4: More Rapport, with Messina
Antonello da Messina
Portrait of a Man (Rome), 1475-1476Tempera and oil on panel, w25.2 cm x h31 cm (9.92" x 12.2")
Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy
Another place where viewer placement is a common consideration: portraiture.
Portraits tend to repeat just a couple formulas1 for viewer-subject relations, and both start by putting the viewer into the subject's space (much as Cassatt put us 'next to' the woman in the loge). After that, the artist tweaks various factors to create or reduce 'psychological distance' — although often the sitter's body language alone will do the trick.
When the artist sets up their portrait to reduce psychological distance, we get an immediate sense of familiarity with the subject that can be rather charming. Take the painting up top: we are cropped in to a bust-length portrait (close enough to see the folds in his neck), the man is making eye contact with us BUT is at an angle suggesting comfortable sharing of space rather than confrontation, and there is a slight smile to his lips finishing out the impression that we are friend standing next to this unnamed man, invited in to look at him as he looks back at us.
Antonello actually did a handful of male portraits in this format, all called 'Portrait of a Man' (now distinguished by their current location), so to see the opposite, a portrait with more psychological distance, we can look at another of Antonello's works:
Portraits tend to repeat just a couple formulas1 for viewer-subject relations, and both start by putting the viewer into the subject's space (much as Cassatt put us 'next to' the woman in the loge). After that, the artist tweaks various factors to create or reduce 'psychological distance' — although often the sitter's body language alone will do the trick.
When the artist sets up their portrait to reduce psychological distance, we get an immediate sense of familiarity with the subject that can be rather charming. Take the painting up top: we are cropped in to a bust-length portrait (close enough to see the folds in his neck), the man is making eye contact with us BUT is at an angle suggesting comfortable sharing of space rather than confrontation, and there is a slight smile to his lips finishing out the impression that we are friend standing next to this unnamed man, invited in to look at him as he looks back at us.
Antonello actually did a handful of male portraits in this format, all called 'Portrait of a Man' (now distinguished by their current location), so to see the opposite, a portrait with more psychological distance, we can look at another of Antonello's works:
Portrait of a Man (Turin), 1476
Oil on panel, w 28cm x h36.5 cm (11" x 14.4")
Museo Civico d'Arte Antica di Torino
This is the Turin Portrait of a Man, and the set-up is extremely similar to that in the Rome portrait: same general placement and angle of the sitter, same background, same (exact) clothing. The main differences come down to 1) the cropping is still bust-length but is *slightly* farther out on this one, showing us the beginning of both arms, and 2) facial expression. The man in the painting at top welcomes us with his expression, but the attitude in the Turin painting shows much more discomfort (perhaps even lightly amused contempt) for the intrusion on his space: chin up and out, brow lifted, mouth flattened and pulled out at the corners in something that doesn't make it to a smile. There's even less light in the irises here than in the other portrait, although in fairness there might be varnish darkening or somesuch on this one, so that's tentative.
NOTES:
1. As a genre, portraiture's goals tend to be pretty streamlined, and the viewer placements it uses are simply the ones most effective for those goals (which at a minimum usually include "convey visual information about the sitter's face"). However, there are lots of different reasons to do portraits and lots of ways to 'place' the viewer for them, and artists have explored tons of these.
Just to give you an idea of what this could look like, here are a few portraits I've done showing alternate arrangements, where the viewer hasn't been brought in 'next to' or 'in front of' the subject:
The trouble is, these alternate viewer placements tend to feel pretty gimmicky, so they have to be used sparingly and only for good reason. (In my case, the second two photos show three works meant for a series specifically about the various uses of and approaches to portraiture...outside of that context, they'd all be rather harder to justify.)