Category Archives: art

General arts and culture posts

Tidbit: how similar is a voodoo doll and a medieval portrait?

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I’ve been reading about the history of the portrait lately. The section before the Renaissance, medieval Europe, seemed like a blip to get through. Really, one, if one were less aesthetically inclined, might use the word, dare I say it, boring?

Not really the case. Portraits functioned as more than just commemorating an occasion, such as marriage, or representing a person visually. It was not important that portraits resembled their subject at the court where people were idealized or to entice one into marrying a woman or to honor the noblest qualities of a ruler.

As it happens, the portraits depicting their subjects naturally were destroyed. These people were criminals who had escaped justice. Portraits had fetishistic properties, and could be used as a substitute for a person. So a criminal who could not be caught was depicted, and then his punishment was given to the portrait, limb by limb as the case may be. Referred to as “excutio in effigie,” the portraits could even be burned publicly.

Hoardings of portraits have been found of persons with their eyes scratched out. Often when a regime changed, the new rulers would gather images of the former governors and scratch their eyes out. Images–often unflattering ones designed to provoke scorn–were placed in public view as well. All these have the ultimate aim of destroying the subject’s authority through defiling the image of them.

So one function of the portrait is punishment? It’s crazy to think that in the Middle Ages, when ruled by God in Christian lands, people gave such power to the graven image. Reliquaries were worshipped as holding real bits or traces of holy people. But did they believe the images of the saints and devils in the churches had the same power? What would happen if someone scratched the Virgin Mary’s eyes out? Maybe the world still gives the same talismanic properties to images they deem holy.

There you have it: why a voodoo doll is like a medieval portrait. Up next, why a raven is like a writing desk, and other important questions.

Grotesque Old Woman: Why did Leonardo and Matsys depict you?

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) sketched the head of the woman to the left. Flemish painter Quentin Matsys (1466 – 1530) painted the oil portrait below. People have generally assumed that Matsys was copying Leonardo. Obviously, there is a remarkable similarity between the two heads produced in roughly the same time. Both artists had an interest in the ugly as much as the beautiful, and these images have popped up multiple times in my reading on ugliness and on portraiture. I think these two works say a lot about the nature of beauty and function of portraits.


I’ve read that Leonardo despaired of finding true beauty after struggling with the Vitruvian man, and turned more to grotesques and caricatures. I don’t find this very convincing. Ugliness, just like evil to good, is so much more interesting than beauty. Also, throughout his life, Leonardo displayed an acute attention to all aspects of life.

So there are many questions about who this woman is, who drew her first (assuming she is the same woman), and why she was drawn. This oil is one of Matsys’s best known pieces today, and, once considered simply a copy of Leonardo, is now thought to depict a real person with Paget’s disease, though it is sometimes said to be a portrait of Margaret Countess of Tyrol, also known as “the Ugly” or “Satchel-mouth.” Was it a commissioned portrait of an individual, or a grotesque head done for fun? Without answering any of these questions, I think one can delve into the ideas of beauty and portraiture that informs these works.

Beauty in the Renaissance era functioned as an outward sign of one’s inner self. Beauty was associated with goodness, and ugliness with vice. Paradoxically then, females–as the original temptresses– were either beautiful and pure, or ugly and lecherous. What a man is to do in those circumstances, I don’t know. More and more in this time, we see men paying homage to ugliness as the safeguard to chastity, or ridiculing old women for their fading charms, or chastising women for using make up to alter their appearance and trick people. In this portrait, the woman is clearly ugly. She does not seem lewd, nor does she seem made up. In Matsys portrait, her old-fashioned bonnet would have made her seem additionally ridiculous. However, Matsys portrait–perhaps just because of the oils–makes her look like a real individual, especially in the eyes, whereas Leonardo’s sketch seems like another of his grotesque heads even as the bulbousness of the figure is less pronounced.


Are the images of the grotesque women meant to depict a real person (or people)? I would argue that both fall into the tradition of the caricature, placing them squarely at odds with beauty. Notice, though, how despite her ugliness she is not revolting. Caricatures, by creating a harmony out of the disproportions of ugliness, neutralize the bad associations that ugly females had. Albeit at the same time as it mocks and dehumanizes its subject, caricature elevates ugliness to a kind of beauty. It is a really interesting phenomenon, documented in Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness, which I highly recommend.

There are very few women who have spanned the centuries by being Quasimodos. Women are traditionally celebrated for their beauty or virtue. These two, or one, women interest me. If anyone know more about them, please let me know.

A gallery night in the LES and Williamsburg

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“Yo, there’s some kind of photo shoot going on up on Essex” my roommate said.

My boyfriend and I look at each other. Where? Just a couple block up?

“Yeah, there’s tinfoil lights and everything. Some wierd people too.”

Actually, it wasn’t a photo shoot. The light and mirrored walls were fromHeist Gallery Gallery, where Shimon Okshteyn was having an opening this past Friday. My boyfriend and I had popped in earlier to check it out. It make me feel pretty cool to have a place like that, with a draw of such great, “weird” people in my neighborhood. (Apparently the owner is a very cool, very sweet 21 year old(!). 21, really?)
The gallery was even cooler than when Miranda from the Sex and the City movie moves to my block, although that was pretty cool. The tiny mirrored space was so full of young people that I can’t actually review the artwork, which supposedly looks like this:

Shimon Okshteyn: Reflection of Reality

Between not knowing the super-trendy kids and not being able to see the work well, we left quickly. It looks pretty cool though, and I love the idea of painting on mirrors.

Then we were off to Williamsburg, walking up Bedford to check out a group show that my boyfriend’s friend was in. What a difference: low-key hipsters walking between that gallery and the one next door, where a band played piano man. Both these scenes had such a different atmosphere than Chelsea–it was really exciting to get out of that box and see new spaces and tastes.

Then last night as I was walking down Houston, I stumbled upon a really cool advertising board on Bowery and Houston, where a projector shows a changing reel and targeted sound as you walk by supports the advertising. When I was stopping to check it out, I turned around and saw another gallery through a window. Very cool: but that will have to be another blog entry.

ADDENDUM: I walked back by Reflections of Reality, and it looks the composition of pieces of mirror with such precise painted patterns on it looks great, and much more interesting than it does in the image above when you get a better sense of texture and changing light.