Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has made news after his photo circulated online for weeks The subject of newsroom ethics debates and crazy memes.
But famed sketch artist Jane Rosenberg took about 15 minutes to capture Mangione’s likeness during his initial appearance in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday, Dec. 19, just before he collected the to a federal arrest warrant hours later. Her final photo depicts a bushy-browed, broad-shouldered Mangione flanked by two of his attorneys, Karen Friedman Agnifilo and Mark Agnifilo; The accused gunman had a quiet expression, somewhere between resignation and acceptance.
“I had to sit there and wait and wait, which was unusual, and he still didn’t come out,” Rosenberg recalled by phone. allergic. “I walked into the courtroom and I was finally ready, I had a good view and it was stressful because it was so short, like an arraignment.”
The artist immediately noticed Mangione’s attire: a crisp white-collared shirt, a black quarter-zip sweater, and khaki pants.
“They brought him in and I was disappointed that they put him in an orange jumpsuit,” Rosenberg said. “I’ve dusted off the orange chalk and I’m really looking forward to it.”
“He was quite calm and didn’t jump out like he did when he was arrested,” she continued. “He didn’t look like the murderer he claimed to be. I mean, his face didn’t show it. He looked like a normal guy.”
There is something fascinating about the practice of forensic sketching, an analogue convention that endures in an age where the circulation of digital images is rampant. In terms of the famous figures Rosenberg has drawn, from Donald Trump to Steve Bannon to Daniel Penney (who was recently acquitted of strangling Jordan Neely to death), the sketch artist faces The added pressure of portraying someone whose image is everywhere. Not just online and in print, but in the collective imagination.
When it comes to what’s shared on the internet, though, Rosenberg prefers to drown out the noise.
“That happened in [the trial] Tom Brady’s portrait — I understand what a meme is,” Rosenberg said, referring to the New England Patriots quarterback in the 2015 “Deflategate” scandal that cost her went viral. The artist’s courtroom portrait of Brady, which some considered unflattering, appears to have temporarily overshadowed the football controversy that sparked the trial. (“I have to apologize to Tom Brady and all his fans for not making him look good enough,” Rosenberg said at the time.)
“That’s when I learned that I wasn’t going to be on social media because there were a million people hiding behind screens and thinking they were art critics, and I just wasn’t going to deal with it,” she said.
In many other contexts, Rosenberg has been praised for his ability to capture a moment and render the ineffable essence of an individual, such as in the trial of Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, the artist Depicting her looking directly at her and drawing her back to the right.
It is said that artists are their own harshest critics, and for her painting of Mangione, Rosenberg lamented that she had not had more time to settle on the composition.
“I want his i don’t know what,” she reflected. “He tilted his head a little bit from side to side, and I wanted to try to do that a little more. But I had to get rid of it as soon as possible. “
“I want to try again,” she concluded.
