The Self-Portrait ‘En Décapité’: interpreting artistic Self-Insertion

This chapter enters the realm of art to discuss images of severed heads in Renaissance and Baroque works of art that are known or believed to depict the artist himself. Study of the self-portrait en décapité has been dominated by such post-modern spheres of interest such as body images, self-fashioning, the grotesque, gender issues, self-mutilation, sadomasochism, and castration complexes, as well as rhetorical discourse, meta-art, the cult of the artist, social emancipation, and art-theoretical topics. The three biblical stories of beheading-Salome and the Baptist, Judith and Holofernes, David and Goliath-enjoyed great popularity in the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The chapter addresses the problems of exegesis of this genre, and examines in more detail the five cases of decapitated self-portraiture most debated in art history. It distinguishes between the likely and the unlikely and defines the self-portrait en décapité as an iconographical category more precisely.