The temple is a latch on the skull where four bones fuse: the frontal, parietal, temporal, and sphenoid. In anatomy courses at art academies students study the latch and its quadruple planes with the help of diagrams and gypsum reproductions. Students draw and redraw these models, accustoming themselves to the relations of the shapes which make up the skull and the rest of the skeleton until at last they can consistently, almost perfunctorily, sketch the outline of a human form with precision. The pencil line will conjure the sweep of the collarbone into the shoulder blade, the spine’s curve, and the haunches above the hips as if the whole figure were fully formed in the artist’s mind and the hand holding the pencil was itself manipulated by the figure in the artist’s imagination — as if the pencil was automatically, without thought, acting on a directive issued by the artist’s subconscious. This automaticity is the point, the essence of the draftsman’s skill. Like a dancer whose knowledge of the choreography is not reflective but muscular, the artist will know the human body so well that even a sketch — say, a hastily rendered likeness copied surreptitiously into a Moleskine on a subway car before the unwitting model, a fellow passenger, has a chance to shift her weight, or to catch the snoop in action — will evince this understanding. The sketch is not just of a face, it is of a face which sheathes a skull, connected to a spinal cord and a ribcage, and even if the artist has not drawn these things she knows that they are all of a piece, smoothly fitted into one another, and the marks in the Moleskine are informed by this prior understanding. If the flesh of a model is pulled tightly over the skull, then the planes which converge at the temple ought to be rendered by the painter in different hues, because the light will reflect off of these planes with stark contrast. This offers an opportunity for the artist to communicate, with a subtle shift in tone, that she has noticed and appreciated the peculiarity of each plane, and how the gradations of color and light border one another. If a model is made to sit for long hours while the painter toils, the light will shift, and then fade, as the day darkens, and the flesh will subtly change color. Fittingly, the word “temple” comes from the Latin tempus, or “time,” because the hair on the temporal bone is often the first hair to turn gray and recede, so temporal means both “pertaining to time” and “pertaining to the anatomical temple.” Take your forefinger and strokes the small field on the side of your head behind your eyes, between your forehead and ear. It curves gently down where the skull-sphere bends inwards at the earlobe and then up and out around the eye socket’s rim. In Vuillard’s Self Portrait, Aged 21, painted in 1889, the viewer can see precisely where the artist’s skull curves. That plane on the portrait — it looks like a slim, obtuse triangle — is yellow ochre, whereas the patch of skin below it which stretches out towards Vuillard’s high cheekbone is a fleshy pink. The temple’s highest point, the point at which the light source would have hit the plane directly, contains the most white. In this painting, the lightest stretch is the curve which lines the upper, outer edge of the eyebrow. The photo of Self Portrait, Aged 21 on the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. website is appallingly lit. One must visit the canvas in the Small French Paintings Gallery to relish the exquisite delicacy with which the painter established this passage. Generally, the temple offers a remarkably satisfying opportunity for portraitists because it is a point of complicated geometry (the four planes converging) and it is encased in the flesh which rests above the eye, so it is delicate. The severity of the edges and the softness of the flesh juxtapose deliciously. When exquisitely rendered, I find it more consistently delightful than almost any other passage of painted flesh. The severity of an edge in a painting, I mean the place at which a plane ends, can be immensely pleasing. From ordinary experience, from the edges that we see every day in buildings, bookcases, furniture, and so on, we are accustomed to an orderliness and a lucidity — not a perfect lucidity, which ordinary perception may not provide, but a clarity sufficient to establish the scene — which painters must render expertly in order to make the universe on the canvas convincing. The lines must be firm even when they are gentle. Geometries, even twisted or interpreted geometries, ground paintings; they are the scaffolding which the eye leans upon for elementary comprehension. Cezanne was a master of geometries. Look closely at the walls of Cezanne’s buildings: the contours of every wall and roof and object are established not just by lines (there rarely is a single line) but by the shape or stroke directly behind the object and the gradations of color within it and against it. A shadow behind the house establishes the end of the building as clearly as the edge of the wall itself. And the same is true of the apples in his bowls of fruit. Shapes and their limits are what interested him. There is a mathematical field called topology, a branch of geometry, that studies the properties of shapes that stay constant when they are stretched or twisted: Cezanne was a topologist. In a letter to Emile Bernard, he remarked that “you must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.” The formal integrity of the object, which preceded the perception of it, had to survive the artist’s interpretation of it. The composition, or the relationships of the shapes within a painting, does not have to be complex in order for the painting to be accomplished, but it must be clean, coherent, and legible,
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