Powerful Acts of Portrayal

"Portrait of a Painter in Turkish Dress" likely depicts a member of the Ottoman dynasty's royal painting studio. (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery)

But while those functional descriptions can give a decent account of the kind of thing a portrait is and how it works at a specific time, they don't provide its final explanation. There's a "why" to portraiture that simple function never seems to answer.

For one thing, use alone doesn't seem to say why one culture's portraits are full of color, while another's favor a duller palette. Or why the Mughals saw the profile as the most distinctive, satisfying view of an aristocratic face, whereas Qing Dynasty China preferred to see the faces of the mighty from directly in front.

This exhibition's portraits demonstrate a widespread pleasure taken in the act of capturing a likeness that transcends the varied uses they're put to.

That pleasure in depiction is evident in the 1824 portrait of the Japanese sage and also in a thumbnail drawing done around 1615 of the Mughal prince Khurram, so exquisitely precise it truly takes a magnifying glass -- there are several hanging not too far away -- to take in all of its immaculate particularities.

Even Mehmet the Conqueror of Turkey, who first brought image-hating Islam to Constantinople, a city famous for its love of holy Christian icons, couldn't resist the tug of highly realistic portraiture. In the late 15th century Mehmet imported realist painters from Venice and Ferrara to help their style take root in his court. A picture from the Freer collection, apparently by an Ottoman or Persian artist, has all the illusionistic virtues of the best Italian work. It even seems to celebrate those virtues in the subject that it shows, since it depicts a painter busily at work on a portrait, seemingly of yet another artist or scribe. No greater purpose here, apparently, than to revel in the way portrayal works.

Once photography arrives, you could even argue that its impressive reality effect helps undermine the functions that earlier portraiture could serve. In a photo taken somewhere around 1895, an Iranian dervish looks less mystical than he might have in a portrait painted 100 years before; the photo absolutely fails to capture his devout search for God, and yet it depicts flesh so well that that seems like enough.

Empress Dowager Cixi, one of the last royal rulers of China, is known to have been as self-obsessed and status-conscious as any ruler ever. And yet she was happy to pose for photographs that leave her stripped of all the regal poise achieved in her predecessors' painted portraits. When Cixi poses for her picture as the Bodhisattva of Compassion, amid painted waves and cheesy artificial lotuses, the 1903 photo makes her seem all too frail and flawed and human -- as though she knows that Chairman Mao is not too far away and that she'd better do her best to manufacture status while she can.

The photo lets us watch her faking it in a way no painting ever would -- and yet the aging ruler knows it captures her, and that's a charm she simply can't resist.