Volume 9, Number 5 · September 28, 1967
Old Faces
By David Piper
The Portrait in the Renaissance
by John Pope-Hennessy
Bollingen-Princeton University Press, 348, 330 plates pp., $12.50
Portraiture tends to provoke split vision, for the portrait always presents two centers for attention: the sitter and the artist. This split exists, of course, to some extent in all representational art: there is always the interaction between style and subject. But only the portrait-maker has to contend with subject matter that not only can, but frequently does, answer back; that, still more important, pays the bill according to satisfaction given or not given. Perhaps this explains why portraiture, as an art form, has tended to have a bad press from artists and art historians; it breeds compromise and impairs the divine autonomy of art, and many artists since Michelangelo have explicitly scorned 'the slavery of the portrait.'
Review, 1814 words
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