Portraiture, like personhood, is a contested category. Vincent Lefèvre selects a variety of examples from early South and Southeast Asia of what portraits in those traditions might be. “This book does not pretend at being a ‘history of portraiture in early India’ but rather a conceptual reflection on the role of portraiture in Indian art” (p. 18). As a meditation on theory and visual evidence, it is an excellent provocation, placing emphasis on “function” rather than “likeness”: “portraiture is something one has to be entitled to” (pp. 13–15). His “Introduction: Portraiture, a Problematic Issue” asserts that “portraiture has been so successful during the Mughal and posterior periods because there was already an old tradition and that some of the characteristics may have continued to live sometimes up to the present” (p. 22) without, however, touching on complex issues of how “Mughal portraiture” functioned.Footnote 1
“Verisimilitude” may be a better category—truthfulness to function—rather than “mimesis” (representation or imitation of the real world). “Donor” figures attending on images of saints and deities in many periods are a “type,” recognizable in form but not identifiable, taking on the “style” of a “real” (Europeanized) “person” (i.e., more particular musculature, hair, and facial expressions) late in the colonial period.Footnote 2 Given the discursive and ruminative nature of Lefèvre's text, the index's lack of concepts like “mimesis” and “semantic” is a drawback.
Lefèvre begins by distinguishing “portrait” from “image” according to three criteria, “intention, perception, and function”; “written sources will be extremely important, and it will be necessary to address the relationship between texts and images” (p. 23). In chapter 1, “Identifying Portraits,” he draws on physical and literary sources, detailing tales of “mimesis” (pp. 104–5) and “the semantic function of images” (p. 181) that provide one engaging aspect of his volume.
“Portraiture covers many realities, ranging from realistic painted likeness to idealized statues and even symbolic objects,” referencing “epigraphic testimonies . . . that liṅgas [Śiva's phallic ‘sign’] could be considered as ‘portraits’” (pp. 49–51). I personally like these speculations, though I do not always find them sufficient. They stimulate, engage, and provoke, as I am sure they were intended. They are elaborated with wide-ranging examples in chapter 2, “Viddha/Aviddha: Different Kinds of Portraits for Different Kinds of Purpose,” where Lefèvre addresses “The Likeness Issue,” “Physiognomic Portraits,” “Typological Portraits,” and “Portraiture as Social and Historical Marker,” each making his insistence more subtle that a portrait is defined by function (even that of double entendre) rather than by “physiognomic likeness” (p. 72). As an example of what he calls “the ambiguity of likeness,” he observes that “the individual is not isolated but is a part of a family or group and therefore it is often as well the lineage as the individual that is exalted through portraiture” (p. 83).
Chapters 3 and 4 take up case studies: “Portraits, Worship and Divine Images” and “The Origin of Portraiture and the Representation of Heroes.” These replace verisimilitude with “the idea of appearance” (p. 129) as a criterion for portraiture. Of yakṣas, “presented as the tutelary deities,”Footnote 3 he writes, “I would be tempted to understand the word yakkha in the inscriptions as ‘this is the representation/image of’” (pp. 134–35)—a “portrait” rather than divinity. This leads him to viras (heroes) and other speculations that problematize, while remaining problematic.
Productive points are raised in chapter 5, “The Royal Portrait, Portrait par excellence?,” which addresses “the most ancient text on image-making, the Citralakṣaṇa”: “the image presented as a model is that of a human being, not a god, and it is an idealized imitation of reality”—“the system used . . . applies for any image of men . . . explaining that everyone must be represented according to his individuality” (p. 150). And yet the text defines these “individuals” by proportions (and skin color) according to rank: “everyone should have his measurements according to his own digits.” Lefèvre does not find what “looks like an anthropomorphic system of representation, according to fractional units” discordant with the “individuality” attributed above. The Bṛhat Saṃhitā also discusses physiognomy in terms of “height of the best type of men” (p. 152), hardly a just criterion for individuated interior representation.
Yet history is measured by such images: “we are dealing with historical scenes or at least with an iconography the interpretation of which was related to historical facts” (p. 162). Lefèvre's meditation raises issues we all must address. “Portraiture” is worth problematizing, yet the word remains problematic, weighted by assumptions of individuation, personality, and intimations of an interior world. I see in front of me the image of memento dolls in Japan, each made to share the “character and appearance” of a person lost in the tsunami.Footnote 4 A typology of individuality need not be representational, but must suggest the individual.Footnote 5 This is the ambiguity Lefèvre strives to make us understand, and yet never is it the core ambiguity he helps us find in South Asia.
