PORTRAITS OF...:

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt (1653) (Jonathan Jones, July 27, 2002, The Guardian)

Distinguishing features: Homer is blind, his eyes brown voids that lead the eye into an inner darkness. The sightless eyes of Homer's bust, on which Aristotle rests his hand, are innocent and profound; Homer's face is humble and weak, and he wears a simple shift. The gold light catches his head and illuminates the face of Aristotle, whose
black eyes look wanly - knowing too much - at Homer. This is a painting partly about the uses of portraits.

In his Renaissance treatise On Painting (1435), Leon Battista Alberti argued that one of the uses of art is to preserve the images of the dead so that they can be looked at many years later. Alberti used the example of a portrait of Aristotle's pupil, Alexander the Great, which, after Alexander's death, brought one of his generals to tears. The Renaissance cult of the portrait was aware of portraiture as a historical document. The portraits that survived from the ancient world were primarily busts, and that is what Rembrandt depicts here.

This is doubly nostalgic: Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century BC, meditates on a portrait bust of Homer, a legendary figure from three centuries earlier. So Aristotle contemplates a portrait that is a token of a remote past, and we contemplate both that and the painted portrait of Aristotle as Rembrandt imagines him. Homer's image in ancient statuary is conventionalised, and Rembrandt acknowledges that any portrait is to some degree a fiction. And yet, because of Rembrandt's brilliance, we find it hard to dismiss Aristotle as a figment of paint. It seems to be the real man before us, really thinking. Other artists give us the appearance of their subjects; Rembrandt conveys interior life, a consciousness.

Readers of Picture This, for my money Joseph Heller's best book, will recall the effective use he makes of this great painting. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 7, 2002 8:05 AM