A Royal Likeness

Download or read book The Likeness of the King written by Stephen Perkinson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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". 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.