During the Rolfing training, photographs of paintings come up often. I have touched once before in this blog on the body and the history of painting (see “The History of Painting and the Body (1) — Viewing the Body Through the History of Western Painting“); this time, as a second installment, I would like to take it up again.
In Session 7, the face and head are dealt with. The face is a sensory organ important for perceiving the outside world. It is a session for learning how this connects with the interior of the body (which in this blog I call bodily sensation), and it is an important session for coming to know the interest of Rolfing.
Before entering the main theme of the head and face, I would like to touch on the representation of the head and face in art (this content, too, is from Giovanni).
Giotto and Raphael of the Renaissance came to reflect a way of grasping the body three-dimensionally in their art (see “The History of Painting and the Body (1) — Viewing the Body Through the History of Western Painting“). Piero della Francesca, by grasping the head and face three-dimensionally as well, captured the sensation that the world widens together with the head and face. It can be said that he expresses, through the face, the state of the mind being stable.
In fact, this same method of expression can be recognized in the Buddhist statues of the Gandhara period (the 2nd–3rd centuries) in India. Through the position of the head, balance, a sense of unity, and a sense of the whole appear. It looks as though — entering into one’s own mind and reflecting inward, through a stable head and feet, and through the figure with palms joined together — it conveys the teachings of Buddhism.
The last to take up is the 19th-century artist Amedeo Modigliani. In Modigliani’s works, through his own distinctive way of depicting the face and head, he devises a method of expression in which the features of the person come to appear. For example, the work below, by depicting the face with a long neck, succeeds in expressing the emotions that appear through the three-dimensionality of the body — such as the person’s human beauty and intelligence.
What painting reveals is that, depending on how the position of the head is depicted, what the person is thinking and their expression change. Looking at painting in this way is, I think, interesting once again.