Portrait

About

A portrait records a particular person, but it also decides how that person should be seen. Early Renaissance Italy favoured the profile of coins and medals, as in Piero della Francesca's paired portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza from the 1470s. Jan van Eyck instead turned his sitters three-quarters toward the viewer and caught every crease in works such as Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban (1433). Anthony van Dyck gave the English court a relaxed elegance in Charles I at the Hunt (c. 1635), and John Singer Sargent's Madame X (1884) caused a scandal with a slipped shoulder strap, which he later repainted.

Photography widened who could be portrayed. Julia Margaret Cameron's close, soft-focus heads of the 1860s aimed at character over polish, and August Sander spent decades photographing Germans by trade and class. Chuck Close later enlarged photographs of faces into huge painted grids.