take on a disarmingly lively appearance, underscoring the camera’s potential for altering our perception. As the artist has noted, “However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”

A final section of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine focuses on photographs that evoke different notions of timelessness, including his Sea of Buddha (1995) series, which portrays an installation in a 12th century Kyoto temple featuring 1001 gilded wooden statues of Buddha; and Lightning Fields (2006 – ), spectacular camera-less photographs created by exposing sensitised paper to electrical impulses produced by a Van der Graaf generator.

The exhibition comes to a stunning conclusion with a gallery dedicated to Sugimoto’s Opticks (2018 – ), intensely coloured photographs of prism-refracted light. Taking inspiration from Newton’s research into the properties of light whilst calling to mind colour field painting and artists like Mark Rothko, Opticks presents deeply immersive fields of subtly varying hues.

Alongside his photographs, two of Sugimoto’s elegantly contoured and polished aluminium sculptural models are presented, alluding to both mathematical equations and the abstract forms favoured by modernists such as Constantin Brâncuși.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 216pp catalogue with newly commissioned essays and an illustrated chronology, co-published with Hatje Cantz. Texts by Ralph Rugoff (on Dioramas), James Attlee (on Theaters), Mami Kataoka (on Seascapes), Lara Strongman (on Portraits), Geoffrey Batchen (on Lightning Fields), Edmund de Waal (on Sea of Buddha), Margaret Wertheim (on Conceptual Forms), Allie Biswas (on Opticks) and David Chipperfield (in conversation, on Architecture).

The show is set to tour internationally in 2024, at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (23 March – 23 June 2024) and The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2 August – 27 October 2024).

Press release from the Hayward Gallery

Sea of Buddha (1995)

Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sea of Buddha series. Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sea of Buddha 049 (Triptych) 1995. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Sea of Buddha 049 (Triptych)
1995
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Chamber of Horrors (1994 – ) and Portraits (1999 -)

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Chamber of Horrors series. Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Garrote 1994. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Electric Chair 1994. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
The Electric Chair
1994
From the series The Chamber of Horrors
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Plague, 1994. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Portraits series. Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Anne Boleyn 1999. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Anne Boleyn
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Queen Victoria 1999. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Queen Victoria
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Salvador Dali
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Oscar Wilde
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Diana, Princess of Wales 1999. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Diana, Princess of Wales
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Lightning Fields (2006 – )

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lightning Fields 163 2009. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Lightning Fields 225
2009
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto: formative years and significant works

For five decades the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has received international acclaim, whilst being presented in major galleries and institutions the world over.

Sugimoto’s photographs are meticulously crafted, often stretching and rearranging the concept of time, and our understanding of the world around us, and he has often re-explored ideas and practices from photography’s earliest exponents. Over the past 50 years, he has often revisited and expanded upon his own ideas, and series, which we take a closer look at, along with the artist’s formative years, here.

Hiroshi Sugimito: early years

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948 to a family of merchants. Among the young Sugimoto’s interests were trains, electronics, carpentry and photography, with his early fascination with the latter further enhanced by one of his elementary school science teachers, who showed Sugimoto and his classmates how to use photosensitive paper to make photograms. ‘He used spoons and forks and other items and he exposed the paper under the light for five or six minutes.’ explained Sugimoto, looking back. ‘When he removed it, the shapes of the spoons and forks remained on the paper. It was an amazing experience for me that left a lasting impression’.

At the age of 12 Sugimoto was given his first camera, a Mamiya 6 medium-format, by his father, which he would use to take photographs of trains and gather reference material for model-making. When he moved on to high school, Sugimoto joined the photography club and also began developing an interest in the cinema, which he would visit regularly. It wasn’t long before his love of film and photography combined, as he recalls, ‘Audrey Hepburn was beautiful and I fell in love with her on the screen. I wanted her portrait so I brought my Minolta SR7 camera into a movie theatre, and I studied how to stop the image on the screen. I found that one-fifteenth and one-thirteenth of a second stops the image’.

In 1970, after graduating in Economics from Tokyo’s Rikkyo University, Sugimoto backpacked across Russia and Europe. Influenced by communist ideology, and the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as a student, he had wanted to experience Russian society, but disillusioned by what he found, he duly continued on to Europe. ‘I kept moving westwards. I stayed in Moscow for a few weeks and took another train to Poland, and then to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries. After several weeks I arrived in Vienna for my first taste of Western civilization’.

Hiroshi Sugimoto in America

Later in 1970 Sugimoto would get another taste of Western civilisation as he travelled to the US, and California. Here he studied at Los Angeles’ ArtCentre College of Design, specialising in photography. Speaking of his studies here, Sugimoto has said ‘ArtCenter College was more like a training school for technicians: car design and advertising. For photography you trained to be a commercial photographer, which is what I wanted. I wasn’t interested in academic study at all’.

After completing his study in Los Angeles Sugimoto moved to New York in 1974 in order to pursue a full-time career in photography. Here, Sugimoto soon became part of the city’s hippy counter-culture. ‘I got serious about using photography as a tool in my art after I moved to New York’, says Sugimoto. ‘I saw many good shows, mainly minimalist shows: Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd. When I moved to the East Coast I found so many interesting people that I decided to stay. I’d just finished my photographic studies and was hungry to work. Since photography was considered a second-class citizen in the art world then why not use photography? It was more interesting for me to start with something a step down and bring it up’.

Dioramas

In 1974, Sugimoto made his first visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it was a visit that would inspire his first major breakthrough in photography. ‘I made a curious discovery while at the exhibition of animal dioramas,’ the artist explains. ‘The stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I had found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real’.

Inspired by these taxidermy dioramas, he went on to commence his Dioramas series, which among its initial works included Polar Bear (1976) and Hyena – Jackal – Vulture (1976). Sugimoto would return to this idea two decades on, adding more works to Dioramas in the 1990s including 1994’s Earliest Human Relatives. In 1978 Polar Bear was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, representing Sugimoto’s first photographic sale. The work was also exhibited in the museum’s Recent Acquisitions show, that same year.

Theaters

It was whilst working on his Dioramas series, that Sugimoto also found the inspiration for his next series, Theaters, as he would later detail. ‘I am a habitual self-interlocutor. One evening while taking photographs at the American Museum of Natural History, I had a near-hallucinatory vision. My internal question-and-answer session leading up to this vision went something like this: ‘Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?’ The answer: ‘You get a shining screen.’ Immediately I began experimenting in order to realise this vision’.

He began this series in 1976, by photographing St. Marks Cinema in Manhattan’s East Village, and the first group of works would also see Sugimoto capture other movie theatres and cinemas in the Northeast and Midwest of the US. It was an approach that the photographer has returned to again and again over the course of his career, firstly in 1993 when he broadened the Theaters series to include depictions of Drive-Ins across the US. The photographer later travelled to Europe, primarily Italy, to replicate the approach with Opera Houses in 2014, and then in 2015 began photographing Abandoned Theaters.

Seascapes

The seeds for Sugimoto’s Seascapes series were sown in 1980. ‘One New York night, during another of my internal question-and-answer sessions I pictured two great mountains’, the photographer has explained. ‘One, today’s Mount Fuji, and the other, Mount Hakone in the days before its summit collapsed, creating the Ashinoko crater lake. When hiking up from the foothills of Hakone, one would see a second freestanding peak as tall as Mount Fuji. Two rivals in height – what a magnificent sight that must have been! Unfortunately, the topography has changed. Although the land is forever changing its form, the sea, I thought, is immutable. Thus began my travels back through time to the ancient seas of the world’.

Sugimoto began the series that same year with a photograph of the Caribbean Sea, taken from a bluff in Jamaica while on a family holiday to the island. Seascapes would subsequently lead Sugimoto across the globe, photographing bodies of water from the Ligurian Sea viewed from Italy to the North Pacific Ocean viewed from Japan.

Chamber of Horrors and Portraits

In 1994 Sugimoto made his first visit to Madame Tussaud’s in London, where he photographed his Chamber of Horrors series on location. ‘I saw the blade that guillotined Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the electric chair that executed the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapper, among other exhibits. They all looked very real to me’, Sugimoto said. ‘To corroborate these various murderous instruments invented by civilised men, I took the requisite eye-witness photographs: thus did people in times past face death head on’.

Sugimoto would return to the wax museum five years later to photograph his Portraits series, for which he was given special permission to remove selected figures from the display to photograph individually, among them Diana, Princess of Wales (1999), Fidel Castro (1999) and Anne of Cleeves (1999). However, he found that the exhibits he had previously captured for Chamber of Horrors had now been removed from the museum. ‘When I asked why,’ he said ‘I was told they’d been removed in a gesture to political correctness. Must we moderns be so sheltered from death?’

Opticks

In 2018 Sugimoto began printing his Opticks series, which was inspired by an 1704 work of the same name by Isaac Newton, in which Newton, through his experiments with prisms presented proof that natural light was not purely white. Drawing on Newton’s approach, Sugimoto used a batch of Polaroid film he had been gifted – one of the last batches of film Polaroid ever produced – along with a glass prism and a mirror to create condensed vivid compositions of pure colour. Sugimoto then enlarged these works into chromogenic prints. Opticks was presented for the first time in 2020 at the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art in Japan, and received its first UK presentation here at the Hayward Gallery.

Anonymous. “Hiroshi Sugimoto: formative years and significant works,” on the Hayward Gallery website Fri Nov 17, 2023 [Online] Cited 19/11/2023

Opticks (2018 – )

Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Opticks isn’t the only series in which Sugimoto has experimented with historic techniques. In his 2006 series Lightning Fields, informed by the work of 19th century photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, Sugimoto captured the lightning-like shapes of electrical currents as they passed across a negatively-charged metal plate.

In his commitment to historic approaches the artist had initially attempted to supply the current to the plates using a hand-operated 18th century Wimshurst Electrostatic Machine, before switching to a more consistent Van de Graaff Generator.

In 2009, Sugimoto was gifted a batch of colour Polaroid film to see how a photographer who worked primarily in black and white might use it. This proved to be one of the last batches of the film ever produced (Polaroid went out of business in that same year) and would eventually find use in Sugimoto’s 2018 series, Opticks.

The images in Opticks – Sugimoto’s newest series, which has yet to be featured in any surveys of the artist’s work – are inspired by Isaac Newton’s seminal 1704 work of the same name, in which he presented proof that natural light was not purely white. Taking his cue from Newton’s experiments with prisms, Sugimoto used the Polaroid, along with glass and a mirror, to create condensed yet vivid compositions of colour in its purest form, before later enlarging these works into chromogenic prints.

Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Rachael Smith
Hiroshi Sugimoto in the Hayward Gallery with his ‘Opticks’ series
2023

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Forms 0003 and Mathematical Model 002. Gelatin silver print, aluminium and steel
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Forms 0003 2004. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Conceptual Forms 0003 Dini’s surface – a surface of constant negative curvature obtained by twisting a pseudosphere
2004
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Mathematical Model 002 Dini’s Surface
2005
Aluminium and steel
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Forms and Mathematical Model 006. Gelatin silver print, aluminium and steel
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Form Surface 0001 Helicoid: Minimal Surface 2004. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Conceptual Form Surface 0001 Helicoid: Minimal Surface
2004
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto
Photo credit: Sugimoto Studio

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Exhibition: ‘Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome’ at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Exhibition dates: 16th October 2011 – 8th January 2012

Simon Vouet (French, 1590-1649)
The Fortune Teller
c. 1620
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Observe if you will:

1/ The treatment of the background behind Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1594-96)

2/ The tension of the hands in this painting

3/ The pallor of the skin of Sick Bacchus (1593-94)

4/ The colour of the bunch of grapes in the same painting

5/ The critical distance between the two apricots and the bowed sash resting on the pediment in the same painting

6/ The youthful innocence of the dupe in The Cardsharps (c. 1595)

7/ The deep, foreboding shadows under the eyes of Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604-5)

8/ The astonishingly beautiful skin tones in Gerrit van Honthorst’s Saint Sebastian (c. 1623) and how the blood from the leg wound at left runs in two directions: one direction when Saint Sebastian was standing up, one when he has slumped down. Inspired.

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Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the Kimbell Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

One of the most influential figures in the history of art, Caravaggio (1571-1610) overturned the artistic conventions of the day and created stunningly dramatic paintings, both sacred and secular. This ambitious exhibition explores the profound impact of his work on the wide range of painters of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish origin who resided in Rome. Arranged by theme, it includes over 50 paintings, with Caravaggio’s compelling images juxtaposed with those he inspired. This is the second largest display of his paintings in North America and only the third Caravaggio exhibition to be held in the United States.

Music and Youth

Many of Caravaggio’s early paintings feature handsome youths, whether singly or in groups. He seems to have used the same favorite models repeatedly – and sometimes his own features, which a contemporary tells us he studied in a mirror. The origins of these novel paintings lay in the types of pictures – portraits, still lifes, and allegories – that were painted in a realistic style in the artist’s native Lombardy, in the north of Italy, although he blurred the boundaries between genres to suggest real-life scenes. Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians would have appealed to Roman collectors who were passionate patrons of music, and likely were created to decorate rooms used for performances. They have a dreamy, slightly melancholy air. If the songs are about love, as we can assume they are, they are surely about the painful side of love rather than its joys. Caravaggio’s early paintings of youths are usually scenes of sensual pleasure but with a built-in warning against indulgence, as when a youth has his finger bitten by a lizard lurking in some fruit. He brings us close to his figures, often having them make eye contact with us, and includes lovingly observed still-life details that enhance the naturalism and immediacy of the scene. Even when there is a visitation from the beyond, like the winged Cupid in The Musicians, he treats this in a matter-of-fact way, attentive always to breaking down the boundaries between the painted world and our own. Caravaggio’s musical paintings caught on throughout Europe in the work of his followers, who brought their own innovations to the genre.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
The Musicians
c. 1595
Oil on canvas
36 1/4 x 46 5/8 in (92.1 x 118.4cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1952

In this scene, Caravaggio shows some young musicians preparing for a concert. We are brought very close to the figures, as if we share the same space. Caravaggio breaks down the boundaries between art and life, and our reality and the painted world become entwined. The instruments are modern, but the musicians wear antique-inspired dress. The lute player tunes his instrument, and the horn player (possibly a self-portrait) catches our gaze. Another youth studies the musical score; it is no longer legible, but doubtless featured love madrigals. The winged Cupid with a quiver of arrows who is handling some grapes makes explicit the bond between music and love. Wine, like music, makes the spirits light. This painting belonged to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who hosted concerts at his palace and invited musicians to live in his household, along with artists like Caravaggio.

Theodoor Rombouts (Flemish, 1597-1637)
A Lute Player
c. 1620
Oil on canvas
43 7/8 x 39 1/4 in (111.1 x 99.7cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art. John G. Johnson Collection, 1917

Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians inspired Rombouts’s depiction of a musician tuning his lute. His intense expression suggests that he is both listening to the sound and sizing up the viewer, his audience. The vividly described carpet and still-life objects on the table recall Caravaggio’s similar close-up presentations. However, the colourful treatment of the costume and the robust delineation of the objects place Rombouts’s work within traditions of Flemish and Dutch painting. The still life, like ephemeral music, serves to remind us of the pleasures of life, but also that pleasure is fleeting. The artist also alludes to the five senses: hearing (the lute), taste (the tankard), smell (the pipe), sight (the musical scores), and touch (the knife).

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
1594-1596
Oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 20 1/2 in (65 x 52cm)
Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi, Florence

One of Caravaggio’s biographers wrote that “he also painted a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was done meticulously.” The picture has suggested various interpretations. As an allegory of touch, it provides the basis for a study of how emotion is expressed physically, and arguably Caravaggio alludes to all the five senses (flowers as smell and so on). With the still life of fruits and roses, common emblems of love, he invokes age-old adages – pain can follow pleasure, and love is a rose with thorns that prick. Poets from Petrarch onward played on the similarity of the Italian words for “love” and “bitter” – amore and amaro – to which Caravaggio adds ramarro (lizard), ingeniously enlarging the joke.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Sick Bacchus
1593-1594
Oil on canvas
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Cardsharps and Fortune Tellers

The young Caravaggio introduced another new kind of painting to the Roman art world with his scenes from the seamy side of life, its frauds and ruses. He painted these works on a large scale with half-length figures, and they were among his most widely imitated creations. His followers played countless variations on the same themes, trying various levels of subtlety and buffoonery in the humour and facial expressions. These highly animated compositions conjure up an underworld of wily cardsharps, soldiers of fortune, foolish dupes, sensuous and deceitful gypsy women, pickpockets, and thugs. They are based partly on everyday observations in the streets, partly on the stock characters and improvised comedies of the commedia dell’arte, partly on sheer fantasy. In such works, Caravaggio and his followers developed ingenious ways of involving us in the action. We read these amusingly moralising pictures through gestures and expressions – but to unravel the trickery takes time. Despite being frozen in a static image, the story seems to unfold before our eyes like one of the popular plays that were its inspiration. The artist extends the theme of deception by painting his subjects with such a high level of naturalism that the viewer is duped and astounded by his artistry.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
The Cardsharps
c. 1595
Oil on canvas
37 1/8 x 51 5/8 in (94.2 x 130.9cm)
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

The players are engaged in a game of primero, a forerunner of poker. Engrossed in his cards, the dupe is unaware that the older cardsharp signals his accomplice, who reaches to pull a hidden card from his breeches. The fingertips of the cheat’s gloved hand are exposed to better feel marked cards. According to an early biographer, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a great patron of the arts, took the young Caravaggio into his household soon after purchasing this picture. It hung along with The Gypsy Fortune Teller in his palace. Together they would surely have reminded the cardinal and his guests of the story of the prodigal son, warning about the perils of greed and fraud. Caravaggio has treated this subject not as a caricature of vice but in a fresh way, in which the interaction of gesture and glance evokes the drama of deception and lost innocence in the most human of terms. He structures the picture to allow us to witness everything, implicating us in the trickery.

Saints

Caravaggio grounded his saints in everyday reality, indicating their spiritual states by means of natural phenomena, especially light. In his early painting of Saint Francis, he shows the saint’s ecstasy – his mystic identification with Christ – by directing a strong light upon his figure and the consoling angel. God’s grace is signalled by light in other images of the saints, such as the scene of Mary Magdalene’s conversion from her former life of sin. In paintings of Saints Matthew and Jerome in their studies, much emulated in Caravaggio’s circle, light is a metaphor of divine inspiration. Generally the saints seem to be emerging from darkness into light, which adds drama, symbolism, and also a sense of mass – as if they were sculpted, not merely painted. In a break from Roman and Florentine traditions, Caravaggio rejected the practice of refining his composition through drawings before he began to paint and instead worked directly from a live model in the studio, preserving that model’s particular appearance, never making the features or body conform to an ideal of beauty. The effect, central to Caravaggio’s art and that of many of his followers, was startling. At this time, many people believed that the painting of sacred personages such as saints called for a special, elevated style that set them apart from the mundane reality of the here and now. Caravaggio’s radical departure from this principle brought him much harsh criticism. He was accused of merely copying and so failing to capture a higher truth. But others recognised in his work a new kind of religious art that directly engaged the faithful and made old subjects new and alive.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness
1604-1605
Oil on canvas
68 x 52 in (172.7 x 132.1cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase William Rockhill Nelson Trust

Caravaggio’s practice of painting a live model in his studio brings this young, brooding saint to life – as if his image were inhabited by the model’s being. Ottavio Costa, a Roman banker, commissioned this painting for a chapel on a pilgrimage route in the countryside outside of Genoa, where his family had its origins. We can imagine what a powerful experience it would have been to encounter the image of the scarlet-robed saint there, dramatically emerging from the shadows into a strong light. When Caravaggio delivered the painting, Costa decided to keep it and placed a copy in the chapel. But even the copy proved inspiring. An early guide described how it “moves not only the members of the brotherhood but also visitors to penitence.”

Gerrit van Honthorst (Dutch, 1592-1656)
Saint Sebastian
c. 1623
Oil on canvas
The National Gallery, London

The Sacred Narrative

Caravaggio was a masterful storyteller who could bring home the drama and significance of a biblical event with tremendous power. In his scenes from the Old and New Testaments, he created a new kind of painting – dramatic, even theatrical, yet grounded in the observation of ordinary reality – and it proved infectious among his contemporaries in Rome. His approach was to make the scene clear and simple, with the main actors in the drama seen close-up and caught in mid-action at a decisive moment, embodying the whole meaning of the event. He played down the setting, sometimes to the point that it is a mere pool of darkness from which the figures emerge. It was the actions and states of mind of the characters in the story that counted, and Caravaggio presented these with sometimes shocking directness and intensity, breaking all the rules of decorum that restrained more conventional painters. He mastered the art of concealing art, re-creating a scene with such a flavour of reality that it comes across as an eyewitness account. It was his power to draw viewers into the emotion and importance of a scene that made his work an essential object of study, even for such an independent genius as the great Peter Paul Rubens.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Martha and Mary Magdalene
c. 1598
Oil and tempera on canvas
38 1/2 x 52 1/4 in (97.8 x 132.7cm)
Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of the Kresge Foundation and Mrs. Edsel B. Ford

Martha’s expressive hands, intensely illuminated, underscore her attempt to convert her sister Mary Magdalene from a life of worldly pleasures to one of spirituality. Several details recall Mary’s life of indulgence: the elegant dress, the ivory comb, the alabaster cosmetic jar. The mirror, a powerful symbol of vanity, becomes here an instrument reflecting the divine light that is penetrating Mary’s soul. Martha’s words seem to have been convincing, and her open mouth signals her amazement as she witnesses Mary’s transformation. The orange blossom in Mary’s right hand and the ring on her left indicate her new status as the blessed bride of Christ.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Sacrifice of Isaac
1602-3
Oil on canvas
41 x 53 1/8 in (104 x 135cm)
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

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Exhibition: ‘Renaissance Faces. Masterpieces of Italian Portraiture’  at the  Bode Museum, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 25th August – 20th November 2011

Filippo Lippi (Italian, 1406-1469)
Portrait of a Man and a Woman at a Casement
c. 1440
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Legend of the Surface, the Facies

“Facies simultaneously signifies the singular air of a face, the particularity of its aspect, as well as the genre or species under which this aspect should be subsumed. The facies would thus be a face fixed to a synthetic combination of the universal and the singular: the visage fixed to the regime of representation, in a Helgian sense.

Why the face? – Because in the face the corporeal surface makes visible something of the movements of the soul, ideally.”

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Georges Didi-Huberman1

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the Bode Museum for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the images for a larger version.

Footnotes

1/ Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere (trans. Alisa Hartz). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003, p. 49

Antonio del Pollaiuolo (Italian, 1429-1498)
Portrait of a Young Lady
c. 1465
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1445-1520)
Profile Portrait of a Young Lady (Simonetta Vespucci?)
c. 1476
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterise less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a “golden age”. Botticelli’s posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then, his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting.

Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519)
Lady with an Ermine (portrait of Cecilia Gallerani)
1489-1490
Kraków, owned by Princes Czartoryski Foundation, at the National Museum
© bpk / Scala

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci,known as Leonardo da Vinci , was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance whose areas of interest included invention, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, paleontology, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time (despite perhaps only 15 of his paintings having survived).

The Gemäldegalerie – National Museums in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, have joined forces in organising a major exhibition on the genesis of the Italian portrait. For Berlin, the Bode Museum presents itself as the ideal location to hold such an exhibition: on its opening in 1904, it was conceived by its founder, Wilhelm von Bode, as a ‘Renaissance Museum’ on the Museum Island. The Bode Museum will host the first stage of the exhibition, running from 25 August to 20 November 2011, before it subsequently goes on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, from 19 December 2011 to 18 March 2012.

More than 150 key works, including paintings, drawings, medals and busts, are about to go on display for the first time together. The more than 50 lenders include the Uffizi in Florence, the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London. Among the exhibition’s many highlights is Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine from the Czartoryski Collection, Cracow.

The exhibition highlights depictions of the appearance and personality of real people. Portraits of feminine beauty vie with portraits of generals, princes and humanists, offering us a fascinating insight into the age of the early Renaissance.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the Italian Renaissance portrait. The Italian art of portraiture evolved under the influence of antique models. However, it was equally shaped by the innovations of the great Netherlandish painters. The history of the art of portraiture, from Pisanello up to Verrocchio, Botticelli, Bellini and Leonardo, is retold in a selection of magnificent and sensational key works, including paintings, sculptures, medals and drawings. The exhibition focuses both on the art produced at the Italian courts, as well as the development of the portrait in Florence and Venice.

A unique architectural and lighting concept, especially designed for the exhibition, takes into account the individual qualities of each exhibit in its presentation. Of crucial importance here is the aesthetic experience, both of the quality of the artworks and of the materials used in creating them.

The artistic diversity evident in these early portraits, the various roles the images served and their historical contexts all resonate with suspense. The Gemäldegalerie – National Museums in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York embarked on an intense collaboration to present this to the general public. Masterpieces from New York and the rich collections of the National Museums in Berlin, not just from the Gemäldegalerie itself but also from the Sculpture Collection, Kupferstichkabinett and Numismatic Collection, offer visitors an unprecedented insight into this epoch. Furthermore, for the first time the show in the Bode Museum also encompasses all media of Italian Renaissance portraiture – medals, drawings, sculptures and panel paintings.

Portraits – either in the form of a painting, photograph and less often a medal – have become commonplace today, but between the 5th and 15th century independent portraits of individual people were rare and the exclusive reserve of rulers and historic figures. Only in the 15th century did it again become customary for artists on both sides of the Alps to produce independent portraits of men and women. Today’s exhibition Renaissance Faces pays homage to Italy’s contribution to this first great age of European portraiture and conveys a sense of the innovative ways in which artists responded to the challenge of creating individual portraits and how they explored questions of identity that arose as a result.

When selecting the exhibits, the organisers’ chief aim was to highlight the prevailing conventions and decisive innovations in a period spanning more than eight decades. Set against the backdrop of Italy’s geographical, political and cultural complexities in the 15th century, the exhibition is divided into three clearly outlined thematic sections. The first of these is Florence, as it was here that the independent portrait first appeared on a significant scale. The visitor’s gaze is then directed to the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Bologna, Milan, Urbino, Naples and finally papal Rome. The circle is then completed in Venice, where a portrait tradition only established itself remarkably late in the century. In each section, works in all media are juxtaposed with each other to give visitors the chance to see for themselves how the various art forms mutually influenced each other with their own unique qualities.

In a society dominated by family descent and social hierarchies, conventions were binding. And it is precisely these conventions that are depicted in profile portraits from 15th-century Italy. Profile portraits were equally popular as reliefs or paintings. Compared with the far more naturalistic art produced north of the Alps, which people in 15th-century Italy were definitely familiar with, this form of portrait seems at first a little surprising, as the Italian artists present the sitters in a soft light and at a slight angle to the picture plane. The sitters are seen standing either at a window or behind a parapet and gaze at the viewer. Sometimes a hand is seen resting on the edge of the painted frame. When looking at these images, it is clear that Italian portraits are not primarily concerned with achieving an accurate likeness, at least not in the conventional sense. Italian portraits do not so much reveal personality, rather convey social conventions and cultural identity.

The profile portrait was frequently given such exceptional importance in Italy, because it largely drew from Roman coins and reliefs for inspiration. But the profile portrait has always been the most elementary form of capturing someone’s likeness. Informal, direct and frontal views have become so familiar to us in portraits today thanks to photography that we first have to be resensitised to the unique possibilities inherent in the profile portrait. For one, it makes it possible to objectify a person’s outer appearance and allows physiognomies to convey cultural meaning. The pleasing aspect of a high forehead, the refinement or contemptuousness expressed in a raised brow, the aristocratic curve of a nose and the severity or gentleness of a chin and jawline – all these are physiognomical characteristics that come to stand as emblems for beauty, rank and power.

Press release from the Bode Museum website quoting the exhibition catalogue

Pisanello (Antonio Pisano) (Italian, 1395-1455)
Portrait of Leonello d’Este
c. 1444
Bergamo, Accademia Carrara
© Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

Pisanello (c. 1395 – c. 1455), known professionally as Antonio di Puccio Pisano or Antonio di Puccio da Cereto, also erroneously called Vittore Pisano by Giorgio Vasari, was one of the most distinguished painters of the early Italian Renaissance and Quattrocento. He was acclaimed by poets such as Guarino da Verona and praised by humanists of his time, who compared him to such illustrious names as Cimabue, Phidias and Praxiteles.

Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1445-1520)
Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici
c. 1478
Washington, National Gallery of Art
© Art Resource, New York

Andrea Mantegna (Italian, 1431-1506)
Portrait of Cardinal Ludovico Trevisano
c. 1459
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431 – September 13, 1506) was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g. by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality. His flinty, metallic landscapes and somewhat stony figures give evidence of a fundamentally sculptural approach to painting. He also led a workshop that was the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500.

Antonello da Messina (Italian, 1430-1479)
Portrait of a Young Man
1478
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Antonello da Messina, properly Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio, but also called Antonello degli Antoni and Anglicised as Anthony of Messina (c. 1430 – February 1479), was an Italian painter from Messina, Sicily, active during the Early Italian Renaissance. His work shows strong influences from Early Netherlandish painting although there is no documentary evidence that he ever travelled beyond Italy. Giorgio Vasari credited him with the introduction of oil painting into Italy. Unusually for a south Italian artist of the Renaissance, his work proved influential on painters in northern Italy, especially in Venice.

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