111). But photograph-like realism of individual personalities, whether accomplished in Flemish painting or Italian sculpture, hardly disposed of the potential for portraiture to be the locus of artistic innovation. The expansion of artistic media after the Renaissance led to experimentation with the means of artistic representation of the self, whether that self was the artist who used himself as a model or the artist's model or patron.
Via portraiture, the artistic representational statement could interpret the external lines of 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 in a rhetorical as well as axiological exercise. That is because a persuasive motive drives the rhetorician, whose objective is latent, concealed behind the manifest instrument of representation. That idea is central to the Rhetoric of Aristotle. "Rhetoric," he says, is "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (22). Because linked with persuasion, rhetoric may also involve technique, including a technique for coping with the universe. Plastic and poetic arts have long been employed for that purpose.
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