Like few other areas of the arts, portraiture has been marked by expectations of what the image should convey to the viewer. Art Connoisseur Giovanni Morelli claimed in 1890 that one of the most interesting tasks of an art historian was to study portraits. According to Morelli, anyone who wanted to understand history should study historical portraits carefully since there was always something in the portrayal of their faces that gave insight into their time, for those who knew how to read them. According to this view portrait painting, historically regarded as the act of capturing both the internal and external likeness of its subject, served as visual documentation from an artist's encounter with a historical person.
In The Image and the Eye (1982) Ernst Gombrich, an ardent critic of early art history’s shortcomings, coined the expression the “eyewitness principle” to describe this tendency to value art as the historical documentation of what an artist saw and experienced at a certain time. In the late 1800s and among early art historians, Morelli wasn’t alone in putting emphasis on that the authenticity of portraiture depended on that a meeting between the portrait painter and the sitter had taken place; other notable voices ranged from Jacob Burckhardt’s “Die Anfänge der Neuern Porträtmalerei” (1885) to Hermann Deckert’s “Zum Begriff des Porträts” (1929).
The aim of this paper is to discuss the interest in portraiture as eye-witnessing in art historiography during the period spanning from 1885 until 1930, when the portrait’s ontology and history came to be established as its own field of research within art history.