Face and Mask: A Double History, Hans Belting, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. 270 pp.

Research output: Contribution to JournalBook/Film/Article/Exhibition reviewProfessional

Abstract

How often have you read an article and then Googled the author to see him
or her? How often have you swiped right or left just looking at the faces
without reading the profile on Tinder? Seeking faces and trying to put faces
to names happens every day but Hans Belting has brought together Face and
Mask to tell us: what you see is not a face but rather a presence ‘rigid as a
mask’ (p. 6). The book speaks of faces and their representational qualities to
ask what a face actually is and how can we write a cultural history of faces?
He portrays ‘face’ to challenge representations and to provoke curiosities
for investigating subject, self and reality by way of faces. The book, in its
luxurious print, is placed at the intersection of historical anthropology and
art history to insist that ‘the face is the cynosure of all images … with the
impossibility of representing it accurately’ (p. 7).
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)274-276
JournalJournal of Visual Culture
Volume16
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

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