A Portrait as an Identity: An Essay on Belorussian Portrait Painting of the 16th–17th centuries

Abstract

The article explores the identifying capabilities of the Belarusian (Grand Lithuanian) portrait of the veristic style, which presents exactly physiognomy and sometimes turns the image into a mask, an icon, unlike the traditional European portrait showing the artist’s interpretation of a person’s inner spiritual world. The genesis of the Belarusian portrait as well as the West European portrait is associated with a reconsideration of Roman cultural traditions in the 16th century. The culture of the Italian Renaissance theoretically and practically managed to connect Christianity with the Greek and Roman Antiquity, creating a triune artistic system of artist — work — viewer. For the Grand Duchy of Lithuania the orientation towards the Ancient culture (Ancient Rome) from the 16th century grew into a culture-forming factor. According to the Roman ancient models, the main rituals were arranged, accompanying the birth and baptism of children, church weddings and marriages, table meetings and feasts, exequial and funeral ceremonies; mummification of the departed and arrangement of crypts with sarcophagi of certain aristocratic families were allowed. The ceremonial side of culture was reinforced by the historical mythologization of the origin of the nobility-knighthood from the Roman patricians. In the portrait of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the veristic style was widely used. First of all, such portraits performed identification tasks depicted, and were an important element of everyday culture rather than art. They were displayed in the halls of family portrait galleries in magnates’ palaces, as well as in the modest houses of middle and small gentry, thery were set up in temples, used in funeral ceremonies as coffin portraits attached to a coffin end wall. During the 16th –17th centuries this tradition influenced the development of the complex composition of a portrait containing attributes of different kind of a character’s social status. The purposes of identification and communication were to correlate the relationship in the portraits of the image and space, representing a system of signs and code formulas, the understanding of which organized a two-level communication identification — the author of the portrait with the depicted face, the viewer with a portrait work.