The tronie—a head or character study—is not a portrait; tronies figure the anonymous as opposed to the recognized, the pathos of expression rather than the portrait’s posed veneer. The tronie and its precise relation to the academic genres of history painting, portraiture, landscape, and still life has been the subject of recent scholarly attention. The slippery pictorial genre first appeared in the sixteenth century as a workshop exercise designed to teach young apprentices the fundamentals of drawing and chiaroscuro. A tronie may also mimic a particular master’s style; thus it became a popular and marketable form in the seventeenth century, particularly around the workshop of Rembrandt.

Neither portraiture nor physiognomy, neither iconographic nor allegoric, neither genre figures nor history paintings, the tronie has continued to elude the classificatory systems of art history. In the 1930s, the scholar Kurt Bauch first discussed an “in-between” category of painting in Rembrandt’s oeuvre that was neither history painting nor portraiture. In the 1980s, Albert Blankert dubbed this form the tronie (a ubiquitous and opaque nomenclature in seventeenth-century painting inventories). Ever since, art historians have sought to define the term and detail the evolution of this neither/nor genre. In six chapters, Franziska Gottwald’s Das Tronie—Muster—Studie und Meisterwerk traces the genealogy of these expressive facial studies from the archetypal representations of apostles and saints in late medieval model books to the enigmatic secularized faces that became sites for artists’ calligraphic display of authorial gheest (mind or spirit), and as such, autonomous objects produced for the booming art markets of the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Similar in objective to Gottwald’s aim to define and classify, Dagmar Hirschfelder’s Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2008) explored the relationship between tronies and portraiture. As opposed to the more “canonical” art-historical projects of Gottwald and Hirschfelder, a recent exhibition and accompanying catalogue at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Tronies: Marlene Dumas and the Old Masters, put the work of the contemporary artist Marlene Dumas in dialogue with Old Master tronies. Despite its temporal disjunction, the comparison between Dumas’s blurred and dissolving images, such as the watercolor-on-paper Jesus-Serene (1994) or the ink-and-crayon Barbie, the Original (1997), and Peter Paul Rubens’s oil-on-canvas Tronie of a Bearded Man (1609/10), demonstrate that these paper, canvas, and wood panel studies each revel in the dissolution of the iconic (Christ, Barbie, Apostle-like heads) against the respective materiality of sculptural oil paint or the dissipating force of watercolor. In the midst of this contemporary interest in representative and represented faces, Gottwald’s Das Tronie likewise shows an assiduous attention to media and their physical materialization (charcoal, oil painting, engraving) as well as a lucid grasp of seventeenth-century Netherlandish art theory. Indeed this concise volume provides new groundwork for further research on the tronie and its various manifestations from medieval pattern books to postwar artistic practice. (Might one imagine Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as a modern tronie?)

Although Gottwald’s primary focus is on the appearance of the tronie as an “autonomous” genre, her attention to other media such as model books, workshop cartoons, and printed drawing books to contextualize the tronie bases her analysis in a body of materials often overlooked by art historians. In the chapter entitled “Head as Model” (“Kopf als Muster”), Gottwald establishes the “iconographic” genesis of the tronie within medieval workshop products (such as the famous Bohemian Musterbuchblätter from the 1400s in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and the use of cartoons in Italian workshops. By establishing the tronie within the medieval model book tradition, Gottwald lays the foundation to better understand later projects, in the medium of print, dedicated to tronies, such as Johannes van Vliet’s printing of Rembrandt’s tronies, Jan Lievens’s Diverse troniken (1625/35) or Michael Sweerts’s Diversae facies (1656). This grounding of tronies in medieval model books illustrates how these later printed works provided repertoires of figures that workshops might then integrate, copy, reinvent, or transform. In this sense, the tronie becomes a thread connecting workshop practice from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century, despite disparate media and material.

The tronie’s development as a genre cannot be considered without attention to the prodigious workshop practices of the Flemish masters Frans Floris and Rubens. In her chapter “Head as Study” (“Kopf als Studie”) Gottwald distinguishes the variant functions the head study served in these two Master workshops, maintaining that neither artist produced the tronie as an autonomous work for the market. For Floris—a Fleming who traveled south—the Italian cartoon was fundamental to his development of the expressive facial study both in terms of its role in the preparation of larger works and as a pedagogical instrument. Rubens—another itinerant Fleming—was also guided by an Italian-derived art and theory. In contrast to the Mannerist style of Floris’s works, Rubens’s naturalistic facial studies reflect a Counter-Reformation balance between ascription to pictorial types (as seen in model books) and a fidelity to nature. Here, too, print plays a pivotal role, for Rubens’s tronies take shape in dialogue with the Carracci as mediated through the Carracci printed drawing books (etched and engraved by artists such as Luca Ciamberlano and Odoardo Fialetti), and Rubens’s own tronie studies which were also disseminated through engravings, such as those made by Paulus Pontius.

The chapter “Head as Masterwork” (“Kopf als Meisterwerk”) describes the tronie’s emergence in the seventeenth century as an autonomous genre produced for individual sale, and as such, an emblem of the final “secularization” of the genre. Gottwald attributes the tronie’s development in the North Netherlands to the young Lievens and specifically to his engagement with Rubens and the Utrecht Caravaggisti. Moving beyond the attributional tasks of the Rembrandt Research Project, Gottwald expertly shows how Rembrandt’s tronies engaged with the tradition of the model (Muster), despite their seeming idiosyncrasy. This final chapter chronicles the tronie’s evolution in Leiden, locating this “in-between” genre at the intersection of a complex nexus of artistic and historical pressures, including competing formal influences, burgeoning Classical art theory, and religious conflict, all of which shaped the distinctive form the tronie came to bear in the seventeenth century.

Paradoxically these copied and modeled faces—anonymous and built from archetypes—remain evocative of an interiorized individual “self.” In light of the tronie’s roots in the model book and its imbrication in the history of print (raising questions of imitation and repetition), such stylized and tropologic faces bring to the fore a thematics of origin and model that have recently come to dominate the fields of Renaissance and Baroque art history, for example, Amy Powell’s Art Bulletin article, “A Point ‘Ceaselessly Pushed Back’: The Origin of Early Netherlandish Painting,” (The Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (December 2006): 707–28); Maria H. Loh’s Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007) (click here for review); Christopher S. Wood’s Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) (click here for review); and Wood’s and Alexander Nagel’s Anachronic Renaissance (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010) (click here for review). If Gottwald does not directly engage with the theoretical questions broached by the archetype and the print, her work implicitly partakes in a widespread dialogue over the transformative influence of models, copying, and the technologies of reproduction on early modern artistic practice and theory.

The attention to tracing the genesis of a Gattung makes Das Tronie an important resource for understanding portraiture, expression, and genre in this period. Yet the study is marked by an unresolved conflict between recognizing the ways in which the tronie resists—even undermines—iconographic classification and a simultaneous insistence on firmly establishing the tronie within its own prescribed genre and category. These bodiless “non-iconographic heads” that commenced within altarpiece painting—acting as models for saints, apostles, and Christ himself—deserve further consideration in regards to the secularization of these once religious, now pathic, faces for the art market. The determination to taxonomize misses the ambiguity, volatility, and transience of these heads without bodies, which so pointedly refuse reduction to a singular allegory, emotion, or identity. Infinitely copied and passed down through generations of workshops—sites of both pedagogy and mastery—the tronie explores the breakdown between form and meaning, the material and the immaterial. Perhaps the determination to classify and name these melancholic representations, which bridged the workshop and the market, speaks more to art history’s own insecurities as a discipline than to the intricacies of seventeenth-century artistic practice.