It seems fitting to approach a book about faces by starting with an examination of the publication’s own face, namely its cover. On first view of Hans Belting’s new book, Faces: Eine Geschichte des Gesichts, only the white and yellow letters of the title emerge clearly. A second look is necessary to make out the female figure located behind the text; it is a portrait of the famous U.S. photographer Lee Miller, taken ca. 1927 by Arnold Genthe. The young woman is slightly turned to the left, as she looks over her shoulder and away from the spectator’s gaze. Her eyes seem somewhat lost in thought and her mouth is closed—its corners subtly turned up—suggesting she is thinking of something pleasant, yet her visage also contains an expression of melancholy. The blonde hair, cut to a bob and pulled back behind her ears, pushes Miller’s face to the foreground of the diffuse space. Appearing young, fragile, and sensitive, the woman first presents her face to the viewer and then withdraws to escape our gaze, but she remains receptive, as if waiting for someone in the picture to arrive. Belting’s cover features a person who, in the broadest sense, has multiple faces, both in this image and in her life and work; Miller was a photo model, a muse and source of inspiration for artists such as May Ray, and an artist herself.

Even a spectator who is unaware of this context can look at Miller’s portrait and recognize more than just the black-and-white structure of a blurry photograph. The sitter’s inner world is open for exploration, and it makes one curious about the object of her contemplation and the meaning behind the shy offer of the right half of her face. Belting’s book, the result of about ten years of work, draws on a central topos of art history—the portrait. But the finished ca. 350-page work, which is well illustrated, approaches this topic from an unexpected perspective. His viewpoint is embodied by the letters set in front of Miller’s features, which produce a distance from her face and introduce the central issue of the book: the history of the mask as the cultural history of the face. Belting views the face as a mask and, conversely, the mask as a face.

Belting is one of the most renowned and innovative German art historians and image theorists of his generation. His image analyses, which he considers anthropological, involve a wide cultural milieu. The image of a face is—as Belting emphasizes in his current book—also a kind of expression of the variability of cultures. Every image is always something both substantive and ambivalent in Belting’s eyes. The image is a product of human action and therefore part of the human being (this is not a novel concept); but as a product, it is also a sovereign object.

Belting’s influential publication Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990; translated into English as Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) was dedicated to the consideration of the image as a result of a cultic-ritual behavior in the pre-modern period “before art.” Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001; appearing somewhat belatedly in English as An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) (click here for review) continued to deal with the pictorial element as cultural event, but was more insistently concerned with the presumed primordial, invariant human fundament of image production. Florenz und Bagdad: Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008; translated as Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011) broke new ground in describing the transcultural mobility of visual systems.

Faces addresses another facet of these same themes, examining the human body’s behavior in relation to artistic and visual production, and the process of perceiving both. This time the focus is on the face alone. Belting’s emphasis on one aspect of the body might be understood as a result of the development of media in our culture. But it is also, one could say, Belting’s heretical inversion, as ever more individuals present themselves, and not just their faces, in more or less public digital networks. All of these developments concern Belting, and new media permeates his new book. For the author, the human face as a representation of the human in portraits and self-portraits is a fact of our current culture. It is within this context that the face became a mask.

The book has three main parts, and Belting deals generally with the relationship between the face and mask at the end of each section. He operates excellently in going between the dimensions of the material presence of masks, portraits, photographs, and faces (that is, between the face per se) and its representations, as well as their constant back-and-forth movement.

In the first part Belting is concerned with the relationship between the face as a part of the human body and the worn mask, which references many long-standing traditions and rituals. He also pays attention to the theater, where the mask created a “pathos of distance, because the emotions onstage were only a task within the role” (Rollenaufgabe) (73; all translation are my own). This function was lost in modern theater. Later, Belting turns to the sciences, especially neuroscience, within the context of the physiognomy of Johann Kaspar Lavater, who was himself dedicated to exploring the relationship between the face as an organic element, mediating between the mind, its passions, and their expression in art. But while earlier physiognomy—pursued by Charles Bell and Charles Darwin—was focused on the physiological and psychological understanding of the face and skull, according to Belting, current neuroscientists concentrate on the brain and forget the face as a crucial part of the outer representation of our inner life.

The second part concerns the portrait and the mask, and relays the traditional history of the portrait as a symbolic transformation of an inner life into an outer surface and delegate—in short, into the persona or mask. Belting fixes no epochal boundaries, but extends his gaze from the earliest objects to Cindy Sherman. Of central interest is the constitution of an icon as the “real face” (echtes Gesicht) of a saint in a metaphysical sense. It stands in contrast to a profane portrait, which can be understood only as a representation of an individual’s exterior. In a chapter on self-portraits, with particular focus on significant artists such as Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Jan van Eyck, the self-portrait is also found to turn into a mask, becoming the outer, isolated representation of a person, her or his mere surface. This section ends with a reflection on photography as a “key” (Schlüsselwerk) to the general question of the mask and the portrait. Man Ray’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, showing her sitting in front of her famous 1906 portrait by Pablo Picasso, brings the two phenomena together. In the photograph, asserts Belting, Stein’s face is confronted by the painting and converted into a mask, while her photographed physiognomy is abandoned or “shut down” (stillgelegt) (201).

In the third part, Belting questions the fate of the face and the mask in new media, from Pop art and film to live video and cyberspace. Belting speaks of “media faces” (Mediengesichter) (218), which have come to replace the natural face in public. He assumes that the face is now trained to transform itself into an amenable mask during photo shoots. This medial development leads to a strong separation of the face as a mask from the lively body, and was already visible in Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Film directors, such as Sergei Eisenstein and Ingmar Bergman, and video artists, including Bruce Nauman and Nam June Paik, either try to escape from the prison of mask production, or—like painter Chuck Close—they disclose that portraiture is only a manufacturer of masks. Belting closes his book by reflecting on the state-sanctioned image of Mao Tse-tung. Its oversized form and unchanging physiognomy express once again that the portrait is a mask, pruned from the real body, and yet, because of his omnipresence, Mao appears, ambivalently, as both a nearby presence and a sacrosanct icon.

The entire book is full of well-known and also exciting lesser-known examples of masks and portraits, drawn from all eras and visual cultures, and discussed within the context of the history of the face as a cultural history of the mask. In instances in which it is possible to transcend this narrative of perennial mask-making in a historically conscious work of modern art (for example, in Francis Bacon’s 1953 reworking of Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent X from 1650, the bare emotionality makes the internal appear in the exterior face, and the mask falls apart), Belting refuses to recognize it decisively. For him, the portrait, and the face itself, is always mask-like, something external and thus subject to objectification. But contemporary developments in digital imaging now allow us to look at a person in non-traditional and unfamiliar ways, and to see individuals from the inside while better understanding their external form.

Furthermore, contemporary readers will notice that the word “face” is central to the name Facebook. In Facebook and other online social networks, a user can show her or his whole world in written and pictorial form before millions of viewers. But Facebook—the name of which is particularly significant, since it implies a collection of portraits and, notably, self-portraits—does not present the face, that frontal part of a human head-cum-mask; rather, it presents the supposed personality profile of a person. Created simply as a configuration of possible information that is thrown together by the user onto the network, Facebook represents the ambiguity of an individual’s representation. This ambiguity is exactly what interests Belting, but he reduces it to a single selected part—the face. What an individual presents as one’s face, however, can be represented by more than this one part of the body. Paweł Althamer’s Self-Portrait in a Suitcase (1996), for example, provides an eloquent idea of the artist’s self. Like a doll’s house, there is an open suitcase in which, reduced to doll size, the figure of Althamer is sitting on a small chair and looking at the meal set before him. With a pleasant dose of irony, the viewer notices that the suitcase is also the artist’s living room, bedroom and study, bathroom and dining room. Living out of a suitcase? This is a maximal self-portrait of the artist, presenting his face. Another striking example is Robin Sellick’s 2006 photograph of Adam Scott, a golfing champion, in the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. The photograph shows an attractive man, carrying no attributes of his sport, facing us with an open shirt and set against a black background with unworldly red foliage. Who is this man? A Shakespearean actor? A fantasy figure? We do not know, yet he appears as the diametrical opposite of Miller on Belting’s book cover, direct and concrete, but also inhabiting an unbearably wonderful reality in his body. Is this a mask, or is it the true face of a man whom the spectator usually sees “masked” by sportswear and the golf club in his hand? The question of what is a mask and what constitutes the self is more subtle and context-dependent than Belting’s grand cultural history allows. But this portrait clearly shows why Belting’s interest lies in the mask rather than the portrait as a mirror of the sitter’s soul. For where is the real person? Is he in the sport suit, provided with a loud trademark, or in a photo-portrait that is completely exempt from such commercial motives?

For all these reservations, Belting’s latest publication is an significant book about the cultural history of the mask, which has not yet been investigated in such depth.