Egoism, as well as being a terrible vice, is a very modern phenomena. The idea of reflecting on the insignificant details of your own life, when there is a whole world out there to be discovered, was unknown before the 17th Century. Only then did the penetrating, analytic, morbid self-portraits of Rembrandt, Fabritius and Bernini (to take three names at random) start appearing.
This I know after reading Five Hundred Self-Portraits, a fantastic Phaidon book edited by Julian Bell, which consists of a visual history of the self-portrait from Ni-Ankh-Ptah (2350 B.C.) to Maurizio Cattelan’s Spermini (1997 A.D.).
Before the the 17th Century (with the striking exception of Albrect Durer) the self-portrait is incredibly superficial. Its surface is placid. Like a white marble sculpture - the eyes don’t reveal anything. After the 17th Century, after the classical world has lost the freshness it had in the 15th and 16th Centuries, the familiar pendulum motion of classicism to romanticism begins. The Baroque (Gentileschi, Caravaggio) of the C17th is romantic, the formalism of the C18th is Classical, from the French Revolution onwards, romanticism dominates again and, except for the occasional blip, has continued to do so ever since.
Only the graphic designers of the early C20th, like El Lissitzky, really escape the charge of romanticism:
Hence my current belief that they can lead the way out of art’s current aesthetic rut.
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