Rethinking the Origins of Portraiture

Abstract

In traditional scholarship, portraiture is generally understood as symptomatic of fundamentally modern interests in individuality and selfhood. Scholars have described the practice as having emerged over the course of the fourteenth century and have pointed to portraits as visual proof that a shift from medieval to modern mentalities occurred at that time. This article seeks to recast our account of the "earliest portraits" by analyzing such images in accordance with the artistic, social, and theoretical preoccupations that prevailed during the era. It concentrates on a specific setting often cited as a point of origin for the modern practice of portraiture: the French royal court in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. To recover that period's understanding of the concept of "likeness," it explores a variety of late medieval written sources, ranging from works of "natural philosophy" to literary texts. It also considers images themselves, discussing works in media privileged by modern scholarship—paintings and sculpture—but also addressing lost images, accessible only through their description in archival sources, as well as works in less exalted material, such as wax votive figures. It demonstrates that late medieval artists and audiences understood likeness as a highly complex quality, and that they therefore saw images as important mnemonic tools. This created a situation in which artists and patrons alike deployed a variety of forms of likeness in images, enabling them to play a major role in courtly displays of devotion and loyalty.

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