L. Millner over Isaac Lichtenstein in The face of Benedictus Spinoza,
Simon New York, Machmadim Art Editions, 1946, blz. 50. 
 
(...) It was left for an artist of our own time, thoroughly schooled in modern technique, to develop the fullest and most rewarding visual approach to the philosopher. A Polish Jew, Isaac Lichtenstein, has the wisdom in human affairs that results from broad contact with the people of many nations. His quick sympathies and instinctive capacity for communicating the living quality of a landscape, a street scene or a personality, are conjoined with an intense experimental and intellectual interest in the technique of his art, and the philosophy of art itself.
It is through one's own personality that it becomes possible to gain insight into another human being. Sympathy is the lubricant of our knowledge. Lichtenstein's great ability to render in visual terms what seems like the intellectual quintessence of Spinoza, is due to the nature of the true artist who literally thinks in terms of his medium, and is capable of finding in its resources the plastic counterparts of the most rarified abstractions. It is also the result of the sympathetic insight possible to a personality which, though on a different plane than that of the philosopher, is in many ways analogously constituted.
Sagaciously Lichtenstein has avoided the temptation to undertake the hopeless task of embodying the full complexity of Spinoza in a single work; for it is an attempt which fairly invites either intellectual or artistic failure, ending usually either in a distortion of the man, or a weak and fragmentary artistic conception. By dwelling on the most significant stages in the life of the philosopher, by representing aspects of his character and influence that have the greatest capacity for concrete interpretation in line, colour and form, Lichtenstein has utilized all that recent developments have taught us about the autonomous nature of art. He had used his technical skill to develop a new perspective for that visual interpretation of history, mind and personality which is so profound and in exorable a human need. (...)
 
 
COMMENTARY MAGAZINE, 1946
The Face of Benedictus Spinoza, by Simon L. Millner
By  Meyer Schapiro

​How Did Spinoza Look?
The Face of Benedictus Spinoza.
by Simon L. Millner.
New York, Machmadim Art Editions, 1946. .51 pp., 42 pi. .$7.50.
What did Spinoza look like? Will we ever know? In a French novel of the end of the last century, Thomas Edison, meditating his inventions, regrets that the phonograph and the movie camera did not exist when there were really great voices and spectacles to record. In a similar vein, Kierkegaard had observed that photography appeared at a time when people were beginning to look more and more alike. Several portraits of Spinoza survive, but since none of them is well documented and they differ enormously, the task of discovering his true face is a difficult job; it ends in doubt and also in dismay at the credulity which has accepted as genuine the images of a face wholly devoid of the qualities that radiate from the writings.
According to his biographer, Colerus, Spinoza had drawn himself in his sketchbook as a fisherman after an image of the Neapolitan Masanielo, the leader of a popular rebellion who was ultimately the victim of a mob. Spinoza’s landlord, an artist, told Colerus that this drawing resembled Spinoza to a hair. The philosopher’s feeling of kinship with the fisherman is a remarkable fact that deserves more attention than Spinoza students, including the author of this book, have given it.
Earlier in the century, Italian painters (Caravaggio, Allori) were said to have portrayed themselves in the decapitated heads of Goliath and Holofernes; in Holland, the ex communicated Jew identified himself with an Italian rebel. The affinity had perhaps a personal political significance, the Neapolitan uprising having been directed against Spain, like the contemporary Dutch war for independence, and the fate of the plebeian leader recalling the murder of Spinoza’s friend and patron, Jan de Witt, by his political opponents in Amsterdam. The philosopher was so deeply aroused by this crime that he prepared to denounce the murderers publicly and was restrained only by the firmness of his landlord, who would not permit him to leave the house in order to post the declaration.
Spinoza’s sketchbook, which Colerus had in his hands, has disappeared, but a contemporary Dutch engraving of Masanielo survives and there is in his features a vague resemblance, more physical than physiognomic, to the portrait of Spinoza on the title-page of an early posthumous edition of his works. This engraved image seems to have been copied from a painting of Spinoza now in the Wolfenbuettel library. From these two works, which, of all the pictures of Spinoza, have the most likelihood of veracity, come many of the later portraits. A German student, Ernst Altkirch, who published a detailed study of the Spinoza portraits in 1913, accepted a number of other works as pictures of the philosopher, but his views cannot withstand criticism.
Mr. Millner wishes to prove that we have other equally reliable portraits. He believes that Rembrandt, who lived on the next block from Spinoza’s, and whose interest in Jews, amounting to a spiritual kinship, must have brought him into contact with the philosopher, represented him in two pictures. He discovers the young Spinoza, just expelled from the synagogue, in the David playing the harp for Saul in Rembrandt’s painting in the Hague. It would be pleasant to believe this, if we had no constraining evidence. But the picture was painted more probably in the 1660’s, when Spinoza was in his thirties, than in 1657 as Mr. Millner asserts without giving his reasons. That is the opinion of Rembrandt students, whose judgment should at least have been mentioned and refuted. It must be said also that very little in the appearance of the dark, curly-haired boy, attentive to his music, suggests the independent philosopher. The idea that a painter with Rembrandt’s understanding would picture Spinoza in this role seems to me a fantasy of modern novelistic biography. We are struck by the wonderful coincidence, brought out by Mr. Millner, that Rembrandt, entangled in debts, was declared bankrupt on the same day (or was it the day before?) that the young Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue. Such things might happen in the same town at the same instant to its greatest artist and its greatest philosopher; but we think it still less likely that Rembrandt then painted his fellow victim in the guise of David before Saul.
The other Rembrandt portrait, The Man with the Lens, in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, has been identified once before as Spinoza. Here again the evidence is of the flimsiest kind. It is true, Spinoza was a lens grinder, but if this is Spinoza, then the Wolfenbuettel portrait and the publisher’s engraving are of another and quite different man.
In the more questionable pictures claimed as Spinoza, Mr. Millner tries to establish the identity through an esoteric diagnosis of the features. The more doubtful and difficult the attribution, the more profound and mysterious the evidence. When we look at a portrait by van Hoogstraaten of a personality without distinction and read that it depicts a man that “can fully live up to our estimate of Spinoza,” we feel deceived; either portraiture is a phoney art, or physiognomonics. . . . Perhaps these are subtleties in which divination is necessarily personal and untransmittable and yet may be right. But in one instance, where the insight is supported by argument, the author’s reasoning and method are obviously wrong. He tells us that a painting in which the subject wears the costume of the 16th century might nevertheless be of Spinoza because as a young Portuguese Jew the philosopher would be inclined to old fashions in clothes (although his costume is strictly contemporary in the other portraits); and that if the face shows little of Spinoza’s mind and has no convincing resemblance to the better-founded images, yet “it could represent Spinoza’s matchless inquisitive agility before it had deepened into precision and profundity.” Unhappily, the style of the painting, like the costume, is of the 16th century, to judge from the photograph.
However, it is interesting to look through the forty-two plates of Spinoza pictures to learn what artists have made of the man whom they have never seen, but imagined through his noble or ignoble reputation and the stock portraits inherited from the past. A few modern artists have perhaps read Spinoza; their attempts to picture the philosopher suffer either from a lack of art or from a shallow conception of the necessary facial qualities of so rare and superior a being, or they belong to a more recent time when portraiture has lost its importance and when the strongest devices of expression in art have been dissociated from the probing representation of the human face.
This album, drawn partly from the late Adolph S. Oko’s collection of Spinoza documents, makes no pretense to completeness, and one can hardly reproach the author for omitting several portraits that he has described in his text. But almost half the illustrations are not even mentioned there, and we are left to wonder why certain ones have been chosen at all. The list of plates at the end is an odd compilation with enigmatic allusions to sources and with careless, insufficient notes. The text contains no reference to the plates and there is no index. Although the book is on some points more critical than the one published by Altkirch, who brought together the essential material, it is inferior as a scholarly work.