The Nose & The Mouth & The Eye & The Brain

While poking around on the Laurentian Library yesterday, I came across a 2014 paper on the history of how people tried to make sense of Michelangelo’s puzzling reality: the classical orders he violated, mathematical composition and proportion, and anthropomorphy. Which, given the Vitruvian principle that the ideal proportion is the human body, was sort of the same thing.

a red chalk drawing by michelangelo of three incomplete profiles of bases of a column. the negative space of the one on the left looked to me at least like a cartoonish profile, with a bulbous nose and slackjawed open mouth, like a shocked beetle bailey; the one on the right looked to michelangelo like a guy with a turban and a hooked nose and a beard screaming. from the casa buonarotti
Studies of architectural bases for the New Sacristy, c. 1524, 283 x 214 mm, red chalk, black chalk, pen, brown ink, Casa Buonarotti, Inv. 10Ar. via

But I was surprised to see the argument lead off with this drawing from the Casa Buonarotti of column bases with a human face in them. Or so I was told.

I stared at the base on the left in lowkey disbelief. Michelangelo was really out here hiding a stunned Beetle Bailey profile in his architecture, and this is how I find out about it? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Jasper Johns?

i could go all 4000 characters on this jasper johns ink on plastic drawing, from the two human figures, the adult silhouette from the seasons on the left, and the inverse child silhouette from...idk later, on the right, to the stony brook bathtub faucet motif at the top center, canonically upside down, though, so the water runs down the center of the composition, to the five round animal or pokemon like faces along the bottom, which I think originated as shrinky dinks and which turned up in several works in this moment, but the point here is the two tumbling vases, with the optical illusion profiles of, on the left, the queen of england and prince phillip, and on the right, picasso and/or johns himself, i'm never quite convinced. made in st martin in 2010, and shown at matthew marks in 2011, the allover feeling of this is grey liquid wash, with structure and image emerging, submerging, or carefully outlined and loosely filled in, the ink doing what it will on this slick plastic surface
Profiles in vases in Shrinky Dink: Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2010, ink on plastic, 29 x 36 1/4 in., via Matthew Marks

No, we should not invite Jasper Johns; he was already here. Reading the Casa Buonarotti curator’s notes on the drawing, I realized I’d been looking for a Johns vase-style negative profile instead of a Michelangelo caricature-style profile, which is in the base on the right:

in his imagination, the upper molding takes on the appearance of a turban, while the base profile transforms into a screaming human face, to which are added, in a caricatured manner, an eye, a nose, and a gaping mouth (for further considerations on this sketch and its possible connection with the Vitruvian idea of ‘architectural anthropomorphism’, cf. ELAM 2012, pp. 94-95, [which I cannot find, btw, but it’s not important now. -g.o]).

But at least it led me back to Johns’s seemingly disjointed but ultimately insightful 2007 interview with John Yau in The Brooklyn Rail:

Yau: It seems to me that some of your motifs, such as the ones of the faces in profile/vase, are irritating because one sees either the faces looking at each other or the vase between them, but never both at the same time. There is a continuous frustration in the looking. The figure and ground keep changing places, and one becomes aware that one never sees this image in its entirety. The feeling I get from this motif is both satisfying and maddening. Why does this conundrum hold interest for you?

Johns: I am not certain that one can’t see both at once. Has someone who knows about the eye and the brain made a determination?

Not only can I see both of Michelangelo’s faces at once, I couldn’t unsee them if I wanted to.

After Yau works through years of accumulated questions [which, ngl, very relatable now. I should call him. -g.o], there’s an actual [sic] dialogue for a minute, about different aspects of Johns’s use of the term “helpless,” and suddenly:

Yau: Is the helpless behavior of a material, the puddling of the ink when used on plastic, for example, one of the parallels between art and life?

Johns: I imagine that our understanding of the behavior of materials is closely related to our understanding of the rest of what we think of as reality.