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Portraits de la pensée 

From 11/03 to 13/06/2011

The Palais des Beaux-Arts of Lille is organising an original exhibition on the imaginary portraits of philosophers by painters of the Spanish Golden Age. The title of the exhibition is Portraits de la pensée. This project is being undertaken in collaboration with Citéphilo, which is organising the Semaines de la Philosophie de Lille.

Alain Tapié will be the exhibition curator, with Régis Cotentin, head of contemporary programmes at the museum. The exhibition will be shown in the large temporary exhibitions room of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille from Friday 11 March to Monday 13 June 2011, with an option to extend.

In art history, the tradition of imaginary ‘portraits’ of philosophers is as important as that of the ‘portraits’ of the apostles, the saints and the Church Fathers. Whether they were carried out according to the artists’ religious conviction and own imagination or based on anonymous models, these paintings provided the artists the opportunity to convey a wide spectrum of symbolism in philosophical thought via the subject’s posture and the direction of his gaze as well as via gestures and objects. Following the creation of such ‘portraits’ of philosophers by Velasquez, Ribera and Giordano in the Spanish Golden Age, the theme of the philosopher was particularly in vogue in Spain, where the act of thinking manifested itself through light, expression, physical attributes, speech and gestures.

How, then, does painting represent the figure of the thinker – his face and body, his intellectual and spiritual aura? This exhibition will show the invisible side of thought by bringing together a gallery of portraits inhabited by silence, pleasure, or the pathos of a thought. Philosophers texts provide us with an image of their thoughts and, thus, of their personality as well. Characteristic of the desire during the Spanish Golden Age to encourage dialogue between the arts, their imaginary portraits show how pictorial composition corresponds to philosophical thought, with intellect resembling allegory and conceptual rhetoric spreading through the artist’s painted space. From narrative and mythical thought to discursive and philosophical thought, the painting of portraits strives to capture the soul, in much the same way as the practice of dialectics serves to establish an indirectly connected truth, at the service of a theory of knowledge.

An original scenographic presentation will offer visitors the possibility to experiment with and experience the invisible side of thought via the concrete form of intellectual diffusion. Bill Viola’s majestic installation Room for St. John of the Cross (1983) will be placed in the middle of the exhibition space, bringing visitors directly into the experience of mediation before they discover the gallery of imaginary portraits of philosophers and the allegorical systems of thought they  represent.

Artists have been inspired to paint passion, work, time and death – the signs of which are all inscribed upon the body. However, rendering thought or meditation visible created genuine difficulties for the artist. Indeed, thought – whatever its affective tonality may be, never seems to be linked to a single, invariable, objective expression of the body. True, one might imagine that thought modifies or leaves its trace on the face, or that it subjects the body to certain forces and metamorphoses in the same way one might suppose it affects the time and space surrounding it. But does that mean that it can be represented? If it can, how can it be rendered visible? Is it enough to evoke the representation of the thinker, the hermit, the solitary philosopher? Can we be content with symbolic allegories, the sole existence of which is to attest to that intangible activity which is thought?

Free access with the City Pass