* Classical art history scholarship did not problematize "the portrait"; most were classified as images of historical persons that expressed their inner personality;
* The rising Athenian bourgeoisie developed portraiture as a means of self expression;
* Portraiture research initially attempted to identifying portraits to later "read" them against the character of the individual depicted; this gave rise to the debate of when "true portraiture" began;
* Sufficient individuation is a major factor in determining whether or not an object is a portrait;
* Recent research questions the applicability of modern definitions of portraiture to the Greeks;
* Understanding a portrait is more an objective decoding of a culturally specific iconography which tells us more about how the subject was classified or categorized within his society;
* The concept of eikon (likeness) seems to imply a deeper sense of unity between outer appearance and inner character (using bodily and facial signs); the concept also represents a shift in the function of these images;
* Portraits in democratic Athens were symbols produced as elements of a system of rewards, as such their use, allocation and form were regulated by institutional rules;
* The procedure for erection of honorary statues was similar to that of proposal, enactment and scrutiny of decrees in Athens;
* Honorary portraits were to be awarded to beneficiaries of the demos in return for "outstanding services"; in a similar manner, the withdrawal or destruction, even, of such portraits was regulated by the attitude of the demos towards the subject;
* The placing of these portraits was regulated by law as well; location allowed for further specification of the meaning of the portrait;
* Gestures, postures, clothing, etc. were tied to the political context in which the portrait was awarded;
* The disciplining of the body was grounded in the political reality that the safety and autonomy of Greek states was dependent on the citizens' abilities to defend their territories; the citizen's body thus belonged to the state and, in some cases, so did the representation of these bodies;
* Scrutiny of faces to determine character was of heightened importance during the fourth and fifth centuries;
* Portraiture served to make and sustain the democratic social order; it represents a fuller institutionalization of the normative culture of the democratic polis;
* The presence of portraits in public spaces fed into the political process, creating new inequalities of prestige, though these inequalities were based on the perceived capacity of the individual to be of service to the polis.
Paul Zanker, "Introduction: Image, Space, and Social Values" in The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (Berkeley 1995), 1-39
* Every age creates the type of intellectual that it needs;
* Neither the Greeks nor the Romans recognized intellectuals as a defined group within society, even though they occupied a special position in society, both by their own estimation and by the recognition of others;
* The author's intention is to evaluate portraits within the parameters of an era's collective norms and values, and the expectations of the subject and the patron who commissioned the work;
* The portrait of Voltaire shows the subject as an aging intellectual hero seated on an ancient throne; the intent is to portray him in likeness with philosophers and thinkers of antiquity and to further legitimate the self-conscious claims of the intellectual elite (even though no ancient philosopher ever sat on a throne);
* Germans erected monument/portraits to intellectual giants and placed them in locations previously reserved for military heroes or royalty; these portraits served as models of citizen virtues with which the populace could identify;
* A successful interpretation of any portrait depends on how well one can re-construct the context in which the portrait was created and displayed (location, patron, circumstances);
* The author's focus is not on the figure of the individual intellectual, but rather on the position and image of intellectuals as a social class: a history of the intellectual in antiquity;
* The issue of the Roman copies: almost all Greek portraits known are Roman copies, which leads to insolvable issues of reconstruction; the purposes that the copies served for the Romans had nothing to do with the purposes the originals served for the Greeks;
- First major issue: Romans were primarily interested in faces, so they usually only had the heads copied, whereas Greeks produced only full-body portraits (for them, the true meaning of a figure was contained in the entire body, not just the head/face - personal/biographical details were of lesser importance); the severing of the bodies left behind significant evidence that could have allowed better interpretation of the portrait and the subject;
- Second major issue: just because the copies are based on a Greek original does not ensure a faithful reproduction; often the copies were altered to suit a particular purpose on behalf of the patron (embellishment or exaggeration of certain facial gestures and features to add expression or character, for example);
- Third major issue: artistic tastes of the particular era in which the copies were made took precedence over faithfulness in reproduction (preference of youthful faces versus wrinkled ones, for example);
- Fourth major issue: mass production of Greek portraits led to hasty worksmanship and poor quality; context was lost, as the copies were often used for decorative purposes in villas or wealthy homes;
* Portrait of Homer: only copies of the head are preserved, information about the body, location, patron and artist are all unknown; the portrait depicts Homer as a blind old man, dignified in appearance and with details (such as the hair and beard) that conceal the less attractive aspects of the aging process;
Head of Homer, Epimenides type. Roman copy after a Greek original from 5th century BC. Glyptothek, Munich.* Portrait of Anacreon and Pericles: only copies of the Pericles head are preserved; the statue was originally placed in the same location as the now lost statue of his father Xanthippus, though deliberately not next to it; another statue that was placed near Xanthippus that can cast some light on the details of the lost statue is that of Anacreon, the copy of which was found in a Roman villa; the Anacreon portrait depicts the poet playing the barbiton, a stringed instrument that was commonly played by drunken revelers during celebrations; the stance and details of the statue display a discreet level of drunkenness, which is to show the image of a model Athenian citizen in a jolly occasion;
Marble statue of Anacreon from Monte Calvo in Italy. 2nd century AD; Glyptotek, Munich.
Idealised bust of Pericles. Marble, Roman copy of the 2nd century AD after a Greek original of ca. 440-430 BC. From the Villa Adriana, Tivoli.* Portrait of Socrates: in life, Socrates had provoked and annoyed fellow citizens with his questions, so it is unsurprising that his portrait, likely commissioned by his followers, would serve to question the very fundamentals of Athenian society which considered external beauty as an expression of inner morality and character; Greeks tended to marginalize the physically defective and ugly, thinking them as lacking in virtue and noble heritage, and of having a base nature; by that same token, the caricatures of that era depicted too much thinking and intellectuality as a cause for physical deformity and a reason for ridicule; the plausible intentions of the patrons of the statue were to criticise the Athenian society's misleading fixation on the external form of the body upon which their entire value system rested;
Bust of Socrates, Roman copy of a Greek original (c. 380 BC); Museo Nazionale, Naples
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