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Blessing, Nigerianne de Nouadibu Art Print Lamazou, Titouan 11.8 in. x 15.74 in. Buy at AllPosters.com Framed Mounted The portrait, whether painted, carved or modelled, confronts the artist with a special problem -- that of achieving a likeness, pleasing the sitter and at the same time creating a work of aesthetic value. It is usually only when confronted by himself that the artist has the opportunity for perfect sincerity and, though romanticism and sentimentality tend to interfere, the most moving portraits are often self-portraits such as those of Rembrandt or, nearer our own time, of Munch and Kokoschka. Portaiture is by no means a continuous artistic activity.
The age of Pericles produced no portraits, and medieval painters and sculptors have left very few records of features which can be identified with particular persons. Portraiture plays little part, too, in the art of the Far East where the individual is held in light esteem. The art of portraiture persisted, however, throughout 4,000 years in Egypt, fostered there by a fantastic pre-occupation with death and the desire to preserve beyond the grave a recognisable likeness of the individual, motives which were scarcely aesthetic; while in Ancient Rome the most interesting and original artistic manifestation was in the sphere of naturalistic portrait sculpture, which arose from the imitation in more durable materials of the wax effigies used in family cults and in funeral ceremonies.
After the advent of Christianity with its emphasis on the worthlessness of the material world, interest in portraiture disappeared almost entirely until its revival in Europe towards the beginning of the 15th century, when diminutive portraits of donors began to appear in unimportant corners of Italian altar-pieces, and when Pisanello and Jan van Eyck began to concern themselves with the representation of individual physiognomies. These portraits were very modest in scale, consisting in Pisanello's case of profile medallions and in van Eyck's of small panels. Even when van Eyck ventured a full-length portrait, extremely rare at that period, as in ' Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife', the picture was of small proportions. In Italy the profile pose, the most nalve and obvious manner of catching a likeness, continued to be favoured until the beginning of the 16th century.
The Renaissance revived the sense of the importance of the human personality which had been stifled by Christianity, and portraits increased steadily in size until life-size or nearly life-size became the rule. Fulllength life-size portraits were, however, at first confined to emperors, popes, kings, doges or great nobles. Men of more lowly status satisfied the urge to immortalize their features by commissioning religious or mythological pictures in which they played the part in the composition.
Thus Chancellor Rollin kneels before the Virgin and Child in van Eyck's celebrated picture; in Veronese's 'Marriage at Cana' the bride, bridegroom and guests are all portraits of personages of the day, including the painters Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano and Veronese himself, while Botticelli's 'Mars and Venus' presents portraits of Giuliano de'Medici and Simonetta Vespucci. The introduction of portraits under the guise of religious or mythological composition soon yielded to portrait groups which pretended to be nothing else, such as Velasquez' 'Las Meninas', which consists of likenesses of the Infanta Margarita and her maids of honour and also includes an almost life-size portrait of Velasquez himself.
The portrait had by this time -- the 17th century -- become recognised as one of the major activities of artists, regardless of the social position of the sitter. By a curious reversal of the earlier state of affairs Rembrandt's 'Night Watch', which showed more interest in composition and chiaroscuro than faithful portaiture, was rejected because some of the sitters felt that their features were not readily recognisable. Artists of the greatest imaginative powers, Velasquez, van Dyck, Hals and, above all, Rembrandt now became absorbed in likenesses, almost to the exclusion of other forms of painting. Portraiture was cultivated with particular zest in England from the 15th century onwards. Holbein, on coming to England devoted himself almost exclusively to the painting of likenesses.
Van Dyck's inclination to become a portraitist was certainly encouraged by his English sojourn, and other foreigners, Lely and Kneller, soon established themselves in England as portrait painters. By the 18th century a galaxy of native portrait artists were at work, including Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Lawrence and lesser artists like Devis and Zoffany. Gainsborough, despite the delicious quality of his brushwork, would sooner have painted landscape, but was compelled to produce likenesses by the taste of the day. No less that 15 presidents of the Royal Academy have been portrait painters.
But things have changed; few serious artists to-day devote themselves to portraiture, in the sense of the careful depiction of an individual physiognomy. The photographic means of recording a likeness has not lessened the numerical output of academic painted portraits, but it has encouraged painters of sensibility to seek other modes of expression than the faithful recording of reality. Cézanne was more interested in making a generalized, formal study of his wife's head than in depicting her features or conveying her character; and though Picasso may suggest the salient features of a personality in an abstraction of the actual forms before him, this can scarcely be called portraiture. But it is not only the tendency of the arts towards nonrealistic forms of expression which has affected portraiture; man's estimation of his own importance has waned. The optimism of the Renaissance and the 18th century, the romantic attitude of the early 19th century towards the individual, have vanished and it is these which must nourish the art of portraiture.
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