Abstract

The portrait, usually regarded as a work that depicts a person or a group of people, with a a particular focus on the face, has often assumed a central role in art history. The aim of this paper is to rewrite a history of the portraiture focused on its presentative function, that is, a story in which the facial figure, in its disfigurement, ceases to reveal the represented subject, by virtue of its transparency, to become an opaque surface, which continuously re-veils itself, its own materiality, its own artifice, the techniques and technologies that historically have shaped its artistic conception and aesthetic experience. The subject’s disfigured facial traits are the results of a continuous alteration and remediation of these constitutive features of the portrait both as a medium of representation and as an artistic object