This research examines portraiture and self-portraiture in the Western tradition of art. The research will set forth the historical and cultural context in which discourse about the aesthetics and rhetoric of the portrait has emerged since the Renaissance and then discuss how rhetorical devices of representation merge with the means of expression to elucidate the pattern of ideas--whether aesthetic, moral, political, or psychological--that inform artistic elaborations of the self.
In his study of the history of Western art as emblematic of civilization, Clark locates the origin of portraiture in Flanders, with Jan van Eyck, a painter who "looked at the human face with a more dispassionate eye and recorded his findings with a more delicate hand" than any artist of the period and in a way more profound than was achieved by the generations of Florentine sculptors who followed. The northern Europeans of the Renaissance by no means abandoned portraiture, of course. It is almost a commonplace of Renaissance art history that one must take note of the fact that Rembrandt gave an account of his artistic life in significant part by way of the self-portrait. So important are Rembrandt's self-studies to the history of art that when a formerly unknown portrait of the painter is discovered, as happened in January 2003 when a restoration project revealed that a portrait of a Russian aristocrat concealed a Rembrandt study, the event makes international news ("Rembrandt Uncovered").
To explain the evolution of portraiture in the Renaissance period, Clark describes medieval pictures of people as presentational, representative of social status or rank within a specific group and not of a specific person. The Renaissance change, in addition to realism as a representation of nature's lines and colors, focused on the specific identity of the portrait subject, probing personality and the environment in which the individual lived and worked (Clark 104; ...