Man in Black

El Greco - Portrait of a nobleman with his hand on his chest
Museo del Prado, Madrid

I have just been re-reading Anne Hollander's Seeing Through Clothes. It's a art-history of European fashion. In it, she mentions this portrait, as an illustration of the history of wearing black, especially with white details. Along with the influence of fashionable clothes on how people paint nudes, and the interaction of how people dress with how they imagine themselves.

In my paperback, this picture is reproduced poorly and in black and white, and I can't tell whether it supports her argument or not.

But now, with a little bit of searching, I can find the picture at its home, the Museo del Prado, Madrid. I can not only see this full-colour reproduction on the left, but zoom to an ultra-high-resolution photograph of the work, and study the wonderful fluid brush-work of the lace, the discreet whorls and touches of colour that suggest the brocaded pattern and the shinyness of the tunic, the transparent blues and yellows of the skin, the confident, airy delicacy of the sword-hilt.

On the same page I can read a description of the work, with a theory about who this man is, and listen to the audioguide with two voices discussing the fame of this picture and how it is seen as embodying an idea of Spanishness.

And not only that - for the very reasonable sum of €10 plus shipping I could order a very high quality A4-sized print (A3 is €20) of the picture for my own personal album of interesting pictures, supposing I had one, perhaps I should, and peruse it on the sofa. I love that museums do this. The National Gallery does it too.

I am just old enough, I suppose, to still think that's amazing. Also, I don't know exactly why he chose these clothes, but I think he looks very serious and very sexy.

Possible Approaches to the Princess Problem

Photo from Wikimedia

For the incurably literal-minded, like me, respectable craftswomen who feel puzzled and vaguely insulted to be told to stand "like a princess", I have looked up a non-ridiculous mental image for stock.

Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan - Hans Holbein the Younger. This wonderful life-size portrait, which the photograph doesn't do justice to at all, was made as a bride-research project for King Henry VIII. Though happy to be painted, the lady is supposed to have said that if she had two heads, she would gladly lay one of them at the service of the King of England. Proving that if she didn't have two heads, she did have at least one brain.

I think my favourite paintings might all be those by artists who got spectacularly good at one thing. Holbein also designed magnificent metalwork and jewellery, but his fame is as a portraitist. All his portraits have this living presence, coming from a hundred clever technical tricks, like the close backgrounds, and careful attention to asymmetries in the faces, but surely also from a wonderful eye for people. There were others who knew the tricks, but they weren't this good. They couldn't paint a dimple in the act of appearing.

Although this lady is more like me: Anne Lovell - Lady with a Squirrell and a Starling. No doubt the capable manager of a large household, she is not used to being painted, and he has managed to paint her disconcerted awareness of his gaze: look at the squirrel's tail, so like a squirrel-hair paintbrush, tickling. What a craftsman.

Good writing about good writing about clothes

Anne Hollander in Seeing Through Clothes, which is about the history of representations of the body and clothing in Western art:

[George Eliot] speaks of the kinds of bonnets that “were then the fate of women,” and she magnificently describes the way a lady sobbing in the transports of deep distress must yet contrive, with a nicely calibrated blend of instinct and calculation, to rush through a narrow door without crushing her wide buckram sleeves. George Eliot must herself have seen it done in the enormous fashionable sleeves of 1830, when she was an observant eleven-year-old girl.