ABSTRACT
Portraiture remains one of the most important genres in the fine art world, thanks in part to heightened contemporary awareness of social identity and its implications. This investigation will probe the origins of portraiture in the Western world and examine how those origins can teach us about the genre’s power today. Specifically, this chapter will argue that portraiture as we know it is descended from the Early Christian icon. Unlike earlier modes of representing persons, the Early Christian icon posited the existence of a spiritual identity for individuals of all classes, rooted in divine destiny and ultimate adoption into the life of God. This new view of identity could be understood as the embrace of a kind of transcendent particularity that eschewed archetypes (king, destroyer, mother, avenger) in favor of endless, highly specific, differentiation. This ongoing search for the transcendent, in particular, has informed all subsequent Western portraiture and clearly marks some of the most powerful portraits of the modern and postmodern eras. After briefly explicating the uniqueness of the Early Christian icon form and its implications for later portraiture, this chapter will examine specific contemporary portraits and illuminate their spiritual and formal connections to the icon prototype.
