Jean-Marie Donat Collection

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Jean-Marie Donat Collection

Multigraph portraiture is a technique that emerged at the end of the 19th century, at the dawn of photography, but it didn’t gain popularity until much later, in the early decades of the 20th century, when members of the Surrealist, Futurist, and early avant-garde movements, such as Marcel Duchamp or Ramón Gómez de la Serna, began to take an interest in it. They saw it as a playful embodiment of their ideas about split identities, illusionism, and phantasmagoria.

Halfway between technical ingenuity and fairground entertainment, the multigraph is based on a system of mirrors that allows a portrait of an object or person to be captured from different angles in a single shot, evoking a three-dimensional vision. Although its rise coincided with that of photography, the use of this technique, which prefigures 360° vision, dates back to the Renaissance, when it was used to obtain multiple views of a subject that could be used to model a sculpture. In this way, Van Dyck’s multiple portraits of the King of England, Charles I (1636) and Philippe de Champaigne’s portraits of Cardinal Richelieu (1642) have survived to this day.

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