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Charles I, King of England, from Three Angles, the Triple Portrait by Anthony van Dyck., it was sent to Rome for Bernini to model a bust on .
Anthony van Dyck, shows three views of one the most illustrious heads ever to have been cut off. This unusual portrait, showing the king in right profile and left semi-profile as well as in full face, anticipates the modern police mugshot. The purpose of van Dyck’s image was not of course criminological, but he did share one aim with today’s police photographer: that of giving the fullest and most functionally descriptive view of his subject as he could. His painting was commissioned as a means to an end, rather than as a work of art in its own right. Charles I’s Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria, had arranged for her husband’s portrait to be carved in marble by the celebrated sculptor, Gianlorenzo Bernini. Bernini lived in Rome and owed his first allegiance to Pope Urban VIII, his chief patron and protector. The Pope, who hoped that Henrietta Maria might succeed in converting Charles to Catholicism, granted a special dispensation to Bernini to fulfil the commission. But a trip to England was out of the question, so van Dyck’s ingeniously three-dimensional portrait was dispatched to Italy instead: a close second-best to the living likeness of the king, from which the sculptor might work.
Conscious that his picture was to come under close scrutiny in the leading studio of Rome, van Dyck did rather more than fulfil the basic requirements of his commission. Each of his three Charleses wears a different but equally splendid costume, the pretext for a virtuoso display of painting. The range of effects conjured up by the artist is rich and captivating: the filigree fineness of a lace collar; the contrast of a slashed black sleeve with its own white lining; the glimmer of purple silk, gathered into a fat swag of drapery; a single bead of reflected light held in the pearl earring that dangles from Charles I’s left ear. The delicately modulated flesh tones of the king’s face, whiter in the forehead and redder around the cheeks and nose, as well as the subtle observation of the different colours in his hair, beard and moustache, show Van Dyck at the peak of his considerable powers. The triple portrait is far more than a sculptor’s aid. It is a gauntlet thrown down by one great artist to another: a challenge to Bernini to sculpt an image as compellingly lifelike as that which Van Dyck has created, here, in paint.
Bernini understood its message very well, to judge by some remarks that he made to the English traveller Nicholas Stone in 1637, a year after he had completed his sculpture of the English king. As one of the perks of the commission, he had been allowed to keep Van Dyck’s portrait (which only entered the royal collection when George IV bought it in 1822); and as Stone noted in his diary, the picture seems to have nagged away at Bernini, ultimately convincing him of the inferiority of marble, in certain respects, to paint. “How can it then be possible that a marble picture can resemble nature when it is all one colour, whereas to the contrary a man has one colour in his face, another in his hair, a third in his lips, and his eyes yet different from all the rest? Therefore, said Bernini, I conclude that it is the most impossible thing in the world to make a picture in stone naturally to resemble any person…”
Bernini’s bust was destroyed when Whitehall Palace burned down in 1698, although history relates that it was received with great enthusiasm in England. The king and queen insisted on opening the crate containing the sculpture on the very night that it arrived, acclaimed the work as a wonder “as soon as the first plank of the case was raised”, and rewarded the sculptor with a diamond worth £1000 – rather more than a small fortune, in the seventeenth century. Surviving casts and copies suggest that Bernini – showing the same pride and independence of spirit as Van Dyck – departed significantly from the painting he had been given to imitate, lending the king a certain Baroque flourish and a livelier, less pensive expression.
It has been suggested that in depicting Charles I as such a withdrawn and melancholic character, Van Dyck created a kind of prophecy in paint: the martyred king stares sadly but knowingly into his own dark future, as stormclouds gather. This is fanciful. In fact, the painting knowingly projects precisely that image of kingship which Charles spent his life fruitlessly attempting to sustain. The stormy sky in the background symbolises the potential awesomeness of his wrath – as sudden and as devastating as a bolt of lightning – and the fact that, as king, he occupies a higher and more celestial realm than mere mortals. In 1635, when Van Dyck painted the picture, Charles I was at the height of his power. Having dissolved parliament, he was ruling alone, in line with his deeply ingrained belief that kings were God’s divinely appointed rulers. He had been taught so by his father, James VI, who had drummed into him that “You are a little GOD to sit on his throne and rule over other men”. The Christ-like melancholia written on his face underlines the message that he is not like other men, but partakes of the nature of divinity. Even the ostensibly functional device of portraying Charles in triplicate seems to strengthen this web of associations, subliminally evoking thoughts of the Trinity. Van Dyck’s triple portrait cannot be described as a painting which predicts the downfall of England’s last truly absolute monarch. But it is a work of art which explains with perfect clarity why, in an anti-Catholic, Puritan England, increasingly bent on progressive democracy, the death of Charles I was both inevitable and (in Cromwell’s words) a “cruel necessity”. (http://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/archive/readArticle/244) |
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发表于 2010-9-6 01:39
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发表于 2010-9-6 01:46
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