Seeing Ourselves: from Boccaccio to the age of the selfie

Frances Borzello’s study of women and their self-portraits is a cornucopia of the weird, the chilling and the sublime

Some books are so beautiful, you tremble to open them. Thames & Hudson’s new edition of Frances Borzello’s Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits (£24.95) is one of these, its ivory pages so crammed with fantastic reproductions, you might want to think about investing in a pair of white cotton gloves before you read it.

And it does demand to be read as well as gawped at (first published in 1998, this edition comes with a new afterword in which Borzello, an art historian with a special interest in bodies, ponders the self-portrait in the age of the selfie). Art books are too often jargon-filled, theoretical to a headache-inducing degree. But this one is both lucid and unexpectedly compelling. The surprise is, I suppose, that in a world in which women artists have often been invisible, so many of their self-portraits exist. The earliest appear as illustrations in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) from 1355-9, and then down the centuries they multiply in number rather amazingly until we reach the 20th century, which brought us Suzanne Valadon, Cindy Sherman, Marlene Dumas and countless others.

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