Portraiture and Critical Reflections on Being

This book analyzes the philosophical origins of dualism in portraiture in Western culture during the Classical period, through to contemporary modes of portraiture. Dualism – the separation of mind from body - plays a central part in portraiture, given that it supplies the fundamental framework for portraiture’s determining problem and justification: the visual construction of the subjectivity of the sitter, which is invariably accounted for as ineffable entity or spirit, that the artist ma...