 |
| Anonymous Lombard painter Ceiling panel with bust portrait ca. 1500 oil on panel Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan |
 |
| Albrecht Dürer Portrait of a young Venetian woman 1506 oil on panel Gemäldegalerie Berlin |
 |
| Vincenzo Catena Portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti before 1531 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
"Portraiture. It is generally assumed that a portrait is the maximally accurate reproduction in dead matter of the head of a living person. Not the same in all times. Even today the portrait does not fully correspond to that definition. If any naive people still believe that portraiture involves resemblance, the spokesmen of modern art will soon teach them differently. Paul Schultze-Naumburg informs us in black and white that a portrait need not establish the slightest likeness. That is not the task of art. Photography was invented at just the right moment: people suspected that art would soon no longer satisfy the requirements of portraiture."
 |
| Anonymous French photographer Portrait of a laundress ca. 1848-50 hand-colored daguerrotype Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
 |
| Corneille de Lyon Portrait of Marie de Batarnay ca. 1535-40 oil on panel Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
 |
| Moretto da Brescia Portrait of Count Fortunato Martinengo Cesaresco ca. 1540-45 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
"The portrait must exhibit full capacity for life solely in external optical appearances; that is, it must satisfy the conditions of causal relations with surrounding elements such as space, atmosphere, light, and color. Whether the individual person is captured – that is, whether the immutable physical presence of the head is reproduced precisely and accurately – is of secondary importance. When a person insists that his portrait display an individual habitus – his own individual habitus – this is merely an echo of the now-obsolete notion that a person is truly an individual entity. Such an idea was fine for an antique era, when every person was also a daimon, and for the Catholic Middle Ages, when people likewise had certain (albeit limited) daimonic conceptions about human individuality, but today art has other objectives. It must depict not the individual, who no longer exists – or, more precisely, is a set of molecules too tiny to be depicted – but the universal connectedness of all natural phenomena. This art presents its subject not as a physically unified individual but as a complex of optical appearances that strike the beholder's eye instantaneously."
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Younger Portrait of Princess Elisabeth of Saxony 1564 oil on paper Kupferstichkabinett Berlin |
 |
| Hendrik Goltzius Portrait of Jacob Matham, the artist's step-son ca. 1584 drawing on vellum Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
"Now we must ask: What is the external purpose of a modern portrait? Portrayal of individuality; the patron, at least, still desires this. What is art's purpose? Portrayal of causal relationships in nature. Extrinsic purpose and art's purpose are thus two separate things; not only do they not correspond, but they even contradict each other."
– from Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, a course of lectures delivered by Aloïs Riegl in 1899 at the University of Vienna, translated by Jaqueline E. Jung and published in English by Zone Books in 2004
 |
| Anonymous English artist Portrait of a lady 1615 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
 |
| Diego Velázquez Portrait of a lady ca. 1630 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie Berlin |
 |
| Anthony van Dyck Portrait of Venetia Lady Digby on her deathbed 1633 oil on canvas Dulwich Picture Gallery, London |
 |
| Jan van Bijlert Portraits of the inhabitants at St Jobsgasthuis in Utrecht ca. 1630-35 oil on canvas Centraal Museum, Utrecht |
 |
| Juan Carreño de Miranda Portrait of Inés de Zúñiga, Countess of Monterrey ca. 1660-70 oil on canvas Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid |
 |
| Carlo Maratti Portrait of Faustina Maratti 1686 drawing Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid |