Hermeneutik des Gesichts

The portrait has been characterized as an art-form of contradictions since its very beginnings to the art of today. The genre is faced with the challenge of recording an individual and his or her character as a strictly specified object and, at the same time, of creating a work of art in its own right. Hence, various forms of portraiture are faced with an aesthetic conflict of solutions that oscillate between similarity to the subject and greatly abstracted works of invention.

This volume collects the contributions of the homonymous "International Warburg College" of the University of Hamburg and is dedicated to the genre of portraiture across various media as well as its entire thematic range. Case studies by international authors examine the broad range of issues involved in this genre: from the exploration of the individual in the portrait, to the political function of the genre; from the stylization of the individual to mask, role, and type; and to the artists' strategies of presentation in the self-portrait.