The Evolution of Portraiture in the Renaissance Period

The Renaissance change, as well as realism being a representation of nature's lines and colors, focused over a specific identity with the portrait subject, probing personality and the environment in which the individual lived and worked (Clark 104; 111). But photograph-like realism of individual personalities, whether accomplished in Flemish painting or Italian sculpture, hardly disposed from the ability for portraiture being the locus of artistic innovation. The expansion of artistic media following the Renaissance led to experimentation on the approaches of artistic representation with the self, whether that self was the artist who employed himself as being a design or the artist's model or patron.

Via portraiture, the artistic representational statement could interpret the external lines with the figure to reveal what lay behind. To the degree the artist sets himself the task of representing the personality behind the image, he engages inside a rhetorical as well as axiological exercise. That may be simply because a persuasive motive drives the rhetorician, whose objective is latent, concealed behind the manifest instrument of representation. That thought is central towards the Rhetoric of Aristotle. "Rhetoric," he says, is "the faculty of observing in any given case the obtainable ways of persuasion"

Henry, Clare. "Flattery Gets You Nowhere: Clare Henry Talks to Photographer Richard Avedon About Posing With out Imposing, and His Belief That Portraiture Is often a Performance." The Financial Times 30 Oct. 2002: 12.

"Rembrandt Self-Portrait Uncovered." BBC World News Online. 31 January 2003. .

Aristotle. Rhetoric. The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Ed. Edward P.J. Corbett. New York: Contemporary Library, 1984. 219-266.

In the case of Rembrandt, the primary context for self-representation was his own life, and the periodic self-portraits can be correlated with, or dated by, the variety of Rembrandt's other paintings to identify the work he was doing aside from giving an account with the rise in social stature of his own self. For other portraitists, context, hence rhetorical relevance, has been achieved by other means. Arnason and Prather note David's portrait on the death of Marat, the face of which was surely done from David's memory on the subject but that's most sharply distinguished by the setting for your death--namely, Marat's bath. Setting the portrait inside the situation of death, they say, made a secular revolutionary martyr out of Marat and (here is where rhetoric, that may be a component of politics, enters the picture) "a methods to powerful political propaganda" (22). It is the mechanism of propaganda, they say, that helps the picture attain "its convincing verisimilitude" (22).

Woods-Marsden, Joanna. Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Popularity from the Artist. New Haven: Yale U P, 1998.

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