In a way, an art historian can also be a detective. Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has shown that Morelli's art authentication is not unlike Sherlock Holmes's method of solving mysteries. This attention to detail applies not only to identifying the author of a painting, but also to sculpture.

At the invitation of the World Art History Institute (WAI) of Shanghai International Studies University, Jeanette Kohl, professor of art history at the University of California, Riverside, recently came to China to share her interdisciplinary research on busts at the "Lecture Series of Outstanding Scholars in World Art History·Art and Culture of the Renaissance". At the same time, she also turned her attention to the East and embarked on a project called "The Human Image: A Global Perspective", attempting to study what makes a portrait a "portrait" of a person and how portraits are defined in different cultures.

Janet Cole gives a speech in Shanghai

Janet Cole is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Riverside, and Director of the Center for the Humanities (CIS) at UC Riverside since 2021. Her art history research focuses on portraiture, sculpture, and concepts of artistic representation and memory during the Italian Renaissance.

During her visit to China, she delivered lectures entitled “Meditating with the Bust: Rembrandt’s Aristotle and the Bust of Homer” at Peking University and “Forensic Medicine, Mummies, and Busts: Forensic Medicine in Renaissance Portrait Sculpture” at Shanghai International Studies University, and led a seminar entitled “The Concept of Style: Epistemology in Art and Science” at the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts with Johannes Endres (Professor of Comparative Literature and Art History at the University of California, Riverside).

The conclusion of the “Lectures by Outstanding Scholars in World Art History: Art and Culture in the Renaissance”.

The lecture in Shanghai was also the finale of the "Lectures by Outstanding Scholars in World Art History: Art and Culture in the Renaissance". In the lecture, Cole introduced the perspective of forensic medicine to analyze a 500-year-old bust sculpture currently housed in the Getty Museum in the United States, revealing a secret and cruel history. Her research fully demonstrated the interdisciplinary nature of art history, integrating the imagination of art history, the precision of natural science and the thrill of detective novels.

Her new book, The Life of Busts. Fifteenth-Century Portrait Sculpture in Italy, will be published by Brepols in 2025. The interview with The Paper also started with this book.

Busts (portraits) from antiquity to the 21st century

The Paper: The Life of Busts focuses on the unique art form of busts, exploring its cultural and social functions from ancient times to the present. Why did you focus on busts rather than full-length portraits or head portraits?

Cole: From ancient Rome to contemporary art, the bust has been an influential and enduring image type in Western art, but most publications focus on questions like "Whose portrait is this?" and "Which artist created it?", "Who does it represent?" and "Who does it belong to?", but ignore the influence of the bust itself and people's unique response to it.

The bust is not only a form of representation of the human figure, it is also highly revered and appreciated in people's daily lives, religious beliefs and museum collections. Therefore, it is an interesting topic to discuss why the bust is so important in human culture.

Busts are also one of my first ways of contacting artists. I am often attracted by images, but at the same time I am also thinking about how to understand works of art from a methodological perspective. In Western art history, painting often occupies a dominant position, while sculpture is relatively neglected and is often regarded as more "material", while painting is considered more "intellectual".

Pericles (Athenian politician) wearing a Corinthian helmet, only part of the base of the sculpture from ancient Greece has survived, the existing Roman copy comes from a bronze statue made by the sculptor Chrysalis, the picture shows one kept in the Vatican Museum.

I hope to change this bias by showing the importance of sculpture, and busts in particular, which I think uniquely combine questions of measurement, material, and form in what I consider to be “phenomenological” [ note: Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl that studies how we experience and are aware of these phenomena. Phenomenology focuses on the nature of experience rather than the actual physical object itself ].

This means that I pay attention to how humans react to three-dimensional faces and the different meanings conveyed by different materials. This is a kind of philosophical transcendence [ note: transcending a specific historical moment or a specific era context, with trans-temporal or universal ], that is, phenomenological thinking. Because the bust is a fragment of the body [ note: fragment, fragment] , it is a bit weird in a way, but it is also very powerful; the bust focuses on the face of the person, and the face is the part that everyone pays attention to, helping us interact with art, so it is very eye-catching.

Attributed to Donatello, Bust of a Young Man, Bargello Museum, Florence

The idea of "fragments" is different from a statue that loses a part (such as an arm). The bust is a fragment that was deliberately designed from the beginning. "Fragments" on a phenomenological level prompt the viewer to fill in the missing parts through imagination. So when you see a part of the human body, the imagination is stimulated to conceive the whole image. This phenomenon is described in literature, poetry, and sound. People also like this idea of filling in the gaps and feeling or understanding the whole person by only seeing a part.

The Paper: There are many forms of busts, including paintings on mummy coffins, coin emblems, ancient Greek sculptures, Renaissance sculptures, sculptures and busts in paintings, etc. What are the similarities and differences in the information conveyed by these different forms of expression?

Cole: Mummy coffins, coins, ancient sculptures, Renaissance sculptures, paintings, etc. are all made of different materials and different textures, and contain different meanings.

I want to go back to the idea that the Renaissance bust was an absorption of the ancient bust. Many people think that the Renaissance was a revival of antiquity, but that was not the case. Although antiquity became important and even a trend, and everyone wanted to own antiquity, Renaissance works were not simple copies, they showed new ideas and used new materials.

I also want to correct a cliché (or a common view) that the Renaissance was a period of rediscovery of antiquity. While there were some traditional connections between antiquity and the Renaissance, the medieval religious bust was very important to the development of Renaissance art and helped shape the artistic expression of the period.

People often say that individuality was lost in the Middle Ages, so the Renaissance had to go back to antiquity for inspiration. But I think this style of individual portraiture had already been invented in religious artworks, like a 13th-century sculpture of a religious figure, which shows a high level of realism and very realistic details. So the Renaissance boom in realistic portraiture is actually rooted in medieval religious art. People had a high level of reverence for these religious objects (sculptures) and would pray in front of them. Interestingly, the reinvention or rediscovery of realistic portraiture actually came from this type of religious portraiture, not just by going back to classical art.

Bust of Charlemagne, with the top of his skull, c. 1350

Compared to coin emblems, ancient Greek sculptures, and paintings, religious sculptures such as busts are powerful containers that are highly respected because they contain relics of saints. The religious use of these busts laid the foundation for their revival in the secular world and promoted the importance of busts outside of religious contexts. This is also the fundamental difference between busts and coins, paintings, etc.

The Paper: How did your research on Rembrandt’s famous painting “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer” lead to the development of a “tactile philosophy of painting”?

Cole: The last chapter of The Life of the Bust, Aristotle and Homer, is about Rembrandt’s famous painting. In this chapter, I look at the sculpture of the bust through painting. In a way, Rembrandt’s painting summarizes the tactile, material, and phenomenological properties of the portrait bust, which make the bust something that humans can relate to.

Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Rembrandt was thinking in his paintings about what painting and sculpture could do and how humans use these mediums. I think he was one of the first or few artists to emphasize the unique role of sculpture in memorializing important people. You can touch the sculpture, it's in your hands, not as abstract as painting.

Painting is only representation, requiring a great deal of painterly skill to transform a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional picture, but the unique physicality of sculpture in memorialization, connecting with it through touch, offers another possibility to remember the great men of the past, which is exactly what he expresses in this painting. I find it particularly interesting that at the end of a book that promotes sculpture as an important medium, there is a reference to looking at sculpture through the lens of painting.

Marble bust of Homer, 2nd century AD, a Roman copy of a 2nd century BC Greek original

This painting by Rembrandt depicts Aristotle and a bust of Homer. Aristotle proposed the concept of "thinking with the hands". Aristotle believed that the hands are closely connected to the mind. When you touch something, the touch is not only a sensory experience, but also associated with intelligence and understanding. This is why sculpture has a special meaning for human cognition at the material and tactile level.

I also compared other paintings, and there are few similarities to Rembrandt's Aristotle and Homer Bust. It has a very unique idea of touching a bust (or object). For example, a collector showing himself and his collection and touching it, this scene has existed. But Rembrandt reinterpreted this and turned it into an image about touch, and linking touch with understanding.

Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (1818-1897), a famous Swiss historian, described the Renaissance as the revival of the individual. That is, the self-conscious individual understands that he is not only determined by God, but also has autonomy and the ability to act. This self-discovery is often associated with an interest in the individual. Roman art, especially individual portraits from the Roman Empire and the Republic, had a greater influence on Renaissance artists. Although Greek art was attractive to scholars in other aspects, Roman art was more representative in portraiture and individual representation, and was the main source of their reference and development.

Francesco Laurana (Italian sculptor and artist during the Renaissance), A Princess of the House of Aragon, c. 1475, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The bust became important again in the 15th century and in paintings in the 16th century as a status symbol, which did not show the wealth of the people who owned them, but also symbolized humanism and knowledge. The bust played an important role as a symbol of knowledge and appreciation of culture [Note: similar to the portraits of people in the Qing Dynasty in China, where their own collection of bronzes, etc. were presented in it to show their knowledge and collections ], but not everyone was as clever as Rembrandt, who made this painting so complicated. "

Ren Xun, "Xi Zhai Collection of Ancient Works" (partial), from the collection of Shanghai Museum

The Paper: The bust tradition has always existed in Western art. What does it represent people’s understanding of individual identity, honor and historical memory at that time?

Cole: During the Renaissance, a new material became popular, and that was fired terracotta. This is a very typical Renaissance bust, fired terracotta and painted to make it look more realistic. This bust is based on the death mask of Lorenzo de' Medici, who was the famous ruler of the Medici family.

Lorenzo de' Medici, painted terracotta bust, probably based on a model by Andrea del Verrocchio and Orsino Benintendi, 1478/1521, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Bertoldo di Giovanni, bronze relief medal of Lorenzo de' Medici, 1478, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

According to ancient tradition, the Romans often used marble, and there were many marble portraits in the Renaissance, but why did the Medici family in particular love to use clay in their portraits? Why is the death mask used as a reference for the bust? Can other images make the bust more majestic?

Cast of the Death Mask of Lorenzo de' Medici (originally gilded), probably by Orsino Benintendi, 1492

We have to mention Lorenzo's uncle, Pope Leo X, who had the same idea. They wanted to appear honest, which is related to honor and authenticity, and at the same time use cheaper materials to show humility and make them approachable. The rulers of the time did not want to appear too luxurious, so they chose clay as a material, which was inexpensive and easy to color, and used death masks to make it realistic. This bust shows what he really looked like.

Attributed to Antonio Benintendi, Giovanni de' Medici, c. 1512, painted terracotta

Raphael, Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi, circa 1518-1519, oil on canvas, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

The honesty and simplicity of clay as a material was recognized as early as ancient times. Pliny the Elder, the author of the Roman encyclopedia, wrote that masks are the embodiment of reality, they are not luxurious, they show good people, honest politicians, and so on.

This is a political expression - they want to maintain power at all costs and consolidate their position in society, while wanting to look like ordinary people, which is also the embodiment of identity, honor and historical memory in the bust.

The Paper: How are busts reinterpreted and used in modern society, and what role do they play in contemporary art and culture?

Cole: I study not only the classical period, but also medieval religious art, and compare Renaissance art with religious objects. Everything is embedded in tradition, and from this I discovered some ideas about how the bust tradition is being re-expressed in contemporary art.

For example, I have shown an object containing the remains of a saint and another object containing the blood of a saint. When the remains and blood are combined, miracles happen in religion. Now, I am thinking about contemporary art related to this. For example, British artist Mark Quinn created a self-portrait using his own blood.

Marc Quinn, Ego, blood (artist), stainless steel, body and refrigeration equipment, 1991

Under the guidance of a doctor, he took blood from his own body, poured it into a mold of his face and head, and preserved it in a refrigeration system. Quinn reinterpreted the ancient tradition of reliquaries, which usually contained human blood or body parts, but he exposed these elements and used them as his self-portrait. So, in contemporary art, there is a reinterpretation of "blood", a connection that returns to the relevance of the bust and Renaissance art.

Borgiano, The Death Mask of Filippo Brunelleschi, 1446, in the Museum of the Duomo of Florence

It also shows the continuity of busts and portrait sculpture from ancient times to the 21st century, with artists thinking about the bust as a medium of representation. But in Marc Quinn’s case, if you unplug the refrigeration, his “identity” disappears. This work is highly dependent on technology, and it also plays with ancient ideas, such as blood symbolizing sacrifice; or, what is human identity? How does the body relate to identity? When we talk about objects like this, there are many questions that come up, and this is what I focus on: those larger ideas about identity and representation, and how artists play with the complex relationship between them.

Honor is a very important principle in the Renaissance, but in contemporary art (especially Western contemporary art), it is no longer so important. It is more about memory and the fragility of memory, because if you unplug it, the memory disappears. So it may be a criticism of technology, talking about the relationship between technology, memory and the body.

Dialogue between China and the West: Portraits are an ideal perspective for cross-cultural visual art research

The Paper: Your doctoral dissertation, “Fama und Virtus,” Berlin 2004, focused on the church cemetery of Bartolomeo Colleoni in Bergamo, Italy. The tomb murals in China are also a visual and spatial expression. However, unlike the Western tomb murals, which are memorial sites and symbolic spaces, the Chinese tomb murals also express personal power, honor, and religious beliefs. Is it possible to conduct a comparative study of Chinese and Western tomb culture?

Cole: This is an interesting idea – I support comparative studies between cultures and see its potential to further enrich our understanding of art and cultural history. Funerary art is one of the most important and fascinating genres in the discipline. “Last things” tell us so much about how people wanted to be seen and remembered, and I would not be surprised if further research in this area shows us that the wishes of the dead long ago and far away in the East were not so different.

Cosimo Rosselli (frescoes) and Mino da Fiesole (altarpiece and tombs), view of the tombs in the Salutati Chapel from inside the Basilica of San Romolo (Basilica of San Romolo, Fiesole).

Humans are not that different from one another on a global scale, and they don’t change that much across time and space. When you mention personal power, honor, and religious beliefs in Chinese funerary culture, these are also major elements in Western funerary art and funeral rituals. That said, research on Chinese and Western funerary culture should not be limited to comparisons of visual artworks.

"Guests and Envoys", the second year of Emperor Zhongzong of Tang (706), east wall of the tomb passage of Prince Zhanghuai, Shaanxi History Museum

As I show in my paper, ritual and written sources, like sculpture and architecture, tell us about the role of individuals in religious and cultural beliefs. Together, they reinforce the quest for immortality that is hardwired into human DNA. No one wants to be forgotten. But the way we want to be remembered, even across time and space, varies. Most people want to be remembered as kind, generous, brave—and many emphasize their religious beliefs. Ideally, cross-cultural comparisons involve research at the intersection of multiple disciplines.

The Paper: There were also portrait paintings in ancient China. Are you interested in this? Is it possible to conduct comparative studies with Western portraits?

Cole: I have always been interested in deep cross-cultural comparisons of different cultures at different historical periods. Obviously, as a Renaissance scholar, I am most interested in portrait art in early Ming China. I have begun working on a project called "The Human Image: Global Perspectives" to examine the following questions: What makes a portrait a "likeness" of a person? And, how is this likeness defined in different cultures - culturally, religiously, and physically? And how is it expressed - through medium, material, likeness, etc.?

Portrait of Wen Zhengming, Ming Dynasty

The cross-cultural perspective of this project is completely new and explores the representation of concepts of “humanity”, “humanity” and “identity” in images and their intersection through global communication paths in the early modern period. The relevant cultures can range from the Ottoman Empire, Yoruba and Ife cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, to the Joseon Dynasty, Ming Dynasty, Maori culture and Oceanic cultures, as well as pre-Columbian and early colonial iconography in the Americas.

Statue of the ancestors of Koval, collected by the Quai Branly Museum in France

The project moves away from colonial and postcolonial issues towards a new understanding of global art practices, image forms and their cultural roots. The focus of the research is what we all have in common - faces and identities, and their relationship to art. The concepts of portraiture and identity are ideal perspectives for conducting cross-cultural visual art research. The project provides a unique opportunity to shape the still-forming field of global art history, studying art history through a historical perspective and a clear thematic focus - portraiture art, and also includes research in sociocultural anthropology, ethnology, religious history, medical history, performance theory and philosophy.

The ancestral sculpture named "Mingjietimi" (left) and ritual board in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 2023, the exhibition site of "Outlines of Time: Oceania Art and Heritage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art" at the Shanghai Pudong Art Museum

This project will expand the history of portraiture, a field that was strictly art history, into a cultural history of portraits and faces in the early modern period. I will further ask: what role do portraits (whether painted, sculpted, written or performed) play in culture? What are their functions? What role do they play in social, religious and mythological beliefs? We will discuss cultural differences in image perception, the agency and magic of portraits, and the "presence" of portraits in these cultures, and analyze different ideas to subvert the priority of realistic portraits in Western and colonial history.

In a global framework, Western concepts of mimesis (i.e., the successful imitation and reproduction of the external world in art), and their close connection to individuality, identity, and facial recognition, will collide with different ideas of identity and representation, which are based on different ways of thinking about relationships. For example, Maori tattoos are one of them, which express the identity of the maker and its bearer through facial inscriptions. If Chinese scholars are interested in joining, I would be very happy to do so.

Interdisciplinary research, art history is not isolated

The Paper: In your lecture in Shanghai, you brought up forensic clues in Renaissance sculptures. How did you come up with the idea of combining these two seemingly unrelated fields?

Cole: This was a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). I got the money from there and organized eight researchers from different fields to carry out a three-year project. The project was called "The Power of the Face" and we wanted to expand from the traditional art historical perspective and add some external perspectives. So we invited a facial surgeon, a religious researcher to discuss the face of Christ, and even a philosopher to discuss how their fields interpret and deal with faces. This is the root of interdisciplinary thinking, aiming to establish a new cultural perspective.

I have always been very interested in portraiture and am currently writing a book on half-length portraiture from the Italian Renaissance, which is also a result of the project "The Power of Faces".

Our team of art historians researched various aspects of the human face and portraiture from the Middle Ages to the 17th century. This wide-ranging project included six conferences on different topics and invited scholars, researchers and practitioners from outside the field of art history to expand the concept of the “face”.

My research has since expanded to include sculpture, because I've noticed that there are many more portraits than statues. I want to make up for the lack of research on statues. At the moment, I'm also branching out in a slightly different direction, and the book has been handed over to the publisher for editing.

In this project, I hope to bring together experts and scholars in the fields of East Asian art, African art, Asian American art, and European art to discuss the relationship between portrait likeness, realism, and idealism in early modern portraiture. So this is currently a work in progress, and I hope to complete this project as soon as possible.

The Paper: What new insights or challenges did this interdisciplinary approach bring during the research process?

Cole: Looking at the face as a phenomenon from a broad academic perspective is one approach, and another is forensic clues. I personally firmly believe that all art historical research must begin with a careful analysis of the object. To do this, it is often and very helpful to consult museum curators and find out what restorers have found, rather than relying solely on photographs. Starting from observation, we can try to reconstruct the history of the object. Then, we combine knowledge from different fields to further understand their history and how they have changed over time.

Francesco Laurana, Bust of Simon de Trent, circa 1470–1480, Getty Museum, New York

A famous example is the marble bust of the Martyred Child at the Getty Museum in the United States. On July 22, 1999, a security guard on his nightly rounds spotted someone kissing the bust (with pink lipstick gleaming on its mouth). This was a form of religious interaction, and it also showed the power of the bust. From this, I traced the forensic evidence on the face and surface of the marble bust to identify the image and identity of the work. This evidence led me back to the remains of Simon of Trent in northern Italy and his horrific wounds, "namely the wounds identified in the historical autopsy conducted by Giovanni Mattia Tiberino in 1475, which was intended to determine and confirm the boy's martyrdom and cause of death, a purpose that was continued in a large number of early woodcut propaganda images, which are understood as visual statements of fact rather than artistic creations or interpretations."

The Murder of Simon of Trent by the Jews, Michael Wohlgemuth and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, illustration from Hartmann Schedel’s World Chronicle, Nuremberg, 1493

This was solved through interdisciplinary research on the misunderstood Getty Museum marble bust, which was fortunate, but I have failed. For example, about 10 years ago, we tried to use facial recognition technology, which was not yet widely available at the time, to compare paintings, coin images, drawings and sculptures to see if those who looked similar were the same person. In some cases, we knew who the person on the coin was, but the identity of the sculpture was uncertain. So we used computer parameters and came up with some possibilities and probabilities, but computer-generated results are not reliable because they cannot take into account differences in artistic styles. For example, all the women painted by Botticelli look similar.

Botticelli, Portrait of a Lady at the Window (Possibly Smeralda Brandini), c. 1470-1475, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Verrocchio, Lady with Flowers, c. 1470-1475, Bargello Museum, Florence

Note: For Botticelli's Portrait of a Lady at a Window (c. 1475) and Verrocchio's Lady with Flowers (c. 1475), two portraits believed by some to be of the same person, a computer test gave a similarity score of 0.727, indicating that the two are likely a match.

Although technology is not always very accurate in art authentication and research, it is indeed valuable in distinguishing true from false and studying production processes. In particular, when dealing with the problem of forgeries in the 19th century art market, technology provides important help. Therefore, we must have a broad understanding, such as the importance of faces; on the other hand, we must believe in the value of careful observation and material analysis, and at the same time, you must be focused.

The Paper: What role do you think interdisciplinary research methods play in art history education?

Cole: Art history is not an isolated discipline. Art history only works in conjunction with textual history, emotional history (or what we call psychology in modern times), and in-depth historical research. Therefore, we have to consider the political and religious environment of the time, which makes art history a kind of introductory discipline in a sense.

For example, literary history usually does not require images to explain texts, but we can often use texts to better explain images. Although I am not saying that every image needs to be accompanied by text to understand it, texts do help us understand the cultural context of the image. Therefore, art history is essentially interdisciplinary in my understanding.

The more you know, the more you see. You need a broad cultural understanding. I always emphasize with my students to look carefully and use all your knowledge to respond to the object in front of you. There needs to be a balance between broad knowledge and careful observation of the object, because the object itself should be able to "speak".

When teaching, I feel that some students may not be good at understanding the "aesthetics" of objects, and they are more concerned with production techniques and hope that beauty can be explained through theory. Although I also like theory and big concepts, many students prefer to read a lot and then write down what they have learned, and put the image or object itself in a secondary position. This is wrong.

I believe that research questions should be developed from the objects themselves, raised through interaction with paintings, sculptures, drawings, etc., so that you can do historical justice to the objects you study.

Note: I would like to thank Lu Jia (PhD candidate at WAI), Wang Lianming (Associate Professor of Chinese and History, City University of Hong Kong), and the World Art History Institute (WAI) of Shanghai International Studies University for their great assistance in this article. The "Lecture Series of World Art History Distinguished Scholars" will be launched in September 2023. The theme of 2023-2024 is "Art and Culture in the Renaissance". 12 top scholars from six countries are invited to China to share their research results in this field. This is the final chapter of the "Renaissance Dialogue".