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Updated: June 7, 2025


An inestimable trilogy of ancient social pictures are the three "Banquets" respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch. Plutarch's has the least claim to historical accuracy; but the meeting of the Seven Wise Masters is a charming portraiture of ancient manners and discourse, and is as dear as the voice of a fife, and entertaining as a French novel.

In the preface to Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" occurs the following sentence; "The author proposed to himself merely to write a fanciful story, evolving a thoughtful moral, and did not purpose attempting a portraiture of Italian manners and character" a sentence than which a fitter could not be written to illustrate the proper use of propose and purpose.

The world presented by the exclusive worshippers of fancy is little better than that "Pompadour" style of painting in which the carnation-tipped checks of shepherds and shepherdesses take the place of a too healthy Rubens-like portraiture. There are dainty, well-trimmed lambs, with pretty blue favors tied about their necks, just like dragées and bonbons.

"The Oliver's Head" was a gay hostelry by the road-side, with what was called in those days a portraiture of the Protector swinging from a post which stood on the slip of turf that skirted the house. It was kept by a bluff landlord and a young and pretty landlady, young enough to be her husband's daughter, and discreet enough to be an old man's wife with credit and respectability.

By her activity and energy five or six separate treaties were drawn up and signed between the different personages whose interests were concerned, each in general ignorant of his comrade's participation. It would be presumptuous in any way to attempt, after Bossuet, a perfect portraiture of this lady, but it may be interesting to glance at the antecedents of her life up to this period.

So far as the externals of portraiture were concerned, there can be no doubt that his art benefited much from his early military life.

Of the multitude of different photographers, each perchance may catch some one trait without which the whole portraiture would have remained incomplete; and the time to secure this is now, while his features are fresh in our minds. It is a daring effort, but it needs to be made.

Petersburg papers, of 'the at last truly discovered leader of the Polish insurrection, which was but a portraiture of a certain, not mentioned but easily guessed, personage in Paris.

There is no effort at portraiture, and no suggestion of any repellent or pitiable traits.

This work shows no direct connection with Bellini's portraiture, but far more with that which we are accustomed to associate with the names of Titian and Palma. It dates probably from the early part of the sixteenth century, at a time when Giorgione was breaking with the older tradition which had strictly limited portraiture to the representation of the head only, or at most to the bust.

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