Photographs of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, have been percolating in cyberspace for weeks, the subject of newsroom ethics debates and exponentially deranged memes.
But prominent sketch artist Jane Rosenberg had approximately 15 minutes to capture the likeness of Mangione during his initial appearance in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday, December 19, hours after he was served a federal arrest warrant. Her final image depicts a recognizably bushy-browed and broad-shouldered Mangione flanked by his two lawyers, Karen Friedman Agnifilo and Marc Agnifilo; the accused shooter bears a quiet expression, somewhere between resignation and acceptance.
“I had to sit there and wait and wait, which is very unusual, he still hadn’t come out,” Rosenberg recounted in a phone call with Hyperallergic. “I went in the courtroom, I’m finally all set up, I have a good view, and it’s very stressful because it was so short, as it always is for an arraignment.”
The artist immediately took notice of Mangione’s dress: a crisp white collared shirt, black quarter-zip sweater, and khaki trousers.
“They brought him in and I was so disappointed that they had changed him out of his orange jumpsuit,” Rosenberg said. “I had polished off my orange chalks and I was really looking forward to it.”
“He was fairly calm, not jumping out of his skin like he was when he was arrested,” she continued. “He does not look the part of the killer that he allegedly is. I mean, his face just does not show it. He looks like a normal person.”
A curious fascination surrounds the practice of courtroom sketching, an enduring analog convention at a time of rampant digital image circulation. In the case of high-profile figures, of which Rosenberg has drawn countless — from Donald Trump to Steve Bannon and Daniel Penny, recently acquitted in the chokehold killing of Jordan Neely — sketch artists face the added pressure of portraying a person whose image is ubiquitous not just online and in print, but also in the collective imagination.
When it comes to what’s shared on the internet, though, Rosenberg prefers to drown out the noise.
“That happened during [the trial] of Tom Brady — I learned what a meme was,” Rosenberg said, referencing her drawing of the New England Patriots quarterback at the center of the 2015 “Deflategate” scandal that catapulted her to online virality. The artist’s courtroom portrait of Brady, which some saw as unflattering, momentarily seemed to have overshadowed the football-air controversy that spawned the trial. (“I have to apologize to Tom Brady and all his fans that I didn’t make him look pretty enough,” Rosenberg said at the time.)
“And that’s when I learned that I’m not going on social media, because there’s a million people hiding behind screens who think they’re art critics, and I’m just not going to deal with that,” she said.
In many other instances, Rosenberg has garnered praise for her ability to seize the moment and render the ineffable essence of an individual, as during the trial of Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, whom the artist sketched staring directly at her and drawing her right back.
It is said that artists are their own worst critics, and for her drawing of Mangione, Rosenberg lamented that she did not have more time to pin down the composition.
“I wanted to get his je ne sais quoi,” she reflected. “He did a little head tilt from one side to the other, and I wanted to try to go for that a little more. But I had to knock it out as fast as possible.”
She concluded: “I want another shot at it.”
