the self-portrait ‘en décapité’ interpreting artistic self-insertion
Arjan R. de Koomen
In this essay we leave the world of the cult of relics, the subject of many of the other contributions to this volume, and enter the realm of art to discuss images of severed heads in Renaissance and Baroque works of art that are known or believed to depict the artist himself. These self-portraits all appear in a story of decapitation in the guise of a victim of the sword. Erwin Panofsky, father to so many concepts of our discipline, has dubbed these appalling appearances ‘self-portraits en décapité’. He did so in his discussion of a painting of Titian [Fig. 1] that shows Salome and John the Baptist (although others identify the subject as Judith and Holofernes).1 He claims, on the basis of comparison to the later self-portraits of the artist, that Titian had projected his own features on to the head of the Baptist on the trencher.2 The artist might have done so, Panofsky suggests, in order to express his love-stricken emotional state. What exactly might have afflicted the thirty-year old artist was beyond Panofsky’s grasp, but to support the idea of amorous implications he treats the reader to what he calls the ‘underground version’ of the Salome-theme, where she is pas- sionately in love with the Baptist and has him killed out of frustration, an eroticized re-telling without biblical foundation. Panofsky takes Titian to be no isolated case and he goes on to name Cristofano Allori, who a century later portrayed himself in a similar way as Holofernes and depicted the girl with whom he had suffered an unhappy love story as Judith [Fig. 6], and also Caravaggio’s David in the Borghese Collection, in which the artist portrayed himself in the guise of Goliath [Fig. 8]. In both cases a seventeenth-century text informs us about the self-portrayal; a historical foundation is lacking in Titian’s case.
1 Panofsky E., Problems in Titian. Mostly Iconographic (Princeton: 1970) 43. The proposal to identify the scene as a Judith and Holofernes comes from Joannnides P., “Titian’s Judith and Its Context. The Iconography of decapitation”, Apollo (1992) 163–170. 2 The identification of the Baptist as Titian dates from the beginning of the twentieth century and was accepted by Foscari L., Iconografia di Tiziano (Venice: 1935) 22. 192 arjan r. de koomen
Fig. 1. Titian, Salome (or Judith) (ca. 1516). Oil on canvas, 90 × 72 cm. Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphili.