When the Picture Stares Back

Or, the Personhood of Alberti's Picture Plane.

So, you’re in a museum, or a park, or a forest and you look at a beautiful object- a painting, a tree, and you just have to stop and stare at it for a while, because it’s arrested you in some way. When you're standing there, simply looking, maybe you’re concentrating, maybe you’re not, but all the sudden you get this feeling that the thing is looking back at you. 

Johannes Vermeer, "Girl with a Pearl Earring," c. 1665. Mauritshuis Museum, Netherlands. Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

Is that even possible? 

From metaphor to metaphysical truth, we’re going to meet those gazes today and study the sympathetic spirituality of object making. 

In our modern Western world, it’s easy to split things up into animate and inanimate - living things and inert objects. Most of us are raised inside this system of thought and rarely question it - until we start getting into the liminal spaces between these two supposedly neat and tidy categories. 

We also tend to think of only living things as capable of sentience, awareness. Some people even argue that humans are the only beings that are self-aware, that our minds are unique in the ecosystem of creatures and beings that make up our world. We build skyscrapers and political systems and written languages and moral codes, and animals are slaves to their biology. Don’t even mention the secret underground language by which trees communicate with one another. 

And while many of us acknowledge the incredible presence of mind of animals and even plants around us, an artwork might be a stretch for some of you. Clearly, this object was designed by an artist and made up of paint, canvas, and a wooden frame. It is a representation, an idea, a cool idea, but not a living thing. 

Or is it? 

What if we were to return, remember, re-acknowledge a past way of seeing, the one we were born with as children, this fantastical way of seeing creation that let us see friends in anything and everything, and which our post-enlightenment culture stripped from our minds, sanitized, and tried to reduce to a scientific process or a commodity. 

Let’s make room in our minds for this possibility that, as JF Martel and Phil Ford assert in their podcast Weird History, “Artworks are People Too.” When I’ve tried to explain how I fell in love with art history, I never had exactly the right words to capture what happened, and how I quite literally fell in love with something that is not a person, not an animal, not even one idea, but a way of being. And now I have the answer - I fell in love with the personhood of the wondrous study of our past through artistic expression. I fell in love with the entire world once I saw it through one of its best lenses - that of being continuously alive, of history not as an inert, dusty study, but a way of seeing and being that is continuously calling us to shape and reshape our own ideas, create and recreate artworks and ideas and ways of relating to each other to shed the dross and shine a light on the best that we, as humans, can do.

No Two Horns (Hunkpapa Lakota artist), Shield, c. 1870. Leather, paint, and feathers. Denver Art Museum, Gift of Rev. CW Douglas 1932.237.

Native and Indigenous cultures, and European culture before the Enlightenment era all recognized the validity, even the inevitability of seeing the world as populated with persons. For a Plains warrior, his buffalo hide shield is not merely the mechanical assembly of buffalo skin, treated wood, and pigment from the earth painted in interesting symbols. The shield is an embodied presence of the power of the buffalo, of the power of the Thunderbird painted on its hide - it is an active site of ongoing protection, a sort of harness of the energy field which flows through the animal and human kingdoms. And, it is important to note, this energy does not die when the buffalo dies. It lives on in the materiality of his skin, in the mind of the warrior who respects the gift he has sacrificed.

To an Andean Inca priest, the rocks of the temple he ascends each day are not merely stone, but flowing, living water running actively down the face of the mountain which is itself alive with spirit. The stone inhabits and expresses its personhood as much as the mountain, and much as the man himself. It moves, reflects and conducts sunlight, that life-giving star upon which we all depend. The stone breathes.

To the medieval Christian nun, her God sets the entire world in motion alongside a host of angels, demons, creatures, sprites, and even personifications of the virtues and seasons and stars. Mercury has a different personality than Venus, and Venus is distinct from Spring, and all of these are different than Gabriel the Archangel. To say that these forces, these personalities, do not exist in the world and actively influence the physical world we all live in, is to deny reality, to deny Creation itself. 

To separate the animate and the inanimate is not to remove a false superstition we were all born with, but to place a veil of perception over the world which stifles the interconnectedness of all creation and denies the ongoing, generative, sometimes violent process of becoming. Every day, every minute, every second, pieces of this world, pieces of our bodies are being destroyed and remade, dying and reborn, torn apart and put back together in different ways. This world is teeming, seething with movement, energy, a contained swirling kaleidoscope of controlled chaos. When we think of our world in these terms, a shifting, swirling site of infinite birthing, the idea of personhood suddenly ceases to belong exclusively to humans. 

As JF Martel says, “You can look at…anything in the world and you could analyze it down to the particles that make it up, or you can analyze it up to the person it constitutes.”

How does this way of seeing change how we interact with, care for, and make art if it is not just a sum of materials, but will take on a life of its own? This is something that artists inherently feel as they are making, like the piece, whether a painting or sculpture or novel, is their child; could this be more literal than we in the West have ever thought? What would happen if we began to see trees, and rivers, and our mother earth in this very real, personified way, not as a concept or a metaphor, but as a living, breathing entity that lives as we live? What would it take for us to value a living earth as much as her stripped down materials?

Does something need eyes to be able to look at you? Who are the persons you intuitively engage with day to day? And I’m not just talking about naming your car, or viewing your dog as your biological human baby. I mean the entities whom you can engage in silent or spoken conversation with, and you know, with a sense beyond knowing, that they are listening to you?

One of my most present persons is the moon. Diana, I call her. Beautiful, luminous Diana, queen of the night. Every time I look upon her lovely face, I see that she has watched my ancestors over thousands of years, has seen humans come and go. I get a sense each time I look at her of the gazes that have looked up before, and we wonder together: are my loved ones safe? What will become of me? Where should I go from here? What will the future bring? And each time I ask those same questions, her gentle reminder is the answer - I have heard your questions many times over. And those people found their answers. So shall you, child. 

And unquestionably, personhood manifests itself most clearly to me in artwork. 

This idea, that some objects are not only imbued with the intentions of their creators and reflected in the eyes of their perceivers, but inherently contain their own individual meaning and identity outside and beyond the lifespan of their creator, those they were created for, or their function, “it’s an awareness that what the universe is made of, is persons, that personhood is a primitive category - primitive in the sense of being primary, fundamental, un-amenable to any further analysis or analytical disassembly,” according to Phil Ford. 

Art historian Charles Carman studies the works of Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti, as well as the philosophical work of Nicholas of Cusa, and finds an overlap in how these two men talk about the faculty of vision, both physical and spiritual. He speaks about the Renaissance conception of the picture plane not as a surface, but a window, something which our eyes can fix upon and then move through.

Masaccio, The Holy Trinity, with the Virgin and Saint John and Donors, c. 1425. Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

A painting then in this sense becomes not only the locus of visual perception to fix our eyes, but reveals an entire infinite world behind the painting, one which comes into being once our spiritual sight is activated. It is not an illusion to trick the eye, but an allusion to something our day-to-day eyes don’t always see or make time for. By depicting the natural world in mathematical and naturalistic proportions, the painter does not squeeze God out of the frame, but rather, the material world of the painting, much like the material world we inhabit, acts as a metonym for his presence in this world as its Creator. 

And Carman asks the question - while we are staring into the painting, into the transcendent universe of meaning and intangible form behind it, what is looking back at us from that transcendent world? Enter Martel and Ford’s personhood theory. Are we looking at the personhood of God? Of our highest Selves? Of the universe? Are these, in fact, different categories of being, or all the same entity? 

Just the other week I was walking through the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum at Colonial Williamsburg, strolling through a gallery of frankly frightful American folk art portraits - the women all rounded boxiness and the men austere angles - until I reached a portrait of a young woman and her baby son. I glanced at it, noted the difference in style which was more pleasing to me, something between Neoclassicism and Mannerism, especially in the elongation of the mother’s neck, when her eyes arrested me and rooted me more firmly to the spot. 

Attributed to Thomas Sully, Portrait of Catherine Macomb Mason and her son, John Henry Mason. Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1829, oil on canvas, Framed: 42x35in, Museum Purchase, The Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections Fund, 2017-4,A&B.

Her eyes - Catherine Macomb’s eyes, as depicted here - are so full of intelligence, life, playfulness, and fierce devotion. I wonder if her eyes captured her husband’s, her friends', like this during her life. I wonder what the painter, Thomas Sully, saw when he looked at her face and sketched out and then filled in these eyes with color, with deliberate linework, with such animation. And I wonder too, what it is that lives behind, inside the paint of this work, which continues, after almost 200 years, to hold that ferocity, that liveliness in place and make me feel as if I know Catherine, somehow. I know that spirit.  

It is almost as if the painter and the sitter together have come together to create a place where the incorporeal ideas of motherhood, devotion, intelligence and womanly playfulness are concentrated and expressed, a place which draws upon their inexhaustible energy, which is continuously fueled by these ideals which exist separately from the woman who exhibited them or the artist who outlined them.

I’m reminded of Plato’s theory of the absolute form - that everything on earth has a perfect, transcendent corollary which we only gain glimpses of through earthly things - that a tree embodies the essence of a tree, but true Tree-ness lives on the transcendent plane. Aristotle rejected this notion, stating that every object or person is matter shaped into a specific form, and this only is where something’s nature can live - the tree’s tree-ness can only live inside of an embodied tree. 

What do you think? 

Have you ever encountered a painting, or a tree, that seemed to be staring back at you unaccountably? Have you ever dismissed such interactions as a projection of your own imagination?

I invite you, the next time you sense a connection between yourself and an object, whatever it may be, not to dismiss it so quickly. Sit there a moment. Be silent. Take out your airpods, put away your phone. And just look, and listen. You might be surprised at how intimate the moment feels, as if it were made just for you, as if it were a wordless conversation happening between two very real people. 

Resources:

Charles Carman, Renaissance Theories of Vision, 2010.

JF Martel and Phil Ford, “Episode 216: Artworks Are People Too,” Weird Studies Podcast, 2026. Available on Spotify.  

Ralph Chami, “What a Living Whale is Worth - and Why the Economy Should Protect Nature,“ TED Talk, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwigf0C6zxM&t=290s.

Thomas Cummins & Bruce Mannheim, “The river around us, The stream within us, the traces of the Sun and Inka kinetics.” Article in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics Journal, 2011. Available on JSTOR.