How to Read Portraits

$29.95 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By Kathryn Calley Galitz Portraiture goes far beyond capturing a likeness. This intimate genre sheds light on the subjects' and makers' politics, relationships, aspirations, and insecurities. Featuring more than fifty works across time and cultures, from the lifelike Faiyum funerary masks of ancient Roman Egypt to Pablo Picasso's and Marsden Hartley's abstractions to likenesses imagined by contemporary artists, this publication probes the notion of what constitutes a portrait, beyond mere verisimilitude…