Repository | Book | Chapter

There are three central demands which an adequate analysis of the concept of a portrait must satisfy. First, the widespread belief that a reasonably successful portrait presents a likeness of its subject must be accounted for. Second, an analysis must explain how it is that portraits come to represent the individual they do and no other. And third, not every picture of which we may want to say both that it is of someone and that it is a likeness of them should come out as counting as a portrait. The second and third constraints overlap in involving the notion of a model as distinct from a subject or sitter, and both concern the problem of explaining what it is for an individual to be the subject of a picture.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-3847-2_17

Full citation: