MPS MEN PORTRAITS SERIES
n°2 English text menportraits.blogspot.com © Francis Rousseau 2011-2020
Transla4on : Anne Menuhin
DOUBT
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ Doubt
Raffaelo Sorbi (1844-1931) Portrait of Emilio Zocchi, 1868 Private Collection
The first doubt is self-doubt. In general, human beings do not particularly like this doubt because one is projected into a cycle which we tend to consider as dangerous. However, there is nothing dangerous in doubting oneself. Doubt is the obligatory companion of evolution: if one does not question one's certainties, one will never accept any criticism. Doubt is at the center of the ordeal that constitutes for each individual personal evolution. The Florentine sculptor Emilio Zocchi (1835-1913) represented here, was never in harmony with the movements of his time. Mostly known for his busts, bas-reliefs and statuettes of individuals in the Renaissance style, he shunned fashions and took refuge in a classicism appreciated by his Florentine bourgeois and / or patrician clientele but despised by artistic circles. Taciturn by temperament, he liked to pay homage to Michelangelo whom he sculpted in different situations, the most famous being Michelangelo as a child which is preserved in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Did Zocchi doubt that by choosing the academic style rather than impressionism, he had made the right artistic choice? Never. Yet his gaze in this portrait questions the viewer. He seems to be saying, "You who are looking at me, wherever you are in time or in space - maybe even a century away - what do you think? " The painter Raffaelo Sorbi, author of this portrait of Zocchi, was of the same artistic mood. Florentine like Zocchi, he produced small canvases, sold by the Galerie Goupil in Paris, many of which were in the Neo Pompeian style inspired by ancient Rome or Tuscan history.
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ Doubt
Are they still alive? This is the question posed by these faces that arise with intensity from a very distant past, these "Fayoum portraits", a set of paintings dating back to Roman Egypt, executed between the 1st and the 4th centuries of the Christian era. . They are so called because of the place of their initial discovery, in 1888, the Fayoum region of Egypt. These are indeed funeral portraits painted on the bark of the fig-sycamore tree and inserted into the mummy's strips at the level of the face. (see below). These deceased, more alive than dead, are always depicted as frontal busts. The "Fayoum portraits", which thus stare straight into our eyes from the depths of EgyptianRoman antiquity, continue the funeral tradition of the mummy of ancient Egypt and the decorated sarcophagus. They enrich it, however, with influences concerning the representation of the body, linked to invasions and immigration, notably Greek and then Roman. The mummy's face was not the only function of the "Fayoum portraits". Above all, they had the capacity to help the living to remember the deceased as he was during his lifetime and whom the portrait should resemble as much as possible, according to Roman tradition. This fitted perfectly with Egyptian culture and its own cult of imagery linked to the body of the deceased developed throughout the Pharaonic era. In Egyptian culture, the deceased had to survive physically and spiritually, and his body served as a physical attachment to those intangible parts of a being ( the ka and ba). The Egyptian tradition went further than the Roman tradition in doubts about the condition of the dead. The Egyptians went so far as to preserve the mummy of the deceased inside the house and involve it in every meal. With a Fayoum at one's table, some could almost doubt that he was dead. It’s also the same doubt about death which still persists today in these portraits and makes them so disturbing and fascinating, 20 centuries after their creation ...
Three portraits of Fayoum 1st- 4th century