A face that’s gaunt and shockingly emaciated from self-starvation just isn’t a glance that we usually affiliate with portraits from the previous. However with the Portrait of Abbot Firmin Tournus from 1725, that’s what confronts us: a imaginative and prescient of a cranium with a skinny layer of flesh barely stretched throughout it. But that’s precisely the best way that the Abbot wished it, tough as that could be for us to imagine at this time.
The Abbot’s portrait challenges our expectations, as a result of we realise that commissioned portraits had been usually a means for the ‘sitters’ to undertaking their most popular photos of themselves into the world. They often expressed bodily attractiveness, worldly achievement, prosperity and opulence. Artists had been anticipated to offer a beneficiant evaluation of the sitter’s bodily qualities. That’s to say, portraits had been usually pushed by outrageous flattery for the particular person being painted – who was almost definitely the one who was paying the artist. It actually paid dividends for the artist to pander to the vainness of the rich sitter. Artwork galleries around the globe are these days filled with such extremely romanticised (or fictionalised) footage of prosperous patrons, who usually look more than happy with themselves.
Nevertheless, there have been some uncommon exceptions to creative flattery. Again in 1654, the famously ugly Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, instructed his extremely nervous portraitist to color him ‘warts and all’ – being constant together with his no-nonsense Protestantism. Cromwell’s instruction was so strikingly uncommon that the phrase ‘warts and all’ has handed into the English language as a spur to pursue brutal honesty as a substitute of vainness.
Likewise, within the 1790s the good grasp Francisco Goya painted portraits of the Spanish Bourbon royal dynasty with rising constancy to the truth he was seeing in entrance of him. Sadly for the assorted Bourbon sitters, their household was hopelessly inbred from many many years of inter-marriage with shut kin. The Bourbons had been more and more a gaggle of goggle-eyed and massive-jawed monstrosities. Goya’s creative honesty lastly grew to become an explosive situation and the artist was pressured to flee to France to keep away from royal persecution.
Whereas the 1725 portrait of the Abbot Tournus has a precedent in Cromwell and a later expression by way of Goya, it retains an influence to bodily arrest us. Though the Abbot thought-about himself loyal to his Catholic religion, he grew to become a follower of a heretic cult referred to as Jansenism, which adopted a non secular path of rigorous penance, mortification and self-inflicted struggling to drive out particular person depravity. As we’d think about, this was not a wildly well-liked method to expressing non secular devotion among the many Abbots and different grand princes of the Catholic church, who had been extra involved with amplifying their very own worldly magnificence.
The artwork of struggling
So, there we’ve the Abbot Tournus: remoted, declared a heretic and outcast by his church. However he stays within the portrait as he noticed himself: being defiantly a person of God in accordance with his personal religion, mind and conscience. Not like the satin-clad Catholic grandees, he’s dressed very merely and is clearly dwelling a frugal life: the room’s furnishings are spartan and whereas there’s a easy loaf of bread – some worldly sustenance and luxury – it’s positioned virtually out of sight and attain. The Abbot’s sustenance comes as a substitute from his books however most significantly from the sufferings of crucified Jesus, whose ache he’s emulating as an indication of dedication to ‘pure’ Catholicism.
Maybe the one form of materials consolation of kinds is the time piece and key, which could be a memento mori: a reminder that for all of us time will run out and we’ll die. The portrait appears to counsel that earlier than that inevitability arrives, the Abbot is in search of reconciliation with Jesus by sharing in his torments.
The Portrait of Abbot Firmin Tournus, painted by Jean Bernard Restout, might be considered on the great Musée Carnavalet – the Museum of the Historical past of Paris – located at 2 Rue Payenne within the 3rd Arrondisement.
By Brad Allan, author and wine tasting host in Melbourne, Australia and frequent customer to France…
