by Jon Lackman | 29 March 2011 | Books, Medieval
I apologize for having posted little lately, but I return with a book to strongly recommend: “The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France,” by Stephen Perkinson. I come to this book a bit late — it was published in 2009, but my review copy went to the wrong address, and so I only just managed to read it. (Of course, by academic book-reviewing standards, this is hardly late at all.) The book could have been better edited and illustrated, as Kathryn Gerry notes in caa.reviews, but his argument is lucid and relevant to anyone interested in portraiture, which should be everyone:
For Leon Battista Alberti, a portrait served as, in effect, the starting point for the history of art; he invoked the Ovidian tale of Narcissus to locate the moment of origins of the human practice of painting … In the twentieth century, several art historians proposed that another image played a similar originating role in the history of art … Louis Gillet proclaimed that “[i]t is very noteworthy that French painting begins with a portrait [the mid-fourteenth century Jehan roy de France" ... [The work's caption at the Louvre] informs the viewer that the work constitutes “the first surviving example since Antiquity of an independent painted portrait” … [This assumes] that it is a physiognomic likeness of its subject; that physiognomic likeness is necessary for the representation of individual identity; that, as a physiognomic likeness devoid of overt religious references, the panel constitutes an example of portraiture in the modern sense; that its medium marks it as modern, rather than a medieval, work of art; and that, as a portrait, it marks a decisive break with medieval artistic traditions … But there are problems with each of these assumptions … As we will see, artists introduced physiognomic likeness … into images at the end of the fourteenth century … to endow images with what contemporary sources on gift-giving describe as “estrangeté”–striking visual qualities … At the same time, they did not eschew traditional methods of establishing resemblance between image and subject; indeed, written sources betray a fear that physiognomic likeness alone was insufficient to allow an image to represent an individual. And perhaps it is here, in these gnawing anxieties over the sufficiency of the representation of the self, that present-day readers may find the most compelling parallels to their own lived experience.
Gerry writes:
Perkinson’s argument is based on evidence drawn from such a wide array of sources, including visual arts produced in a variety of media, and literary, scientific, historical, theological, and political texts, that there is little room to wonder if any (surviving) voices have gone unheard. His examination of textual sources is strengthened by careful attention to how language is being used by the authors, and he relates shifts in the use of certain words to changes in the understanding of art and artistic practice. Perkinson’s careful and detailed analyses of works of art is to be commended, as is his thoughtful assessment of what evidence these works can and cannot provide.
