Anyone who has strolled through the halls of a museum knows that
portraits occupy a central place in the history of art. But did
portraits, as such, exist in the medieval era? Stephen Perkinson's
"The Likeness of the King" challenges the canonical account of the
invention of modern portrait practices, offering a case against the
tendency of recent scholarship to identify likenesses of historical
personages as "the first modern portraits."
Unwilling to accept the anachronistic nature of these claims,
Perkinson both resists and complicates grand narratives of
portraiture art that ignore historical context. Focusing on the
Valois court of France, he argues that local practice prompted
shifts in the late medieval understanding of how images could
represent individuals and prompted artists and patrons to deploy
likeness in a variety of ways. Through an examination of well-known
images of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century kings of
France, as well as largely overlooked objects such as wax votive
figures and royal seals, Perkinson demonstrates that the changes
evident in these images do not constitute a revolutionary break
with the past, but instead were continuous with late medieval
representational traditions.
"A lively, well-researched, and insightful work of scholarship
on late-medieval portraiture and its cultural and intellectual
context. "The Likeness of the King" provides a strong account of
late-medieval aesthetics and specific, concrete examples of
image-making and the often political needs it served. It offers
smart handling of literary, philosophical, and archival sources;
close and insightful reading of images; and a willingness to
counter received ideas."--Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago
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