The Face

Acta Bio Medica : Atenei Parmensis, 2021

The study of human anatomy, besides being fundamental to the practice of medicine, has traditionally always been present in the daily life of many Renaissance artists. In this context, the specialized literature has described the famous Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) as being among the greatest artist-anatomists of his time. Thus, many researchers have tried to better understand the inspirations of this famous artist, and even the possible diseases that affected this genius of human anatomy. Therefore, for the first time, this manuscript provides evidence that Michelangelo Buonarroti may have concealed letters, numbers, and faces in the anatomy of the Vatican’s Pietà [Virgin Mary/Jesus Christ] in 1498-9. The revelation of these findings, besides testifying to the artist’s considerable skill in representing the corporeal forms in his sculptures, will also be provide useful insights into the iconographic understanding of a work of art that is undoubtedly one of...

Art History, 2016

In his 1568 biography of the Venetian painter Giorgione, Giorgio Vasari described a now-lost or possibly fi ctive painting by this artist composed of a series of mirrored effects. Apparently it depicted a male nude seen from behind: at his feet, a limpid stream of water bearing his refl ection. To one side was a burnished cuirass that the man had taken off, and this refl ected his left profi le since the polished surface of the armour revealed everything clearly. On the other side was a mirror refl ecting the other profi le of the nude fi gure. This was a very fi ne and fanciful idea. .. . greatly praised and admired for its beauty and ingenuity. 1

FACES (Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems) is a project that, after two years of research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), has established proof of concept for the application of face recognition technology to works of portrait art. In the application of face recognition technology to photographed human faces, a number of difficulties are inherent in a real or perceived alteration of appearance of the face through variations in facial expression, age, angle of pose, and so on. With works of portrait art, not only do all these problems pertain, but these works also have their own additional challenges. Most notably, portrait art does not provide what might be called a photographic likeness but rather one that goes through a process of visual interpretation on the part of the artist. After establishing the initial parameters of the application of this technology, the main goal of FACES has been to test the ability of the FACES algorithm to restore lost identities to works of portrait art, something our research has shown is clearly feasible. Our work has also suggested a number of other potential applications, both using the FACES algorithm and employing basic concept of FACES in an altered form. The use of the FACES algorithm should not be thought of as limited to facial recognition in the sense of identification alone. An altered form of the technology used in FACES might also be used to study a wide range of other applications such as adherence or non-adherence to widely recognized artistic canons, formal or informal; the identification of variations in the practice of an individual artist (over time, with different subjects, with different genres, after exposure to external influences, and so on); probable bodies of work of anonymous artists; difference in larger bodies of works (art historical ‘big data’); even to detect the change of masons in medieval building.

Leonardo's unbearded face, 2019

Among the various portraits considered to represent Leonardo, two less mentioned drawings (fig. 1) have been related to the painter as examples of auto-mimesis, in the sense that, still unconsciously, the painter was representing himself. 1 Figure 1 LEONARDO DA VINCI. The two heads of old bearded men analysed by Martin Clayton. The Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Martin Clayton, dating the drawings to the last decade of Leonardo's life, with reference to the head on the left writes: "We know that Leonardo himself had a full beard at this time, and an old bearded man drawing an old bearded man cannot have been oblivious to an element of self-portraiture", and with reference to the head on the right writes: "Leonardo must have been conscious here of some element of a self-portraiture.....A drawing such as this, with no preparatory purpose and retained by the artist, surely expresses some of Leonardo's feelings about his own physical decay". 2 The words that have been reported in italics show clearly what the Author's reasoning guesses, as to say that Leonardo is representing himself. The aged person represented in the drawings with long hear and beard does not have the traits of distinguished dignity in comparison with the most known representation of Leonardo's face, but some consequences emerge if, on the contrary, the drawings are considered as true Leonardo's self-portraits according to the suggestion by Clayton with reference to Leonardo's physical decay. Let the hypothesis of work be then that the two drawings in the figure 1 3 represent the real aspect of old Leonardo's face. If this is so and we look at it carefully we will discover a peculiar anatomical trait that can be observed because, on one hand the ear is not covered by hair, and on the other the ear can be seen even if the hair (strange peculiarity) should cover it. It is clear that in both cases the upper border of the auricle is bent forward. This is a very uncommon anatomical peculiarity and the two drawings represent consequently the same person. The short ear lobe, the form of the mouth, the long fleshy nose ending at the level of the mouth, the thin lips, the prominent cheekbones, the shape of the eyes, the baldness at the top of the head and the

Pressed against the right edge of the picture, a donor stands in the presence of the Virgin and child and the infant Saint John the Baptist (plate 1). The donor -an old man, almost completely bald -is undressed for the grave. 1 By the time the Italian painter Luca Signorelli made this painting, probably in the late 1480s, the man was dead. Signorelli indicated this not only by depicting the man in a state of undress. The colour of his arms is grey and the man's face seems painted after a death-mask had been made from the corpse. The weight of the plaster has caused the man's cheeks and eye-sockets to sink into his face; and this is also why his nose bridge and jaws protrude remarkably. Signorelli has opened the man's eyes and has made him stand upright, but he amended little more. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the man's portrait is the folded ear. There is no physical cause for the ear to fold so dramatically; there is no cap or hat.

The Hybrid Face Paradoxes of the Visage in the Digital Era, 2023

The chapter addresses five theoretical attitudes with regard to portraiture: (i) the Renaissance painting tradition, (ii) the Baroque era tradition, (iii) the representation of heads in portraits by Francis Bacon, (iv) the conception of photographic portraits espoused by Roland Barthes during his seminars at the Collège de France, and (v) the contemporary facial images used to produce deepfake videos. These five theoretical attitudes are performances of theoretical positions of portraiture and are exemplified in this text by some famous portraits. The fundamental objective is to study the transformation of the figure-ground relation through the centuries and to analyze how the relations between the totality of the visual composition, and its parts are modeled and remodeled in these five different types of portraits in order to understand the relation between portraits and various conceptions of individuality.

Performance Research, 2008

Within a contemporary thinking of culture and representation, the body has assumed gargantuan conceptual proportions, which it can no longer bear. This essay re-thinks the face in its inherent theatricality, by reading a series of extraordinary photographs made by the 19th C. French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne through an encounter with a range of contemporary theoretical and philosophical projects. Read as the imaging of a literally experimental theatre, Duchenne’s photographs are re-imagined as the site of a reinvigorated understanding of the discarded concept of expression, which might further animate an ethics of appearing as a supplement to the politics of representation.

Catalogue from the 2014 exhibition Early Modern Faces at the Newcomb Art Gallery of Tulane University, with works from the Sarah Campbell Blaffer foundation. Includes an essay by C. Jean Campbell of Emory University.