Redefining Portraiture in the Ancient Mediterranean

This panel invites a critical reassessment of ancient portraiture as both a category of artistic production and a culturally situated mode of representation. Traditionally viewed as a record of individual likeness or a barometer of stylistic development, ancient portraits—especially those of the Mediterranean world—have been interpreted through frameworks such as the Zeitgesicht and the realism/idealism binary. Yet these interpretive models often obscure the diverse functions and meanings of portraiture within ancient societies, from its roles in ritual and commemoration to its capacities for political expression and memory work. Rather than treating portraits as passive reflections of identity or period style, this panel foregrounds their active role in shaping notions of personhood, authority, and temporality. We seek to explore how ancient portraits negotiated the tensions between presence and absence, life and death, past and future, and how they mobilized visual strategies that resist linear or teleological art-historical narratives.

Focusing on the ancient Mediterranean in its broadest definition, this panel encourages contributions that challenge Eurocentric or modernist assumptions about likeness, individuality, and representation. In doing so, we aim to situate portraiture within a wider set of cultural practices and intellectual frameworks—those that defined what it meant to be seen, remembered, or idealized in antiquity. By rethinking ancient portraiture as a dynamic and contested form, this panel contributes to ongoing conversations about visual culture, identity, and the ethics of interpretation in the study of the ancient world.