Perhaps one of the major problems with seeing portraits as documents
is how the presence of the individual calls upon the viewer to respond to
a person rather than a piece of information. So even while portraits were
used to identify conspirators or to document the appearance of kings
and queens at a given moment, they also had an immediacy and a pres-
ence that enabled them to stand in for the real people they represented.
Many portraits have this power. Roland Barthes in his Camera Lucida
has written most eloquently about the effect a portrait photograph of
his mother had upon him.
Although the photograph recorded his
mother as a little girl, long before he was born, the associations he had
with her as an older woman were sharpened and awakened by viewing
the photograph. The power of the photograph was further enhanced
because it documented a moment that was past and could never be
recovered. Although Barthes was writing about photography, portraits
in other media have long been felt to have this effect. The portrait seems
to offer the viewer a magical substitute for the individual depicted by
bringing a past moment of that person’s life into the present.
The nature of portraits as a proxy or substitute for the sitter was an
effective metaphor in Italian Renaissance poetry by writers such as
Aretino and Bembo. Poets often addressed portraits as if they were
writing to living individuals, and artists exploited the portrait’s immedi-
acy and engagement with the viewer by choosing poses, gestures, and
expressions that seemed to call the viewer into the picture, rather than
excluding them from it.
The private engagement with the sitter’s visage
was reinforced in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries
with the popularity of miniatures and pastel portraits. Miniatures
were small portrait images that could be held in the hand, or placed
inside lockets, snuff boxes, or other tiny ornaments. Their minute size
functioned to create a seemingly private relationship between the sitter
and the owner of the image. Similarly intimate was pastel portraiture,
which was invented in the early eighteenth century and quickly became
a popular method of taking an engaging and lifelike portrait. In the
hands of talented artists like Jean-Étienne Liotard the soft tones of
pastel could mimic the texture of flesh and enhance the immediacy of
the portrait image. Because they rendered the person both lifelike
and seemingly touchable, miniatures and pastels potentially had an
erotic or fetishistic quality and were collected obsessively.
The talismanic and erotic charge of portraiture may have been one
of the reasons that portraits were frequently used in marriage negotia-
tions among European royal families. Families intermarried for the
purposes of expanding dynasties and power bases, but potential spouses
more often than not lived a prohibitive distance from each other and
therefore could not meet before the marriage ceremony took place. It
was thus common to use the portrait as a way of undertaking marriage
negotiations. The portrait then served the function of validating the age
and physical attractiveness of the sitter, as well as their state of health.
Henry VIII most famously employed Holbein in his efforts to seek out
a wife to succeed Jane Seymour. Holbein was forced to do the travelling,
while Henry stayed in England and examined the portraits of potential
wives. Holbein’s exquisite skill in portraiture played no small part in
Henry VIII’s decision to wed Anne of Cleves, but when he first
met her his distress at her real appearance allegedly contributed to their
speedy divorce. Whether or not this story is true, it attests to the per-
ceived power of the portrait image and its role in human relationships.
Since portraits could serve as proxies for the individual represented,
they were often exchanged as gifts. Roman consuls commonly pre-
sented portraits in the form of ivory, wood, or metal diptychs to friends
or to emperors to demonstrate their respect. In the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries the exchange of portraits was a prominent means of
affirming friendships, particularly among young men. Individuals
would have their likenesses made or copied for the purpose of giving
them to a friend or relative. This was particularly the case in educated
circles. For example, the humanist Erasmus in Rotterdam commis-
sioned a portrait of himself from Quinton Metsys in 1517 specifically as
a gift for Thomas More in London. This acted as an affirmation of
common belief and mutual respect. This tradition has had a striking
longevity. For example, Van Gogh and Gauguin exchanged portraits
shortly before they were due to come together for what turned out to be
an ill-fated partnership in the French village of Arles in 1888 . The
English boarding school Eton College had a long tradition of asking its
leavers to donate a portrait of themselves to the school, and something
of this tradition remains in scholarly communities. For example, in
American schools today it is common for children to exchange portrait
photographs with their friends.
The portrait thus has a sort of power that allows it to be thought of
as a substitute for the individual it represents. The use of portraits for
marriage negotiations, gifts, and private contemplation grew from the
power of a portrait not only to stand for the represented individual, but
also to evoke the individual’s presence in the minds of viewers.
The portrait as commemoration and memorial
Whether portraits serve primarily an aesthetic, biographical, docu-
mentary, or proxy function, they are often associated with the past, with
memory, and—by extension—with death. Portraiture almost magically
retains the life of individuals who are dead, or the youth of individuals
who have aged. Louis Marin has argued that as the portrait seems to
bring the dead back to life, or to bring the past into the present, it serves
the same kind of function as other types of commemoration—specifi-
cally the panegyric and the funerary oration.
Portraits offer their
sitters a kind of immortality, but they also act as relics, souvenirs, or as a
stimulus to memory.
The relationship between portraits and rituals of death and burial is
an ancient one. Indeed, it could be argued that portraits were originally
invented to serve ritualistic funerary functions. In early Oceanic and
South American cultures, the portrait was considered to be a trace of
the dead individual. The importance of the trace was also felt in ancient
Rome, where it was common practice to take a death mask in order to
preserve the likeness of a family member for posterity. In Egypt, realis-
tic portraiture was necessary, given the strongly held belief that dead
people needed a body to inhabit when they died.
Such a pragmatic use
of the likeness was also part of ancient Chinese culture, where identifi-
able and distinct likenesses enabled families to recognize and worship
the correct ancestor.
However, early portraits also commemorated the
dead (for example, the Fayum portraits from Roman Egypt in the first
to second century ad ) and served to remind the living of an exem-
plary life (such as classical Greek portraits on tomb stelae). James
Breckenridge has argued that the majority of ancient portraiture played
such a funerary role, but in his view true portraiture privileges the like-
ness of an individual over any religious or ritual function.
Although he
makes a solid case for portraiture as distinct from artistic genres associ-
ated with death rituals, the relationship between portraiture and death
is not one that ends with the ancient world.
From the Middle Ages onwards, portraits have formed a prominent
part of tomb sculpture. Originally tombs would include only effigies of
the dead individuals, and often these were stylized and interchangeable.
But portraits on later medieval tombs begin to show distinctiveness in
individual features as it became increasingly important to allude to the
person who had died, rather than making only a generic reference to life
and death. The direct relationship between portraits and tomb sculp-
ture in these earlier periods may have contributed to an association
between portraiture and death that persisted for centuries. As David
Piper eloquently put it: ‘the painted portrait may often seem to be but
a domesticated tomb-effigy’.
Certainly from the fifteenth century
onwards, portraits included the presence of dead individuals amidst the
living, and references to death in portraits of the living. Given the
prevalence of sudden or premature death, it was common for patrons to
request that portraits include representations of loved ones who had
died. The English portraitist John Souch’s representation of Thomas
Aston at the Deathbed of His Wife commemorates an actual death,
but artists were generally less obvious in their references. In the next
century, Hogarth included a deceased sibling in his famous portrait of
The Graham Children, and in The Cholmondeley Family (1731 )he
represented a wife who had died of consumption in France and whose
body had been lost at sea. He included both of these dead people as if
they were part of the living scene: in the case of the Graham child,
Hogarth began painting him before he died, but he had to resort to
copying an old miniature for his portrait of the deceased Mary Chol-
mondeley. The dead presented as if living was also an attribute of post-
humous portraits, which were sometimes produced from death masks.
The inclusion of dead individuals in portraits of living ones was not
the only association between death and portraiture. Many seventeenth-
century portraits featured a skull as a prop. This was intended to be a
memento mori, or a reminder of death, which emphasized the ultimate
destiny of all the live individuals represented. To show a skull or other
symbol of death in a portrait was a way of undercutting the vanity of
portraiture by reference to the levelling function of death. This persis-
tent tradition in European portraiture was exploited and used ironically
by artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is important
to see how the associations between portraiture and death continued,
even when death was no longer necessarily associated with religion and
elaborate funerary rituals. The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s Self-
portrait with Skeleton Arm represents the artist as both living and
dead, in a macabre testament to Munch’s obsession with the more neg-
ative aspects of the cycle of life—a fascination he shared with many fin
de siècle contemporaries. Revelling in the morbidity of death was more
prevalent from the nineteenth century onwards; early modern refer-
ences to death tended to be reverent, commemorative, or superstitious.
Ironically, because of their apparent vivification of the represented
person, portraits had an inextricable relationship with death. A portrait
could bring the dead back to life and appear to provide both a trace of a
body and a stimulus to memory.
is how the presence of the individual calls upon the viewer to respond to
a person rather than a piece of information. So even while portraits were
used to identify conspirators or to document the appearance of kings
and queens at a given moment, they also had an immediacy and a pres-
ence that enabled them to stand in for the real people they represented.
Many portraits have this power. Roland Barthes in his Camera Lucida
has written most eloquently about the effect a portrait photograph of
his mother had upon him.
Although the photograph recorded his
mother as a little girl, long before he was born, the associations he had
with her as an older woman were sharpened and awakened by viewing
the photograph. The power of the photograph was further enhanced
because it documented a moment that was past and could never be
recovered. Although Barthes was writing about photography, portraits
in other media have long been felt to have this effect. The portrait seems
to offer the viewer a magical substitute for the individual depicted by
bringing a past moment of that person’s life into the present.
The nature of portraits as a proxy or substitute for the sitter was an
effective metaphor in Italian Renaissance poetry by writers such as
Aretino and Bembo. Poets often addressed portraits as if they were
writing to living individuals, and artists exploited the portrait’s immedi-
acy and engagement with the viewer by choosing poses, gestures, and
expressions that seemed to call the viewer into the picture, rather than
excluding them from it.
The private engagement with the sitter’s visage
was reinforced in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries
with the popularity of miniatures and pastel portraits. Miniatures
were small portrait images that could be held in the hand, or placed
inside lockets, snuff boxes, or other tiny ornaments. Their minute size
functioned to create a seemingly private relationship between the sitter
and the owner of the image. Similarly intimate was pastel portraiture,
which was invented in the early eighteenth century and quickly became
a popular method of taking an engaging and lifelike portrait. In the
hands of talented artists like Jean-Étienne Liotard the soft tones of
pastel could mimic the texture of flesh and enhance the immediacy of
the portrait image. Because they rendered the person both lifelike
and seemingly touchable, miniatures and pastels potentially had an
erotic or fetishistic quality and were collected obsessively.
The talismanic and erotic charge of portraiture may have been one
of the reasons that portraits were frequently used in marriage negotia-
tions among European royal families. Families intermarried for the
purposes of expanding dynasties and power bases, but potential spouses
more often than not lived a prohibitive distance from each other and
therefore could not meet before the marriage ceremony took place. It
was thus common to use the portrait as a way of undertaking marriage
negotiations. The portrait then served the function of validating the age
and physical attractiveness of the sitter, as well as their state of health.
Henry VIII most famously employed Holbein in his efforts to seek out
a wife to succeed Jane Seymour. Holbein was forced to do the travelling,
while Henry stayed in England and examined the portraits of potential
wives. Holbein’s exquisite skill in portraiture played no small part in
Henry VIII’s decision to wed Anne of Cleves, but when he first
met her his distress at her real appearance allegedly contributed to their
speedy divorce. Whether or not this story is true, it attests to the per-
ceived power of the portrait image and its role in human relationships.
Since portraits could serve as proxies for the individual represented,
they were often exchanged as gifts. Roman consuls commonly pre-
sented portraits in the form of ivory, wood, or metal diptychs to friends
or to emperors to demonstrate their respect. In the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries the exchange of portraits was a prominent means of
affirming friendships, particularly among young men. Individuals
would have their likenesses made or copied for the purpose of giving
them to a friend or relative. This was particularly the case in educated
circles. For example, the humanist Erasmus in Rotterdam commis-
sioned a portrait of himself from Quinton Metsys in 1517 specifically as
a gift for Thomas More in London. This acted as an affirmation of
common belief and mutual respect. This tradition has had a striking
longevity. For example, Van Gogh and Gauguin exchanged portraits
shortly before they were due to come together for what turned out to be
an ill-fated partnership in the French village of Arles in 1888 . The
English boarding school Eton College had a long tradition of asking its
leavers to donate a portrait of themselves to the school, and something
of this tradition remains in scholarly communities. For example, in
American schools today it is common for children to exchange portrait
photographs with their friends.
The portrait thus has a sort of power that allows it to be thought of
as a substitute for the individual it represents. The use of portraits for
marriage negotiations, gifts, and private contemplation grew from the
power of a portrait not only to stand for the represented individual, but
also to evoke the individual’s presence in the minds of viewers.
The portrait as commemoration and memorial
Whether portraits serve primarily an aesthetic, biographical, docu-
mentary, or proxy function, they are often associated with the past, with
memory, and—by extension—with death. Portraiture almost magically
retains the life of individuals who are dead, or the youth of individuals
who have aged. Louis Marin has argued that as the portrait seems to
bring the dead back to life, or to bring the past into the present, it serves
the same kind of function as other types of commemoration—specifi-
cally the panegyric and the funerary oration.
Portraits offer their
sitters a kind of immortality, but they also act as relics, souvenirs, or as a
stimulus to memory.
The relationship between portraits and rituals of death and burial is
an ancient one. Indeed, it could be argued that portraits were originally
invented to serve ritualistic funerary functions. In early Oceanic and
South American cultures, the portrait was considered to be a trace of
the dead individual. The importance of the trace was also felt in ancient
Rome, where it was common practice to take a death mask in order to
preserve the likeness of a family member for posterity. In Egypt, realis-
tic portraiture was necessary, given the strongly held belief that dead
people needed a body to inhabit when they died.
Such a pragmatic use
of the likeness was also part of ancient Chinese culture, where identifi-
able and distinct likenesses enabled families to recognize and worship
the correct ancestor.
However, early portraits also commemorated the
dead (for example, the Fayum portraits from Roman Egypt in the first
to second century ad ) and served to remind the living of an exem-
plary life (such as classical Greek portraits on tomb stelae). James
Breckenridge has argued that the majority of ancient portraiture played
such a funerary role, but in his view true portraiture privileges the like-
ness of an individual over any religious or ritual function.
Although he
makes a solid case for portraiture as distinct from artistic genres associ-
ated with death rituals, the relationship between portraiture and death
is not one that ends with the ancient world.
From the Middle Ages onwards, portraits have formed a prominent
part of tomb sculpture. Originally tombs would include only effigies of
the dead individuals, and often these were stylized and interchangeable.
But portraits on later medieval tombs begin to show distinctiveness in
individual features as it became increasingly important to allude to the
person who had died, rather than making only a generic reference to life
and death. The direct relationship between portraits and tomb sculp-
ture in these earlier periods may have contributed to an association
between portraiture and death that persisted for centuries. As David
Piper eloquently put it: ‘the painted portrait may often seem to be but
a domesticated tomb-effigy’.
Certainly from the fifteenth century
onwards, portraits included the presence of dead individuals amidst the
living, and references to death in portraits of the living. Given the
prevalence of sudden or premature death, it was common for patrons to
request that portraits include representations of loved ones who had
died. The English portraitist John Souch’s representation of Thomas
Aston at the Deathbed of His Wife commemorates an actual death,
but artists were generally less obvious in their references. In the next
century, Hogarth included a deceased sibling in his famous portrait of
The Graham Children, and in The Cholmondeley Family (1731 )he
represented a wife who had died of consumption in France and whose
body had been lost at sea. He included both of these dead people as if
they were part of the living scene: in the case of the Graham child,
Hogarth began painting him before he died, but he had to resort to
copying an old miniature for his portrait of the deceased Mary Chol-
mondeley. The dead presented as if living was also an attribute of post-
humous portraits, which were sometimes produced from death masks.
The inclusion of dead individuals in portraits of living ones was not
the only association between death and portraiture. Many seventeenth-
century portraits featured a skull as a prop. This was intended to be a
memento mori, or a reminder of death, which emphasized the ultimate
destiny of all the live individuals represented. To show a skull or other
symbol of death in a portrait was a way of undercutting the vanity of
portraiture by reference to the levelling function of death. This persis-
tent tradition in European portraiture was exploited and used ironically
by artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is important
to see how the associations between portraiture and death continued,
even when death was no longer necessarily associated with religion and
elaborate funerary rituals. The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s Self-
portrait with Skeleton Arm represents the artist as both living and
dead, in a macabre testament to Munch’s obsession with the more neg-
ative aspects of the cycle of life—a fascination he shared with many fin
de siècle contemporaries. Revelling in the morbidity of death was more
prevalent from the nineteenth century onwards; early modern refer-
ences to death tended to be reverent, commemorative, or superstitious.
Ironically, because of their apparent vivification of the represented
person, portraits had an inextricable relationship with death. A portrait
could bring the dead back to life and appear to provide both a trace of a
body and a stimulus to memory.
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