The northern European schools excelled at reproducing exact facial features and topography. The meticulous realism of the fifteenth century Flemish art was carried over into the German portraiture of the sixteenth century, as seen in Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein’s works. In the Dutch school of the seventeenth century this exemplary realist technique reached its climax, with Rembrandt becoming the only notable exception to the rule. Velasquez had his own way of portraying the sitter, rather than focusing on the meticulous imitation of detail, he attempted to convey the total impression of the person.
Generally, portrait painters are distinguished as either being subjective or objective which depends on their decision to either use themselves or other sitters more regularly as their subjects. Nobility and distinction were attributed to Titian and Anthony van Dyck and grace and charm to the French and English schools of the eighteenth century. Different schools of artists and masters like Holbein, Hals, and Velasquez, utterly lost themselves in their subjects giving themselves up wholly to their personal impressions and idealizations. Their work stood outside themselves and gleamed in brilliance as if they had merely held the brush for an external motive force to wield its subject.
In the history of portraiture one artist’s limitation was another’s opportunity to flourish. In Van Dyck and Jean-Marc Nattier’s compositions there was always the constant reiteration of the same subject, or class of subjects, which later became mechanical and redundant to the point where they lost their ability to grow and evolve within their artistic styles. Velasquez and Rembrandt found one single model as an inexhaustible field of study. A lifetime was not long enough for them to devote to the multitudinous variations that one figure could inspire.
Again it is interesting that while some men were distinctly the product of their time; others seemed anachronistic. Titian came at the climax of Venetian art and epitomized the best of its characteristic qualities while Velasquez came two hundred years ahead of time, and created new compositions that his predecessors had never dreamed of. The environment of Titian and Holbein or of Peter Paul Rubens and Van Dyck, shaped the character and quality of their work, but other painters seemed to have no relation to their surroundings. It was the straight forward Dutch mentality that produced the most visionary of painters such as Rembrandt. Other countries such as Spain, a land of warmth and romantic adventure, brought forth the naturalists like Velasquez. So through the whole range of great portrait painting, we are able to find many temperaments, and many types of work. No single painter possessed all the qualities that would represent the “ideal portrait artist,” but all are necessary to present and explore the many different aspects and hidden sides of this substantial artistic genre.
By the nineteenth century, with the advent of other artistic mediums such as photography, portraiture was viewed as a dying art. Photography encompassed virtually all of the elements that portraiture had thus far attempted to achieve and therefore portraiture had to take a new direction. French Impressionists such as Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet began developing new techniques involving the effects of light and their own artistic interpretations. The Postimpressionists, notably Vincent Van Gogh, popularized the self-portrait and the use of vibrant colour. These evolutions acted as a catalyst for numerous artistic movements that would produce some of the most influential artists such as Picasso and his Cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The powerful Surrealist movement cultivated artists like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst who propelled an epoch that paved the way for abstraction and the contemporary portraits. With artists such as Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol, contemporary art and portraiture took on a new image that began after World War II and incorporated the new 50s and 60s consumerist culture. What follows are examples of more than a few paintings that in themselves not only represent the portrait genre, but also are representative of specific movements in art history.
For the reader and viewer, the pages that follow show a panorama of more or less famous personalities from the past that form a chronological timeline of art. While the collection gathered here is a mere taste of the plethora of portraits created over time, the works within this book are representative of some of the most important artistic genres in the history of art. The power of the portrait is defined by its ability to preserve a memory of the person being represented, thus implying the indispensable quality of these works. Therefore this dynamic collection of one thousand masterpieces creates a dialogue of sorts between the artists and even their respected time periods that allude to the different aesthetic and stylistic hurdles that enabled them to express their creativity.
Antiquity
2. Gudea, Prince of Lagash (anepigraphic statue), Mesopotamian, Tello, ancient Girsu, c. 2120 B.C.E. Diorite, 70.5 × 22.4 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
The art of portraiture did not begin with Antiquity; in fact, historians found the first traces of the portrait during the Upper Paleolithic (c. 30000-12000 B.C.E.) period up until the Neolithic (c. 8000–3000 B.C.E.) period when “artists” already knew and developed many different forms of human representation. From the Venus of Brassempouy (or the Lady with a Hood) to the King of Uruk, thirty thousand years of technical experience had already passed. Although we can not analyse ancient art in a general sense, because of the diversity of all the civilisations involved, we can explain why portraiture during antiquity was radically transformed. The birth of the first writing systems changed the perspective on human form from a supernatural and protective use to a political, religious and funerary use. Historical proofs imply that portraiture was predominantly represented through sculpture. In fact, the materials used in the creation of sculptures, allow them to withstand the test of time much more so than paintings, because at the time painters used tempera to create their frescoes. Tempera was made of crushed coloured pigments (vegetal or mineral based metallic oxides) which dissolved into a water soluble binder such as gum or egg. Unfortunately, this delicate mixture was not easily conserved in humid climates, which explains the lack of ancient paintings, with the exception of Egypt (mainly because of the dry climate), Herculaneum and Pompeii.
Egyptians are considered to be the pioneers of portrait art. They were among the first to develop the concept of idealised, well-proportioned human figures and a narrative tradition through paintings and relief sculpture. The representation of the human body in ancient Egypt was consistent with very precise classifications that the artists strictly followed. This explains the remarkable stability of this art over the centuries. When comparing a portrait of a pharaoh from the Old Kingdom to that of a pharaoh from the New Kingdom, only minimal visual differences can be seen. Another important observation is that Egyptian art was fundamentally anonymous: even up to this day it is impossible to distinguish one artist from another because their style was so rigorously uniform. In fact, a proportional grid served as a guide for the artists. Until recently, researchers have found evidence of two types of these grids: the first was used until the 25th dynasty and the second lasted until the Roman epoch. The work and research of the Egyptologist Gay Robbins during the 80s and 90s (Proportion and Style in Ancient Egyptian Art, 1994) determined, thanks to meticulous analysis, that for any particular epoch numerous different grids existed. The artist chose the one that applied to the sitter’s position that he was trying to represent (standing, sitting, kneeling…) as well as the societal hierarchy (pharaoh, priest, scribe…). Dr. Robins, an Egyptologist, also observed differences between the Middle Kingdom and the Old Kingdom concerning masculine and feminine portraits that can specifically be seen in details such as the shoulders, the small of the back and even the length of the legs.
The expansion of an autonomous Greek art would not have been possible without the initial influence of the Egyptians. With one look at the kouroi of Polymedes of Argos (nos. 36, 37), the artist’s familiarity with Egyptian statuary is easily understood: the standing position, the leading leg, the arms positioned along the body and the clenched fist just like the pharaoh from the Triad of Menkura. Later the Greeks manifested their own original style associated with