Portrait
A genre of art, and an individual work, that represents a particular real person or group of people and conveys their likeness.
A portrait is a representation of a particular person or group of people in painting, sculpture, graphic art or photography. Its defining feature is the intention to capture a known or supposed likeness of the sitter, usually including the face. Representations of anonymous, fictional or mythological characters are not portraits: the Getty thesaurus places them under a separate concept, “figures”.
Portraiture goes back at least to ancient Egypt. Before photography, a painted, sculpted or drawn portrait was the only way to record a person’s appearance; it also displayed the sitter’s power, status, wealth or learning, and was therefore usually flattering. In the seventeenth century the French Royal Academy codified a hierarchy of the genres of painting in which portraiture ranked second, after history painting. Photography later became the principal medium of traditional portraiture, and since the 1990s artists have also made video portraits.
In Ukraine, according to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, portraiture is the oldest form of secular art: early examples include the fresco of the family of Yaroslav the Wise in St Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv (1044), and it emerged as a separate genre in the sixteenth century. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are marked by the parsuna (from Latin persona), a formal portrait of a notable in rich dress. Later masters include Dmytro Levytsky, Volodymyr Borovykovsky, Taras Shevchenko and Oleksandr Murashko.
