Face to Face with a Portrait

If we look closely at Van Haecht’s Kunstkammer, Van der Geest, whose figure occupies the centre of the composition, doesn’t remotely appear to be 73 years old, as he would have been had he been born in 1555. His features resemble those painted by Van Dyck eight years earlier… but are apparently rejuvenated, as if he were a little over 50 years old, that is, the age he would have been if born in 1577 (in accordance with the information from the Netherlands Institute of Art History). It’s certainly possible that Van Haecht might have wanted to ingratiate himself to his friend by giving him a facelift. The relationship between the two was so close that the painter bequeathed his most valuable works to the collector, who survived him. The visit to Antwerp of the Infanta Isabel Clara and Archduke Albert, which the Kunstkammer depicts, took place in 1615, so it’s possible that the painter might have wanted to portray Van der Geest as a man who was 13 years younger. Far from being a naturalistic work, the Kunstkammer is characterized by abundant inventions and symbolism. Everything suggests a fabricated scene, including the presence of Rubens and Van Dyck in prominent positions (as befitted the patron’s favorite artists). Everything… except perhaps the figure of Van der Geest.

Regardless of its verisimilitude or lack thereof, the presence of Rubens among the illustrious guests of the Kunstkammer, as well as his respectful attitude towards the patron, give rise to puzzling questions. If our portrait dates back to 1620 as stated, it would be strange for a client of Van der Geest’s stature to have ordered his portrait from a young talent (the youngest in Antwerp) and not from his friend Rubens, the artist he most supported and protected, and to whom he gave many lucrative commissions. In fact, as far as I know, no portrait of Van der Geest exists among the known works of Rubens (nor is there any record of such a portrait having been lost).

This makes me wonder if it is not more likely that the patron commissioned his portrait when his life was nearing its end. There is a resigned melancholy in the sitter’s expression that is clearly not that of a young person. Considering his advanced age – 65 years if Van der Geest were born in 1555 and the portrait dated back to 1620 – it makes sense that he would have thought of Rubens, rather than Van Dyck. Nor may we forget that in 1620 Rubens was living in Antwerp, was in the prime of his working life and owed many favors to his patron. This leads me to a slightly risky speculation. Rubens left Antwerp repeatedly, sometimes for more than a year. When? Precisely when Van Dyck, on his return from Italy, established himself once more in his native city, not moving from there for five years, from 1627 to 1632, as if occupying the vacuum left by his mentor. These years coincide with a period of intense diplomatic activity for Rubens, who, as is well known, had friendships in all the European courts. It was then that he took advantage of his connections to promote the cause of peace between Protestants and Catholics, whose wars had brought Antwerp and much of the Low Countries to the brink of ruin. On this premise, I wonder if it may be appropriate to reconsider the date of the portrait. Is it not more probable that Van der Geest, already elderly, commissioned this portrait from Van Dyck during the long – too long – absence of his esteemed friend Rubens? Probable or not, it is a futile question, since scholars agree that Van Dyck portrayed Van der Geest between 1619 and 1621, before traveling to Italy. Be that as it may, the birth date of the patron is wrong somewhere: either in the National Gallery or in the Rubenshuis and in several encyclopaedias. If the sitter were born in 1577, Van Dyck’s portrait cannot be from 1620 since he appears to be an old man, not a 43-year-old. On the other hand, if he was born in 1555, why should Van Haecht, in 1628, have painted not a 73-year-old but a man who appears to be 20 years younger?

My doubts, conjectures and related research have led me this far. Now I would like to return to the moment in which I saw Van der Geest’s portrait for the first time, half a century ago, in all the naïveté of my 19 years. I didn’t care then about dates or art history, and I knew nothing of the influence of the Venetian school on Rubens and Van Dyck. What mattered to me then was to guess at what the portrait sitter expressed, what the portrait – a simple mixture of color, light and shade – and its caption afforded to my intuition, my inventiveness and my imagination. Nothing else.

Looking at the portrait of a close relative, we can tell whether the artist has managed to capture not just his physical aspect but also his intimate likeness, the expression of his character. But if the sitter is unknown, it’s impossible to judge the physiognomic faithfulness of the portrait. In this case, our task as observers is the reverse: to reach an understanding of the sitter’s character through his representation. This implies trusting the artist’s ability to depict the subject in an intimate manner, almost as if we knew him.

It is half a century now since I first saw Van der Geest’s portrait. The years fill us with information and knowledge, but they rob us of a capacity for intuition and guesswork. To recover the innocence, let us say the virgin state of looking, I have invited a young Italian friend to the National Gallery, Marina, who is a third my age and is untrained in the reading of works of art. She has the ingenuousness that I might have had at her age. I ask her to tell me what she sees in case it resembles anything of what I saw and recorded in an old poem.

I wait for a while as she looks and is looked at by Van der Geest. At last, Marina says to me: “He is tired, pale, tentative, disenchanted and self-aware.” I ask her to use fewer adjectives and more nouns. She agrees and continues: “He knows he’s close, that’s why his lips seem as if they had wanted to speak but they do not. He has caused disappointment, and he knows it. He spent some time tidying his beard, he has a sense of his appearance, but a pounding in his heart; he is very lonely; all the beauty was not enough. He has always slept little, he has lain awake thinking, and he has felt the cold, well, he has felt so cold that he has the typical pallor of someone who is very cold. Not a single color, but pallid. He has shiny, wet eyes, like when the wind makes your eyes water.” “Perhaps it is not the wind,” I suggest. She appears doubtful, and then adds something very important that I had seen, but not smelled: “He has put on some perfume, for sure.” “Perfume? How do you know?” I ask. “You can see it between the beard and the collar. There is perfume there, take a look! It is a discreet, cold, slightly blue perfume, like your grandparents’ aftershave, a lotion.” “An eau de Cologne?” I ask. “Yes, a cologne,” she replies. She falls silent. I ask her: “Anything else?” She looks, thinks, allows herself to be seen. She finishes: “Wait, one more thing: he is deliberately ambiguous.”

Leonardo Sciascia notes that “when physiognomic truth is captured and transformed in expressiveness, that is, in the moment in which the subject expresses himself most fully, in which the light of his eyes and the fold of his lips tell what we already know about his life, his actions, his thoughts and his work, the portrait acquires an even stronger likeness and the interpretation becomes even more reliable.”⁴ On the other hand, when the subject is unknown to us, then, if we wish to know his character, his thoughts, his works and his life, we have no alternative but to depend on the portrait. The fidelity of Van Dyck’s brushes is borne out by the other two portraits of Van der Geest mentioned earlier. But the comparison between them is not enough to establish whether the painter succeeded, and to what extent, in capturing the “expressiveness” of the sitter. To determine this, we must appeal to our faculty (an exclusively human gift) of reading the mind through the face, the appearance and the expression.

What does our intuitive mind read in this portrait? Just as the two hemispheres of the brain are dedicated to distinct vital, rational and emotional functions, so the human face, even though it tends towards symmetry, is never perfectly symmetrical. Each half of the face, in a certain sense, expresses distinct aspects of the same personality. In the portrait of Van der Geest we can see a duality noticed both by Marina, who calls it “ambiguity,” and by Efrain Kristal, the famous Hispanist, who has helped me bring this topic into clearer focus. The same duality that I captured in my first eye contact with Van der Geest, and that I expressed in a poem built precisely on the tension between the affluent merchant and the lover of beauty: on one side, the industrious and practical man, on the other, the man fascinated by the eternal sense of art. According to Kristal, the expressions of the two sides of Van der Geest’s face represent two types of sadness and two types of tiredness, just as the mouth shows a type of energy absent from both, perhaps because of the presence of the dark circles under his eyes. In my opinion, we see in the collector’s face the juxtaposition of body and spirit.