Cat and mouse with a master
I am particularly fond of hidden masters, and especially the shock of discovery when one is uncovered. Today, the BBC’s Kelly Grovier encounters in Caterina van Hemmessen a woman and an artist; and finds in her self-portrait a soliloquy on faith and identity:
The intriguing sense of artistic and spiritual mirroring activated by the [1548] self-portrait – of Hemessen merging her identity now with Dürer, now with Christ – is magnified by a mystery of actual optical mirroring that hangs over any perception of this perplexing painting. To appreciate any self-portrait is to presume the existence of a looking glass used by the artist and positioned somewhere outside the painting's frame – a materially reflective surface that makes possible the image the painter is creating.
But in Hemessen's reflection, something doesn't add up. In the painting we have before us, the artist's head is in the top right of the panel, whereas in the panel on the easel, the painting within the painting, the fragment head is in the top left. It is as if Hemessen has cleverly corrected the optical inversion of the image of herself that the mirror she is looking into, outside the frame, has created. As a result, it is the barely begun and fragmentary self-portrait-within-the-self-portrait that is truer to life than the finished painting we see before us.
By playfully entangling herself (and us) in a mind-bending puzzle of mirrors, Hemessen has created more than a rollicking retinal riddle. She has produced a profound visual treatise on the very nature and substance of spiritual and physical imitation – a topic at the centre of contemporary religious thought. A century before Hemessen painted her self-portrait, the late Medieval Dutch-German theologian Thomas à Kempis published his influential Christian devotional book The Imitation of Christ, a guide to spiritual life that seizes upon the prop of the mirror to emphasise the importance of reflecting the holiness of the universe. "If your heart were right," à Kempis writes in the book's fourth chapter, "then every created thing would be a mirror of life for you and a book of holy teaching, for there is no creature so small and worthless that it does not show forth the goodness of God." A mirror is never just a mirror. In Hemessen's day, it was a crucible of virtue, a sounding board of salvation.