Portraits through time

Why do people create portraits?

Ancient Rome: Imagines and Marriage Portraits To remember someone who Is gone. To show status of people Still living To create a reality that is Pleasing to the patron

Renaissance: Giovanni Bellini To show someone as being important Or sacred To explain ideas through symbols To provide access to the idea of a person

Renaissance: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci To tell a story about a person To give an idea of someone’s Personality To show something about a Person’s family

The Baroque: Portraits with Light and Tenebrism…

Rembrandt of the Baroque period To create a mood that reflects A person’s state of mind To give a sense of the inner Self…. To give a truthful view of an Individual’s physical appearance

Caravaggio of the Baroque period To tell a story with people Who seem real enough to Touch… To heighten the experience Of a person’s story through A dramatic experience To exaggerate the qualities Of an individual to create An ideal

Caravaggio

Neo-Classicism: Portraits that create ideals Ingres created portraits That commemorate a great Individual Here-he idealizes his own Image

David of the Neo-Classical Portraiture as propaganda for An emperor…

Romanticism: Portraits that exaggerated mood or feeling Gericault painted images Of people who had mental Illness…and exaggerated the Mood and atmosphere to Communicate an idea

Photography: Portraits as Documentation To document and/or commemorate a person or people of a certain time A much faster way to document This is a daguerreotype photograph-a portrait of a soldier from the Civil War

Early Photography: Portrait of an Artist Some of the early portrait photography went beyond simply documenting and ventured into the realm of fine art- photography as a fine art medium This is a portrait of the Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix, take by one of the early innovators of photography Felix Nadar PS- the VMFA show Artists as Art: Photographic Portraits ends this Sunday (3/22)! Go see it while you still can! (free admission)

Photography & Portraiture: Dorothea Lange Dorothea Lange’s photograph Migrant Mother taken during the Great Depression is an example of a candid photograph. Portraiture in photography can combine fine art and documentation. …and lets not forget emotion! This is a photographic portrait that carries quite a lot of emotional weight.

Photography & Portraiture: Conveying Identity Cindy Sherman was a photographer who did a lot of staging: she set up very specific environments with the intention of conveying information about the subject’s identity. This photograph is a self portrait which explores identity in relation to gender (more specifically, gender related stereotypes). Portraits, regardless of media being used, can be made with the purpose of representing (an aspect of) the subject’s identity. Portraits can challenge what we assume about a person’s identity.

Photographic portraits are great, but what becomes of the way portraits are created using non-photographic media? For example, how do painters approach the portrait?

Going Beyond the “Real” Artists like Van Gogh challenged the notion that portraits had to be as realistically rendered as possible. Shift in focus: a portrait does not necessarily have to render a person as realistically as possible. Expressive mark-making can be used to convey emotional/personal information about the subject. Upcoming VMFA Exhibit featuring Van Gogh (Van Gogh, Manet, and Matisse: the Art of the Flower) begins this Saturday (3/21)

20th century: Modern Art (Picasso) Picasso begged the question: what can a portrait be? …and what is an important function of a portrait in this modern age? …To show a truth about a person that cannot be seen by everyone…

Does a portrait even have to depict a physical person? Marsden Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer Hartley created this commemorative portrait by painting symbols that represented the deceased. A portrait can include or consist of symbols that represent an individual.

For our prisma color self portraits we will be employing more photorealistic techniques

Chuck Close

Gerhard Richter

Kehinde Wiley

James Valerio