EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

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.{ref2} Even Renaissance medical terminology made use of this link, naming the cavities of the brain ventricles, thus little bellies or little wombs.{ref3}

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.”{ref4} Most significantly, imagination in the Renaissance was said to be “bred in the eyes.”{ref5} 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.{ref6}

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.