As a recognized product of the Western episteme whose origins are traced back to the history of Ancient Egypt and in particular its important funerary cults, the art of portraiture was based for centuries on the principles of naturalistic representation, relying mainly in visual languages and its supposed advantage of a spontaneous relationship with the order of the world.

As an aesthetic objectification of ideas and questions about identity at different levels - individual, social, political or cultural - the portrait is an artistic genre that acknowledged a remarkable flowering in the Western world from the Renaissance, coinciding with the acquisition of an important socio-professional conscience by the artists and the possibility of access to the authority of an exemplary image by increasingly broad layers of the population. Conceivable according to different typologies and assuming various functions, such as the desire for self-knowledge or political and ideological propaganda, the portrait turned out to be progressively transversal to multiple art forms, from painting and sculpture to the medals , the decorative arts , photography or the more recent digital and intermedia productions, extending even to music and literature where it is frequently confused with intimate and (auto)biographical writing with which it delineates boundaries not always clear.

The 'westernization' of the portrait, voted to the enhancement of the self and the assertion of authorship and singularities, would not be called into question but from the first decades of the last century, when new formulations of identity dissociated either of an iconography of appearances and similarities or of a sense of individuality definable in terms of uniqueness tend to assert themselves.

The hypothesis of fragmentary, decentred , unstable or dissipative identities produced since the twentieth century gave the concept an increasingly comprehensive and shifting latitude, combining social, professional, psychological,  ethnic, age, sexual components, partially derived from historical and contextual expectations and contingencies. The nineteenth century portrait and especially contemporary portrait confront us with ambiguous and typologically complex proposals that resist consensual categorizations. The portraiture image starts to absorb a logic of mobility and metamorphosis, a dimension of silence and shadow that compromise its traditional 'authority' and its traditional celebratory and exemplary functions, reconfiguring it as a place of ' search 'to be exercised within an uncertain threshold between the representable and the unrepresentable, the visible and the invisible, the form and the formless. Initially subordinated to an optical code able to translate reality as narrative, the portrait moves progressively away from a duplicative and 'consoling' recognition pattern, and thus from faith in images, towards alternative grammars of figural construction or other modes of resisting the figure, scarcely thinkable within a strictly representational paradigm.