The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France by Stephen Perkinson (review)

REVIEWS 290 providing an important synthesis of the region’s civic life. SARAH WHITTEN, History, UCLA Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2009) 352 pp. ill. In The Likeness of the King, Stephen Perkinson traces the development of naturalistic representation in medieval France, culminating with the depictions produced for the Valois court. Perkinson argues that, rather than a sudden, revolutionary artistic change that signals the beginning of the modern era, the development of naturalistic likenesses, or “portraits,” must be understood in the context of the intellectual developments, royal patronage, and artistic practices of the late Middle Ages. He begins with an examination of a depiction of Jehan Roy de France, thought to be a fourteenth-century profile depiction of the French king set against a gold background. The painting has a remarkable history . Once considered a mere curiosity, presently it has the status of a signature achievement in the history of French art—a status underscored by its placement as the opening image in the gallery of French Art at the Louvre, an illustrious location to be sure. Its claim to prominence rests on labeling it as the first modern portrait of the French king, a designation that is both highly politicized and, in terms of artistic practices, less transparent than it would initially seem. Perkinson notes that as commonly understood, the term “portrait” suggests a number of specific requirements: for instance, that it be an independent image (i.e., not a secondary part of a larger composition), and that it be painted from life, which seemingly would be indicated by its naturalized and individualized appearance. His goal, however, reaches far beyond the debate of whether the painting can truly be considered a modern portrait. Instead, he uses the image not just to critically examine the definition of portraiture, but, more importantly , to ask how the defining features of portraiture, namely naturalism, arose in late medieval France. In the process, he disrupts the teleological view that naturalism was the predetermined goal of artistic achievement and provides an opportunity to probe some of the foundational assumptions of Western art history . Naturalism may be a representational quality that is universally recognized, but every society has a different metric by which they gauge which type of naturalism is appropriate; therefore its acceptance in any society must necessarily be contextualized. Specifically, Perkinson asks why representations of the human body, or corporeal likeness, became important in the late Middle Ages. He rejects grand narratives of the emergence of naturalism that reduce it to a side effect of the early modern reemergence of natural science, noting that those perspectives are unable to take into account naturalism’s differential development in the realm of artistic practice. For the medieval mind, the naturalistic representation of the human body presented both artist and audience with a set of issues that were distinct from those of associated with the naturalistic representation of plants, to provide one example. Using a variety of textual evidence to examine how corporeal naturalism was received and perceived for late medieval audiences (for example letters, literature and scientific treatises), he charts how the body came to be increasingly understood as a reflection of the REVIEWS 291 soul. Only once images were seen as transparent, that is, that the depiction provided an adequate replication of the original, could the representation of secular individuals emerge. During the late thirteenth century, depictions of secular individuals began to proliferate. Yet most scholars see these representations as generic, sharing a fixed iconography and idealized faces—a designation that Perkinson firmly rejects . While the figures’ faces may seem little differentiated, the inclusion of other identifying markers, such as coats of arms, gender, and gesture, served to individualize the images for their intended audience. Furthermore, he argues that these markers were not secondary at all since selfhood was conceived primarily in terms of office, not physiognomy. The move to create specialized depictions of recognized individuals was not without its risks, and Perkinson details which types of representations were considered valid, versus those that were condemned as dangerous and heretical. These cautions serve to remind us that the emergence of...