How I see Art.

My Approach

Art takes time. You cannot enter an exhibition unprepared, stare at a landscape and be moved, at least
in the manner that artists intend. To appreciate art, you must become familiar like the artists
themselves with the themes that unite art and without which craft cannot become art. It used to take
years of study. Today the methods revealed here speed the process, allowing you to see almost
immediately what once was hidden. Still, the truth remains: the longer you study an image, the more
you will see.

Art is intended for artists. T.S. Eliot or another great poet once said that great poetry is not written for
lovers of poetry ensconced in an armchair, nor professors of Literature at prestigious universities, nor
even for literary critics or eager students. Great poetry is only written for other great poets. So it is with
great art too. Nevertheless, with the now-ready availability of images, it is easier for anyone with an
independent mind to understand art like a great artist does than it ever was. This site makes it easier
still.

Art is not photography. Ever since artists re-introduced illusionism around 1500, experts have viewed art
like illustration, as though "through a window". Patrons and ordinary viewers did too. Today, even
though the methodologies of scholarship regularly change, the perception through which experts view
art never does. They think of art in photographic terms even if, as in many masterpieces, numerous non-
realistic features defeat their illusion. Their paradigm does not allow them to think otherwise. True art,
though, always depicts the inner world of the artist by its very nature. It is the unseen difference
between art and craft. Once you grasp that, all changes.

Art is veiled. Illusionistic art is what it says: an illusion. It may look real (meaning a view of the outer
world) but it never is. A battle scene, for example, is never a battle. All those weapons are paintbrushes,
palette knives or, perhaps, the hammers of a sculptor and all those soldiers represent the artist and his
assistants in the studio as they “battle” in the artist’s mind to create the painting. Just as we think in
metaphors and then translate the same ideas into words, as linguists tell us, so art depicting thought is
metaphorical too.1 Don’t take the images literally; they are visual metaphors.

5
Sight is deceptive. For people in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, reality was an illusion because
the only true reality was divine. They were partly right, as scientists now know. Sight is inaccurate
because, contrary to common sense, you only see what you already know. For instance, art historians,
convinced that portraits portray a real sitter, never recognized that many of them resemble the artist’s
own self‐portrait. [See Portraiture] They never saw these obvious resemblances because, convinced that
art is “photographic”, they never imagined them. Thus, contrary to what we think about sight, we paint
our own reality. Art helps us to understand that.

Art is esoteric. A large proportion of artists, regardless of culture, followed one of the many forms of the
Inner Tradition. These include Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Spiritual Alchemy, Theosophy and the
Kaballah. In all these traditions, self-knowledge is the only true knowledge which is why every painter
paints himself. Most artists, though, probably followed mystical strains of Christianity, some of which
were banned by the Church, others accepted within it. All claim that reality is an illusion and that the
goal of life is to “purify” the mind. The most important idea from our point-of-view is that the Bible
should be read allegorically as a guide for the individual soul and that, since Man was created in the
image of God, each of us can become Christ.

Art contains knowledge. It is little understood by conventional art historians that much of what an artist
needs to know about philosophy, religion and art is contained in art itself. A Renaissance artist’s lack of
formal education was thus no hindrance to his or her understanding. Indeed the knowledge and wisdom
of a Renaissance craftsman was far more highly admired than scholars have even imagined.2
Fortunately, with help from this site, you too can learn to read art like an artist. Once you do, art
becomes your own gateway to self-knowledge which is the only form of wisdom that has lasting value.
All other knowledge is a product of your own time, perceived according to the prevailing paradigm. That
will change but the knowledge conveyed in art will remain, as it does in great literature too.

Art makes sense. Art historians often note “errors”, “ambiguities” and “inconsistencies” in the apparent
scene that do not make sense. These, they then argue, are typical of a great masterpiece because art
does not need to make sense. If that were true, there would be no wisdom in the image and it would
not be art. The truth is that many of the “illogical” features in a work of art are problems of the viewer’s
own perception. Once the underlying scene is recognized, they make sense after all.
Art's Themes

1. Alter Ego

Artist as Animal

The Portrait Galleries on this website reveal with numerous examples that artists often use other people
as their alter ego. However, their self-identification with other characters is not restricted to human
beings as the entries under this Theme show. Many artists, from the first shaman onwards, have
identified with or represented themselves as dogs, cats, monkeys, horses and even dragons. Kafka
became a cockroach. Artists feel at one with virtually everything in a painting. That iconic ox and donkey
from The Nativitity, for instance, paired and watching every scene of Christ’s birth since the earliest
centuries of Christian art, are not mentioned in the Gospels. Yet, as animal-observers, they are almost
always an alter ego of the artist, in part because the ox is the attribute of St Luke, patron saint of
painters.

Artists do not represent themselves as animals to hide the concept that every painter paints himself
from the patron; that is not their principal purpose. They do it either because they feel at one with an
animal or because, as mystics, they believe that behind the individualistic mask of the self lies unity.
Indeed sexual desire defiantly asserts Man’s unity with Nature: we are all animals. Artists in any age, like
ordinary people in the so-called “Dark Ages”, see life in plants and rocks too, however strange that may
seem to the rest of us. If you have trouble grasping this, try to remember that most of us in this material
world of the twenty-first century have lost our imaginations. The natural world of vision is not real, as
even science tells us; what we see is an illusion. Only the life of the mind is real and that, in art, is what
we are looking at.

Artist as King

Kings and queens dominate European history not just factually as the figurehead of an era or the
instigator of events but also as a symbol of all that is most pure and powerful in the human soul. It is an
idea that runs through the art and literature of every century with a solid foundation in Scripture. Old
Testament prophets, like Moses and David, were raised in royal households, according to their
constructed myths, because royalty signified a semi-divine status above mundane life and thus a step
closer to God. Jesus, from a humble family, became “King of the Jews”. In Asia Buddha started life as a
royal prince for similar reasons. The palace garden in the Middle Ages also symbolized a secure,
enclosed space more rarified than field or street. It became the setting of troubadour poetry, an
important avenue for the Inner Tradition. In alchemy too the king and queen represented the male and
female principles in each of us which, when combined, become the symbol of our purest essence, the
Self we all share with Nature.

Royal portraits are particularly important as the face of a nation's consciousness. The discovery then
that a long sequence of English and French rulers look strikingly like the artist who painted each portrait
will disabuse viewers well beyond art lovers. Not only are the iconic faces of these rulers inaccurate but
they should change our understanding of art as well. The link, though, between great artists and
kingship is not an understanding confined to artists.

Artist as Other Artist

Saul Bellow’s son, a writer too, once explained how over the years he had incorporated aspects of his
late father’s being into himself: “ways of thinking, particular expressions, a certain way of looking at the
world.” Now that he was dead, he wrote, “my father, though absent, is deeply, unpredictably,
stubbornly present in me.”1 Poetic painters feel the same way about earlier masters whose work they
have studied so intently that the other artist’s characteristics, brushstrokes, subject matter and ways of
thinking are deeply embedded in themselves. This means that Giorgio Vasari’s account of how the soul
of one Renaissance artist was kept alive in the next is not a mere literary flourish (as generally explained)
but a very accurate description of how one artist feels about another. This deep sense of identification
with their earlier peers can be seen in art from many periods and many countries.

When Matisse and Picasso discussed the issue in old age, they both agreed that it was important to keep
earlier artists “alive in their minds.”2 Indeed Picasso, on being shown some Paleolithic cave art,
wondered whether he might not even have been that cave-painter, “the same little man” reborn time
and again as a great artist until he became Picasso. Awareness of this theme and of its importance to
poets will help you recognize such references in the most unlikely places. Indeed the ways in which
artists weave this meaning are varied, with some of the more common ones demonstrated below.
Become familiar with them because the more often you see them (as with any theme here), the more
often and easily you will recognize them elsewhere.

Artist as Poet

One of several themes running through art concerns the artist's relationship with a great poet. He or she
not only considers the poet a muse but identifies with him as well, aspiring to become as great in visual
art as the poet is in literature. Michelangelo's widely acknowledged identification with Dante is the best
known. Auguste Rodin thought similarly when he placed the well-known figure of The Thinker above his
Gates of Hell. Rodin in calling the sculpture The Poet thought of it as a representation of both himself
and Dante, two-artists-in-one thinking about (and thus creating) his own masterpiece which was
inspired, of course, by Dante's own Inferno.

An artist’s identification with a poet was even essential to the birth of illusionistic portraiture. In the first
portrait of a woman not in profile, Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci, the sitter was a celebrated
poet. Mary Garrard has argued that Ginevra’s identity as both poet and woman was crucial to Leonardo
and correctly argued that he thought of women as symbols of creativity even as she dismissed the
theory of another scholar that the portrait is an ode to painting.1 Both are right, of course (see Ginevra
de’ Benci), and even the Mona Lisa addresses the same issues. Besides, Martin Kemp has argued that
Leonardo was yet another admirer of Dante whose work we see reflected in his drawings.
Art On Stage (Theatre)

Painting is a performance. Every day artists enter their studio and stand in front of their easel, brush in
hand, ready to paint. They are alone, like an actor on a stage. No-one can help them. This aspect of
painting is deeply ingrained in the creative mind. At least three major figures in the Renaissance – Luca
Signorelli, Michelangelo and Albrecht Dürer – produced art that has been described by modern scholars
as performative. David Summers wrote: “For Michelangelo, the idea of art as a performance had the
deepest significance. To conceive and realize – or perform – ever more difficult things was a sign of
election and of spiritual progress.”1

Artists as distant to each other as Thomas Gainsborough in the eighteenth century from Jean-Michel
Basquiat in twentieth both used a pencil in ways that have been described as “a performance.”
Basquiat’s pencil apparently danced across the page.2 In 1988 Svetlana Alpers based a whole chapter of
her excellent Rembrandt monograph on the theatrical nature of Rembrandt’s art, arguing that he tried
to present life “as if it were a studio event.”3 Using the theater as the underlying metaphor for their
own performance, major artists often stage seemingly unrelated scenes as though they are in a theatre.
Art historians then criticize their work for the staged atmosphere of their scenes, wrongly assuming that
the look is unintentional, unwanted and inconsequential.

There used to be a legend about Jacques-Louis David, the great master of the French revolution, that he
imagined his early Oath of the Horatii while attending the theater.4 It appeared to be true solely
because the figures resemble actors and the background a stage-set. Henri Matisse’s work is described
as performative too, in part because he was an amateur violinist and used a violin in his compositions as
an alter ego.5 More than one theorist believes that the main theme of Pablo Picasso, his rival, was also
the nature of his own performance.6 Even J.M.W. Turner the earlier British landscape artist who rarely
drew interior scenes is said to have had a “strong instinct for the nature of painting as a performance.”7

A theatrical metaphor about the visual arts may initially appear somewhat forced because while
musicians, actors and clowns perform in public, the artist is alone in the studio. Even so, they hang their
work in public, images which are then subjected to the criticism of the crowd. Their art, though, is such
an accurate reflection of their inner thinking and being that they identify with their canvas on the wall,
just as they identify with Western art’s iconic subject too, Christ hung on the Cross. Remember this
because it is a very important link which will stand you in good stead when you yourself interpret art.

Poets verbalize what artists depict so they too think of their life, indeed all lives, as a performance.
Shakespeare’s rap that “all the world’s a stage” is well-known in part because it is so true. If that were
not so, few would remember the lines however well chosen the words. Indeed its universality signals its
far-reaching significance. Another poet, Arthur Rimbaud, thought it wrong to say “I think” because we
ought to say “I am thought”. The I, he argued, is somebody else so that, in effect, the mind observes
itself at work; he thus thought of himself as a conductor. Likewise, Stéphane Mallarmé thought that the
reader needed to perform his work in order to complete it.8

Art externalizes the inner workings of the mind, dressing up its various parts as features or characters
from life. In that respect all art is a stage-set. You only need think superficially on the primary level to
recall pictures of the biblical Susannah bathing alone unaware that two dirty old men are watching or
battle scenes in which horses gallop horizontally across the stage. Enter left, exit right. Or Christ, in
images of Ecce Homo, standing alone as the crowd looks up at him “on stage.” Even the Crucifixion
story, as mentioned earlier, is played over and over again, with different actors in each role and a
different crowd watching it all happen. Christ, though, was not the beginning.

Art carries in its forms ideas from earlier art endlessly repeated in novel ways specific to its own time.
That is why the themes on this site are not restricted to any particular century or culture but have been
documented, at least here, from medieval times onwards. This is worth a short digression. Art helps
man survive the hellish torments of this life by providing examples, for those who can detect them, of
how to find wisdom in one’s own being, a wisdom that will bring inner peace. It is present in all of us. I
have a hunch that some of these ideas, as expressed in visual art, started long before Christ in other
forms on the walls of Neolithic caves deep underground. Christ, after all, was “born” 2,000 years ago; art
40,000. David Lewis-Williams, a prominent scholar of the Neolithic era, believes that early homo sapiens
imposed the pattern of his mind on his environment and turned awe-inspiring caverns deep
underground into a 3-D representation of the neolithic mind complete with mental images on the wall.9

Today performance in art has transformed into an established genre, known as Performance Art. That
does not mean that the art is necessarily self-reflective but the good art is. To give but one example an
Icelandic artist, Ragnar Kjartansson, spent each day at the 2009 Venice Biennale painting portraits of
Speedo-clad models. The Village Voice’s art critic then wondered how much of his show was about the
paintings and “how much about the performance of being a painter.”10

The Divine Artist

The Renaissance tendency to describe great artists as “divine” is usually considered a rhetorical device
to express society’s admiration for the inexplicable talents of a great master.1 Though no doubt true,
many artists interpreted the term differently, not through Church doctrine as society did but through
the interiorized beliefs of mystics and saints with whom they felt at one (See The Inner Tradition.) The
visual evidence for this is overwhelming. Art all over Europe suggests that artists really did think of
themselves as divine, not because they had vast egos (which no doubt they had) but because we are all
made in the image of God, however well disguised. Just as a saint follows Christ’s path and is an image
of Christ that ordinary believers can imitate, so artists undergoing the agony of creation identify with
Christ’s suffering too. Their portrait of Christ is thus an image of their own self.

Artists’ identification with the Divine Creator is the foundation of Western art and explains how biblical
scenes from the Nativity to the Crucifixion are all expressions of the basic idea that “every painter paints
himself.” Their art, like the teaching in devotional books that were so popular in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, suggests that Christ’s story should guide our own interior life and that by following it
we can each uncover our own divinity. However surprising, it is a truth without which you will never
understand art.2 Even modern artists felt the same way. Manet painted himself as Christ twice and
when Matisse as an old man was asked by a Dominican novice whether he was inspired by God, he
replied: "Yes, but that god is me." Of course, no-one should take my word for it. Go see for yourselves,
either below or in museums of Western art anywhere.
Every Painter Paints Himself

Every painter paints himself, a saying first documented in the early Renaissance, has been mentioned by
artists ever since. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci used it, as Picasso did too; Lucian Freud and
other contemporary artists still cite variations today. Yet despite its great significance to artists, art
scholars rarely discuss the saying or its meaning. Those who do seem to have no choice but to deny it:
painters don’t really paint themselves, they say, but their sensibility. But why would a phrase that meant
so much to great masters, and still does to their followers, require re-phrasing to mean anything? The
truth is, as this website demonstrates, it is the images of these visual artists that are veiled, not their
words.

Despite everything you have ever heard about art Every painter paints himself is the underlying principle
of great art since at least the Renaissance and probably before. To artists and thinkers in the
Renaissance, the human body was a microcosm of the universe and it was widely believed that the
secrets of God’s creation could be found inside us. That is why both Michelangelo and Leonardo
dissected corpses, breaking the law in the process. They were searching inside for the secrets of
Creation and the cosmos.

Now forget almost everything you have ever been told about the visual arts. Great art is not, and has
never been, a depiction of the exterior world. True artists never intended that, even if their patrons
expected it. It would have been mere copying of nature. Regardless of initial appearances, all poetic art
is an allegory of the artist’s own mind in the process of creation, and thus an allegory in miniature of
God’s own creation. That is why ‘know yourself’ in a broader context is the motto of all mystics. Not
everyone can see this, though, because as in difficult poetry, the true meaning of great art is hidden. The
French painter Eugene Delacroix wrote “the eyes of many people are dull or false; they see objects
literally, of the exquisite they see nothing.” Other masters have made similar remarks. If you change
your perception, though, and stop imagining falsely that art is an early form of photography, the scene
itself will change from a depiction of the exterior world to that of the artist’s own mind. The process is
similar to how a Shakespearean play is mere entertainment for groundlings on one level while also
providing, on a higher plane, an allegorical illustration of the poet’s own mind in the process of creation.
Literary critics George Steiner and Elizabeth Sacks have each separately shown how. The same has been
written of Dante’s Commedia.

The problem in art, going back to antiquity, is everyday vision. While we all know that words can be read
on multiple levels, we do not grasp easily how sight can be too. We think that what we see is “fact”
though our minds use just a tiny selection of the visual data they receive to create a scene of our own
making. As humans we have much in common and thus see much alike but the differences can also be
major as jurors soon discover. We each paint our own visual “reality” as a reflection of what we already
know. Thus artists, learning this from each other’s art, do likewise and paint an allegorical view of their
own mind with each figure as a specific alter ego. It is a traditional concept commonly accepted in
literature that only the illusion of visual reality prevents us from seeing in art.

Once you know that every painter paints himself, every masterpiece of Western art has the potential to
change before your eyes. Discover here some of the techniques that artists have long used to convey
this and your perception of art will improve as dramatically as your enjoyment of it will also increase.
Music as Art

Music as a metaphor for the creative act has been an iconic metaphor in the visual arts since at least the
Renaissance, readily recognized by visual artists in all periods yet unseen by others. For example, female
artists in the sixteenth century instead of painting their self-portraits laboring at a demeaning, manual
craft showed themselves at a keyboard performing music. Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana and
Tintoretto’s daughter, Marietta, all did so. Yet although music is well-known and widely accepted as a
metaphor for visual art in the work of individual painters, such as Courbet playing instruments in his
early self-portraits or Matisse with his violin1, it is still largely unrecognized as a metaphor common to
poetic painters in general.

There are other links too, beyond poetry being central to both arts. A painter’s palette methodically laid
out with a range of colors can be visually similar to a keyboard. Theodore Reff, a specialist in French
painting of the nineteenth century, wrote that Paul Cézanne prepared his palette with as many as
eighteen pigments, “arranging them in series like musical scales.”2 Yet, despite his own use of music in a
simile for paint, Reff has generally failed to recognize Cézanne’s and Edgar Degas’ own use of music as
self-representational. The reason why is obvious. Sight is so compelling as a representation of truth that
we recognize a play on words much more easily than a play on something seen by our own eyes. Take a
really good look.

Writers and Writing

Writing and drawing, the action of using a pencil or pen to make marks on paper, are visually similar
processes. The poetic mind in any medium is also similar as well. Yet when confronted with, say,
Courbet’s Portrait of Baudelaire we observers of art will think: “This is a poet. The title identifies him as
Baudelaire; he looks like Baudelaire. He must be writing.” This form of conventional perception has little
in common with the poetic instincts of the writers themselves or even of our own ideas about literature.
In the nineteenth century, for instance, novelists like Balzac, Proust and Oscar Wilde were using stories
about artists to illustrate their own creative processes and no sensitive reader has any trouble in
recognizing this. Basil Hallward, the painter in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, is a prime example.
Yet the illusion of reality is so persistent that we cannot imagine the reverse so easily: that a visual
image of Baudelaire is Courbet. It is worth remembering too that, in French at least, the same word is
used for the action of both writing and drawing: écrivant.

My own theory, that all figures in a poetic painting are in one way or another an aspect of the artist’s
own mind, illustrates this paradox well. It is, after all, a novel idea in the visual arts. No-one, it appears,
has ever suggested it before. Few accept it now. Yet Wilde’s own analysis of his book not only fits the
theory precisely but is relatively tame and surprises no-one: "Basil Hallward [the painter] is what I think I
am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian is what I would like to be....”1 All three figures are
Wilde.

The paintings and graphic works discussed under this theme reveal, almost all of them for the first time,
that figures in art who write, from the Evangelists to modern poets, are the artists themselves drawing.
 2. Poetic Mind

Androgyny

While the Renaissance phrase Every painter paints himself uses the masculine to denote both genders,
as the English of my youth did too, the artists themselves were under no delusion that their male minds
would be sufficient to become like God (see The Divine Artist). They needed a feminine side too (or a
masculine one in the case of female artists) because a mind reflecting the cosmos – whether God’s or a
visual poet’s – contains both genders as any reasonable thinker since Plato would have known. This is
important to grasp because the patriarchal norms of everyday life in the Renaissance, of particular
interest to feminist art historians, were markedly different from the intellectual concepts so important
to mystical thought.

Although some historians believe that Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine mystic and translator of Plato's
writings, rediscovered the subject of androgyny in the late fifteenth century,1 it had always been
present in one form or another, including among the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages. Caroline
Walker Bynum has shown, for example, how large numbers of devout people described and thought of
Jesus as Mother. Indeed, even more surprisingly, “authors [in the medieval period] found it far easier
than we seem to find it to apply characteristics stereotyped as male or female to the opposite sex.”2

Although artists from the Enlightenment onwards may not have been as religious as their earlier
colleagues, many remained spiritually-inclined, even mystically-inclined, and continued to present their
psychic life as androgynous. In the nineteenth century artists like Edouard Manet, a man not easily
linked to mysticism or esotericism, demonstrated with startling clarity that their minds (or at least the
mind they imagined) was androgynous, a position which by the twentieth century was receiving outside
support from discoveries in analytical psychology.

Artist’s Mind

All true art is literally a mirror of the artist’s mind, a reflection of the artist's imagination at work. If you
know that, and bear it in mind when looking at artworks, your eyes will be alert for the visual details
that convey it. If not, your perception will fall victim to the everyday illusion of exterior reality, whether
examining an image of the Nativity, a portrait of Napoleon or a view inside Matisse’s studio.

Some scholars have identified artistic production as the true subject of a seemingly quite different scene
but such occasions are rare.1 Most are so convinced that past art was designed for the patron that they
look at art through the eyes of a contemporary spectator: as though through a window. They are
literalists. Yet to poetic painters the canvas is never “a window” but “a mirror” and nothing is as it
seems. We are not looking out, but in. Remember that, and doors will open that you never even knew
were there. Take a look at these examples of how artists portray their own mind.
Conception (Sexual and Mental)

The poet’s pen is in some sense a penis, wrote a literary critic. “[T]he patriarchal notion that the writer
fathers his text just as God fathered the world is and has been pervasive in Western literary civilization.”
That is how she expressed the common link between male writers and the female body in early modern
Europe. The English poet Philip Sydney (1554-86) wrote in a sonnet that he was “great with child to
speak, and helpless in my throes (child labour).” John Milton (1608-74), described as a “phallic poet
extraordinaire”, also made analogies between the “issue of the brain” and “the issue of the womb.”1

It is difficult for us to imagine this but in the Renaissance ordinary people assumed that the process of
human thought mirrored on a smaller scale God’s creative acts in Genesis. Our minds were a microcosm
of the macrocosm. That is how and why Michelangelo turned the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling panels on
God’s creation of the world into the self-referential thought processes of his own imagination.2 Even
Renaissance medical terminology made use of this link, naming the cavities of the brain ventricles, thus
little bellies or little wombs.3

Nowhere, though, is the link between human sexuality and the mind’s activity more clearly nor more
repeatedly stressed than in Shakespeare. Again and again the Bard makes bawdy jokes as entertainment
for the groundlings that on another level indicate the generation of ideas within his own mind and those
of his characters. “Shakespeare revelled in the knowledge of his creative powers", wrote Elizabeth Sacks.
"I would further contend that he transferred this creativity to almost all his characters, in that they also
can generate and give birth to thoughts as well as to children.”4 Most significantly, imagination in the
Renaissance was said to be “bred in the eyes.”5 In fact, in the fifteenth century it was common to refer
to an artist's initial sketches as a concepto, an esempio or a modello. Art historians have noted how
these terms and their cognates seem to have implied the mental image of the artist, the scene in their
mind, and by the middle of the sixteenth century the idea that drawing was a record of mental activity
was beyond question.6

Sexual intercourse, conception and pregnancy have been long-running metaphors in both literature and
art as ways to describe the mind’s processes. Yet vision is such a powerful illusion – and painting
sometimes so similar to what we see through our own eyes – that we often fail to differentiate in art
between the object described and its underlying metaphor. That is what has happened with Titian’s
Venuses and Manet’s Olympia, scenes taken for a description of reality but which, in their poetic
meaning, are metaphors for the artist’s own conceptions.

Creative Struggle

Great art, far more commonly than is recognized, uses visual metaphor to depict the process of its own
creation in the artist’s mind. There are many stages in the conception of an artwork in any media, each
with its own specific character. Some, like the initial meditation on a theme, can be relatively passive;
others far more active. The process of transforming a mental image into a specific composition can be
particularly frustrating and has often been described as a great struggle. We have all experienced at one
time or another the agony of a writer as we try to express ourselves in words; artists and composers
must do the same with images and sounds. Works of art are not pretty pictures without meaning. They
are full of profound thought. The internal effort involved in placing that thought into an image –
articulately, concisely and elegantly – can result in a full-scale battle within the psyche. We, the
audience, may find that difficult to imagine when the end-result appears so effortless.

Titian was said to look at his pictures “with a concentration as severe as if they had been his mortal
enemies, in order to find faults in them; and if he found something that was not in accord with his
intentions, he went to work like a surgeon who ruthlessly removes a tumor…’1 And Manet, whose
brushwork looks so spontaneous, often went through thirty canvasses to produce a single portrait.
Artists continued to express the same idea in the twentieth century because the internal effort to create
never changes. Matisse once said: “I don’t want any more struggles in my life. I’ve got quite enough in
my work.”2 It is the same in music. According to the man who interrupted Beethoven while composing,
he “looked as if he had just emerged victorious from a life and death struggle with the entire host of
contrapuntists, his constant antagonists.’3

Art historians are specialists today so they tend to focus on what differentiates one period from another
or one work of art from another. They often fail to recognize those elements in art that never change.
The vacuum is so great that ordinary lovers can easily recognize what professionals have never seen. For
instance, awareness of how extraordinarily difficult this struggle to create can be, and of the psychic
energy expended, will help you recognize the metaphorical meaning behind the many images in art in
which this struggle is the central theme.

Executing Painting

Even today we speak about “executing a painting” or “the artist’s execution of the work” so it should be
no surprise that execution is one of the most important allegorical themes in art. Whether the story
behind the artist-as-executioner is religious, mythical, fictional or even historical, the underlying subject
is always about art with the artist as both executioner and victim. After all, since every painter paints
himself (see that Theme), every artist executes himself too. This theme, fusing the artist's imagination of
the studio on one level with the painting’s apparent theme on another, takes advantage of the long
tradition in which artists have used various weapons, from arrows to rifles, as symbols of their own tools
(see Brush and Palette.) It also suggests, since either the executioner or the victim is usually evil, that
the artist’s mind (the total image) contains both good and evil (See The Inner Tradition.) In addition,
since many such stories tend to contain an executioner of one gender with a victim of the other, the
artist can present his/her mind as androgynous, as all truly creative minds always are (See Androgyny) In
a further twist, the moment of death has long symbolized the completion of the artist’s creation in any
medium. Thus, as the executioner sends the victim to his/her death in the image, the painting-in-process
is completed. In “death” it reaches perfection and becomes, somewhat paradoxically, a symbol of the
artist’s “immortality”.
Frowns and Thoughts

The frown is not a hot topic in art history and, though little has been written about it, few features
convey meaning so efficiently. Elizabeth Sacks wrote that a pursed brow in Othello immediately
indicates thoughts shut up in the brain and so it does in art too.1 But who’s thinking? A deep furrowed
brow often appears on odd characters, such as Michalengelo’s David (1501-04) or Ron Mueck's A Girl
(2006), where it can only represent the artist’s thoughts as expressed through his alter ego and not the
thoughts of the protagonist it seems to represent. When frowns appear on animals, such as St. Jerome's
lion in an engraving by Albrecht Dürer, you know at once that the animal, as a self-reference, is thinking.
The meaning of a frown is so obvious that Charles Darwin thought the corrugator muscle making it was
the most remarkable of the human face because it irresistably conveys the idea of mind.2

And that's why a large number of Dürer’s portraits are characterized by frowns as well.3 They furrow
their foreheads not because they share any similarity on the surface but because all represent
underneath the thinking Dürer himself. Thery are common in self-portraits too. Artists, accused in the
Renaissance of being just manual labourers, are thinking beings and the frown conveys it. For a dozen
examples of such self-portraits, see the post "Art's Unknown Frown" (2013).

Letters in Art

One little-known artistic method is letter-based, an artist’s use of their own name or initials to indicate
subjectivity. A signature is conventionally considered a sign of authorship and nothing more but, as a
number of scholars have pointed out within their own specialty, the careful placement of a signature
adds meaning too.1 This ought to be better known and considered in the interpretation of any work of
art. What you need to know, though, is something even more fascinating and rarely seen by those who
are not artists themselves: the hidden presence of an artist’s initials or the letters of their name. By
disguising the letters as objects in nature, the viewer “reads” them as images of something else and thus
misses the artists’ meaning. Study the examples here and you will see the same method in other art
because, as we always emphasize, if you do not know that artists do such things, you cannot see them.

Art historians have seen such letters on occasion but unaware that “every painter paints himself” either
mistake them for another form of signature without meaning or identify them with some biographical
detail of the artist's life unrelated to art. Something similar has been uncovered in poetry too where the
hidden use of letters linked to a poet’s name and the creative process has a long tradition. In Dante’s
Commedia Madison Sowell has argued that phrases such as “io non lo ‘nvidio” and “io vidi” refer with
their use of o, v, i, and d to Ovidio (in English, Ovid), Dante’s poetic muse.2 Likewise, in the painter Jan
van Eyck’s famous motto “as well as I can”, which appears on several paintings, Pamela Smith has
revealed that it is a form of anagram, containing all the letters of his name except the “V” and the “Y”.3
Looking for letters in art is one of the simpler paths to aesthetic satisfaction because, in finding them
and they are relatively easy to see, new meaning is revealed.
Mirrors

Mirrors and reflections are enormously important in art, and so common a theme, that you should keep
an eye out for them: they will help explain the work’s underlying meaning. Here’s why. The mind has
been likened to a mirror for as long as humans have written, painted, sculpted, etched and composed
poetry. The Greek root for Plato’s word idea, eidos, literally means not just image or likeness but an
image reflected in water or mirror.1 Even in English, minds reflect and speculate. So, since all true art
depicts the artist’s mind, mirrors and reflections are bound to play a highly significant role. Mirrors
suggest that the viewer should turn inwards to gain self-knowledge rather than outwards to the natural
world. In paintings, the discovery that the surface itself represents a mirror contradicts the very
principles on which conventional art history is based: that artists depict the world outside. Indeed it is
only once you accept that artists do not depict material reality that you begin see so many mirrors in art
because you cannot see what you do not believe.

Here is an example. No-one to my knowledge has ever noted that Velazquez’s iconic masterpiece Las
Meninas, once known as The Painting of Paintings, is not a naturalistic depiction of the Royal Family but
a reflection in its entirety. Depicting his mind as a mirror, the Spaniard composed the painting as though
the canvas itself, across its entire surface, is a giant looking-glass. In the center, in the distance, he
painted a second, smaller mirror with the king and queen looking back out at us (or, more accurately,
him.) They are him, as any alchemist of the time might have recognized: royal symbols of the creative
mind in spiritual perfection, united androgynously, male and female. The whole canvas is his mind; the
small mirror his inner eye. It is a theme repeated time and again, from Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait
to Edouard Manet’s Olympia and beyond.

For all true artists, even atheists like Picasso, our minds are a reflection of God or, put less religiously,
the cosmic power of Creation. Many mystics have described our minds as a mirror of God, even St. Paul,
the founder of the Church as an Establishment. He wrote: “Now we all, with unveiled face, reflecting the
glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are being changed from glory to glory into his own image, for this comes
from the Lord who is now Spirit.”2

Believe this, if you can, because if you do your understanding of art, which artists think is virtually
synonmous with true aesthetic satisfaction, will be enriched.

Smoking Art

Once tobacco reached Europe, smoking became a visual metaphor in art for the imagination. True artists
need to convey the process by which their minds form images and they found pipes and cigarettes a
clever way to do so.

The smoker inhales nicotine from the exterior world and then blows the substance out of his body again
as smoke, just as the mind of a poetic painter imports scenes from outer reality and then “exports”
them again onto canvas as something else. Besides, tobacco stimulates the mind and encourages
reflection, an idea easily conveyed by a smoker deep in thought. In another serendipitous characteristic,
smoke itself changes shape in the air, providing a concise metaphor for the metamorphosis of visual
form within the artist’s imagination.

Making as much as possible out of a single metaphorical subject, artists sometimes use the shape of a
cigarette (long, thin with a burning, red tip) to suggest a paintbrush in the artist’s hand with a blob of
red paint on it.

State Honors

One common feature of poetic art that has remained almost totally unknown is the symbol of state
honor. Though not as widely used among artists as some of the other themes on this site, it was still
commonly used by the best of the best. Artists like Titian, Rubens and Van Dyck received gold chains
from powerful rulers in recognition of their favor. The artists then proudly displayed these heavy chains
in their self-portraits as well as in portraits of other figures. The chains on the latter now help identify
these figures as an alter ego of the artist while also conveying the artist’s primacy over contemporary
painters.

Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) sought state honor all his life and when he finally became a member of the
Order of Santiago, the Order’s Cross was famously painted onto his self-portrait in Las Meninas. Edouard
Manet (1832-83), the French artist who was an enthusiastic follower of Velazquez, was similarly keen to
receive the French equivalent, the Légion d’Honneur, and when he too received it shortly before his
death he remarked that he would have preferred it sooner. Nevertheless Manet’s oeuvre, almost from
the beginning, is full of symbols referring to the Légion d’Honneur as a fictional mark of his primacy
among French painters. Learn to identify the handful of symbols used to suggest these honors and it will
help you unravel the work’s meaning.

Violence and Art

Art - as opposed to illustration - is tough to produce, very tough. Every masterpiece requires the artist to
expend large reserves of psychic energy while battling the chaos of conflicting ideas. It is a painful
process often compared to childbirth. But struggle and childbirth do not fully express a third theme, a
common visual metaphor in art, violence. Violence in every conceivable form, from murder to a bloody
battle. Leonardo, thinking of the ultimate murder, claimed that the sculptor re-enacts the Crucifixion
itself each time he models Christ's wounds. This is, I should add, a clear indication that Leonardo
understood Christ's story not as external fact but as a metaphor for what he had experienced in his
mind.1 Think about it: Leonardo identified with Christ's killers and the work of art with Christ himself.

The many recorded comments of twentieth-century artists continue to echo those from the
Renaissance. Matisse, like Leonardo, imagined the crucifixion as a psychic event that all artists and
mystics experience. "The process of creation", he remarked "demands crucifixion" and he added that
“the builders of churches never achieved anything good or beautiful without being crucified for it.”2
Otto Dix said something similar in non-religious terms: “Painting [is] a medium of cool execution;
observation an instrument of relentless attack."3 Though they initially seem contrasting ideas, even
'cool execution' involves violence. This aspect of creative thought, as with its close cousin Creative
Struggle (a separate theme), can be seen throughout the history of art and is often expressed through
military metaphors and in battle scenes.

3. Eye

Eyes at Bottom

Discover another "unknown" theme in art: the artist's eye or eyes at the bottom of the picture. By
placing forms in eye-shapes near the lower edge, the artist communicates that the image above is inside
his mind by being, so to speak, behind his forehead. And, although the practice is pervasive in art used
by painters from the Renaissance to the present day, I have never come across any mention of this in
the literature. Like the ubiquity of self-representation itself, this particular strategy to convey it, one of
many, also remains "unknown".

Behind the Artist’s Eye

This group of images is really a sub-set of the Hand and Eye theme. In depicting their own imaginations
at work, some great artists have set their scene where, if you think about it, we ought to expect it:
behind the eye or, more exactly, behind their eyes in their imagination. Yet we are so accustomed to
the idea of painting as a mirror of nature, or as a view through a window, that even when we know for
certain that the scene is set inside an artist’s imagination we think of it as outside, in nature. It is a
failure of the viewer's imagination which, to understand the artist on the poetic level, must be equally
imaginative. That's why a great artist's true audience is other great artists, not you and me.

In accepting the current art historical paradigm as the correct one we fail to imagine that the scene
takes place where it obviously would. In the examples below there are eye-shaped openings in the
background or diffused light filtering in from the outside as though through a lens or, as in examples by
Rembrandt and Goya, the action seems to take place in the darkeness of a cave with the cave’s opening
as an ancient orifice: the human eye, the artist's. Sometimes, as in paintings by both Michelangelo and
Heironymous Bosch, the location is so precisely described that optical nerves are represented as well.
This type of setting is so important to both the artist’s meaning and the new paradigm proposed by this
site that I have created a separate section for it. Yet despite its importance only one art scholar, to my
knowledge, has ever recognized this: John Ciofalo writing on Goya.1
Hand and Eye

God in medieval and Renaissance art is often represented only by his hand, as in the hand of an artist
extending from the heavens. Indeed Genesis describes God as a model craftsman carefully checking the
quality of his daily production with the phrase : "and God saw that it was good." God is an artist and his
hand symbolizes Creation. For this and other more mundane reasons the hand became a symbol of the
artist’s craft while the eye came to represent the mind or imagination. These meanings are often missed
because the current art historical paradigm takes images literally and fails to recognize that all figures,
including their body parts, are representations of the artist.

As we demonstrate in a number of entries below, the hand and eye are often juxtaposed in art as well,
one placed next to the other. There is meaning to this because without the hand, the conception in the
artist’s eye is just a conception; without the conception, the hand has nothing to craft. Both are needed.
With this simple idea many now-mysterious works of art can be explained. Nevertheless, not all
representations of eye and hand are quite so obvious because, as poetic elements, artists often disguise
them in visual metaphors: the eye as a window, a lighted doorway, the sun or moon etc. The hand may
likewise be represented by an animal’s paw or an empty glove. Keep an eye out for these clues to art's
meaning. They are important.

Insight-Outsight

In art, as in language, there have always been two forms of vision, sight and insight. In the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance "reality" was not considered to be in this world which is ever-changing and poorly
perceived by our senses. Almost everyone in the Renaissance, regardless of their sect, thought that true
reality was elsewhere where forms remained pure and constant. A popular tract, published by Martin
Luther in 1516, argued that the right eye had the power to see into the eternal while the left eye saw
the material world we know. The two together, though, cannot function as they ought to
simultaneously. The left eye must shut off this world for the right eye to see eternity. This tradition has
been widely used ever since and is still practiced today. It has, however, hardly ever been recognized,
with James Hall a rare and notable exception.1 Among secular artists in tune with the Western tradition,
an open eye signifies perception of this world, a closed one insight into the imagination.

Art historians used to think that Realists and Impressionists only used outsight, a complete
misunderstanding of their method as some examples below will show. Insight, though, the ability to see
through the appearance of exterior reality to a greater truth, often occurs subconsciously. Since both
are important to making art, and both crucial skills for those seeking greater wisdom, they are
frequently symbolized in both painting and sculpture. Once you know about this idea, you will recognize
it easily in figures with one eye open and one closed. Whether the open one symbolizes insight or out-
sight may, however, vary from case to case. Other, less common, methods of portraying sight and
insight are described in the individual entries below.
 4. Craft

The Artist with His Art

Almost all these hidden themes (few ever seen before) hark back to the idea that every painter paints
himself. One of the most common is the depiction of the artist holding his or her art. Sometimes,
especially in the Renaissance, the artist might represent himself as an executioner holding up the head
of his victim (his “painting”) for us to see. This explains why the head of the victim is often a self-
portrait. There is also an obvious pun in Italian on the word for masterpiece, capolavoro, which literally
means head-work.1 In other examples the artist might be in the foreground facing his “painting” which
is the background painted in a different style. The two levels symbolize two different realities, the
artist’s studio and the painting. In other cases, especially in the nineteenth century, the background may
defy perspective, seemingly flat or vertical and thus indicating its existence in the studio as a flat, upright
canvas.

Brush and Palette

One of the longest-running, little-known traditions in Western art is the use of visual metaphors for the
tools of the artist’s trade, most commonly brush and palette. Daggers and swords, which are long and
thin like a paintbrush, are often used to symbolize brushes while the accompanying battle or fight
depicts, unseen by the unsuspecting viewer, the artist’s own creative struggle. Palettes are suggested in
circular objects such as shields, plates, or flat surfaces such as tables. A bunch of flowers, often circular,
can also suggest the many different colors on a palette. And, although Michael Fried has noted similar
symbolism in Courbet’s paintings and recently in Caravaggio's too, visual metaphors for the tools of an
artist's craft have been used in paintings since at least the early Renaissance.1 Here, for the first time,
we show how common they are in art of the past six centuries and how crucial to the meaning of the
work too.

Portraiture

Great portraiture is one of art’s many surprises. Portraits, of course, have long been considered
historical documents of what the sitter looked like but EPPH suspects, despite most opinion over the
centuries claiming otherwise, that an accurate likeness was rarely the primary goal of a great portraitist.
And while a painter-poet (our definition of an artist who paints) can depict a sitter as his or her own
alter ego in many different ways (see THEMES) , one of the most common and intriguing, it seems to
me, is the fusion of the artist's own facial features with the sitter's. The evidence available is fairly
abundant and far exceeds the content of this site to-date. First of all, we are not alone. Other art
historians have noticed the phenomenon too (see below). The most compelling example is the portrait
series of British monarchs from Holbein's Henry VIII to Lucian Freud's Elizabeth II. You can judge for
yourself in the gallery of English sovreigns and other famous Brits. There are similar selections on Italian,
Spanish, French and American portraiture as well. The series of early American presidents is another
eye-opener.

Overall there are hundreds of examples in the Gallery section from every century since the early
Renaissance and we have published a 97-page book titled Every Painter Paints Himself (what else?)
stuffed with comparisons and relevant quotes. You can find samples on the Book page. Nor, as
mentioned above, is EPPH the first to mention something odd happening. A few art historians have been
surprised in their own area of research, usually within the work of a single artist. Perhaps because they
are specialists, they seem unaware of similar findings elsewhere or, in consequence, the continuity of
the practice. Nevertheless, all portraits by Petrus Christus in the 14th century are said by a Christus
expert to be "consistent in their physiognomy" with two famous portraits of different people looking
precisely the same.1 Another specialist writes that Hans Memling's portraits have "a family
resemblance"2. And two major artists in the Italian Renaissance were notorious for it even in their own
day. Contemporaries said that the two painters "repeated their own physiognomies in almost any face
in their paintings because they simply could not avoid painting themselves." Frank Zöllner then adds
that "the visual evidence seems to confirm that in fact Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli painted
themselves." Giovanni Bellini's slightly later portraits are also said to be of "a biological likeness".3

For lack of space and to add variety, let's fast forward to 19th century Paris. Edouard Manet's facial
features are frequently seen by scholars in the faces of his sitters and his historical characters.4 And
Heather McPherson has commented on the gaze common in Paul Cézanne's self-portraits: "The
ambiguity of that gaze, which appears both to look outward and turn inward, is one of the most
disquieting aspects of Cézanne's self-portraits....The portraits [of others], which often portray the same
long-suffering models whom he knew intimately, are in some instances co-extensions of the self-
portraits."5 In Edgar Degas' work too, Luzius Keller saw a facial resemblance in many of his early
portraits6 while Felix Bauman wondered whether the so-called Impressionist fused his facial features
onto someone else's face.7.

Thus, despite the long-held belief in a portrait likeness, we suggest that you keep your mind open. In
looking through the entries on EPPH consider whether poet-painters really did depict their own self-
representations intentionally without the knowledge of their patrons and still do. If you are willing to
spend time on EPPH and read about a range of artists - and not just those you prefer - you may find
grounds for questioning the conventional history of art. Your independent study in museums will help
too. And that might lead you, as it has for other readers, to a deeper analysis of what an artwork
represents and, moreover, a lifetime of aesthetic satisfaction. But the key point is: you don't need to be
an expert. You can do it too.

Pointing and Touch

Of all the self-referential symbols an artist can use, the hand is paramount. It is often said that in the
early Renaissance when artists were trying to gain recognition for themselves as intellectuals they
played down the hand’s importance to their craft because it signalled manual labor. Paradoxically,
though, the finger of God was also associated with creation, as in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. An
earlier, medieval illustration depicts the story of a miraculous image, worshipped in Gethsemane, of
Mary and Christ impressed on stone and it shows God actually forming the sculpture with his own
finger.1 Both ideas persisted but once the artist's finger was recognized by contemporaries as the equal
of poets, the hand became an even more potent symbol for the craft of painting while the eye or
forehead continued to symbolize the art's conception or intellectual content. Today we even say as
evidence of art’s authenticity: “it was done by his or her hand.”

From time to time artists, including Titian and Rembrandt, have painted with their fingers so touching a
canvas, and not just pointing at it, has significance too.2 Dürer's earliest and remarkably precocious self-
portrait, drawn when he was only thirteen, depicts him pointing with his finger, suggesting that even at
that age he knew that a pointing-finger meant a painting-finger. Raphael's later Self-portrait with a
Friend depicts the friend pointing, apparently out at us, but more truthfully at the reflected image of
themselves in a mirror, his alter ego painting what we see. Take a look at examples of how hands point
and touch a "painting" within the painting. You should study them carefully so you too can become used
to recognizing the pointing finger - or touching hand - of the unseen painter.

The Poses of Painting

One of the many ways artists depict the creative process metaphorically is to pose figures in an
unrelated setting as though they were figures in a studio. For instance, they might pose a man inside a
bar holding a pipe or cigarette as if he were sitting in front of an easel holding a brush. Only those “in
the know” would then recognize how the symbolism of the pose adds meaning to the conventional
symbolism of smoking (which often links deep thought and imagination to the changing forms of
smoke.) The artist’s own meaning is thereby conveyed in the resulting image, regardless of the patron’s
wishes.

Artists at work often have their arms extended as well, either painting a canvas or striking marble with a
hammer. This then allows figures with outstretched arms, with or without tools, to serve as visual
metaphors for the artist. Titian made much use of this in the Renaissance and Michael Fried, a well-
known expert on later art, has recognized that several figures in paintings by Caravaggio are posed like
an artist. However, unaware of the tradition, Fried fails to see the full significance of his insight.1 There
are, of course, many other ways to use the poses of the studio in painting and sculpture, as we
demonstrate in the entries below.

Swords and Weapons as Brushes

Weapons as symbols for an artist’s brush are the single most overlooked characteristic of Western art.
The world’s museums are full of masterpieces in which ‘artists’ are secretly at work ‘killing’ their
subjects, often themselves. In fact, so successfully have great masters hidden their underlying theme
that scarcely any of them have ever been recognized. There are, however, hints in the literature and in
prints about painting. In the 15th century L. B. Alberti had suggested a connection between archery and
painting.1 In other treatises and allegories on the subject it has been noted that ‘armor and battle are
frequently associated with the artist and the Art of Painting’.2 A 16th century critic described
Michelangelo’s brush as a ‘lance’ while Rembrandt and others donned military armor in their self-
portraits. Vasari likewise used terms with military connotations to illustrate Michelangelo’s approach to
painting the Sistine chapel and eventually announced that the sculptor had ‘vanquished’ the medium.

A eminent art historian describing a 1527 woodcut of Michelangelo sculpting wrote that the sculptor
handles his chisel ‘as if it were a sword or knife.’3 It is an apt metaphor that spans cultures. In China
battle is a known allegory of art. The brush, for instance, was often compared to a battlefield weapon
and in a colophon attached to Lady Wei’s 17th century treatise, Battle Array of the Brush, “the paper is
the battlefield, the brush is sword and lance".4 The images discussed under this theme will arm you with
a multitude of examples with which to confront and interpret the next masterpiece.

5. Metamorphosis

Veiled Faces

This may be the most controversial suggestion because it has been proposed by many lay experts before
and denounced by the academics every time as foolish and mistaken. Certainly, there have been some
outlandish claims but to dismiss all of them, some of them highly important, is equally foolish. This is the
truth: under the apparent surface of many great paintings, especially landscapes, is a hidden face.
Sometimes it is the artist’s, sometimes an admired poet’s or, as in most instances, still anonymous.
Academics comment in disagreement “that you can see what you want to see” but the self-evident
examples shown here make that response untenable. Practising artists, however, when shown these
examples have unanimously agreed with our perception, many with comments like “That’s how an artist
thinks.”

Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is the preeminent example. Scores of figures around the altar-wall, when
seen together from a distance, resemble the unmistakeable profile of Michelangelo’s poetic hero, Dante
Alighieri.....with Christ in the center of Dante’s brain. This was first suggested by a Venezuelan diplomat
in 1951 and has been ignored with few exceptions ever since. Charles Tolnay, a well-known expert on
Michelangelo, last cited it in a note in 1960.1 For the next half-century no book or article on
Michelangelo ever mentioned it. I brought the observation back to the attention of the art world, with
additional support, in the pages of The Art Newspaper in 2007. It was met with a deafening silence.
Nevertheless, what you need to know is that hundreds of subsequent artists were inspired by the
presence of Dante’s profile in the Sistine Chapel. Look at it in a book. Go see it yourself in Rome. It is the
single most important visual illusion in the history of art.

The examples here all come with supporting evidence. It is not just that the “faces” look like a face but
the “face” has meaning. All scenes in true art are ideas in the artist’s mind so the instability with which
an image can change from an apparent scene of nature to a human head beautifully conveys the
evanescence and constant mutability of human thoughts. After you train your eyes with the examples
here, you will get more enjoyment out of a museum than you ever had before. Interpreting art becomes
fun.

The evidence for the illusion in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is laid out in abundant detail in the essay
“Michelangelo’s Art Through Michelangelo’s Eyes.” If you have the time – and it does not take long –
read it. It explains not just Michelangelo’s methods but the fundamentals – explained here in a different
way – of all art, helping you interpret other art by yourself. Each way has its own merit. Try both.

Visual Metamorphosis

Visual metamorphosis is the term we use to indicate shape-shifting in art. It allows an artist to transform
a shape representing one item into a similar shape representing something else. This, in turn, allows one
meaning to be hidden behind another. It is a visual technique equivalent to allegory and metaphor in
literature and has, in consequence, been widely used. It was first proposed in the 1930’s in a slightly
different form by the French art historian, Henri Foçillon. Although subsequent historians have
recognized visual metamorphosis in a few works by major artists, Dürer being the best-known, it has
been far more widely used than anyone, save artists, has ever recognized.1

Any great European artist in any period would have assumed that a borrowed form borrows meaning
and that there is no difference between an idea for a painting and a composition of form. Plato’s word
for form was idea.2 Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century many experts believed that paintings by
Edouard Manet, who was by far the most significant artist of the day, had no specific meaning. His
compositions, they said, were just a variety of different colored forms and that the artist himself paid no
more attention to painting a human head than he gave to the depiction of the same man’s shoes.3 Just
as materialist science had robbed the world of meaning, so art criticism repeated the pattern in art. The
movement reached its peak in the theory of Clement Greenberg, a twentieth-century American critic,
that painting should have no other meaning than the essence of its own medium: canvas, paint, flatness
and frame.

Even before Foçillon, though, cultural historians trained in Germany and led by Erwin Panofsky had
argued that the traditional symbolism of certain objects allowed artists to embed their images with
meaning. Their prime example was how the circular shape of a straw firescreen behind the Virgin’s head
in a painting now known to be by Robert Campin imitated the shape of a halo. It allowed the artist to
portray the Virgin as an ordinary mother without the artificial baggage of an ancient symbol. Iconology,
as the methodology is known, became popular though few examples were quite so visually intriguing as
the firescreen and the halo. Many involved the changing meaning of an object over time rather than of
one form being mistaken for another. Like other methodologies it succumbed to competing theories,
also non-visual, that seemed to offer more promise.

A few art historians continued to focus on vision. In 1934 Foçillon restated St. Augustine’s argument
from a millennium earlier that forms live in the artist’s mind.4 Forms, he argued in his book The Life of
Forms in Art, are in constant change not only in the mind of the artist but as they are transmitted from
one work of art to another. The metamorphosis that a form undergoes in the mind of a great artist, he
declared, is unavailable to the unimaginative painter who cannot recognize the common element nor
even effect the change. 5 If many painters cannot recognize the metamorphosis, it is not surprising then
that most viewers have not been able to see them either. Indeed Foçillon’s own experience of such
metamorphoses seems to have been somewhat limited because his concrete examples in art are
relatively scarce. Once shown, however, the ability to see visual metamorphosis can be taught and, as in
so many other talents, practice helps improve performance. (A word of warning: it is important that
visual metamorphosis make sense within the work itself, the artist’s overall oeuvre and art history too. If
not, the viewer can get carried away by his or her own imagination, not the artist’s.) Studying our
examples, though, from a variety of periods by a variety of different artists will help strengthen your
own neurons’ ability to recognize similar patterns supported by similar evidence elsewhere. Indeed the
joy that comes with such recognition, fed by the neurons' release of dopamine, is as close as many will
ever come to pure aesthetic satisfaction.

6. Spirituality

The Inner Tradition

This is perhaps the most difficult part of your journey towards looking at art through the artist’s own
eyes, especially if you believe in Christ and belong to an established Church. It is important because so
much of Western art, especially in the Renaissance, depicts religious themes. Few people know that
there are at least two ways of reading the Bible: the conventional exoteric tradition favored by the
various Churches and the esoteric tradition practised, often in secrecy, by individual mystics, saints,
prophets, poets and visual artists too. It is little known because over the centuries many of its
practitioners have been denounced as heretics by the Church and their writings destroyed. Nevertheless
their approach was practised by many of the early Church Fathers, including Origen in the second
century AD. In the exoteric tradition, favored by the Church, the Bible is read at face value as though it is
an historical account of divine events. This makes makes their followers into believers who must
suspend their critical faculties to accept, paradoxically, the unbelievable.

Within the Inner Tradition, a group that includes a wide assortment of esoteric traditions, the Bible,
other gospels and religious works are read independently, not as an historical account but as an
instruction manual or guide for the reader’s own soul. Each story is treated as an allegory. Through this
method the practitioner (no longer a believer) identifies with each character in the story and either
seeks to imitate them, if they are positive, or avoid them. Nevertheless, even the bad characters like
Judas are part of us. Behavior, not belief, is what matters and by using their faculties independently,
followers of the Inner Tradition can find heaven in this life and a potential union with the divine. The
most accomplished practitioners are the mystic saints and poets like Dante but anyone can try. Thomas
a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ was one of the best-read books of the Middle Ages and many other
devotional books of the time also encouraged their readers, all of whom were thought to contain a
divine spark, to identify with Christ. Within the Inner Tradition Christ, whether or not he ever existed as
we think of him, represents that ultimate mental state that few Christians can ever attain but that all
thinking ones should strive for. Buddhists call it nirvana.

Even St. Luke makes this two-way approach to spiritual development clear in his Gospel by having Jesus
tell his chosen disciples, all mystics, that: “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom
of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not
understand” (Luke 8:10) Artists, mostly mystics too, have long depicted the Christian story as a guide for
like-minded individuals, a visual parable that their successors and other perceptive viewers must unravel
in order to follow. Ordinary spectators may have been entertained by art’s apparent scenes but the
scenes are constructed “so that seeing (the viewer) may not see.” The artists’ patrons, often important
figures in the Church, seem to have accepted the resulting images as an interpretation in tune with their
own beliefs. Perhaps, like many others, they overlooked the visual problems that contradicted their own
understanding. Over the centuries there have been many forms of the Inner Tradition, both inside and
outside the Church. from Spiritual Alchemy and Neoplatonism in the Renaissance to Theosophy in the
nineteenth century. All have been practised by well-known artists and have certain elements in
common. Among these characteristics are the promise of a more peaceful spiritual life and intellectual
barriers which, as in difficult poetry, require the practitioner to study at length before their eyes are
opened. Many are practised in secret or their truths kept secret by a small core of adherents. Interest in
esoteric matters flourished in the late twentieth century but because Christianity’s own inner traditons
had been long forgotten (or deemed heretical), Christians who could have satisfied their intellectual
curiosity within their their own culture, were forced to seek out Asian practices. Only more recently,
with the arrival of popular books on Gnosticism and the varied sects of early Christianity, has a Christian
alternative become more widely known.

It is also worth noting that, for a long time, the Church was pulled in both directions because the mystics
who followed the Inner Tradition were often important people inside the Church or, like St. Francis, so
widely popular that his new monastic order could not be denied. Joscleyn Godwin tracks that history in
The Golden Thread: “Once, men and women of high spiritual attainment and profound esoteric
knowledge had worked as leaders in the Church and were revered as saints. There were Pope Sylvester
II (c.945-1003), architect of the Holy Roman Empire; Abbot Suger, father of the Gothic cathedral; women
mystics with practical and political influence like Hildegard of Bingen and Theresa of Avila; philosophers
like Aquinas, Bonaventura, Nicholas of Cusa; saints like Bernard and Francis; and the Order of the
Knights Templar. But the Catholic Church has [now] lost the dimensions represented by such people,
while few of the innumerable Protestant sects ever wanted them.” He notes that all these people had
one thing else in common, a mental characteristic that they would have shared with artists as well:
imagination. "The Western esoteric tradition has always emphasized the imagination as the primary way
of access to higher worlds. All esoteric schools train students in visualization and active imagination…the
inner senses can be strengthened, just as the muscles of an athlete can."1

All this is important for art lovers to know because once you look at great art through the eyes of the
artists themselves, so many of them followers or admirers of the Inner Tradition in one form or another,
you see things as you would never have seen them before. Just as the New Testament aims to please
both ordinary minds seeking solace in the superficial story and more sophisticated minds searching for a
deeper truth and greater understanding, so too does art. Remember this and, over time, as you consider
the examples on this website and in your local museum, your eyes will open.