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Renaissance Faciality

Context and contribution: Loh is both co-editor (with Patricia Rubin) and a contributor of a key essay to the edited volume, Mal’Occhio: Looking Awry at the Renaissance, which appeared as a Special Issue of the Oxford Art Journal. This collection of essays offered five new studies in the area of Renaissance art and visual culture. The essays were the result of a conference Loh co-organized with Patricia Rubin at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2008).

Research imperatives and process: Loh’s article proposes a history of the portrait in early modern Italian art that turns away from conventional views of humanism of Renaissance faces to engage with the abstraction of Renaissance faciality. The term faciality is used here to deterritorialize portraiture from the heroic model of the Renaissance individual. The discussion challenges the traditional (and previously unquestioned) identification of Michelangelo in Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican, The School of Athens, which turns out to be a twentieth-century invention, and focuses upon the various mythical faces of Michelangelo in art history.