A Cognitive Approach to the Study of the Image of Christ in
Renaissance Painting
By Lasse Hodne, NTNU / 6 sider, ca. 2.600-3.500 ord (Full versjon ca. 4.600)
This point of departure is the face – the face in art, which is called a portrait, and the face in
psychology, where face perception is an important branch. Is it possible to use methods from
cognitive psychology when studying the art of ancient masters.
This question I will try to answer, using portraits of the German born Flemish 15th century
painter Hans Memling (ca. 1435-1494). I will focus on four portraits of Christ that Memling painted,
beginning with a short description of his works.
Based in Bruges, Memling’s works were sold to courts and noblemen in several European
countries and his works include a number of large scale compositions with biblical scenes, as well as
so-called group portraits. Portraits was his favourite genre, and his portraits with landscape
background seem to have influenced Italian masters like Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio
and Leonardo da Vinci. According to Dirk de Vos more than a third of his extensive surviving oeuvre
are portraits.
Vis Pasadena + Genoa.
What I am going to do is to analyse these two portraits by Memling … Pasadena 1478, Genoa
1480, describe.
Not only the pose is different, but also the signs of passion … stigma marks, crown of thorns,
blodd on the forehead, sad expression and so on.
The signs and symbols present in the Genoa painting tell us that this represents Christ as a
human being, suffering the pains of martyrdom. Does this imply that the other painting, the one on
the left, represents him as God? This is the question I ask, and I will try to answer it not only by
implication, but also by referring to results from psychological tests.
But let us first look at the conventions that governed portrait painting in Memling’s own
period, the Renaissance. Did artists in Renaissance Europe, consciously or subconsciously, employ a
particular pose (profile or semi-profile, direct gaze etc.) to express a specific emotion or a
characteristic aspect of his model’s personality?
Vis samling sekulære portretter.
To answer this, together with an assistant I made a survey of portraits from the 15th and the
16th centuries. The survey was based on pictures from catalogues from Italy, Germany, and the
Flemish regions. This survey, which was limited to secular portraits, not including paintings of Christ
or saints, comprised 590 portraits. What we found was that almost only profile and half profile was
used in secular portraiture. Of the more than 200 German portraits in the survey, there were only
four full face portraits. Of the 172 Dutch works none were shown frontally, whereas among the 196
Italian there were two, both by the same master.
Vis samling Kristusportretter.
This survey of secular portraits was later followed up by a similar analysis of portraits of Christ.
The point of departure was images from the 18 volume strong catalogue of Raimond van Marle, The
Development of the Italian Schools of Painting. These volumes cover Italian art from more or less the
period of Giotto until the verge of the High Renaissance around 1500.
Given the fact that there are – as we have seen in the case of Memling – several types of Christ
portraits, we took care to define two basic forms, the Holy Face and the Man of Sorrows … as in
Memling.
Since what we want to investigate is the use of head pose (frontal versus profile/half profile),
the two types cannot be defined by pose, but must be defined iconographically by means of signs
and symbols. Hence, a Man of Sorrows, is defined as such by the inclusion of signs from the Passion:
stains of blood, stigma marks, crown of thorns on Christ’s head, and/or a sad facial expression, etc. In
contrast, portraits where Christ has a calm expression and signs of passion are absent or, at least, not
exposed in any evident way, is a Holy Face.
Most Christ portraits can be easily defined as belonging to one or the other of these groups.
The number of Christ portraits in Van Marle is not very high. Among the thousands of paintings
and portraits in his 18 volumes, there are only 24 portraits of Christ. Of these, 10 are of the Holy Face
type, whereas 14 are Man of Sorrows. Interestingly, when these were divided into sub-groups, we
found that of the Holy Face type, there was a clear preference for full face, with 7 full face portraits
and only 3 half profile. In contrast, regarding the Man of Sorrows the tendency was even clearer in
the opposite direction: of the 14 panels, only one was full face. The others were all in half profile.
What this shows is, first, that the full face is used much more often in representations of Christ
than secular persons. Of the 590 portraits included in the first survey, only seven were shown
frontally. Not considering works that were reproduced in more than one catalogue (a very limited
number), these seven comprise about 1.2 percent of the total!
For the Christ portraits of the second survey the result was totally different: Of the 24
paintings of this type in Van Marle, no less than 8 – a third – are shown en face. This impression is
confirmed when consulting the catalogue of Flemish art, where the percentage was even higher: no
less than 7 of 10 Christ portraits are frontal!
Second, there also seems to be a differentiation between the Holy Face type and the Man of
Sorrows as regards face pose, full face being most common in representations of the Holy Face, while
half profile is most frequently used when painting the Man of Sorrows.
Although the statistical material could be extended, including works by masters not
represented in the catalogues, it is my firm conviction that the analysis gives sufficient material to
conclude, first, that the full face view is used much more often in representations of Christ than
portraits of ordinary people, and, second, that even among Christ portraits there is a distinction: The
full face view is used more frequently in representations of the Holy Face than in the Man of Sorrows.
Vis Memling’s secular portraits.
If we return to Memling, we discover that his works are in perfect harmony with what we
found. Analysing his secular portraits, we discover that they are all in half profile. When painting
‘ordinary people’ he always used the half profile. Full face is only used when representing Christ and,
just as important: It is used for one specific type of Christ portrait – the Holy Face. When Christ
showed himself as a human being, Memling used a scheme that belongs to secular portraiture.
This distinction may not have been conscious. It may be that he simply followed conventions,
but the important thing is that he used different schemes for different aspects of Christ. The two
types of Christ portraits – the Holy Face and the Man of Sorrows – are coined to represent two
different aspects, one human and one divine.
One of the characteristics of gods in most cultures is that they are immortal, yet Jesus died to
save mankind from eternal damnation. Hence, when Christ in the Genoa panel appears along with
elements that remind us of his death on the Cross, he reveals his human aspect only, concealing the
divine. This we gather from the symbols present in the painting: the Crown of Thorns, the stains of
blood, and the stigma marks.
In contrast, the Pasadena panel shows him as divine, triumphant, and immortal. If this is the
idea that Memling wanted to evoke by his two contrasting visions of Christ, he was in perfect
agreement with Christian doctrine. Ever since the fourth ecumenical council at Chalcedon in 451 the
Church has been professing that Christ is quote “perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same
truly God and truly man.” unquote.
Vis Pasadena + Genoa.
From this it should also be quite clear that it was precisely this distinction between holy and
secular that artists adopted when they faced the task of painting the double nature of Christ,
choosing the frontal view for his divine aspect and half profile for his human.
There remains one question to answer, however: Why was the frontal view chosen to
represent the divine while the profile/half-profile was preferred for secular persons as well as for the
human aspect of Christ? Couldn’t it just as well have been the other way around? If the answer to
this question was yes, our survey could have proceeded as a purely art historical/humanistic
investigation since it would be only a question of conventions and the meaning of signs and symbols.
But there might be more to it, and we must remember that a portrait, whether it is Christ or Mona
Lisa, is always also a face. This means that portraits, at least to a certain extent, can be studied as
faces.
The face, in turn, is important in social interaction. Head direction and gaze are important cues
that tell other people whether we intend to communicate or interact with them. The importance of
face detection is evidenced by the diverse and extensive parts of the brain involved in the processing
of faces. Researchers identify in particular three “face areas”: the fusiform face area (important in
the processing of emotions), the occipital face area (known to identify eyes, nose, and mouth at early
stages of recognition), and the superior temporal sulcus, but also the amygdala and the
anterior/inferior cortex of the temporal lobe plays a part. Together these areas are important for
successful detection and identification of faces.
Behavioural studies have demonstrated a connection between gaze contact and face
recognition. Faces are more easily remembered and identified when the target looks directly ahead
than when it looks away, but this effect is not stronger for frontal faces. In fact, there is evidence that
faces are most easily recognized when direct gaze is combined with deviated head orientation – one
of the most common poses in Renaissance portraiture, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa being the most
prominent example!
Vis Wollaston.
When we talk with someone or call upon them, we usually direct our eyes in that direction.
Humans are good at judging the direction of attention of other people, which is due to the fact that
our eye’s iris is relatively small and surrounded by a white sclera that is always visible when our eyes
are open. However, another person’s gaze direction is not determined by the position of the iris in
the white sclera alone. As W.H. Wollaston demonstrated in a classical study in 1824, a person with
his face turned slightly to the left will appear to look directly at us if the direction of the eyes
counterbalances that of the face (top left). But if we extract the eyes from this portrait and insert
them into a face with different direction cues (hair instead of nose) (bottom left), the person in the
picture is not looking at us anymore.
This means that we must look at both aspects; the direction of the eyes as well as the face
orientation. Several such studies on the joint interaction of gaze and face direction exist. I am not
going to discuss them here. I will just briefly mention one of them – that of the Norwegian based
research program Symmetry in Art and Science that my colleague Per Olav Folgerø will soon explain
in detail.
The Symmetry group is a cross disciplinary project that aims at bridging the gap between art
history and the neurosciences. Its main interests so far has been symmetry perception, facial
symmetry, and the relationship between face perception and portrait painting. The study of face
perception is an important branch of psychology, and the fact that a portrait is a face, means that the
art of portraiture to a certain extent can be studied by psychological methods.
The Bergen Symmetry group made three tests; two based on photos and one on paintings of
the same type that I am dicussing here. The photo tests used images of people from different angles.
Test 1 and test 2 were quite similar, only that the photo material they used was different. Test 3 was,
as mentioned, based on paintings.
Participants were asked to define the images from pre-defined categories of adjectives. The
results showed that frontal faces scored higher on positive values such as harmonious, trustworthy,
and caring, than negative ones. However, the score was not the same in all tests, and support for the
hypothesis that frontal face and frontal gaze was most positive, was strongest in test 2.
Face and gaze both turned away from the spectator also had a fairly high score on positive
values, wheras, not surprisingly, face away together with face directed towards the spectator was
perceived as monitoring.
The studies performed by the Symmetry group confirm at least two important propositions.
First, that gaze direction and head orientation work together in judgements of facial expressions and
second that joint head and gaze direction (both forward) enhances the emotional effect transmitted
by the face.
Vis studenttester
Now, if we remember our findings that the Holy Face is almost always frontal whereas the
Man of Sorrows is usually in three quarter profile: are we justified to conclude, from a behavioural
study of positive and negative adjectives, that positive means divine?
It is obvious that this needs further research. Therefore, I would like to mention thre results of
a few small tests that I did on my own with my students.
I took six portraits of male models from the Renaissance. All the portraits were more or less
frontal, but none was perfectly symmetric (as such portraits, as we have seen, does not exist). The
clothing and the background was made neutral, almost black, so that all paintings had more or less
the same style.
Then, of each portrait a perfectly symmetric version was made. I then had 12 portraits of
which six were perfectly symmetric and six were not.
The material was then inserted into an online survey-program.
The participants in the test, all students, were told, as was also correct, that these were all
manipulated photos of Renaissance paintings. They were also told that half of them were
manipulated from secular models, whereas the other half represented saints – which was not true,
since they all actually represent quite ordinary people.
In the test they were asked to press either "holy" or "secular" for each manipulated image.
What’s interesting is that the results show a score of almost 80 per cent "holy"for the
symmetric faces and the other way around for the asymmetric. Even if there was no image of Christ
or saints in the series, participants could easily be made to believe that "symmetric" meant "holy".
To a certain degree these latter results lend credibility to the findings of the Symmetry group.
Both seem to support our analysis from the catalogues that the en face view of the face is suited for
representations of the perfect and divine, whereas the less univocally positive half profile fits the
suffering.
What’s particularly interesting with this is how painters intuitively realized this effect, choosing
the frontal view for the Holy Face and averted gaze and face for the Man of Sorrows. As we have
seen, these two figures represent two different aspects of Christ. The type we saw in Memling’s
Pasadena panel represents the risen Christ who turns to the faithful in his prayers to give him
comfort. For this type it was natural to choose the frontal pose which, as we saw, signals values of
trust and care. Quite the opposite with Memling’s Genoa panel, which shows a person who is about
to be tortured and realizes that his sacrificial death is just around the corner. Expressions of sadness
and fear in this case would elicit no extra response if he was turned towards the spectator, so,
instead, in grief he turns his head away.