The Likeness of the King
A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France
The Likeness of the King
A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France
Anyone who has strolled through the halls of a museum knows that portraits occupy a central place in the history of art. But did portraits, as such, exist in the medieval era? Stephen Perkinson’s The Likeness of the King challenges the canonical account of the invention of modern portrait practices, offering a case against the tendency of recent scholarship to identify likenesses of historical personages as “the first modern portraits.”
Unwilling to accept the anachronistic nature of these claims, Perkinson both resists and complicates grand narratives of portraiture art that ignore historical context. Focusing on the Valois court of France, he argues that local practice prompted shifts in the late medieval understanding of how images could represent individuals and prompted artists and patrons to deploy likeness in a variety of ways. Through an examination of well-known images of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century kings of France, as well as largely overlooked objects such as wax votive figures and royal seals, Perkinson demonstrates that the changes evident in these images do not constitute a revolutionary break with the past, but instead were continuous with late medieval representational traditions.
352 pages | 96 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2009
Art: Art--General Studies
History: European History
Literature and Literary Criticism: Romance Languages
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Jehan roy de France and the History of Portraiture
Chapter 1: The Discourse of Likeness in the Late Middle Ages
Chapter 2: Representing the Royal Body in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries
Chapter 3: The Vocabulary of Likeness at the Late Fourteenth-Century French Court
Chapter 4: Likeness, Loyalty, and the Court Artist
Epilogue: A Reconsideration of Jehan roy de France
Bibliography
IndexBe the first to know
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