![]() The patterning of the language of her floating caption was an unambiguous allusion to what is still, to this day, one of the most arresting self-portraits ever made: Albrecht Dürer's Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight (1500). Trained by her father, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, a leading figure of the Romanist School (16th-Century Low Country artists who'd travelled to Rome) in the Flemish Renaissance, she knew her art history well. There can be little doubting that Hemessen deliberately hinged so much of the work's intensity on the impenetrable poetry of her riddling inscription. Who, after all, is speaking these wafting, weightless words? Are we to imagine that they are being breathed ghostily down the centuries from the departed lips of the artist herself – a gifted stylist who, in an era when few female artists made much headway, so distinguished herself that the queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia, Mary of Austria, retained her services? Or is this declaration, "I Caterina…", the ventriloquised whisper from the motionless mouth of the artist's alter ego in the painting – a silent semblance of self whose absent eyes stare out assertively but refuse to meet ours? Or does the "me" in "I … painted me" attach instead to that ever-emerging almost-self on the panel-within-the-panel who is, if we follow the logic of the painting's depiction to its conclusion, the eventual, irreducible "me" that will ultimately be created? Hemessen's portrait presumes the existence of three distinct selves, refracted like a ray of white light in a prism into the bright spectrum of the painter, the painted, and the yet-to-be-painted – a trio locked forever in a spinning phantasmagoria of identity. Though it was customary for portraitists to inscribe their works with captions identifying their sitters, in this instance, the language is anything but clarifying in its function and serves ingeniously to intensify the panel's visual verve with a level of semantic, psychological, and philosophical intrigue. ![]() The depth and complexity of the small, oil-on-oak panel's reflection on the very nature of creativity and self-invention is incontestably ground-breaking and changed forever the way artists presented themselves to the world. There's always a chance that an earlier example, unfairly forgotten by time, will come to light.īut in the case of Hemessen's transfixing masterpiece, it isn't simply the posture – the young woman depicting herself in meta-mid-brushstroke as she sets out to create the very same painting that we see before us – that distinguishes the work as one of the most pioneering in the history of image-making. Just ask the endless succession of nominees for inventor of abstract painting (now Kandinsky, now Hilma af Klint, now JMW Turner…). Such attributions are a risky business, of course. There is every reason to conclude, as art historians have, that an absorbing self-portrait by a gifted young Flemish Renaissance painter by the name of Caterina van Hemessen, painted in 1548, is likely the first self-portrayal of an artist, male or female, at work at the easel. ![]() The tragedy of art's greatest supermodel ![]() The secret toilet humour in a Titian painting So masculine is the stereotype of the aloof artist, lifting his paintbrush like an existential barbell freighted with psychological weight, it is almost unimaginable that the tradition should have begun with a corseted 20-year-old young woman, whose contribution to cultural history and to shaping our modern idea of the artistic temperament – trapped in a prism of preoccupied thought – has gone largely unappreciated for nearly half a millennium. You know the ones: from the rumpled nobility of Rembrandt's Self-Portrait with Two Circles (1665) to the smouldering introspection of Vincent van Gogh's iconic Self-Portrait as a Painter (1886), from the bashful gaze of Francisco Goya's Self-Portrait in a Studio (1790) to the circumspect squint of Paul Gauguin's Self-Portrait with a Palette (1894). Think "creative genius" and a parade of self-portraits from the history of art, each brooding intensely before an unfinished canvas, flashes across your mind. ![]()
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