The Likeness of the King

Opening with the problematic panel supposedly depicting John II the Good in the Louvre, Stephen Perkinson’s The Likeness of the King provides a thought-provoking, contextualised account of the courtly culture and concepts of representation fostered and sustained production of what he terms physiognomic likeness in late medieval France. Throughout, Perkinson examines four interrelated questions: What criteria determine likeness in the Middle Ages? What were the larger representational systems in which a ‘portrait’ would circulate? How and why did representational systems change to include physiognomic details in the fourteenth century? And finally, what motivated artists to create such images? Treating naturalism as a cultural practice, Chapter one charts the shifting relationship between a Christian distrust of represented appearances as unable to capture the nature of the soul and that the body and its motions betray inner intentions. Perkinson pays particular attention to the terms contrefaire and portraire, the former associated with mere mimicry of surface, the later with the true representation of a subject. Chapter two focuses on the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century French court, particularly under Philip IV. Utilising a series of case studies from royal tomb sculpture to charges of sorcery, the chapter outlines a highly robust representational system based in naming, gesture, measurement, and heraldry among other signs, but notably not engaged in the accurate portrayal of individual features. Chapter three tackles the thorny question of how this seemingly sufficient system changed to include naturalistic details in the fourteenth century, highlighting the role of physiognomic treatises, the poetic trope of the beloved’s image, and the importance of portraying from memory as a sign of engin. Chapter four builds on this worldview, arguing that patrons and particularly artists used their ability to procure/create likeness to show loyalty to the depicted subject.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Literature · Naturalism · Representation (politics) · Sculpture · Soul · Subject (documents) · Trope (literature) · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy