“Time” after time

It is the eternal curse of the public figure: to end up on the cover of Time magazine. It is not enough to appear; one must appear well. It is not merely a photograph but, for some, an act of investiture, for others, a public excommunication. The real drama begins when the subject is a man who has turned himself into a visual fetish, a self-moving logo. For such a tycoon, the photographic result is no longer an editorial concern but a theorem of inverted self-perception: a casus belli.

The recent cover dedicated to Donald Trump, following the peace deal between Israel and Hamas, would deserve a full treatise on the semiotics of power. The chosen image, according to the man himself, not only produced an “ugly picture” but performed a curious act of subtraction: his hair, rendered almost invisible.

Here we reach the very essence of representation. When a man of power disputes his own portrait, it is never about politics but about theology, about what the image implies. The tycoon’s complaint is not a matter of salon aesthetics, but a deep ontological rift. The photograph is “ugly” not for any compositional flaw, but for an identity failure. The light becomes a luminous halo around the head—an involuntary, blasphemous aureole—the true stone of scandal. It is not an investiture, but a denial. As if the photo suggested an unexpected grace, or worse, an exposed fragility. And fragility is the last thing a brand of power wants to reveal.

Let us then turn to portraiture, including religious ones, and look at Caravaggio’s Madonna dei Palafrenieri (1605), a masterpiece of raw realism intended for St. Peter’s, soon withdrawn for indecency. Mary was too common, too carnal; the Child, already grown, helped his mother crush the serpent in a too dynamic, almost prosaic gesture. Saint Anne, meanwhile, was an old, wrinkled woman lost in shadow. Merisi’s sacred was too real to be accepted. The halo, though present, was mere formality before the scandal of the flesh.

Today, the man on the cover contests the excess of the sacred—a halo that is not an investiture but the negation of one of his greatest identity constructions: his hair. It is the inversion of Caravaggio’s scandal. Here, reality is too unflattering to tolerate the idea of unintentional holiness. And yet, in some way, the foreshortened perspective of Trump’s face recalls that great work.

We might also look at Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat (c. 1481). The Virgin, framed in ideal grace, is crowned with a golden diadem by two angelic pages, and the golden light signals a pre-existing grace—the spiritual beauty that the Florentine Renaissance elevated to a canon. Light here is an added value, a visible mark of election. Trump, by contrast, perceives that optical illusion as a failure, an external imposition upon an iconography that prefers the polished marble of power to the gilded veil of sanctity. Botticelli idealized; Time magazine, in its own way, has triggered an unintended transcendence.

And then comes the supreme warning of irony—something power rarely understands. Let us look northward to Frans Hals and his Laughing Cavalier (1624). A vibrant portrait, painted with free and lively brushstrokes: the subject, with his curled mustache and sumptuous attire, is not even laughing, but smiling slyly, almost conspiratorially. No halo, no divine grace; only the bourgeois pride of a Netherlands entering the Baroque. The power of that smile lies in its self-awareness, its acceptance that the image is a game, a performance.

Had the man on the Time magazine cover possessed the humor of that Dutch cavalier, he would not have complained about the hair or the halo. He might instead have smiled—that brazen smile which is the true crown of modern power—and accepted that even the worst portrait is part of a tronie already becoming legend. Instead, the involuntary halo is unacceptable to the President of the United States. It is “ugly.” And that, in the end, is the greatest visual paradox of our time.