Faces of eternity

The sedately beautiful, almost too painful new exhibit on Lincoln and the Civil War at the Bruce Museum is about many things. It's about leadership in crisis — something all too rare in our world today. It's about the inescapable touchstone that this period in our history has become. It's about the insidious cancer that is slavery.

But it's also about a subject that has long fascinated me and that is how leaders use the media of their time to express both the universality of leadership and the particularity of personhood. In the modern era, for instance, we are familiar with how President John F. Kennedy used TV and photography to present himself not only as a vigorous, youthful statesman but a playful father and an adoring spouse of an iconic wife.

Lincoln, too, used the then-newfangled medium of photography to further his political ambitions, record events and present himself as an empathetic wartime leader, says Rye resident Harold Holzer, who as both a Lincoln scholar and a Metropolitan Museum executive is well-qualified to speak on Lincoln and the visual arts.

Indeed, Lincoln — who was well-aware that some people thought his striking but unconventional face was ugly and employed his self-deprecating wit as a defense mechanism — was vain enough to take a young admirer's advice that he grow whiskers to give his thin mug some sophistication. As he became shrewder photographic subject, the tousled auburn hair got smoother, the suits darker and crisper.

But Honest Abe wouldn't brook any chicanery. He wouldn't, for example, allow folks to think that the book he and youngest son Tad were looking at in one of his most famous photographs was the Bible when it was really an album of photos. (In other words, unlike some of our present-day politicians, he wouldn't exploit religion for personal gain. Isn't that refreshing.) And I think that's why when you look at Lincoln's haunted, haunting face — in the exhibit but especially in the companion book "Lincoln, Life Size" (Alfred A. Knopf) — you see not only the president but the man.

It wasn't only that way. In ancient times, leaders went for idealization over reality. Ramesses the Great, who was a past master at propaganda, liked to lop off the heads of the sculptures of previous pharaohs and substitute his own. At places like Abu Simpel, he gave us the face of eternity — perfectly symmetrical and exquisitely chiseled, with almond-shaped eyes, a straight nose that flares slightly at the nostrils and a bow-shaped mouth.

Did Ramesses actually look like that? Judging from the hook-nosed mummy in the Cairo Museum, he did not. But then, a corpse may not be the best clue to what someone looked like in life.

By the time you get to the Greeks and Alexander the Great, you begin to see the coalescence of romance and reality. Alexander was another great propagandist, so much so that he tried to ensure that only three people — the painter Apelles, the sculpture Lysippos and the gem-carver Pyrgoteles — were allowed to fashion his image. But the upward tilt of the head, the liquescent eyes and the leonine hair were apparently all Alexander. And if they happened to dovetail with his image of himself as the new Achilles fulfilling the Homeric ideal of excellence in his conquest of the Persian Empire, well, so much the better.

In Alexander, the man, the media and the message merged beautifully. Leaders have been trying to replicate that recipe ever since, with mixed results.

Not everyone is pleased that they make the effort at all. That superb iconoclast Percy Bysshe Shelley mocked the once-powerful Ramesses' shattered stone remains in his well-anthologized sonnet "Ozymandias." But Shelley — himself immortalized by a sensual neoclassical sculpture at Oxford University — misses the point.

It's not that Ramesses has been reduced to fragments, Alexander to a coin or Lincoln to a calling card. It's that these survive at all, and through them the leaders they represent.

Long after we're gone, those leaders and their images will still be here.

"Lincoln, Life Size" — based on the collections of the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation at Purchase College, is on view today through June 6. 203-869-0376, brucemuseum.org. The Meserve-Kunhardt collections are open to the public by appointment. For more information, call 914-251-4474 or log on to mkfound.org.

And if you're interested in the subject of leadership imagery, you might want to take a look at the chapter on "Art and Power" in Nigel Spivey's "How Art Made the World" (Basic Books) and Andrew Stewart's "Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics" (University of California Press).

The Lincoln images are courtesy of the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation.