Medieval Self-Portraits

In his new book The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History, James Hall examines how this style of art emerged and developed over the last thousand years. While self-portraits did exist in ancient times, Hall explains that “in the Middle Ages self-portraiture becomes very much a Christian concern, connected with personal salvation, honour and love. The two medieval legends of St Veronica and King Abgar, in which Christ presses his face to a piece of cloth, leaving an imprint, posited Christ as a self-portraitist. No greater self-portraitist is of higher status than St Dunstan, prostrate on a mountain top, himself both high and low; and no funnier self-portrait exists than that of 1136 of Hildebertus, throwing a sponge at a mouse stealing his lunch.”

Here are ten medieval portraits that Hall examines in his book:

Hall also notes, “it is during the Middle Ages that mirrors become cultural symbols, metaphors for all kinds of knowledge, both of self and others. But the Renaissance ‘mirror myth’ has obscured the contribution of the Middle Ages and limited our appreciation of what a self-portrait can be. It has led us to assume that self-portraits were almost exclusively concerned which giving an accurate likeness. But the self-portrait – more so than a portrait – is primarily a product of memory and imagination.”

The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History was published in 2014 by Thames & Hudson. To learn more about it, please visit the publisher’s website or Amazon.com.

In the following videos, Steven Zucker and Beth Harris discuss Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban from 1433, and Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait from 1500: