Portraiture goes far beyond capturing a likeness. This intimate genre sheds light on the identity of both the sitter and the artist. A portrait’s details can reveal the subject’s and maker’s politics, relationships, aspirations, and insecurities.
Carefully selecting which version of your likeness to present to the public may seem like a digital phenomenon, but as these texts show, humans have used images as a way of amassing social capital since ancient times.
Interested in reading more about the art of portraiture? Explore these and other texts on MetPublications—where hundreds of books are available to read for free online!
The Medici: Portraits and Politics 1512–1570
By Keith Christiansen and Carlo Falciani, with contributions by Andrea Bayer, Elizabeth Cropper, Davide Gasparotto, Sefy Hendler, Antonella Fenech Kroke, Tommaso Mozzati, Elizabeth Pilliod, Julia Siemon, and Linda Wolk-Simon (2021)
This compelling publication tells the story of Florence’s dramatic political transformations under Cosimo I de Medici and features more than ninety works by artists such as by Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Francesco Salviati, and Benvenuto Cellini. As this volume’s leading international scholars attest, portraits of Florentines from 1512 to 1570 not only conveyed citizens’ character, social position, and cultural ambitions, but also raised the city’s profile to the center of art and culture it is now known to be.
Alice Neel: People Come First
By Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey, with contributions by Meredith A. Brown, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Susanna V. Temkin (2021)
In 1950 Alice Neel declared: “For me, people come first. I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.” This ambitious publication surveys nearly seventy years of Neel’s radical humanism, as expressed through her remarkable portraits of victims of the Great Depression, fellow residents of Spanish Harlem, leaders of political organizations, queer artists, pregnant women, and members of New York’s global diaspora. Essays tackle Neel’s portrayal of LGBTQIA+ subjects; her unique aesthetic language; her personal preoccupations with death, illness, and motherhood; as well as her commitment to progressive politics, civil rights, feminism, and racial diversity.
“The Significance of Azurite Blue in Two Ming Dynasty Birthday Portraits”: Metropolitan Museum Journal, v. 53
By Quincy Ngan (2018)
This focused study of two Chinese portraits from the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644) evaluates the significance of the azurite blue pigment used to represent the garments of an elderly husband and wife whose likeness were rendered on the occasion of their eighty-fifth birthdays.
Irving Penn: Centennial
By Maria Morris Hambourg and Jeff L. Rosenheim, with contributions by Alexandra Dennett, Philippe Garner, Adam Kirsch, Harald E.L. Prins, Vasilios Zatse (2017)
The nearly three hundred commercial, conceptual, and documentary pictures by influential twentieth century photographer Irving Penn featured in this book demonstrate the artist’s skill and versatility. Among Penn’s varied subjects are cultural figures and celebrities, fashion models, female nudes, and peoples of Peru, Dahomey (Benin), New Guinea, and Morocco.
Vigée Le Brun
By Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer, and Paul Lang with contributions by Ekaterina Deryabina, Gwenola Firmin, Stéphane Guégan, Anabelle Kienle Poňka, Xavier Salmon, Anna Sulimova (2016)
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s expressive portraits of French royalty and aristocracy—especially of her patron Marie Antoinette—exemplified success and resourcefulness in an age when women were rarely allowed either. This handsome volume features ninety paintings and pastels, a chronology, and a map of the travels of the artist who nimbly negotiated a shifting political and geographic landscape before, during, and after the French Revolution.
Roman Portraits: Sculpture in Stone and Bronze
By Paul Zanker (2016)
Thorough and multifaceted, this survey of ancient portraiture provides essential context for Greek and Roman sculpture depicting people of all ages and social strata. Subjects include revered poets and philosophers, emperors and their family members, military heroes, local dignitaries, ordinary citizens, and young children.
“Photographic Portraiture in West Africa: Notes from ‘In and Out of the Studio’”: Metropolitan Museum Journal, v. 51
By Giulia Paoletti and Yaëlle Biro (2016)
Recognizing the varied aesthetic vocabulary of West African portrait photography from the 1870s to the 1970s, this article provides a reexamination of portraits from The Met Visual Resource Archive (VRA). Originally acquired as contextual pictures supporting works of African art in The Met collection, this text reevaluates the photographs, postcards, and original negatives in the VRA as essential works in the history of photography and modernity.
The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini
Edited by Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann with essays by Patricia Lee Rubin, Beverly Louise Brown, Peter Humfrey, and Rudolf Preimesberger, and contributions by Andrea Bayer, Francesco Caglioti, Eleonara Luciano, and Stephen K. Scher (2011)
This history of early portraiture in Italy features 160 magnificent examples of painting, drawing, manuscript illumination, sculpture, and medallic portraiture by artists such as Donatello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Pisanello, Mantegna, Antonello da Messina, and Giovanni Bellini.
American Portrait Miniatures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
By Carrie Rebora Barratt and Lori Zabar (2010)
Featuring intimate objects made to be worn or carried, this engaging volume highlights six hundred portraits by more than one hundred and fifty artists over two hundred years. The book uncovers their stories of connection, love, and loss in the selected works created from the 1700s through the mid-twentieth century.
Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch
Edited by Gary Tinterow and Philip Conisbee, with contributions by Philip Conisbee, Rebecca A. Rabinow, Christopher Riopelle, Robert Rosenblum, Andrew Carrington Shelton, Gary Tinterow, and Georges Vigne, and drawing entries by Hans Naef (1999)
Featuring 42 paintings, 101 drawings, and 22 studies spanning six decades—from the last years of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, to the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, and the Second Empire—this volume details how Ingres portrayed the ever-shifting who’s who of France’s nineteenth-century ruling elite, capturing them as they wished to be remembered.
The Emperors’ Album: Images of Mughal India
By Stuart Cary Welch, Annemarie Schimmel, Marie L. Swietochowski, and Wheeler M. Thackston (1987)
Bound together at a later date, the fifty leaves of the Kevorkian Album inclue works from the seventeenth and the early nineteenth century. In addition to discussing the album’s calligraphy and natural history studies, the authors of this volume highlight the richly detailed Mughal court portraiture created for the private enjoyment of emperors Jahangir and Shahjahan.
