What/When is a Portrait?: Royal Images of the Ancient Near East

Abstract

WE USE the word in modern language(s), there is a strong tendency to assume naturalism in the resulting representation affected by the photograph, by realism in painting, and by a long history of the genre in the West. Royal images of the ancient Near East for example, Gudea of Lagash of ca. 2110 BCE (fig. 1), and Assurnasirpal II of Assyria of ca. 875 BCE (fig. 2) would not necessarily fall into this category, however clear it may be that they represent identifiable rulers of the ancient Near East. Our conventions for realism hearken back to Roman portraiture, in which what is presumed to be a reasonable likeness of the deceased was represented on sarcophagus lids (fig. 3), and family busts were carried in procession, where the recognition of persons belonging to known lineages, hence likeness, was culturally valued.2 And to the Renaissance, where in a literary invention of 1519, the portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, author of the famous treatise The Courtier, was said to provide his wife with solace when the subject himself was absent.3 In an article entitled L'effet de resemblance [The Resemblance Effect], however, Henri Zerner has argued that various tricks may be employed to suggest verisimilitude in portrait painting.4 He cites as an