FACING THE MIDDLE AGES

What difference does a face make?

Just inside the Great West Door at the front of Westminster Abbey hangs a most intimidating portrait. It is that of King Richard II of England, and it was painted in the 1390s, when Richard was coming towards the end of his reign and his life. 

It’s one of my favourite portraits in the world, although I don’t like to look at it too long. Although we know Richard is nearing his end, he does not, and the cold majesty with which he glares out from the wooden panel can put the willies up you. Richard wears green and crimson and gold; his cloak is trimmed with ermine and he grips his regalia, the orb and sceptre, as though he will never give them up. 

But it is not the clothes and baubles that intimidate. It’s the face. Richard’s bulbous eyes protrude from rosy cheeks; his mouth is pursed above a fluffy forked beard. There’s cruelty there, and coldness too. Perhaps I feel that because we know that around this time Richard was limbering up for his ‘tyranny’ - a time when those in his court were expected to fall to their knees and grovel if his gaze rested upon them even for a moment. Yet I think much of the impression comes from the image itself. 

Richard’s ‘Westminster portrait’ is usually said to be the first of an English king taken from life. Whether this is true or not, it certainly marks a leap forward in English royal portraiture. We can lock eyes with Richard as we can no medieval monarch before us, and imagine as we do that we may take the measure of the man. 

There is a historical line that runs from here to Jan van Eyck’s glorious fifteenth-century portraits of Burgundian dukes, and on to Hans Holbein the Younger’s spectacularly knowable portraits of the great luminaries of Henry VIII’s English court.

I thought about this as I was looking over some recently released digital reconstructions of less exalted medieval faces. These were commissioned by a project called Cold Case Whithorn, and try to portray the ‘real’ faces of three people buried at Whithorn Priory between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

The artist who made them is Dr Christopher Rynn, who is on Instagram - his page is well worth a look, for it includes short videos illustrating highlights of the process by which he makes his models.

chris_rynn

A post shared by Dr Christopher Rynn (@chris_rynn)

There is, self-evidently, an enormous amount of human skill and processing power that goes into making models like these. Perhaps not as much sheer technical genius as van Eyck or Holbein possessed… but somewhere in here lies a similar understanding of how new artistic methods and media can be deployed to stop people in their tracks.

The effect is not in an extremely strict sense, ‘historical’. Yet so much of what many historians do is concerned with creating what I sometimes call ‘empathy bridges’ across the ages. Do you care more or less about what life might have have been like around Whithorn Priory in the later Middle Ages now that you have stared into the digitally reimagined eyes of someone who once lived there?

If your answer is ‘more’, then this novel form of portraiture has done its job. Just as the Westminster Portrait once did.