The works collected in this bibliography are organized with two goals in mind. Even the anthropocentric definition of portraiture and the insistence on the face as the locus of humanity have been called into question. With the turn to relational models, the idea of the “autonomous portrait” as a marker of the Renaissance has given way to considerations of the beholder’s share.

That definition is necessarily complicated by studies that focus on the functions of portraiture: aesthetic, rhetorical-poetic, commemorative, religious, mythic, and otherwise anthropological. The expectation that a portrait is a picture that represents a specific and historically locatable individual is challenged in various ways.

In many ways the topic of portraiture seems natural to the Renaissance and Reformation, especially when the Renaissance is defined, in the tradition of Jacob Burckhardt, as the “rebirth of the individual.” Historically, discussions of portraiture intersect thematically not only with discussions of individuality, subjectivity, and self-consciousness but also with discussions of realism/naturalism and idealism, authorship and authority, and eventually selfhood, cultural poetics, and the (political) construction and presentation of “identity.” Yet, for all the ways portraiture has served as a testing ground for various expectations concerning the intellectual, cultural, and social history of the period, the question of what constitutes a portrait remains open.

Portraiture definition