The Sovereign Image: Authority Across Cultures

Marcus Oyelaran ◹

Ledger · Art & political history

The exhibition's premise is seductive and historically legitimate: that power across cultures converged on a visual formula of gold, frontality, and untouchability. The problem is that the show proves this only by ignoring almost everything that matters about how these images actually functioned in their own moments, which is to say, it mistakes formal similarity for historical equivalence and flattens power into a single, timeless shape.

Start with The Fieschi Morgan Staurotheke, a Byzantine reliquary from around 800 that opens the argument with genuine material authority. The gilded silver and cloisonné enamel work creates a surface so precious and so deliberately fractured by pattern that the viewer cannot settle into comfortable looking, cannot access the object as a stable image. This is reliquary metalwork, made to contain and protect and to demand ritual approach, not democratic viewing. The formal frontality here is not primarily about the sitter's power but about the sacred object's removal from use, from touch, from the profane world. When the exhibition slides that same formal language into Diego Velázquez's Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670), a portrait of an enslaved man of African descent whom Velázquez trained as a painter, the curatorial logic breaks down entirely. Velázquez does use frontality here, and the painting does present an inscrutable face, but the work is doing something far more legible and far more troubled than encoding "unquestionable authority." The painting's formal dignity is precisely what makes it impossible to resolve: Pareja's status as both subject and object, both depicted with the care reserved for a court painter and legally positioned as property. The frontality is not about power's permanence, it is about a contradiction that cannot be painted away. To treat this work as another example of authority's visual grammar is to miss its entire historical weight.

The show's treatment of the Baroque court painters is more troubled still. Rubens' Study of Two Heads and Study for "The Bear Hunt" (for the Alcázar, Madrid) are working drawings, studio sketches, provisional and human and full of second thought. They show painters thinking, correcting, trying angles. Placing them in a show about sovereign authority that "cannot be questioned" asks the viewer to ignore what these works actually are: the exploratory labor that precedes the official image. This is where the curatorial framework does real damage, because it requires erasing the material difference between a finished court portrait and a preparatory study, between the moment when authority is being constructed and the moment when it appears complete. Similarly, Frans Hals' Portrait of a Woman, probably Aeltje Dircksdr. Pater is a work of almost violent intimacy, its brushwork visible and urgent, its sitter alive in a way that actually resists the exhibition's claim about Baroque portraiture's immobility. Hals painted people who looked back at the viewer with presence, not distance.

Where the show could have done real work, it punts. The exhibition mentions Benin bronzes in its subtitle and preamble but includes none in the actual roster, which is a curatorial choice that speaks volumes. To argue that Benin court hierarchies expressed authority through the same visual language as Byzantine or European systems, and then to not show the work, is to treat Benin as a theoretical appendix rather than a case. More importantly, it avoids the most important and difficult question: that these formal similarities might not prove a universal truth about power, but rather might demonstrate how European empires absorbed and redeployed visual systems from the cultures they encountered and colonized. The gold, the stillness, the frontality, might not be an independent solution but a stolen one, circulating through imperial networks. That would be a genuinely sharp curatorial argument. This show is not making it.

There are moments of real formal interest here, particularly when looking at the Renaissance bronze Neptune in a Sea-Car [reverse], which shows authority in motion rather than stillness, breaking the exhibition's central claim outright. If Lysippus Junior's work is in this show about the immobility of power, then the premise is already compromised, and the curator has not acknowledged the contradiction. The gilded bronze Bust of Christ sits somewhere between devotional object and portrait, between image and relic, and that unstable position is where the exhibition's vocabulary actually fails. These works are good enough to deserve a show that asks harder questions about what they actually were doing when they were made, for whom, and what it would mean to see them side by side not as proof of power's permanence but as traces of how power has always had to remake itself, had to borrow, had to work harder than its own visual claims suggest.

The exhibition is historically minded but not intellectually restless. It knows its objects are connected, but it has chosen the flattest possible connection, the one that requires the least interrogation of its own assumptions about what authority looks like and who gets to say.