1. Portraits through time

2. Why do people create portraits?

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. The Baroque: Portraits with Light and Tenebrism…

7. 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

8. 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

9. Caravaggio

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

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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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)

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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?

18. 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)

19. 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…

20. 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.

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

22. Chuck Close

23. Gerhard Richter

24. Kehinde Wiley

25. James Valerio