The portrait is one of the oldest Western art forms, and one of the few to remain an object of both demand and innovation nearly continuously until the present day. One might follow the history of portraiture, in fact, by tracking its relationship to the changing art around it: its emergence in antiquity as a variety of honorific sculpture, its identification in the Middle Ages with the iconic devotional image, its transformation in the early modern period into a quasi-autonomous collectable, its fraught subsequent life as both an embodiment of private decadence and a revolutionary touchstone. This course will look at the whole history of portraiture, but with special attention to the years after 1500, when Raphael embraced portraits as the epitome of ?Renaissance? art and Michelangelo all but refused to make them, when Durer turned the portrait into a distinctively modern religious artform and preachers both north and south insisted that portraits had no place at all in the church. Students will be responsible for readings, a presentation, and a research paper.