How to Read Portraits

This latest volume in The Met’s acclaimed How to Read series explores the meaning of portraiture across time and cultures—from funerary masks to realism to abstraction

Portraiture goes far beyond capturing a likeness. Portraits speak to such fundamental human concerns as status, relationships, and identity. Featuring more than fifty works across time and cultures and in different media, from the strikingly naturalistic mummy portraits of Roman Egypt to Pablo Picasso’s Cubist abstractions t...