* The portrait shown on the cover of the book, "Old Man with a Matted Beard", has yet to find a place in Greek portraiture history despite being "one of the finest and most expressive images" from Antiquity, this because it has not been successfully identified; the portrait's lack of identity has made it almost invisible to scholars because not much can be said about an unidentified portrait;
* Portraits played two distinct roles in Greek and Roman society: on the one hand, Greek portraiture fulfilled a complex socio-political function, on the other, Roman copies were often made for decorative purposes and with the intent of showing the patron's knowledge of Greek culture and past;
* First Issue: Classical portraiture as a field would most likely disappear if one were only to take into account original pieces; most of the pieces are found as Roman copies and considering the fourth century BC was a time of great innovation in Greek portraiture, Roman copies from this period are crucial to understanding the evolution of portraiture through time;
* Second Issue: Many of the portraits defy identification (only about 20 individuals form the basis of Greek portraiture as a field); this excessive focus on identification has produced a view that is too narrow and that often disregards "sustained critical analysis of these images as representation"; the once-known identities of these portraits have been lost for various reasons (surely the Greek originals had inscriptions and dedications being that most were placed in public spaces; Roman copies, on the other hand, needed no such plaques - presumably, the patron who commissioned the piece(s) knew the subject or the subject was so well-known that it needed no identifier; in fact, evidence suggests that identifying portraits (in their Roman copies incarnation) was quite rare, which stands in contrast to the field's traditional interest in the identities of the subjects;
* How can we know the portraits represent Greeks? The use of herms to display portrait heads, several copies of the same subject also suggest the subject is ancient Greek of some notoriety;
* Portraits of which only single copies remain represent a different challenge; in order to be studied, they must be grouped (based on style and appearance) around the few originals known, Greek reliefs, and named Roman marble copies;
* Anonymous portraits are usually dealt with (from a scholarly point of view) as objects that need to be identified; the approach involves dating the portrait stylistically to a certain decade or quarter century and observing the portrait's similarities with the character or physiognomy of a famous person who is known to have died around that same time; this approach is problematic due to a) its highly interpretive nature (the incorrect identification of the Pseudo-Seneca/Hesiod and Pausanias/Pindar, the identification of Diphilos based on suspect evidence) and b) the inherent difficulty in tracing a chronology from Roman copies, the stylistic evolution of which did not "behave" in a traditional way;
Diphilos Type. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.* The development of new techniques in Greek portrait-making led to an expansion of the field of portraiture; bronze portraits could be made cheaper and quicker than before; the more statues went up, the more it became necessary to differentiate them in style or expression; this development can only be detected by studying the anonymous portraits in addition to the named ones;
* The relationship between archival data (literary sources regarding a subject's biography and character, for example) and the actual portrait is one that needs to be consistently interrogated (instead of being taken for granted); in some cases, the portrait of a person seems to contradict or questioned the accounts of a person's character or appearance (as was the case with the rough appearance of the tunics of the statue identified as Demosthenes versus the description of his tunics as "lovely" and "soft" by Aeschines);
Statue of Demosthenes, Vatican Museums, Braccio Nuovo.* The traditional study of portraiture treats these objects as visual biographies; this approach is underpinned by the belief that a portrait must "express corporeal uniqueness" and that a resemblance to the sitter is an absolute point of reference, however, this leads to the exclusion of many insufficiently-individuated images (such as the Tyrannicides) from the category of portrait; individuation is somewhat of a modern expectation, the questioning and challenging of which should concern the field of portraiture itself;
* Dillon's approach to the study of portraiture considers aspects such as facial expression, beards, frowns, etc. as symbolic systems that would have been meaningful to the original viewer(s) and not merely as a unmediated equivalent of the self (which, she argues, produces a history that is too "neat and tidy");
* During the Hellenistic period, portraits were mostly full-bodied; it wasn't until the late Hellenistic and the Roman periods that the abbreviated formats become regular; as such, disembodied heads provide only a partial picture of the characteristics of the portrait;
* Portraiture seems to be Athens-centric because a) more information is available about Athenian portraits than about any other Greek city, b) many of the Roman copies were originally set up in Athens, and c) portrait statues played an important socio-political role in Athens, which increased the number of portraits made;
Paul Zanker, "In the shadow of the ancients" in The mask of Socrates: The image of the intellectual in antiquity (Berkeley 1995) 146-197
* There are several examples of so-called "character portraits" that represented the subject in an anachronistic way that presupposed an educated viewer; one example is the old poet singing, another is the Pseudo-Seneca; the latter seems to aim at capturing a specific set of biographical data (the negative connotations stemming from the appearance of this portrait as a fisherman or peasant); the poet depicted in the Pseudo-Seneca is now believed to be Hesiod, who was called to poetry by the Muses and lived a life of worry, toil and disappointment;
* "Retrospective literary portraits" led to the development of subtly differentiated types; the varied facial expressions illustrate the translation of the subject's traits (intellectual, biographical) into spiritual physiognomy; these portraits would be unthinkable in the context of publicly displayed monuments in the Hellenistic cities which, while expressive in their own right, always avoided elements of violence or drama;
* The subjects of these portraits stood apart from contemporary conventions of the citizen image; they seems to have fulfilled a new and different function in society;
* Newer portraits were more theatrical than representational, the latter being held in a completely different (higher?) regard when compared to the contemporary ones; these new portraits reflected the new "breed of intellectuals" or professional scholars who devoted their time to the study of earlier writers in solation from society; the reading and interpreting of ancient writings became something of a pastime and this interest in the ancient also informs and guides the retrospective portraits;
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