Renaissance Portraiture & Fame

Leo Braudy - The Frenzy of Renown

• Portraiture saw significant changes starting in the late fifteenth century, shifting from religious/allegorical depictions to individualized images.
• These changes were linked to innovations in printing and a rising culture of self-representation, where an image became a claim to personal fame.
• The rise of verisimilitude and perspectival representation in drawing created images that appeared "real".
• Monarchs and aristocrats used these images to legitimize their public power, linking personal image to state authority.
• Monarchs and artists both sought to control the narrative during the Renaissance.
• Monarchs commissioned paintings to assert power, while artists leveraged their artistic abilities to assert cultural significance.
• Visual strategies included classical allusions versus meticulous naturalism and detailed printmaking.
• Innovations in layout and design allowed for mass reproduction of images, expanding of both heroic and everyday images, and standardized visual forms for political propaganda.
• Braudy contrasts Mantegna's sculptural form and dramatic spatial perspective with Dürer's refined naturalism and technical precision.
• These differences reflect broader cultural debates about how to represent individuality and authority.

Julie Crawford - Marvelous Protestantism

• Illustrated published accounts of "fashion monsters" reveal early modern European beliefs that clothing could "transnature" identity.
• Clothing was thought capable of bestowing or undermining holiness by visibly marking the wearer's inner moral state.
• Images suggested flashy Catholic clothing showed off vanity and moral decay, rather than holiness.
• English Protestants and the monarchy used these pictures as propaganda to promote a simple, genuine faith and distinguish themselves from Catholic practices.
• Representations of "fashion monsters" helped define appropriate behavior in Elizabethan England by contrasting the "excesses" of the feminine with purported virtues of restraint and moral discipline.
• Woodcuts and illustrated pamphlets provided vivid, propagandistic tools that communicated Protestant critiques of Catholic practices.
• New claims about proper moral behavior were reinforced by visually linking superficial appearance with inner virtue/vice.

Bordo, Susan – The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism & Culture

• Medieval art was non-perspectival, reflecting a world where the observer was not fixed, indicating a sense of unity between self and world.
• Perspectival art created a fixed locatedness that individualized the viewer's position and introduced a psychological separation from the world.
• Cartesian thought enforces a dualism, separating mind from body, objectifying the body and reducing it to a mere machine.
• The "transcendence of the body" has social and cultural implications, distancing personal identity from lived, embodied experience.
• Bordo uses the metaphor "parturition" (the painful birth of objectivity) to describe how modern subjectivity emerged from a split with earlier, embodied modes of being.

De Bolla, Peter – The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain

• Regime of the picture refers to images as constructed objects involved with cultural value.
• Regime of the eye refers to the act of seeing itself as a perceptual and social process.
• In eighteenth-century Britain, regimes of the picture and eye were debated in relation to public taste, access, and the authority of art.
• The explosion of portraiture in Britain raised issues of social status, commodification, and the tension between self-presentation and authentic identity.
• Portraiture disrupted traditional modes of art production and criticism by blurring the boundaries between personal vanity and legitimate artistic expression.
• The figure of the connoisseur emerged as an expert whose refined taste both elevated art and reinforced social hierarchies.
• The ambiguity of the connoisseur reflects the period's class turmoil and the burgeoning consumer market, where art became a marker of both distinction and exclusion.
• De Bolla demonstrates the emergence of a culture of visuality during the 1760s through analysis of contemporary paintings and writings.
• Analysis shows how visual culture became central to public life, shaping notions of taste, morality, and social order.

Benjamin Schmidt – Inventing Exoticism (Chapter Two: Seeing the World – Visuality and Exoticism)

• Dutch geographers revolutionized the way non-European places and peoples were depicted by incorporating elaborate illustrations and engravings in their publications.
• Their visual products—maps, atlases, picture books—played a key role in constructing an "exotic" image of the world that was both alluring and othering.
• Innovative publishing strategies such as detailed woodcuts, rich engravings, and a strong "brand" of visuality created a spectacle that attracted wide audiences.
• These visual strategies helped cement durable cultural and ethnic stereotypes by emphasizing visual appeal over textual detail.
• Schmidt claims that "Seeing per se could be less important than seeming to see," arguing that the appearance of perceptiveness (“seeming to see”) is often more valued in the production of exotic knowledge.
• The trope of close observation is a performance that reinforces cultural authority, even when it disguises underlying biases.
• De Bruijn's work is distinguished by its imaginative and flamboyant style, blending empirical observation with artistic invention in a way that set him apart from more conservative contemporaries.
• Dutch exotic geography sometimes exported images of violent encounters and deformed "exotic bodies” as commodities in a global market, reinforcing European anxieties and fantasies about non-European peoples.
• These stereotypes had lasting effects on colonial governance and continue to influence modern representations of race, gender, and culture.

Nicholas Mirzoeff – The Right to Look (Visualizing Visuality; Chapters on Oversight and Visuality)

• Oversight is a key mechanism by which colonial powers maintained control over enslaved populations—through the systematic surveillance and ordering of space (land, labor, and bodies).
• Natural science and cartographic technologies contributed to this regime, creating a "visual apparatus" that rendered control visible and measurable.
• Enslaved and subaltern groups developed countervisual strategies to reclaim the act of looking, challenging the dominant visual narratives imposed by colonial oversight.
• The "right to look” becomes a form of resistance, contesting the visual regimes that objectified and marginalized them.
• Thomas Carlyle's notion of the Hero, who “visualizes” history and wields authority through a superior gaze, represents a traditional, top-down model of visuality.
• Revolutionary and abolitionist countervisualities emphasize the democratization of vision and the possibility of multiple, contesting perspectives.
• Carlyle's critique of modern phantasmagorias and his rejection of Bentham's panopticism reflect a broader debate: whether visual culture should privilege the regime of the picture (the static, authoritative image) or the regime of the eye (the dynamic, engaged act of seeing).
• His arguments provide insight into how visuality was mobilized in political and military contexts, linking the capacity to “see” with power and governance.

Discusses the evolution of portraiture in the late fifteenth century, its connection to printing innovations, and the rising culture of self-representation. Explores how monarchs and artists used portraiture to assert power and cultural significance through visual strategies and mass reproduction.