Before anyone makes the obvious comment about in my piece in today's G2 recounting my experience of the illness Bell's palsy, I'd like to stress one point I left out of the article - this would be a much more disturbing condition for someone who was proud of their looks in the first place. Having cut my face in an accident, then had acne, as a teenager I'm well aware that I never was a beauty. Imagine being an actor and getting this - apparently George Clooney had it - and it's obvious that both in terms of my relationship to my face, and my profession, I had it easy.
On the other hand, I had a bad case. Most people get over Bell's palsy in a matter of weeks. Mine was severe at the start and so it took longer to ameliorate. I'm not stressing this to get sympathy but in case anyone is filled with terror of what can be a mild condition.
Anyway, it's fun, as well as potentially therapeutic, to spot illnesses in art. I sometimes get the impression every portrait has, at one time or other, been diagnosed with a medical condition. Mark Brown wrote in Saturday's Guardian about new theories pertaining to another painting in Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery, An Old Woman by Quinten Massys (generally known as "The ugly Duchess"). Another painting I've always found powerful is Rembrandt's portrait of Gerard de Lairesse, whose face is marked by syphilis, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sometimes the face bears the marks of inner suffering in a graphic way. The most spectacular instance is of this is, of course, Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear in the Courtauld Institute. In fact, it's another way to think about Van Gogh's self-mutilation if you reflect that here was a man who regularly portrayed himself and others - a man deeply aware, therefore, of the face and how it expresses the self. In cutting off part of his ear he literally defaced his own portrait: and recorded the wound in his art. It was a self-imposed disfigurement that turned the face into a direct sign of his inner turmoil.
Feeling ugly can change your whole life: it changed Michelangelo's. When he was a teenager the great Renaissance artist was punched in the face by a rival; his nose was shattered and he felt ugly all his life. He expresses this in poetry, and his self-portraits are startlingly frank and even alienated from his own body: in the Sistine Chapel he imagines himself as a flayed skin flapping about.
Michelangelo's passion for beauty was saved from blandness by his deep unease in his own skin. If he'd felt beautiful, he would have been a different artist.
