Although the meaning of the term ‘portraiture’ may appear to be self-
evident, there is often only a fine distinction between objects that could
be considered portraits and those that are best classified differently.
Usually a portrait is a work of art that represents a unique individual,
but this simple definition belies the complexity and contradictions of
portraiture. While a portrait can be concerned with likeness as con-
tained in a person’s physical features, it can also represent the subject’s
social position or ‘inner life’, such as their character or virtues. A
portrait can be subject to social or artistic conventions that construct
the sitter as a type of their time; it can also probe the uniqueness of an
individual in a way that sets the sitter apart from his or her context.
Portraiture’s capacity to do all these things at once makes it such a
powerful form of representation.
In attempting to unpick the complexities of portraiture, it is useful
to consider three factors: first of all, portraits can be placed on a contin-
uum between the specificity of likeness and the generality of type,
showing specific and distinctive aspects of the sitter as well as the more
generic qualities valued in the sitter’s social milieu. Secondly, all por-
traits represent something about the body and face, on the one hand,
and the soul, character, or virtues of the sitter, on the other. These first
two aspects relate to portraiture as a form of representation, but a third
consideration is concerned more with the processes of commissioning
and production. All portraits involve a series of negotiations—often
between the artist and the sitter, but sometimes there is also a patron
who is not included in the portrait itself. The impact of these negotia-
tions on the practice of portraiture must also be addressed.
Likeness and type
The etymology of the term ‘portraiture’ indicates the genre’s associa-
tion with likeness and mimesis. Portraiture expresses the likeness of a
particular individual, but that likeness is conceived to be a copy or
duplication of his or her external features. Some artists took a literal
approach to the idea of copying a likeness. In ancient Rome the
common practice of using death masks allowed facial features to be
reproduced with exactitude, as did some subsequent western European
artists. For example, the fifteenth-century Italian artist Verrocchio and
the nineteenth-century American artist Gilbert Stuart took life masks
of their subjects to enhance the verisimilitude of their portraits. After
the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, artists such as
Degas in France employed photographs to help them achieve as exact
a likeness as possible. The ability to reproduce recognizable and lifelike
features was considered to be a valuable asset to portraitists, although
they could also be condemned for what was perceived to be a slavish
imitation of reality.
However, likeness is not a stable concept. What might be considered
a ‘faithful’ reproduction of features relates to aesthetic conventions and
social expectations of a particular time and place. Different approaches
to likeness can also be taken by artists working within the same context
and conditions. An observation of any two portraits of the same indi-
vidual by different artists reveals just how unstable ideas of likeness can
be. In fifteenth-century Flanders, where close observation of the mat-
erial world was appreciated, both Jan Van Eyck and Rogier van der
Weyden painted portraits of the same individual, Nicolas Rolin, who
held a major political administrative role as Chancellor of Burgundy
A comparison between the two portraits shows the same fleshy
lips, prominent chin, and slim tapered ear. It is clear we are looking at
two versions of a single person. However, Van Eyck’s Chancellor has a
dignity of expression and seriousness of demeanour that is lacking in
the frail and sadder image of Rogier van der Weyden’s Rolin. Part of
this difference could be attributed to the age of the sitter: Van Eyck’s
Madonna with Chancellor Rolin was painted in the 1430 s, at least a
decade before van der Weyden’s version. However, Rolin was already in
his sixties when Van Eyck painted his portrait, so in both instances, it is
an elderly man being portrayed. It is more likely that the different deci-sions made by these artists could have been inspired by the diverse
purposes for which these portraits were produced. Although both
works are altarpieces, Van Eyck’s bold Chancellor, who visually holds
an equal status to the Virgin, may have been painted for Rolin’s son, the
Bishop of Autun Cathedral. Van der Weyden’s portrait was only a
single panel in a polyptych (multi-panelled altarpiece) on the theme of
the Last Judgement donated by Rolin to the chapel of a hospital in the
Flemish town of Beaune. The difference between an arrogant Rolin
and a humble one is stressed through the way each artist has suited his
altarpiece to the purpose for which it was intended—the first a context
of family power, and the second a place of disease and death. While the
function of these two portraits may have dictated different approaches
to likeness, the individual style of the artists who produced them can
also account for their differences. Van Eyck was known for his micro-
scopic and penetrating analysis of facial features and van der Weyden’s
portraits were more stylized and less detailed.
Thus both works are
likenesses, but the likenesses are mediated by the varying functions of
the portraits and the distinct styles of the artists.
Thus the drive for likeness in much portraiture must be balanced
against the limitations of representation, which can only offer a partial,
abstracted, generic, or idealized view of any sitter. Many writers have
drawn attention to the duality of portraiture—its simultaneous engage-
ment with likeness and type. Bernard Berenson famously distinguished
between ‘portrait’ and ‘effigy’—the former representing the likeness of
an individual and the latter an individual’s social role.
Erwin Panofsky
provided one of the most concise statements about portraiture’s dualism:
A portrait aims by definition at two essentials . . . On the one hand it seeks to
bring out whatever it is in which the sitter differs from the rest of humanity and
would even differ from himself were he portrayed at a different moment or in
a different situation; and this is what distinguishes a portrait from an ‘ideal’
figure or ‘type’. On the other hand it seeks to bring out whatever the sitter has
in common with the rest of humanity and what remains in him regardless of
place and time; and this is what distinguishes a portrait from a figure forming
part of a genre painting or narrative.
Although portraits convey a likeness of an individual, they also can
demonstrate the imagination of the artist, the perceived social role of
the sitter, and the qualities of the sitter that raise him or her above the
occasion of the moment. Furthermore, portraits can reflect conventions
of behaviour or art practices that originate in the sitter’s social and cul-
tural milieu. In these respects, portraits become less about likeness and
more about the typical, the conventional, or the ideal.
These ambivalent qualities of portraiture may explain why, for
example, it was common practice in the sixteenth century for artists to
paint portraits of sitters they had not seen for some time or, indeed, had
never seen. In the 1530 s Isabella d’Este most famously asked Titian to
paint her portrait, but instead of sitting for him, she sent him a portrait
by Francesco Francia to copy. Francia’s portrait had itself been copied
from another portrait 25 years previously. Thus Titian’s portrait was a
copy of a copy, without direct reference to the real age and appearance
of the sitter who commissioned it. The ideal qualities of the sitter were
what concerned Lomazzo in his art treatise of 1584 , in which he advised
that only worthy, virtuous, or high-born individuals should be the
subjects of portraits. Lomazzo’s implication was that by merely repre-
senting a likeness of a worthy individual the artist would somehow
absorb and reproduce their virtuous qualities for the edification of the
viewer.
Generic qualities attributed to a sitter could be conveyed through
gesture, expression, or role-play; artists also used props as clues to a
sitter’s worth. A monarch could be represented with robes of state; a
landed family could be shown sitting in the landscaped garden of their
country seat; an individual known for learning would be shown with
books or other attributes. The last is demonstrated in the German artist
Johann Zoffany’s portrait of Francis I surrounded by scientific instru-
ments redolent of his fascination for natural history and Enlightenment
invention . Although Zoffany’s portrait uses specific objects to
express the interests of a particular man, some settings and accou-
trements became artistic conventions. For instance, the practice of
using a curtain and column in portraits may have originated in paint-
ings of the Virgin and Child seated under an awning or draped throne.
In Renaissance altarpieces of the Virgin and Child, especially those of
the Low Countries, the draped awning often had a liturgical associa-
tion, as it could represent the altar cloth or canopy, and, by extension,
could refer to the Eucharist.
These associations endowed the column
and curtain with vestiges of authority, appropriated in portraits of mon-
archs and aristocrats. By the eighteenth century such elements
commonly accompanied many portraits of sitters from several different
classes of society, but by this time they functioned more frequently as
often gratuitous theatrical props.
Other conventions in portraiture had social or artistic, rather than
religious, origins. For example, for centuries after Raphael’s famous
representation of the courtier Castiglione ( 1514 –15 ), portraitists adopted
Raphael’s half-length format with a sitter leaning on a ledge or parapet.
Some eighteenth-century portraits in both England and France repre-
sented their sitters with a hand in the waistcoat pocket, but while this
was a social mannerism among the elite in France, in England it was
associated with portraiture, rather than actual behaviour.
Similar social
conventions have been traced in the widespread inclusion of gloves and
fans in French nineteenth-century portraits of women, and in the
adoption of plain black tunics in seventeenth-century Flemish paint-
ings of old men.
Each of these poses or props served as signs of the
sitter’s actual or desired social position, but in many cases, they became
conventions of portraiture that enabled the artist to express typical
qualities of the sitters concerned.
This duality of likeness and type can be traced back to the ancient
world. Although archaic Greek sculptures of kore and kouros figures
from before the fifth century bcare stylized and repeated, from that
time classical and Hellenistic Greek art distinguished between differ-
ent individuals. Sculptures of famous philosophers and writers such as
Socrates, Aeschylus, and Euripides can be differentiated from
each other by physical features that were clearly associated with each
individual. Likeness allows the viewer to see the figure as an individual,
but it was also important for the Greeks to evoke virtues that tran-
scended individuality. The portrait subject therefore became a symbol
for higher human qualities. Even the Romans, whose portraiture was more naturalistic than the Greeks, sought for the general within the
particular. The widespread use of statues of Roman emperors as cult
objects, for example, attested to the importance of the ideal qualities of
the individual, despite the emphasis on likeness in the sculpture.
Although there were both stylistic and functional differences between
them, portraits in ancient Greece and Rome were therefore like enough
to enable a human association with the individual depicted, but they
were idealized to reflect those qualities felt to be worthy of admiration
and emulation. As the Greek moralist Theophrastus wrote, ‘only a flat-
terer tells a man that he looks like his portrait’.
This tension between likeness and the generic qualities of the sitter
remains in some twentieth-century portraiture. A representation of
a ‘rural bride’ from German photographer August Sander’s album of
photographs, Menschen des 20 . Jahrhunderts ( People of the Twentieth
Century), exemplifies how this tension can test the boundaries of por-
traiture. Sander’s project, which he began in the mid- 1920 s, was
conceived within the aesthetic of the neue Sachlichkeit or ‘New Objec-
tivity’, which dominated German visual and literary culture at the time.
It was characterized by a desire to represent reality in a sober and
detached manner, and a belief that ‘objective’ representation of the
world was possible. Christopher Isherwood—an English writer who
lived in Berlin during this period—expressed it succinctly in the phrase:
‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not think-
ing.’
Sander intended that his photographs should represent types of
people in contemporary Germany, and he divided his subjects into
social categories such as farmers, craftsmen, and professions. Because Sander’s project was concerned with types rather than individuals, he
did not identify most of his sitters by name. However, his use of real
people in these professions as his subjects enhanced the unique qualities
of the sitters, whose individuality undermines the idea that they stand
for whole categories of people.
Sander’s works are portraits of individ-
uals, but these portraits were conceived as representing qualities of class
and profession.
The duality of likeness and type can also be investigated by looking
at portraits that are accepted as faithful likenesses because they rep-
resent their sitters in an unflattering way. The portrait of an old man
with a deformed nose (c. 1480 ) by the fifteenth-century Italian artist
Ghirlandaio is an early example of a work that lingers on a physical
detail that would have been considered at the time as an unsightly
sign of disease. Such deviations from the ideal were unusual in the
Renaissance, but they became common in portraits from the nine-
teenth century onwards, even those representing sitters who might be
expected to require a flattering likeness. For example, the New Zealand
artist Oswald Birley was sought after in England by politicians,
members of the royal family, and other public figures, but his portrait of
Arabella Huntington as stern, short-sighted, and prim suggests
that visual frankness did not deter his patrons. However, there is no
indication that such uncompromising views of sitters are more ‘like’
than other kinds of portraits.
Likeness is thus at best a problematic concept, and while artists
nearly always produce portraits with some hint at the likeness of the
individual, portraits also stress the typical, conventional, or ideal aspects
of their sitters. These signals emerge through pose, expression, setting,
or props. Likeness is subject to the quirks of artistic style and, for the
viewer, is a slippery and subjective notion. It is not possible for us to
compare most portraits we see with the sitters who posed for them, and
therefore our impression of likeness is one that comes through the skill
of the artist in creating a believable model of a real person.
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