Enfilade

Published last December by Reaktion and distributed by the University of Chicago Press:

Marica Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1780230412, £25 / $40.

We are surrounded by portraits: from the cipher-like portrait of a queen on a banknote to security pass photos; from images of politicians in the media to Facebook; from galleries exhibiting Titian or Leonardo to contemporary art featuring the self-image, as with Jeff Koons or Cindy Sherman. In Antiquity portraiture was of major importance in the exercise of power. Today it remains not only a component of everyday life but also a crucial way for artists to define themselves in relation to their environment and their contemporaries.

In Portrayal and the Search for Identity, Marcia Pointon investigates how we view and understand portraiture as a genre, and how portraits function as artworks within social and political networks. Likeness is never a straightforward matter as we rarely have the subject of a portrait as a point of comparison. Featuring familiar canonical portraits as well as little-known works, Portrayal seeks to unsettle notions of portraiture as an art of convention, a reassuring reflection of social realities. Readers are instead invited to consider how identity is produced pictorially, and where likeness is registered apart from in a face. In exploring these issues, the author addresses wide-ranging challenges, such as the construction of masculinity in dress, representations of slaves, and self-portraiture in relation to mortality.

Marcia Pointon is an independent scholar and research consultant; she is Professor Emeritus of History of Art at the University of Manchester and Honorary Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She is author of Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery and Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-century England.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction

1. Portrait, Fact and Fiction
2. Slavery and the Possibilities of Portraiture
3. Adolescence, Sexuality and Colour in Portraiture: Sir Thomas Lawrence
4. Accessories in Portraits: Stockings, Buttons and the Construction of Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century
5. The Skull in the Studio

References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index