Portrait of a Horned Ruler Wearing a Diadem, 3rd-2nd c. B.C., marble with stucco, 13 7/8 x 7 5/8 x 9 7/8 in. (35.2 x 19.4 x 25.1 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2012.479.10.

G.2.1 ‘Making an Appearance’ After Alexander the Great: Configuring the Hellenistic King’s Domain through ‘Unofficial’ Royal Portraits & Local Spectacles (331-30 B.C.)

Bailey Barnard, PhD Candidate in Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University

Since the genre’s inception, people have enjoyed identifying portraits. From the beginnings of early modern collections of classical portraits, in particular, viewers were eager to identify portraits of the “great men” of antiquity to enliven studies of ancient texts. Despite the fervor for identifying classical portraits by means of ‘empirical’ methods, many portraits remain effectively anonymous. This proposed paper pursues new lines of inquiry that emerge when identification is not possible.

The paper interrogates a group of mostly unidentifiable, unstandardized marble portrait statues of Hellenistic kings, the successors of Alexander the Great. The lack of standardization and recognizability in Hellenistic royal portraits contrasts sharply with Roman imperial portraits; in the latter, emperors’ official types were established centrally and subsequently distributed for replication throughout the vast empire. The tightly controlled, consistent, dispersed replications of Roman imperial portraits linked periphery and core, with the emperor’s repeated portrait evoking a sense of sameness and connectedness throughout the empire. By contrast, most Hellenistic royal portrait statues were local commissions with no reliance on ‘official’ prototypes. Cities commissioned royal portraits for specific occasions, with the portrait and its adjunct festivities serving to entice or commemorate visits from kings. In short, royal portraits were intended to resonate artfully with spectacular royal visits, not to copy official types.

This study investigates how Hellenistic royal portraits helped conceptualize the king’s territory within these periods and spaces of encounter. When viewed alongside the rituals and theatrics of royal visits, the paper argues that unstandardized, locally commissioned portraits eschew a core-periphery dichotomy, emphasizing instead the itinerant yet integrated nature of Hellenistic kingship. Most broadly, the paper demonstrates the fruitfulness of studying unidentifiable portraits precisely because they problematize the notion of ‘likeness’ and test the limits of long-standing methods and desires for identifying who sits ‘behind’ a portrait.

Pietro da Milano, René d'Anjou and Jeanne de Laval, obverse. France (Provence). Bronze, 304.94g, 10.05 cm, 1462, British Museum, London.

G.2.2 Self-Fashioning and Cultural Hybridity at the Angevin-Provençal Court: René d’Anjou’s Medals

Françoise Keating, University of Victoria

This paper examines five numismatic portraits of King René d’Anjou (1409-1480), his wife Jeanne de Laval and his brother Charles IV du Maine, and analyses their visual format in comparison with two medals by the Italian sculptor Antonio Pisano – one of Alfonso V of Aragon, the other of the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaiologos – to interpret the Angevin-Provençal court’s late medieval self-fashioning. Particular artistic conventions usually restrict these miniature sculptures, portraying the sovereign on the obverse and identifying him/her on the reverse through allegorical symbolism to be deciphered. René’s set of medals, now conserved globally, leap out of these aesthetic boundaries, anticipating the medal artistic tradition and adopting transcultural visual depictions, thus revealing his vast knowledge of the Mediterranean world.

History has started to explain why René, as other chivalric princes, needed to re-evaluate his noble identity within the context of a catastrophic war. This study questions the spaces of cultural encounter provided by these medals to comprehend how René challenges our understanding of the late medieval world, exploring the fifteenth-century noble patron’s imaginary through the blended notions of beauty, knowledge and travel. Investigating evidence of cultural cosmopolitanism in other media and relating René’s medals to transportable, collectible art of miniature size with phenomenological capacity, I argue that King René’s self-fashioning used cultural hybridity and humanism to promote himself in the European political arena, thus projecting the Angevin-Provençal court at the forefront of the French Renaissance.

G.2.3 Of Nations and Myths, Of Heroes and...: Juxtaposing Mohammad bin Qasim and the Pakistani Nation in Bani Abidi's The Boy who got tired of Posing

Varda Nisar, Concordia University

The paper will explore the work, The Boy who got tired of Posing (2006), by Pakistani born visual artist Bani Abidi (b. 1971), by situating it within the complicated, ideological struggle that the nation state of Pakistan continues to have. It will do so by exploring it within the binary opposition created by notions of foreign/local; Muslim heroes/Hindu enemies; Pan-Islamic/territorial links.

Collected from photography studios in Karachi, and situated within a larger body of work, it foregrounds the popular trend of parents bringing their sons dressed as Mohammad bin Qasim to have their studio portrait taken. Qasim, the eighth-century Arab national hero resurrected in the 1980s in the educational and ideological discourse of the nation-state, is credited for bringing Islam to the subcontinent, laying the foundation of this future Muslim nation state, which only became a reality after gaining independence from its British Colonial masters, as well as its separation from India. This was achieved by distinguishing the Muslims of the subcontinents as a separate nation vis-a-vis the Hindu Indians by virtue of having their own particular history, culture, language, religion, and heroes. However, the territorially detached struggle has meant that Pakistan has constantly had to look for its origins beyond its borders within the pan-Islamic discourse.

The portraits thus not only provide a glimpse of the studio and political culture of Karachi in the 1980s, but also situate this complicated ideological relationship that Pakistan continues to have with its origin story within larger socio-political-cultural-religious dynamics. The work highlights how the actions of this colonial, transcultural figure have been effectively reinterpreted as religious and pious, to render him as “our” hero. These portraits thus embody a criticism of the nation state, which can be contextualized by the other works in this series.

Tobias Stimmer, Mehmed II, in Paolo Giovio, Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (Basel: Pietro Perna, 1575), p. 164, Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library.

G.2.4 Mobile Objects and Mutable Images: Paolo Giovio’s Portrait Collection as a Site of Cultural Encounter

Savannah Marlatt, University of British Columbia

The early modern collection has long been considered an expression of the diverse aesthetic, intellectual, and material concerns that shaped an era of widespread global expansion. The place of portraits in these collections raises questions about how such images facilitate cultural encounters and work to reshape the geographical imagination of their viewers. Paolo Giovio’s portrait collection, which represented almost five hundred figures from around the world, provides unique insight into these broader functions of sixteenth- century portraiture. It transcends both the social and scholarly confines of earlier portrait collections in its historiographical conception of portraiture and broad temporal scope. Its universal perspective and schematic representation of knowledge means that it also bears similarities to the princely cabinet whose aim was picturing the world; however, perhaps because of its emphasis on portraiture, as well as its decentralized mode of patronage, it has yet to be considered in relation to them.

Approaching the portrait collection as a site of cultural encounter, I will explore how Giovio’s project reconfigures developing models of universal collections around its specific object of interest, portraits, while interrogating the capacity of those images to create and carry cultural knowledge across diverse forms and media. Framing my discussion in terms of the fluid translation of likeness across visual and temporal dimensions, I will trace the shifting meaning of Giovio’s portraits from their conception as oil paintings displayed in a villa, to their reiteration as printed images, and ultimately to their appearance in local and global contexts, revealing how the remediation of portraits in different spatial frameworks encouraged dynamic encounters between viewer and image. The reproduction of the portraits in contemporary collections, like the gallery of Cosimo I de’ Medici in the Sala delle Carte Geografiche, and the wide distribution of their printed versions, which acted as a model for the Ottoman imperial portrait book the Sema’ilname, suggest that the portraits became a locus of cultural exchange through which established world views might be asserted, challenged, and reimagined.