Hello I'm Francesca. I'm an Associate
Curator here at the National Gallery and today I'm talking about this portrait, a
woman from the Hofer family from about 1470 and I'm trying to answer the
question 'Why does this lady have a fly on her
head and what does that tell us about the tricks the artists play on us?'
[Music] So, imagine the year is about 1470
you are having your portrait painted. Now even if you're really wealthy this is
unimaginably expensive. You might maybe once, maybe twice in your life get to sit
before an artist who's going to paint you and commemorate what it is that you
look like at that particular moment. So you are going to get yourself ready
in your finest clothes you're going to do your hair you're going to make
yourself as presentable as possible. You go to the sitting you sit there maybe
for hours in front of this artist. They might go away work on the picture come
back you're waiting waiting waiting and finally you get to see your finished
portrait and there's a fly on your head.
why on earth would there be a fly on your head?
Well I think this takes us right back to the origins of painting this question
and what it is that makes art so magical. So when we look at this portrait here in
the National Gallery we've got a lot of questions. First question, who's the
artist? And actually we don't know we think they're probably an artist working
in Southwestern Germany in, as I said, around about 1470
but we don't know who the artist is we think that on kind of stylistic grounds
historical grounds, but we don't actually have one single artist's name yet.
And who's the woman? Well again we don't know who this lady is sitting for this
portrait is. We've got one clue which is up here
in the top left hand corner where there's an inscription that reads
'Geborne Hoferin' which means she was born a member of the Hofer family and that's
amazing you might think oh goody we've got a clue we can go from there but
annoyingly Hofer is a really really really common surname in Southwestern
Germany so it doesn't actually help us that much in tying down exactly who this
lady is. So really when we look at this panel and
the portrait that's painted on it, all the information we have is kind of
in the picture itself. She's
not an old lady, she's not a young young girl. I've landed on her being young-ish
because if we look really closely you can see that she has this amazingly
smooth complexion, there's no lines no wrinkles, and the artist has lavished
incredible attention in painting every single detail. So we can look at her eyes
and you've got every eyelash picked out there. She's got this beautiful face,
unlined, kind of slight turning up of the lips as she's kind of almost almost on
the verge of smiling. Like I said she's dressed in her finest
clothes so we've got this black fabric here but it's not just a kind of plain
black fabric it's not matte, if you look closely it's a brocade so it's been
woven. It's got these amazing kind of swirling patterns to it and that would
have been incredibly expensive. She's wearing that for a reason and that
brocade actually that extends not only just in her clothes but also in the
background behind her she's standing against again a kind of woven fabric
background so all of these are kind of markers of her wealth, indicators that
she really has put on her very finest clothing. If we look at even more detail
we can look around her neck or around her cuff and we can see that her garment
is fur lined. Well, really only they're like very very
wealthiest people could afford a fur line costume so again this is telling us that
she's absolutely putting her best foot forward in this picture.
I love the detail of the metal clasps holding this garment together because
they're so intricate and lovely and I think they work really well actually
with the kind of the jointedness of her hands and the way that she's holding her
hands up to us here. Her hands as well they've got more clues on because
they've got lots of gold rings again ordinary people don't have this kind of
finery, ordinary people aren't sitting to have their portraits painted either so
all of this is telling us just how wealthy she is
and in her hands there's one more clue for us, she's holding this little sprig
of very delicate blue and white flowers, forget-me-nots. Now normally if you're
looking at a portrait from the second half of the the 1400s and you have a
sitter holding something, especially a plant,
art historians think that's like winning the jackpot because that's a clue, that's
included by the artist to give us some kind of information whether it's
why the portrait is painted at that moment or who the person is or what
their profession might be and we do have some kind of tantalising glimpses with
these forget-me-nots because often they're associated with love,
especially in german poetry of this period, so is she holding forget-me-nots
because this is a picture that's being painted to commemorate an engagement or
a marriage? We don't know. At the same time think
about the name even in english forget me not, that's a flower that's associated
with remembrance and not forgetting people, so is this a portrait that's
being painted so that we remember this woman after
she's gone? we don't 100 percent know.
Having looked at all those details we have to get to this amazing white
headdress that she's wearing. I deliberately left it but it's really
hard to avoid it you come at this picture and there's this amazing kind of
pale swirl of fabric. It's an incredibly
architectural bit of painting actually to have the kind of sweep of the folds
that sense of volume but again these very
sharp corners and points and folds. It's something the artist has lavished a lot
of attention on. It's also worth saying that for an artist it's incredibly
difficult to paint white like that because how do you, if you've just got
white, how do you create light and shadow and depth and volume?
It's a really hard ask and I think that's why this artist has shown off
their skill as much as they have with this headdress.
Every detail has been included so we can look at the edges and see every
individual stitch, we can look at the pins that presumably kind of hold this
headdress together or maybe even fasten it to the woman's hair, we've got every
single pinhead and the kind of indentation in the fabric. It's
absolutely beautiful as a piece of painting
and it's again about money. Imagine the wealth you'd have to have to keep a
piece of white fabric like that so spotless and pristine and imagine all
the servants you'd have to have to launder it for you and iron it and even
kind of put it on you again it's a way of saying how well off this woman is and
of course the headdress brings us back to this pesky question, this pesky fly
sitting there with its horrible googly eyes and its transparent wings,
painted in such detail that you've not only got the spindly fly legs but even
the shadow cast by those legs on the white headdress.
So what is this fly doing there? Why has this artist included a fly on this
lovely looking lady's head? I think the answer is it's a joke and
it's a joke that works on different levels because on the one hand the fly
has been tricked into thinking this is a real headdress, so the flyers come and
landed on it thinking it's real and it's not it's painted,
but obviously there's a double joke because we looking at it think 'oh my
gosh, there's a fly on that painting oh my gosh' and in that moment that instinct
to kind of bat it away or be panicked that it's
there, the artist has tricked us, we've been
duped because actually everything here
is two-dimensional. This is just paint and the skill of the artist is that
they've been able to take that paint and a brush and a bit of wood
and to conjure it into something that feels so lifelike, we do believe even
just for a second that that's a fly sitting on that picture. She is living
hundreds of years before the kind of image saturated world that we live in.
We've all got cameras in our pockets. We can, any moment of the day or night,
capture anything and everything around us and she's inhabiting
a totally different universe to that. For so many artists for so many centuries
capturing a moment in time and capturing that sense of life likeness, that was the
kind of ultimate goal, and I think that's what this artist is doing here with
the detail of the fur trim and with every single eyelash being painted and,
kind of gross as it is, with that fly as well. They're saying
'look at me, look how I can capture the world around me',
and that impulse, that impulse to trick us, to make something, to make this
fiction of a picture that's so believable, that takes us right back to
the origins of painting. So painting in the kind of western tradition is
thought to begin in about the fifth century bc in ancient Greece there's a
famous painter called Zeuxis who paints still lives and paints them in
this kind of radical radical way with a radical illusionism, whereby although
they're fresco, so kind of painted onto a wall, they are so lifelike that if
he paints a bunch of grapes birds will come and peck at them and knock
themselves out on the wall. That's the kind of myth the story around Zeuxis.
So that's how we think of paintings starting. It starts with that trick, with
that moment of looking across a room and going 'oh for a moment I thought you were
there, I thought you were real and that it was you not your painted
person, but actually your physical person here in the flesh'.
This lady, whoever she is, this lady born into the Hofer family, I think she must
have been in on this joke because there's no way an artist just kind of
sticks a fly in there without her knowing about it at the end right she'd
have known and I think, for me I love that because I look at her and I look at
these slightly upturning lips and I look at the fly and I think she must have
been in on that. She must have appreciated what that meant in terms of
tricking people. She must have had, when this portrait was finished, a sense of
pride not only about how it captured how she looks, but also that it was going to
trick people. That friends and family that people coming to view it, they'd
have that moment of being duped by the illusion. I like to think that in some
way or other it is a bit of a love story this picture, and although we don't know
for certain, we do know that it gets to us here at the gallery as part of a love
story. So this is a picture that was owned by Prince Albert the Prince
Consort, husband of Queen Victoria and he gives it to Queen Victoria as a gift and
his encouraging she gifts it to the nation. So,
whatever this lady's story might be we know that it comes to us by a bit of a
love story. It should go without saying this is by
no means the largest picture in our collection at the National Gallery I
think you'd have a hard time arguing it's the most important but it is a
picture that really rewards close looking
and for me it's not only a painting that makes me smile every time I come and see
it but actually it's one that reminds me that the very best artists always keep
us on our toes. If you'd like to know more about our
collection you can click here or here thank you so much for joining us, I hope
to see you again soon
