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The rise of the independent portrait in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—images created to present an individual or group to a defined audience—was among the most consequential innovations of Early Modern visual culture. This course considers this development, asking what such portraits can reveal about identity, memory, and self-fashioning, and how they both upheld and challenged contemporary social, political, and religious structures. Through case studies that range from Italian and Netherlandish portraits to Spanish Habsburg dynastic images, it will examine topic such as: artists and self-representation; gender strategies; visual conventions for women, men, and children; the intersection of portraiture with ideals of beauty, character, and lineage; portraits as exemplars of virtue, safeguards of family memory, and instruments of politics; the sites and audiences of portraiture (private settings, corporate halls, civic spaces, and devotional settings); and issues such as physiognomy, costume, setting, and materiality as carriers of meaning. |
