[feature_headline type=”left, center, right” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h5″ icon=””]…the magic of painting is in this alchemic unification of all layers of meaning and expression; the essence of co-feeling is in this temporary fusion of minds between the sitter, the painter, and the viewer[/feature_headline]
A portrait is an act of love. It suspends the ordinary boundaries between two people, between the subject and the object, between the body and the soul. It is a state of co-feeling; sym-pathy in its original Greek etymology, but an asymmetrical one: the roles of the painter and the sitter are distinct but inseparable, like yin and yang, like the knower and the known.
I know it’s an act of love because I cannot do it unless I love my sitter in the deepest sense of the word to begin with. At a risk of sounding too biblical, I cannot do it unless I love the sitter as myself. Incidentally, it means I also know that I cannot love a random neighbour as myself; maybe when (and if) I can, I will finally be able to do portraits of strangers.
Titian, quite obviously, could. But at the time of painting this portrait, in the early twenties of the sixteenth century, he was yet to become this universal (and universally sought-after) portraitist we know from the art history, the prince of painters and the painter of princes. So he was painting portraits of friends, of people close to him in age and sensibilities; people to whom he must have felt a natural, easy sympathy as a living human being, not as a master painter or as a sage proficient in universal love; a kind of sympathy one can easily identify with, co-feel.
Art historians don’t know for sure the identity of this young man — there are several competing hypotheses. This uncertainty eerily resembles the enigma of Shakespeare’s young man, but here, at least, one can be certain that there existed one, very concrete and very individual, young man who, somewhere in the beginning of the sixteenth century, was sitting for this portrait holding his glove with easy elegance. The sonnets, for all we know, could have been addressed to different young men, or to none in particular. Shakespeare, this master of creating living, breathing individuals in his plays, gives you next to nothing about the young man of the sonnets and so sets you free to imagine him as you like it.
So I am free to imagine him as Titian’s “Man with a glove”. Of course, this boy is Italian or Spanish (not English and not even Welsh), and time-wise, too, it’s not exactly right: he could have been Shakespeare’s young man’s grandfather or even great grandfather. But he is also young, beautiful, elegant, rich; and he, too, belongs to the age of Renaissance. And in the end, these objective differences and similarities don’t really matter: there is something deeper, more fundamental, that connects this portrait to Shakespeare’s sonnets and their young addressee.
There is a seductive quality in the portrait, born out of two contradictory forces. One is the tangible psychological closeness, the illusion of sharing in his feelings and thoughts, of knowing him. Immersed in the portrait, I find myself as though within this act of love, understanding, sympathy which was happening at its conception. For a brief time, I can be one with both the painter and the sitter, experiencing my own looking at the portrait as essentially the same act as this young man’s looking at something or someone I don’t see, and as Titian’s looking at his sitter in the process of painting. In this safe, sanctified space created by the painting, I surrender my own mind to both of them: co-feeling with the sitter, co-knowing with the painter.
I know, even though I am not directly conscious of it, that some neurones in my brain “mirror” the pose and the facial expression of the young sitter as though he were really here, while others react to the painter’s representational choices. And one of these choices is to impose a distance, a separation the sitter from the viewer — the second force that contributes to the power of the portrait. This boy with his glove is completely in his own space, separated from me by the marble pedestal.
The pedestal has Titian’s signature on it — and even as just now I felt myself within the flow of sympathy between the painter and the sitter, this feeling is spontaneously replaced the next moment with being thrown out from this space, the painter putting an impenetrable barrier between me and the sitter. In marked difference with Titian’s later portraits, this man doesn’t engage with the viewer in any way; he doesn’t make eye contact — he looks resolutely elsewhere, at something I don’t and can never see, completely within his space and his moment in time, undisturbed by my gaze.
This tension between closeness and distance, attraction and alienation, love and estrangement, heat and cold — that’s, I believe, what gives the portrait is seductive strength, and also connects it with the sonnets and their emotional roller-caster.
Titian uses the distribution of whites in the painting to underscore this contrast: with the background so uniformly dark, it is the whites that play the lead in establishing the viewer’s relationship with the sitter. And here, the whites make two very different gestures. One is the sharp triangle of the boy’s shirt, which points to the face directly and straightforwardly: if you trace its edges upward in your imagination, they will enclose the face. The opening of his coat is like opening of his soul to the viewer.
The other gesture is the graceful, indirect, discontinuous curve which begins at the bottom of the painting, with the cuff on the right hand, goes slightly up and to the right, through the exquisite greys of the gloves to the other cuff, and then up and leftwards, to the collar, and only then to his eyes; the invisible continuation of this curve is the direction of his gaze.
And then, of course, there are hands: the right, gloveless, hand with energetic, direct movement of the index finger and the relaxed left hand, covered by one glove and carelessely holding the other — probably the most straightforward expression of the contrast between openness and aloofness. He is here, and yet he is not. I feel like I am one with him, and yet he is distant.
These compositional devices work, it would seem, at different layers of the painting. The sitter’s own nature with its combination of sincerity and aloofness, simplicity and elegance: the viewer pays attention to the expression of his eyes, his pose, the gesture of his hands as if he were sitting right here in the same room, in flesh and blood. The relationship between the painter and the sitter, with its sympathy and distance: the painter absorbs the sitter, both his outward appearance and his inner world, but he cannot let himself be absorbed (otherwise there would be no painting); the sitter lets himself be lovingly observed, but looks away — he keeps his distance, too. And finally, the relationship between the portrait and the viewer: the time-defying connection established right here and now, as you look at the portrait. So where, in whose mind, does this tantalising, seductive feeling, the contrast between attraction and separation, belong?
I don’t know, and that, in a sense, is the point: the magic of painting is in this alchemic unification of all layers of meaning and expression; the essence of co-feeling is in this temporary fusion of minds between the sitter, the painter, and the viewer.