The Functions of Portraiture

Portraits are representations, but they are also material objects, and as
such they have had a variety of functions. As objects, portraits come in
a range of media. Painting remains by far the most common medium of
representation in portraiture, but prints, drawings, and portrait sculp-
ture in the form of busts, tombs, and monuments are also prevalent.
Portraits appear on objects of mass circulation, such as coins, banknotes,
and stamps. They have a place on commemorative medals, plates, and
mugs that are meant to be preserved, as well as fans, handkerchiefs, and
other objects with finite use-value. Portrait photography is displayed in
domestic settings, and appears in popular journalism through images in
glossy magazines, for example. Portraits furthermore can be produced
in media that do not seem particularly suitable to the close study of like-
ness, such as mosaic or stained glass.
Because of the many different forms they take, portraits have been
and can be used for a variety of dynastic, commemorative, judicial, per-
sonal, and propagandist purposes. They can be considered aesthetic
objects, but they can equally be seen to act as a substitute for the indi-
vidual they represent, or as conveying an aura of power, beauty, youth,
or other abstract qualities. Many portraits were produced for public
places such as city squares, civic or religious institutions, or for mass dis-
semination in the form of coins or in prints, for example. However, even
portraits that had an ostensibly private function, such as miniatures or
family snapshots, are usually intended to be viewed and responded to by
a group of individuals rather than a single person. Portraits therefore are
normally created with the understanding that they will be in the public
domain (however that may be defined) and that they will serve a special
purpose. More than any other genres of art, portraits draw attention to
themselves as objects that can be employed or exploited in a variety
of ways.
Portraits therefore take a number of physical forms and serve a
multiplicity of aesthetic, political, and social functions. This function-
ality is enhanced by the ways portraits transcend the temporal limits
implied in the process of their making. As shown in the previous
chapter, a portrait calls attention to the process of its production—to
the appearance of an individual in the fugitive moment in which it was
produced. This is what the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer refers to
as the ‘occasionality’ of portraiture.
But a portrait also serves magically
to freeze time and to extend artificially the life of the represented indi-
vidual. Portraits can thus appear to be both records of specific events
and evocations of something more lasting. The power of portraiture
rests largely in this tension between the temporal and the permanent.
The portrait as a work of art
A portrait is a work of art like any other, but portraits are also a special
class of object that can resist classification as art. As Richard Brilliant
has put it, ‘There is a great difficulty in thinking about pictures, even
portraits by great artists, as art and not thinking about them primarily
as something else, the person represented.’
One way of testing the
portrait’s status as an art object is to look at the history of portrait
collections and portrait galleries and to map the motivations behind
them. Aesthetic value—the perceived quality of the portrait as a
skilful, inventive, or beautiful work of art—has only rarely been the
primary inspiration in the commissioning, display, and reception of
portraits.
Portraits of family members were an important component of art
collections from the ancient world, but there are a number of cases of
collectors who sought out and gathered portraits as the primary focus of
their acquisitiveness. It is notable that some of the earliest art galleries
were galleries of portraits. Pliny the Elder mentions that the kings of
Alexandria and Pergamon collected portraits of famous poets and
philosophers.
This legacy was noted when portrait collections of illus-
trious men became common in both Italy and northern Europe from
the fifteenth century. Portraits of eminent men were often displayed in
the libraries or studies of Renaissance princes and dukes as objects of
inspiration and emulation. Federico da Montefeltro employed Justus of
Ghent at Urbino in the 1470 s to paint a series of famous men, and
Castagno produced a similar series in around  1450 . In each of these
cases, the portrait formula was the same for each individual repre-
sented, and the effect of the whole outweighed the power of any one
likeness. One of the earliest and most extensive of these was the collec-
tion of the sixteenth-century Bishop of Nocera, Paolo Giovio. In a
letter of  28 August 1521 to his friend the secretary of the Duke of
Mantua, Giovio claimed that he wanted to bring together ‘true por-
traits of men of letters, the sight of which will stimulate men to virtue’.
By the late 1530 s, he had collected nearly 400 portraits of famous men,
which he displayed in his villa at Lake Como. These portraits were
divided into categories representing living and dead men who were
known for nobility of spirit, saintly actions, military valour, writing, art,
or leadership. The collection was exclusively devoted to men, and
                                                                                                             
although Giovio paid some attention to the artistic merit of the chosen
works, his primary concern was the identity of the sitters.
A focus on the identity of the sitter, independent of questions of
aesthetic value, is a leitmotif in the history of portrait collections.
Increasingly, collectors gathered portraits of individuals that fell within
particular categories, such as artists, beautiful women, or monarchs.
Giovio’s Como collection was one of the earliest examples of a tendency
that proliferated in Italy, Spain, the German states, and the Low Coun-
tries by the end of the sixteenth century. When Cosimo de’ Medici
decided to start his own portrait collection, he commissioned the artist
Crisofano dell’Altissimo to copy Giovio’s collection in  1553 . In the
seventeenth century, Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici augmented this
collection of copies into what eventually became the Uffizi collection of
artists’ self-portraits.
The fact that many of these portraits were
copies, rather than original works, suggests that artistic authenticity
was not a major concern. Although portrait collections were displayed
as art works, the motivation behind their exhibition was more often
dynastic, national, or institutional.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the dynastic portrait col-
lection was prevalent among the European monarchy and aristocracy.
Portrait collections such as that of Ferdinand of Tirol or Maria of
Hungary represented royal families usually in a patterned or stylized
manner, showing the sitters in poses that visually echoed or comple-
mented each other .
Such portraits could take the form of panel
paintings or tapestries and could be introduced into decorative
schemes, such as state rooms or long galleries, to create an impression
of family continuity. Often such collections would serve as a kind of
genealogical tree, to confirm the pedigree of the portraits’ owners, or to
  establish their relationship with the current monarch. This dynastic
portrait collection was further domesticated by the eighteenth century
when owners of country houses in Europe displayed portraits of family
members and ancestors. Portrait series such as these were produced by
a single artist or group of artists who had never met or seen many of the
deceased subjects of the portraits.
By the nineteenth century the dynastic emphasis in these early
private collections was displaced somewhat by a greater number of por-
trait collections that represented national, rather than family, interests.
One of the earliest of these was the group of portraits amassed by the
American artist Charles Willson Peale and exhibited in his ‘Gallery of
Illustrious Personages’, which opened in Philadelphia in the 1770 s.
Peale’s collection included examples of famous Americans, many of
whom had signed the Declaration of Independence and been figure-
heads in the subsequent War of Independence [23]. Peale himself was a
republican, and his patriotic impulses lay behind this series of portraits
glorifying the American revolution and its heroes, some of which he
painted himself.
Thus in this case the portrait collection was not a
means of emphasizing family heritage but of referring to successes in
American history through the faces of worthy individuals who had
contributed to national goals. Peale’s gallery included both portraits and
objects of natural history. His coupling of the faces of American patri- ots with natural objects links his collections to cabinets of curiosities—
eclectic collections of art and ‘wonders’ that had dominated European
collecting practices before the advent of specialized museums in the
eighteenth century. Both the natural and the national histories were
thus a kind of taxidermy or preservation of the past, significantly
juxtaposing nature with the nation.
In the  1850 s, G. F. Watts in England undertook a similar project by
painting a series of portraits of distinguished living men. While Peale
always anticipated a wide public audience, Watts’s project was a private
one; whereas Peale chose to include portraits by a number of different
artists, Watts was solely responsible for painting the portraits in his own
collection. Nevertheless Watts’s project had resonances for the founda-
tion of the British National Portrait Gallery in  1856. 
The debates surrounding the foundation of the National Portrait
Gallery in London further indicate the tensions between the perception
of the portrait as a work of art and the sense that portraits have a broader
function. In the mid-nineteenth century, when discussions were under-
way about the formation of a gallery of portraits, some argued that only
portraits of high aesthetic quality should be allowed in the collection,
but the debate was dominated by those who emphasized the historical
importance of visages of significant people from British history. The
founder of the concept of the National Portrait Gallery, Philip Henry
Stanhope, made this clear in a speech to the House of Lords on
4 March 1856 , when he indicated that the gallery should include ‘those
persons who are most honourably commemorated in British history as
warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature, or in science’ [ 24].
The
portrait gallery was thus set up with an ideal of national celebration, and
the choice and arrangement of the exhibitions inevitably presented this
history with particular biases.
Such debates have been revisited in the formation and display of
national portrait collections in other countries. For example, a 1990 s
publicity leaflet for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC
stated: ‘This is a history museum. By the time you finish with this, you
will have seen all of American history.’ Portrait collections have often
become adjuncts to national histories in other contemporary galleries.
For example, American colonial portrait collections are frequently hung
next to antique furniture in American museums such as the Rockefeller
Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in
Hartford, Connecticut. Portraits seem to evoke the feel of an era by
providing faces of contemporary people in the midst of period furni-
ture. In European countries as well, portraits are still displayed as
dynastic or historical artefacts rather than works of art in their own
right. The Schweizerische Landesmuseum in Switzerland includes
portraits as part of a display of history, separated from works of other
genres displayed in the art galleries in Zurich; Schloss Ambras in Inns-
bruck houses the Austrian national collection of royal portraits, while
other old master works get pride of place in Vienna’s principal art
gallery, the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
The attempt to site portraits
as if they are unproblematic reflections of a time, place, and national
identity is compounded by the choices made about what sort of subjects
should be chosen for display. For example, curators have wrestled with
the problems of bringing marginal or oppressed figures into such por-
trait pantheons, even though portraits of these individuals are more rare
than those of their noble, powerful, or famous contemporaries.
The tendency to see portraits as something other than works of art
has been reinforced by their centuries-old association with institutions
of various kinds. Portraits of company presidents, university vice-
chancellors, distinguished scientists, or members of royal families grace appropriate institutional settings, but these portraits can adhere so
rigidly to conventions that they can be virtually invisible on the walls of
the buildings in which they are hung.
As soon as a group of portraits
is put together, the viewer is invited to see them as a collection of
people, rather than a display of art works.
There have been alternative views, however. In the sixteenth cent-
ury, when portrait collections were becoming popular, writers also  began to recognize the quality of the artist above the virtues of the sitter.
Bembo, Aretino, and Castiglione wrote poems praising artists such as
Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, and Titian for their portraits; in each case,
their emphasis was less on the subject of the portrait and more on the
skill of the artist.
In the nineteenth century, when national portrait
galleries were in their formative years, connoisseurs were beginning to
collect portraits by eighteenth-century artists such as Gainsborough
and Reynolds for their value as beautiful samples of old master painting
rather than for the fame of the sitter.