I’ve chosen to compare a pair of paintings, one is Japanese and the other is Italian, because of their subject, the portrait of powerful men.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Itsuō Art Museum, Osaka, about 1598
Toyotomi Hideyoshi was the most important leader of the Momoyama age, so called because of the place where his castle was built. He reunified Japan and passed laws aiming at establishing a social system divided into castes, including samurai’s one allowing them to carry weapons. Of humble birth, he took great care in acquiring status and privileges of an aristocrat, thus flaunting wealth and charm, even through the performance of the tea ceremony. His image has inconsistent features because he is on one hand remembered for his brutality against undefended women and children when he moved into Korea, on the other for having taken a number of commendable measures, such as that regarding slavery abolition.
The portrait under examination captures in a way as realistic as possible the elderly tyrant’s edge of the face and personality. Owing to the triangular face, supplemented by prominent zygomatic, and goatee, he was nicknamed by his contemporaries “monkey face”. Hollow cheeks and wrinkles that make him in the picture even more shrunken, are the features of an elderly and sick person, but still animated by an indomitable spirit which still seems to issue from that intense look in his eyes the color of amber. The long trained bulky dress and the silky hard headgear combine for the subject to be categorized as a high-ranking dignitary. However, note the striking contrast between the garment, with its disproportionately opulent display, and the apparently slender-body guy who wears it with thin hands coming out from the wide sleeves. The long sword on the left side and the stick, symbolizing authority, in the right hand combine in accomplishing the iconography of the powerful man.
Things are quite different when attention is paid to that masterpiece of quattrocento portraiture, authored by Piero della Francesca and representing Federico da Montefeltro, together with the spirit imbuing it. The painting highlights status and authority of this warlord, as well as scholar and patron of arts and culture, who doesn’t want to go down in history as a despot, but rather as an enlightened sovereign. The solemn and quiet character of the profile pose appears to be enhanced by the monumental plasticity of the picture, as a roman coin. He’s set in a serene light, in the foreground, with his land as a bright background. The author pays attention to a detailed reproduction of the face in also taking account of warts and wrinkles around the eyes, thus in line with the Flemish painting by which he was influenced. The infinitely close is put into relation with the infinitely far away thanks to the laws of perspective that make the space an orderly and harmonious universe with the human person at the center.
All things considered, both above artworks are representative of that bipolar nature of authority which is encountered in the history of all peoples: in the order of the above description, the authority can, substantially, either degenerate into the tragic dominance on the part of a single man, which is bound to be consumed and wiped out, or consist in an intellectual and moral dominion which is proper not of one man, but of each.
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