The Self-Aware Image: An Insight Into Early Modern Meta-Painting

"Maybe we could think about book covers for a moment here because the image on the first edition of Stoichita’s The Self-Aware Image is Rembrandt’s “The Artist in the Studio”. We are all familiar with Rembrandt’s incredibly searching self-portraits painted at various points in his life. But what I find so interesting about the painting that appears on Stoichita’s book is that art historians sometimes identify it as a self-portrait and sometimes simply refer to it as “The Artist in the Studio”. This is very different from an ‘autonomous’ self-portrait, which focuses on the identity of the artist. For instance, Stoichita refers to Dürer’s many guest appearances in his own paintings, such as the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand , as a ‘self-portrait as visitor’. We know this is Dürer because he identifies himself as such and because it looks like the same face we find in his self-portraits. But with “The Artist in the Studio”, Stoichita pushes us to think about painting as a site of self-awareness, where painting becomes almost a form of and forum for visual philosophy. And so, in Rembrandt’s image, even if the man in that painting is not an actual portrait of Rembrandt, it is nevertheless a portrait of the process that Rembrandt like any other artist went through in order to paint something. It becomes a portrait of the artistic self at work, rather than a self-portrait of Rembrandt’s face. What’s also going on in both the example of Dürer and the other artists that Stoichita speaks about is a moment of changing technologies. With Dürer, it’s the introduction of prints, which then leads on to the dissemination of thoughts, ideas, as well as images in the first decades of the sixteenth century and, more crucially, during the Protestant Reformation. Whereas, according to The Self-Aware Image , we witness the arrival of the portable canvas in the second half of the sixteenth century, an object that can be taken out of its original context and travel into new ones, and that can speak on behalf of the artist in absentia . Stoichita’s last section on artists is inflected by the ideas and writings of Descartes and Montaigne, for instance, which represents a different philosophical moment that is perhaps the eventuality or the sequel to some of the ideas put forth in the earlier moments by thinkers such as Erasmus, Calvin, Luther, and, of course, an artist like Dürer. “Art was a form of visual philosophy written with brushes and chisels rather than with pen and ink” What’s inspiring about Koerner and Stoichita is that both authors are thinking about how changes and shifts in the history of ideas coincide at a certain moment with changes in technology as well, and how that precipitates a modern form of portraiture that asks new questions about the meaning of life: what it is to be a self, what it is to be here, what it is to be a time-bound mortal subject, and what is an image—that is, what can it do? Historians of ideas have long since mapped out the trajectory from Augustine’s Confessions to Rousseau’s Confessions . Even in Descartes’ time, the notion of selfhood was very fraught; the idea of the ‘self’ was closer to the modern notion of selfishness than of more positive concepts such as self-sufficiency. “I think, therefore I am” is a phrase heavy with doubt and anxiety. Artists, too, were participating in these debates; art was a form of visual philosophy written with brushes and chisels rather than with pen and ink."