Portraits share affinities with the literary form of biography. Analogies
between portrait and biography are certainly common. The eighteenth-
century portrait painter and art theorist Jonathan Richardson most
famously wrote:
A Portrait is a sort of General History of the Life of the Person it represents,
not only to Him who is acquainted with it, but to Many others, who upon
Occasion of seeing it are frequently told, of what is most Material concerning
Them, or their General Character at least . . . These therefore many times
answer the ends of Historical Pictures.
Richardson here hints that the portrait can convey the same sort of
information about an individual as a biography can. This was certainly
a common assumption from the sixteenth century onwards, as biog-
raphies were frequently published with engraved portraits of their
subjects. Furthermore, literary portraits, based on a tradition that dated
back to Lucian in the second century ad, were a popular means of
evoking a picture of an individual through the medium of words.
Literary portraits were briefer and sketchier than biographies, and they
thus approximated the snapshot moment of visual portraiture. The
relationship between biography and portraiture reached a peak in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably exemplified by James
Granger’s Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the
Revolution(1760 ). Although the original publication of Granger’s book
was in a single volume, subsequent editions were augmented with so
many engraved portraits that by 1824 , the history consisted of six
volumes. However, despite what seem to be clear links between the
verbal and visual representation of an individual, the relationship
between portrait and biography is not a straightforward one. Although
the two modes reinforce each other, they also serve clearly separate
functions.
The momentary nature of portraiture—its ‘occasionality’—as well
as the portrait’s paradoxical impression of a timeless or iconic image, is
at odds with the more sprawling and developed aspects of character and
action that comprise biographical writing. From the fifteenth century,
however, portraitists attempted to deepen the significance of their work
by including mottos, emblems, or other clues to the character of the
sitter. Pope-Hennessy called this the ‘augmented portrait’.
Portraits
by sixteenth-century Italian artists commonly included verbal mottos,
sometimes invented and sometimes taken from classical literature.
These mottos, called imprese , could appear on scrolls, sleeves, books, or
ledges. They could refer generically to the evanescence of life or the
inevitability of death, or to the character or moral qualities of the sitter.
In works such as these, the portrait veered towards biography’s recount-
ing of the characteristics of the subject, but what the portrait could not
achieve was a demonstration of that individual’s actions or behaviour.
As portraits could be tied to conventions of gesture and expression, the
presentation of character frequently had to be enhanced by these addi-
tional literary tags.
In the sixteenth century, this use of impresa and literary tag engaged
with contemporary ideas of character. The German artist Lucas Cran-
ach’s portraits of Dr Johannes Cuspinian and his wife Anna [ 25] are
examples of the way an artist could use astrological symbols to elucidate
the character of the sitters. Sixteenth-century notions of character
partook of the ancient idea that an individual’s behaviour was deter-
mined by the dominance of one of the four humours. In these paired
portraits Cranach placed an image of the children of Saturn from an
astrological fresco behind Johannes, indicating a saturnine or melan-
choly character. His wife Anna is accompanied by the attribute of a
parrot, which evokes a sanguine personality. However, the poses, ges-
tures, and expressions of the sitters themselves are conventional and
unrevealing.
There are more differences between biography and portraiture than
simply the medium of representation. Biographies chronicle the lives
and achievements of individuals, often deceased. Before the twentieth
century, biographies were largely organized on a chronological basis,
following conventions of revealing the character, appearance, and
actions of the subject from birth to death. The particular moment
chosen for a portrait cannot be extended in such a way: it represents the
individual’s appearance at a specific point, and other aspects of his or
her life can only be alluded to. Imprese and other forms of verbal device
in portraits act as footnotes to the momentary image, but their artifi-
ciality can often jar with the illusion that we are looking at a living
person at a given moment.
Furthermore, the nature of what constituted a biography gradually
changed after the sixteenth century. Early biographies focused on
establishing the higher worth of their subjects through carefully
selected revelations of action and character. Biographies could also cat-
alogue eccentricities or faults of character, as witnessed by the Italian
Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (first published 1550 ) or the Englishman
Aubrey’s Brief Lives, which was compiled in the seventeenth century
but not published in full until 1813 . However, in these cases, the subject’s
faults were also seen to contribute to a picture of his or her character. In
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, biographies began to offer
more probing considerations of the motivations and personality traits
of the subject, as well as to more intimate aspects of their subject’s lives.
During the same period, portraits similarly undergo a transformation
from the representation of generic traits to a greater probing of charac-
ter, but it could be said that this is where the similarity between the two
genres ends. A portrait can take on only the most basic elements of a
biography, while a biography cannot convey the presence of the indi-
vidual with such immediacy and evocative power.
The portrait as document
The occasionality of portraiture gives it a more prominent relationship
with historical documents. Portraits are representations, not docu-
ments. Portraiture, however, can have a documentary feel: the depiction
of a named individual; the details of dress, setting, and props; and
labelling of the sitter’s name and age can all evoke the specificity of a
particular time and place. However, as with any historical document, it
is important to balance what seems to be the presentation of ‘facts’ with
the ways those facts were represented and understood.
Like documents, portraits often contain words. These words can
appear on a scroll or piece of paper within the representation, or they
can be written on the canvas itself or on the frame. The use of labels to
indicate the age of the sitter, the date the portrait was produced, or other
pieces of information was commonplace from the fifteenth century.
The dominance of these words in some portraits, such as the anony-
mous portrait ( 1616 ) of the native American Pocahontas, suggests
that they were especially important in establishing the authenticity of
the likeness. The use of words to identify Pocahontas confirms the his-
torical placing of the sitter, but in this case the claim for authenticity was
misleading, as this portrait was a third-hand image—copied from a
print which itself was copied from a drawing.
It might be asked what the use-value of such ‘documentary’ portraits
might have been. In the centuries before photography, portraits were
the only way of conveying the appearance of an absent or unknown
person, and they were a method of preserving the physical appearance
of someone that would remain after their death. Portraits also could act
as reminders of particular events, such as marriages, treaties, or diplo-
matic visitations. For example, an anonymous portrait of a Moorish
ambassador from the early seventeenth century provides a docu-
ment of the age of the sitter, Abd el-Quahed ben Messaoud Anoun,
and the date he visited England and the court of Queen Elizabeth I.
However, the format of this work appears formulaic and possibly indi-
cates that it could have been part of a series similar to Giovio’s collection
of eminent men. Contradictory signals, however, appear in the distinc-
tive physiognomy of the sitter, which gives the work a dramatic quality
that prefigures the Moorish stereotypes in Shakespeare’s Othello , which
was first performed four years later. The documentation of the sitter’s
age and visit are thus in tension with both the formulaic and stereo-
typical qualities of the portrait.
Although it may be common to look at portraits solely as documents
of identities or events, portraits are more complex than this simple
analogy allows. One of the clearest demonstrations of this can be seen
by examining the art-historical debates about the meaning and purpose
of Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage [28]. Although this work has
been subjected to a variety of conflicting interpretations, art historians
are compelled to engage with Erwin Panofsky’s assertion in 1934 that
this work served as a document of a marriage ceremony.
As one of the
first free-standing whole-length double portraits, this work was an
innovation in early fifteenth-century painting. It represents the Lucch-
ese merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife Giovanna Cenami.
Their hand gestures and the symbolic accoutrements of the room
suggest they are engaged in some sort of ceremony or ritual. What con-
vinced Panofsky of the documentary nature of this work was the
presence of an inscription on the back wall, ‘Jan Van Eyck fuit hic’ (‘Jan
Van Eyck was here’), and the accompanying appearance of Van Eyck in
the room, seen in the mirror on the back wall. Panofsky felt that this
combination of elements established the work as a document of the
sacrament of marriage, which in this case had been conducted as a
private ceremony with Van Eyck as a witness. Panofsky’s interpretation
has provoked many objections and a number of questions: why would a
couple go to the expense and trouble of using a portrait as a document
of their marriage, when a simple piece of paper would do? How would
such a document be used? To what extent does this bland documentary
quality conflict with the highly complex symbolic functions of the
objects in the room?
Furthermore, the portrait is packed with the
kind of religious symbolism normally associated with altarpieces. The
‘documentary’ quality of the inscription sits uneasily with the moraliz-
ing symbolism of the fruit on the table (either innocence or its loss); the
burning candle (possibly the eye of God); the dog (fidelity); the image
of St Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth, carved on the chair; and
the clogs cast aside as a sign of holy ground. The portrait is thus much
more complex than the label of ‘document’ allows. However, though
convincingly rebutted, Panofksy’s argument raises important issues
about how a portrait might serve the function of a historical document
and the way the written inscriptions on the portrait contribute to this
purpose.
What underlies such uncertainty about the documentary nature of
portraiture is the way artistic interpretation and representation always
undermine any authenticating information that might be appended to
a work of art. However, it is fair to say that portraits are—and have
always been—used for documentary purposes. From ancient times,
portraits on coins serve both to establish the identity of the current
reigning power and to consolidate that authority by making the appear-
ance ubiquitous. Portraits were used to validate identity in the early
modern period, when they were employed in lawsuits or in campaigns
to track down conspirators. Portraits appeared in early manuscripts, for
instance in the roll of pleas in the court of the King’s Bench in England,
as authenticating records of individual identity.
Artists could employ
portraits for utilitarian purposes: Albrecht Dürer, for example, pro-
duced a famous portrait drawing of himself (c. 1512 – 13 ) as a means of
demonstrating a painful sore to a distant doctor. In eighteenth-century
Mexico, families commonly commissioned portraits of daughters who
were going into convents, and such portraits are riddled with references
to the women’s marriage to the church.
Portraits have been used effec-
tively by costume and furniture historians as a way of reconstructing the
appearance of garments, textiles, or tapestries, for which the actual
material evidence is minimal or has been damaged by the ravages of
time. Portraits remain an intrinsic part of the legal system in Western
countries: passport photographs allow individuals to travel and identi-
kit and photo-fit records of suspected criminals have been produced as
part of police investigations since the late nineteenth century [29].
In the early twenty-first century, the documentary nature of portrai-
ture has been both embraced and rejected. In 2001 the British artist
Marc Quinn was commissioned to produce a portrait of the geneticist
Sir John Sulston for the National Portrait Gallery in London. He chose
to display a DNA culture taken from Sulston. The ‘portrait’ was there-
fore both invisible to the naked eye, and it provided the ultimate confir-
mation of Sulston’s distinct identity. Quinn called this the ‘most
realistic portrait in the gallery’, and it could be argued that the use of
DNA relegates the portrait to a piece of forensic evidence that confirms
Sulston’s genetic individuality.
However, it could also be argued that
Quinn’s artistic gesture involves the kinds of choices that all portraitists
make about how best to represent their sitters. As Sulston’s fame came
through his involvement with the human genome project, Quinn’s use
of DNA parallels the methods of artists who use props or costume to
signal the individuality of their sitter. Portraits can appear to provide
documentation or authentication of a person’s appearance, age, status,
or even biological identity. But the imaginative and interpretative
aspects of all portraiture make it resistant to documentary reductivism.
between portrait and biography are certainly common. The eighteenth-
century portrait painter and art theorist Jonathan Richardson most
famously wrote:
A Portrait is a sort of General History of the Life of the Person it represents,
not only to Him who is acquainted with it, but to Many others, who upon
Occasion of seeing it are frequently told, of what is most Material concerning
Them, or their General Character at least . . . These therefore many times
answer the ends of Historical Pictures.
Richardson here hints that the portrait can convey the same sort of
information about an individual as a biography can. This was certainly
a common assumption from the sixteenth century onwards, as biog-
raphies were frequently published with engraved portraits of their
subjects. Furthermore, literary portraits, based on a tradition that dated
back to Lucian in the second century ad, were a popular means of
evoking a picture of an individual through the medium of words.
Literary portraits were briefer and sketchier than biographies, and they
thus approximated the snapshot moment of visual portraiture. The
relationship between biography and portraiture reached a peak in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably exemplified by James
Granger’s Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the
Revolution(1760 ). Although the original publication of Granger’s book
was in a single volume, subsequent editions were augmented with so
many engraved portraits that by 1824 , the history consisted of six
volumes. However, despite what seem to be clear links between the
verbal and visual representation of an individual, the relationship
between portrait and biography is not a straightforward one. Although
the two modes reinforce each other, they also serve clearly separate
functions.
The momentary nature of portraiture—its ‘occasionality’—as well
as the portrait’s paradoxical impression of a timeless or iconic image, is
at odds with the more sprawling and developed aspects of character and
action that comprise biographical writing. From the fifteenth century,
however, portraitists attempted to deepen the significance of their work
by including mottos, emblems, or other clues to the character of the
sitter. Pope-Hennessy called this the ‘augmented portrait’.
Portraits
by sixteenth-century Italian artists commonly included verbal mottos,
sometimes invented and sometimes taken from classical literature.
These mottos, called imprese , could appear on scrolls, sleeves, books, or
ledges. They could refer generically to the evanescence of life or the
inevitability of death, or to the character or moral qualities of the sitter.
In works such as these, the portrait veered towards biography’s recount-
ing of the characteristics of the subject, but what the portrait could not
achieve was a demonstration of that individual’s actions or behaviour.
As portraits could be tied to conventions of gesture and expression, the
presentation of character frequently had to be enhanced by these addi-
tional literary tags.
In the sixteenth century, this use of impresa and literary tag engaged
with contemporary ideas of character. The German artist Lucas Cran-
ach’s portraits of Dr Johannes Cuspinian and his wife Anna [ 25] are
examples of the way an artist could use astrological symbols to elucidate
the character of the sitters. Sixteenth-century notions of character
partook of the ancient idea that an individual’s behaviour was deter-
mined by the dominance of one of the four humours. In these paired
portraits Cranach placed an image of the children of Saturn from an
astrological fresco behind Johannes, indicating a saturnine or melan-
choly character. His wife Anna is accompanied by the attribute of a
parrot, which evokes a sanguine personality. However, the poses, ges-
tures, and expressions of the sitters themselves are conventional and
unrevealing.
There are more differences between biography and portraiture than
simply the medium of representation. Biographies chronicle the lives
and achievements of individuals, often deceased. Before the twentieth
century, biographies were largely organized on a chronological basis,
following conventions of revealing the character, appearance, and
actions of the subject from birth to death. The particular moment
chosen for a portrait cannot be extended in such a way: it represents the
individual’s appearance at a specific point, and other aspects of his or
her life can only be alluded to. Imprese and other forms of verbal device
in portraits act as footnotes to the momentary image, but their artifi-
ciality can often jar with the illusion that we are looking at a living
person at a given moment.
Furthermore, the nature of what constituted a biography gradually
changed after the sixteenth century. Early biographies focused on
establishing the higher worth of their subjects through carefully
selected revelations of action and character. Biographies could also cat-
alogue eccentricities or faults of character, as witnessed by the Italian
Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (first published 1550 ) or the Englishman
Aubrey’s Brief Lives, which was compiled in the seventeenth century
but not published in full until 1813 . However, in these cases, the subject’s
faults were also seen to contribute to a picture of his or her character. In
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, biographies began to offer
more probing considerations of the motivations and personality traits
of the subject, as well as to more intimate aspects of their subject’s lives.
During the same period, portraits similarly undergo a transformation
from the representation of generic traits to a greater probing of charac-
ter, but it could be said that this is where the similarity between the two
genres ends. A portrait can take on only the most basic elements of a
biography, while a biography cannot convey the presence of the indi-
vidual with such immediacy and evocative power.
The portrait as document
The occasionality of portraiture gives it a more prominent relationship
with historical documents. Portraits are representations, not docu-
ments. Portraiture, however, can have a documentary feel: the depiction
of a named individual; the details of dress, setting, and props; and
labelling of the sitter’s name and age can all evoke the specificity of a
particular time and place. However, as with any historical document, it
is important to balance what seems to be the presentation of ‘facts’ with
the ways those facts were represented and understood.
Like documents, portraits often contain words. These words can
appear on a scroll or piece of paper within the representation, or they
can be written on the canvas itself or on the frame. The use of labels to
indicate the age of the sitter, the date the portrait was produced, or other
pieces of information was commonplace from the fifteenth century.
The dominance of these words in some portraits, such as the anony-
mous portrait ( 1616 ) of the native American Pocahontas, suggests
that they were especially important in establishing the authenticity of
the likeness. The use of words to identify Pocahontas confirms the his-
torical placing of the sitter, but in this case the claim for authenticity was
misleading, as this portrait was a third-hand image—copied from a
print which itself was copied from a drawing.
It might be asked what the use-value of such ‘documentary’ portraits
might have been. In the centuries before photography, portraits were
the only way of conveying the appearance of an absent or unknown
person, and they were a method of preserving the physical appearance
of someone that would remain after their death. Portraits also could act
as reminders of particular events, such as marriages, treaties, or diplo-
matic visitations. For example, an anonymous portrait of a Moorish
ambassador from the early seventeenth century provides a docu-
ment of the age of the sitter, Abd el-Quahed ben Messaoud Anoun,
and the date he visited England and the court of Queen Elizabeth I.
However, the format of this work appears formulaic and possibly indi-
cates that it could have been part of a series similar to Giovio’s collection
of eminent men. Contradictory signals, however, appear in the distinc-
tive physiognomy of the sitter, which gives the work a dramatic quality
that prefigures the Moorish stereotypes in Shakespeare’s Othello , which
was first performed four years later. The documentation of the sitter’s
age and visit are thus in tension with both the formulaic and stereo-
typical qualities of the portrait.
Although it may be common to look at portraits solely as documents
of identities or events, portraits are more complex than this simple
analogy allows. One of the clearest demonstrations of this can be seen
by examining the art-historical debates about the meaning and purpose
of Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage [28]. Although this work has
been subjected to a variety of conflicting interpretations, art historians
are compelled to engage with Erwin Panofsky’s assertion in 1934 that
this work served as a document of a marriage ceremony.
As one of the
first free-standing whole-length double portraits, this work was an
innovation in early fifteenth-century painting. It represents the Lucch-
ese merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife Giovanna Cenami.
Their hand gestures and the symbolic accoutrements of the room
suggest they are engaged in some sort of ceremony or ritual. What con-
vinced Panofsky of the documentary nature of this work was the
presence of an inscription on the back wall, ‘Jan Van Eyck fuit hic’ (‘Jan
Van Eyck was here’), and the accompanying appearance of Van Eyck in
the room, seen in the mirror on the back wall. Panofsky felt that this
combination of elements established the work as a document of the
sacrament of marriage, which in this case had been conducted as a
private ceremony with Van Eyck as a witness. Panofsky’s interpretation
has provoked many objections and a number of questions: why would a
couple go to the expense and trouble of using a portrait as a document
of their marriage, when a simple piece of paper would do? How would
such a document be used? To what extent does this bland documentary
quality conflict with the highly complex symbolic functions of the
objects in the room?
Furthermore, the portrait is packed with the
kind of religious symbolism normally associated with altarpieces. The
‘documentary’ quality of the inscription sits uneasily with the moraliz-
ing symbolism of the fruit on the table (either innocence or its loss); the
burning candle (possibly the eye of God); the dog (fidelity); the image
of St Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth, carved on the chair; and
the clogs cast aside as a sign of holy ground. The portrait is thus much
more complex than the label of ‘document’ allows. However, though
convincingly rebutted, Panofksy’s argument raises important issues
about how a portrait might serve the function of a historical document
and the way the written inscriptions on the portrait contribute to this
purpose.
What underlies such uncertainty about the documentary nature of
portraiture is the way artistic interpretation and representation always
undermine any authenticating information that might be appended to
a work of art. However, it is fair to say that portraits are—and have
always been—used for documentary purposes. From ancient times,
portraits on coins serve both to establish the identity of the current
reigning power and to consolidate that authority by making the appear-
ance ubiquitous. Portraits were used to validate identity in the early
modern period, when they were employed in lawsuits or in campaigns
to track down conspirators. Portraits appeared in early manuscripts, for
instance in the roll of pleas in the court of the King’s Bench in England,
as authenticating records of individual identity.
Artists could employ
portraits for utilitarian purposes: Albrecht Dürer, for example, pro-
duced a famous portrait drawing of himself (c. 1512 – 13 ) as a means of
demonstrating a painful sore to a distant doctor. In eighteenth-century
Mexico, families commonly commissioned portraits of daughters who
were going into convents, and such portraits are riddled with references
to the women’s marriage to the church.
Portraits have been used effec-
tively by costume and furniture historians as a way of reconstructing the
appearance of garments, textiles, or tapestries, for which the actual
material evidence is minimal or has been damaged by the ravages of
time. Portraits remain an intrinsic part of the legal system in Western
countries: passport photographs allow individuals to travel and identi-
kit and photo-fit records of suspected criminals have been produced as
part of police investigations since the late nineteenth century [29].
In the early twenty-first century, the documentary nature of portrai-
ture has been both embraced and rejected. In 2001 the British artist
Marc Quinn was commissioned to produce a portrait of the geneticist
Sir John Sulston for the National Portrait Gallery in London. He chose
to display a DNA culture taken from Sulston. The ‘portrait’ was there-
fore both invisible to the naked eye, and it provided the ultimate confir-
mation of Sulston’s distinct identity. Quinn called this the ‘most
realistic portrait in the gallery’, and it could be argued that the use of
DNA relegates the portrait to a piece of forensic evidence that confirms
Sulston’s genetic individuality.
However, it could also be argued that
Quinn’s artistic gesture involves the kinds of choices that all portraitists
make about how best to represent their sitters. As Sulston’s fame came
through his involvement with the human genome project, Quinn’s use
of DNA parallels the methods of artists who use props or costume to
signal the individuality of their sitter. Portraits can appear to provide
documentation or authentication of a person’s appearance, age, status,
or even biological identity. But the imaginative and interpretative
aspects of all portraiture make it resistant to documentary reductivism.
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