Michael Hampton: Figure Drawing

The Art of the Portrait

"Portraits painted between the fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century must be seen in connection with the advent and development of empiricism, a tendency which had been making itself felt in the arts since the late Middle Ages. Their execution therefore seems guided by an underlying rationalistic impulse, an impression reinforced by demands that they should be true to life and their subjects verifiable - criteria, in other words, derived from the practicalities of "rational" Roman Law. Paradoxically, however, portraits from this era still exhibit many magical or fetishistic characteristics. These were expressed in the "substitutive" or "vicarious" properties of the portrait, qualities which had been attributed to the likeness since the dawn of civilisation."

Robert Fludd

"The spiral of human development is leading many people back to a world-view not so very different from Fludd’s, yet (as is the way with spirals) a little more advanced. The magic of these pictures is that they remind us of the possibility, indeed the iminence, of a cosmic view free alike from the myopia of materialism and the absurdities of naive spiritualism."