ABSTRACT
Modern convention associates the portrait with a single occasion, not narrative. But early modern portraiture found ways to capture the passage of time, and the drama takes advantage of this when it invokes the genre to tell stories. Individual likeness is not always the prevailing project of early modern portraits, and while looks may reveal a generic disposition to vice or virtue, explicit mythological analogies invite viewers, characters and audiences to make meanings by drawing on their knowledge of traditional narratives. But, although it is not confined to depicting a transient moment, art cannot give life. In the necessary failure of its promise to duplicate the living or bring back the dead, portraiture may be the most elegiac of visual genres.
