Who deserved an image? The ethics of early modern portraits

Research Seminar - Department of Art History and Cultural Practices, University of Manchester

Who deserved an image? The ethics of early modern portraits.

Dr Niko Munz, Christ Church, University of Oxford

Abstract

Today, anyone can make an image of themselves. How difficult it therefore is to grasp the social conventions once attached to images we call portraits. Barriers to self-portrayal are now almost wholly foreign to us. Yet our modern-day ‘right to one’s own image’ and legal notions of visual identity maintain a shadow, much distorted, of these former ethical controls. This talk traces early beliefs about the rights to images. By returning to late medieval and Renaissance humanistic and art theoretical sources, it describes how the portrait image (private portraits and public statues) was seen as, even meant to be, a reward, gift, or honour. This talk continues image theory’s enquiries into the nature of images by fleshing out one of its most elusive historical concepts: the image-right.

Image Caption: French or Flemish, Profile Portrait of a Lady, c. 1410. Oil on panel. National gallery of Art, Washington

Biography

Niko is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford, working on the prehistory of image rights. He studied History of Art at the University of Cambridge and University of York, where he wrote PhD on interior scenes in early Netherlandish painting. He has held curatorial positions at the Royal Collection Trust and J. Paul Getty Museum’s Paintings Department. He has had fellowships at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Freie Universität, Berlin. Niko also publishes on the seventeenth-century history of the royal collection; he recently rediscovered a lost painting by Artemisia Gentileschi.

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