ABSTRACT
The haunting portrait of the Italian Count’s deceased wife in ‘The Image’ resurfaces in a short essay entitled ‘The Blame of Portraits’ published in Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of Life (1904) in which Vernon Lee writes eloquently of the futility of the portrait form. Our ‘humble desire for a likeness’ of our loved ones is, she argues, ‘one of our most signal cravings after the impossible: an attempt to overcome space and baffle time; to imprison and use at pleasure the most fleeting, intangible, and uncommunicable of all mysterious essences, a human personality’ (1904, 140). According to Lee, the impossibility of this desire is particularly acute when the portrait functions as a memento mori, and she illustrates her point using as example the macabre copy of the Count’s deceased wife in ‘The Image’. From the passage below it is clear that her tale is based on a real-life encounter which had a profound effect:
Whilst Lee’s argument is certainly valid, historical evidence suggests that without man’s attempts to represent the dead, the world would have been denied an important record of its human, and aesthetic past, for as Eva Kuryluk observes, in ancient Rome ‘Deathmasks as memento mori for the living played an important role ... and might have contributed to the extreme naturalism of Roman portrait sculpture’ (1991, 206). The Romans’ artistic preservation of the dead is particularly fascinating and resonates interestingly with the doll in Lee’s tale. Kuryluk writes:
The portrait form, it seems, has always been intimately related to death. Catherine Maxwell specifically associates the birth of portraiture with loss, and comments on two accounts of the development of painting taken from Pliny’s Natural History (Bk 10). In the first, Pliny argues that although the geographical location of its origin is imprecise, it is generally agreed that the art of painting began ‘with tracing an outline round a man’s shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done in this way’ (quoted in Maxwell 2002, 516). In the second, which discusses the origin of the plastic arts, the origin of portraiture is attributed to a female artist, the daughter of the first sculptor, ‘Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth’ who was in love with a young man. When she learned that he was going abroad, she drew ‘in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp’ on which her father ‘pressed clay’ and ‘made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery’ (quoted in Maxwell 2002, 517). From this less than auspicious beginning, the silhouette became ‘an important form of eighteenth-and nineteenthcentury portraiture, in which the profile view of the subject’s head and shoulders is depicted either by a black paper cut-out or in black ink’ (Maxwell 2002, 515). Maxwell notes that:
And, as she has written elsewhere, the fully realized portrait is equally elusive in its evocation for, like its ghostly counterpart, the silhouette, it too can be no more than an ‘absent presence’ (Maxwell 1997, 253).
