An essay by art critic Jonathan Jones (pictured) of The Guardian in the UK after a medical condition left his face temporarily disfigured.The human face is a miracle of nature. It can communicate nuances of emotion just by tweaking a muscle, it allows our brains not just to see the world but in some sense - through a smile or a grimace - to be seen by it. I discovered exactly how amazing the human face is when half of mine stopped working on Valentine's Day last year.
The early 19th-century Scottish anatomist, surgeon and medical artist Charles Bell identified a peculiar medical condition in a paper to the Royal Society in 1821. Inflammation of the seventh cranial nerve, he pointed out in the course of a revolutionary description of the nerves of the head, can result in a temporary paralysis to one side of the face. He had observed it in young farmhands in wintertime. To this day, that illness is called Bell's palsy.
I woke up with it just over 18 months ago. Despite walking around all day with a headache and a numb feeling in my face, I didn't really think much was wrong until my wife, Sarah, pointed out I looked a bit different and we did what we always do in medical emergencies - phoned Sarah's parents who are both doctors. That was how I received my diagnosis of Bell's palsy from Dr Angela Currie: it was such a classic case, she could spot it over the phone. And that was about all the medical profession could do. The doctor I saw the next day said that, although some people prescribe steroids to kick start a recovery, there's no statistical evidence that intervention makes any difference. Bell's palsy is usually caused by a virus. Most patients make a complete recovery by themselves. It's not painful or life-threatening. So why did I recently find it in a book called 100 Diseases You Wouldn't Want to Get, right next to bird
flu?
Because it made me look, for a few months, like Victor Hugo's Quasimodo. "Oh, you poor chap," said one medical professional, a little unhelpfully. The effect of having the left side of my face become immobile, with an eye that didn't blink and a mouth that twisted abstractly when I tried to smile, made me feel like a medical freak. I felt bizarre - and looked, for a time, a lot more bizarre than I felt. I looked like a gargoyle. I discovered how lucky I am to be surrounded by people whose sensitivity made me feel OK about this, or unaware of it, because when I encountered less understanding contexts I felt very uneasy. In those early weeks after diagnosis I felt stared at in the street, at the airport, in hotels. Disliked even. A psychology book I recently consulted says of Bell's palsy that "you may have seen people like this on the street". Yeah, and it might have been me. I cancelled any TV engagements I had. Fortunately I work at home: going in to an office every day would have been hell. As a writer you can control your social visibility more than in most professions.
I live my life through art and look for artistic connections in everything, so, of course, I turned to art in this unusual situation. I found comfort in a painting at the National Gallery: Francisco Goya's portrait of his friend Andrés del Peral, gilder to the Spanish royal household and small-time art collector. Peral, posing for Goya in about 1798, with his long, greying hair given a sparkling lift by the silvery sheen of his jacket, faces you with his arm stuck into his shirt, Napoleon-style, and seems from a distance an arrogant, disdainful man. Then as you approach, you realise his striking look of contempt is actually a facial weakness: the side of his face that he holds back from us hangs downward - it is palsied. Maybe it's the result of a stroke, maybe it
actually is Bell's palsy. Doctors, please tell us if you think you know. But this is a great painting: Goya does something infinitely more complex than simply turn a weakness into a strength. When you first see Peral he looks cold and harsh: when you realise this aggressive look is actually the product of weakness, it humanises him. His ailment makes him warmer.
I knew this painting and it reassured me in the period when I actually looked much worse than Peral. I think when I mentioned it to people they thought I was kidding myself, but what I really meant - I believe - was that if the condition didn't completely heal, if there was a residual permanent effect, well, you can look distinguished and noble in your weakness, like Peral. Of course, in the event I just got better, like most Bell's palsy sufferers. It was not that big a deal."Why do you trivialise it?" I'm sitting in a London cafe having breakfast with a distinguished man in a suit. I make sure to fix my eyes on James Partridge, despite my long-held fear of burns. Partridge was in a car crash when he was 18. The petrol tank went up and he suffered terrible burns to his face and body. Today he runs the organisation Changing Faces, which takes its name from his 1990 book - at once autobiography and advice - that tries to pass on what he has learned. The charity supports people with disfigurements and campaigns to transfigure attitudes. Partridge's face, the face he has after many operations, is one I find myself falling for. This is because of the way he displays it. He shows his face, he exercises and animates it before me. He is an extraordinary individual who convinces me that one of the worst fates I can imagine can be not just survived but even followed up with a life of joy. And he asks why I trivialise Bell's palsy?
He points out that a small disfigurement (if it is permanent, unlike Bell's) can ruin someone's life as easily as a major one. Psychological studies show there is no correlation between the scale of a disfiguring injury and the psychological suffering it causes. And this is all made much worse by our deep investment of moral value in beauty. In the Renaissance they were explicit about it: we are covert and hypocritical.
Our ideas of beauty and ugliness ultimately originate in Renaissance art. In a new exhibition opening at the National Gallery tomorrow, Renaissance Faces, you can see Henry VIII as a boy, captured in painted terracotta by the Italian artist Guido Mazzoni in about 1498. He giggles infectiously. We know he will die a bloated serial wife-killer but he's a lovely looking lad in this portrait. He is surrounded in the twilit Sainsbury Wing galleries by the kind of perfect human beauty Renaissance artists are famous for celebrating. The smooth-faced, straight-nosed, wavy-haired couple, sculpted in a marble relief by the Venetian artist Tullio Lombardo in the early 1500s, share a physical perfection so pristine that male and female blend into one another; gender dissolves before the magic of beauty.
Renaissance artists believed explicitly what today we believe implicitly. We do not go around saying, as they did, that there are correct proportions for every anatomical feature - a correct mathematical symmetry of eyes and ears, legs and arms, against which everyone's appearance can be judged. Yet in reality everything in our culture constantly tells us this is so. On screen, in games, in magazines, there are the beautiful people, and at the opposite pole there are monsters. Most of us, of course, muddle on somewhere in between. Yet in so far as we still admire perfect beauty we still depend on the existence of its opposite - the face without order, harmony or composure.
Officially, ours is a culture that acknowledges difference. In reality, ugliness, especially when it borders on what the Renaissance would have happily called "monstrosity", is still surrounded by prejudice and nightmare. No disfigurement is more shrouded in horror in my own imagination than the one Partridge has and I can honestly say meeting him, talking to him, blew away images of burns that have festered inside my head all my life: I remember seeing burned airmen in a war film when I was a child and, pathetically, that film, which gave me nightmares, shaped my dread of this type of injury right up to this week, when I met him. So this really is about images.
I normally dislike it when art is spoken of in terms of positive and negative images - as if Marc Quinn's statue of Alison Lapper became good art because it was positive; it did good work. The aesthetic deadness of Quinn's sculpture, as sculpture, for me negates its human worth. But images really do haunt and shape us. They can also liberate us.
I want to show Partridge my favourite image of an out-of-the-ordinary face in any portrait ever painted. It is Domenico Ghirlandaio's An Old Man and His Grandson, painted in Florence in about 1490. A man looks down from heavy lidded eyes at a young - and beautiful - boy who looks up at him tenderly: the boy is looking straight at the old man's distinguishing feature, his nose, which is massive and malformed, covered in tumour-like bulbs (the medical term is rhinophyma). It turns out that Partridge has a reproduction of it in his office. Of course he does. Because I can't think of a work of art in the world that more tenderly, simply, honestly and truly says all the things Partridge is trying to get across through Changing Faces, and that our society needs to get its head round.
Partridge says people sometimes tell him beauty is an "inner" thing, but he doesn't buy that. Our bodies are who we are. What is hard for people to understand is that he doesn't try to ignore his face: "I'm very proud and pleased with my face. I'm not in any way unhappy with it." And I can see that this is true.
In the Ghirlandaio painting, the boy who looks up at the man's nose is not ignoring it: there is a "marvelling", as Partridge puts it. And this is what I too find so insightful about the painting. I think it is infinitely more humane than any number of positive images that might be circulated today because it is truthful. Art can help us to think more sensitively and humanely about others not by concealing reality, and not by simply making a banal point of diversifying images, but by the kind of rich, deep sense of life's magic that hums in Ghirlandaio. In his painting, fascination defeats revulsion, and individuality triumphs over ordinariness. Far from looking past an unusual feature, airbrushing a blemish, this Renaissance painter emphasises it as part of the man's identity. Ghirlandaio was probably commissioned to commemorate the old man by his descendants: in the exhibition at the National Gallery you can see how it was based on a deathbed drawing of the man with the marvellous nose. In the painting he comes to life again, a gentle grandfather, adored by the erfect-featured boy to whom his "disfigurement" is part of a person he loves and will never forget.
Nearby hangs a drawing by Albrecht Dürer of his friend Conrad Merckell, whose twisted nose Dürer turns into a grotesque fantasy: it was done for Merckell, it is an act of friendship, and its exploration of the serpentine, gargantuan possibilities of the human face can stand as an image of how great art liberates us from cliched ideas of beauty. Even the Mona Lisa, some doctors have observed in one of the very many theories about this painting, has a slightly unbalanced smile - that's right, she has in one perhaps eccentric view been diagnosed with Bell's palsy. An after-effect of Bell's is even called Mona Lisa syndrome. It is true that asymmetry is part of this painting's beauty: as the art historian EH Gombrich pointed out long ago the left and right sides of the picture don't add up. After the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque, this appetite for asymmetry became an addiction. Velázquez and Rembrandt portray people as masses of colour, as palettes of imperfection: when Velázquez portrays dwarves he relishes their unique bodies and faces. As for Rembrandt, there is no "health", no "perfection" in his world and it is by discovering the strangeness of every face that he reveals the marvel of humanity.
In the first days of my Bell's Palsy experience, I went to Barcelona and something happened that now strikes me as significant. I fell rapturously in love with the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. I mean, I've always liked Gaudí's spiralling soaring mosaic abandon, but this went beyond admiration - it was ecstatic. And perhaps this was no coincidence. Gaudí is one of the most anti-classical artists of all time: his imagination rejects symmetry like the plague, laughs at elegance, transcends order. It is sprawling and chaotic. Perhaps, as I nursed my temporarily bizarre face among the medievalist delights of Gaudí's Sagrada Familia, I was for a moment truly like Quasimodo, whose deranged form makes him the living human embodiment of the architecture of his Gothic home, Notre Dame. My unusual medical experience made me see that beauty and ugliness are meaningless words, that all forms are marvellous, that the perceived perfections, imperfections and average in-betweens of our bodies, including our faces, are to be savoured as part of the crazy chaotic wonder of life.
It turns out that Charles Bell was also an artist. He trained in art before turning to medicine, and illustrated his own books: he also did graphic portraits of the soldiers with facial wounds he treated at the battle of Waterloo. He learned a lot about the nerves and muscles of the face from the traumatically exposed faces he saw in the Napoleonic wars. Bizarrely, the Goya painting that helped me is connected with Bell - for they both looked into the extremes of human appearance during the Napoleonic wars. Bell even treated the wounded of Britain's retreat from Coruña, in the Spanish campaign that was also part of Goya's experience. Yet in the end, Bell's diagnosis merely defined a curiosity. Goya's portrait of Peral imagines a human possibility.
It was strange, as someone who looks at art for a living, to suddenly find myself visually defined by illness. Bell's palsy is essentially, in modern medical parlance, a "cosmetic" disorder. Science can only describe it. Art can help you live with it and even teach you to value it as an aesthetic adventure. A lot of people get better in three weeks or so from this unusual condition; my face took about four months to start looking more "normal". The experience was prolonged enough to make me a bit shyer, a bit more hesitant in some contexts - perhaps even a bit less rude in my criticism, as I became more concerned that people should accept me. But I got over that and I got over the "face thing", as I called it. Lots of people have facial differences they must live with permanently. I've written this as a reminder to myself, before this experience becomes part of my ancient history, never to look at such people without imagining the mind behind the face: to look at others through Goya's eyes, not Bell's.
