The Art Bulletin

Collective funerary monuments were common in the Roman world. In comparison, however, with early Imperial tombs, which memorialized individuals primarily in terms of their status within the family and served as vehicles for the self-presentation of the household group, Early Christian burial basilicas in North Africa of the fourth to sixth centuries ce redefined the concept of family. By gathering the graves of unrelated Christians into a common space, these churches commemorated them with homogeneous memorials and expanded the commemorative audience to the entire local community of coreligionists.

A twelfth-century illuminated Greek manuscript in the Vatican alternates text and image in a novel way. Created for a young French princess betrothed to the son of a Byzantine emperor, it enacts the princess’s separation from her homeland, her transformation into augusta, and her incorporation into an imperial family rife with faction. Beyond depicting a rite of passage, however, the book’s ritualized narrative constructs and organizes a set of social relations. Interrogating the particular relation between an art object and its potential for social agency reveals that the manuscript masks tensions as much as it creates cohesion.

Careful scrutiny of the preparatory drawing and the copies of Hans Holbein’s lost portrait of The Family of Sir Thomas More reveals a subtle parody of the artist’s formal state portrait of Thomas More in the Frick Collection, New York. Placed at the center of his gathered family, More’s duplicated public persona is undermined and inverted by the centrifugal forces of domestic life, which include hitherto unrecognized literary and symbolic allusions, not just informality as such. Holbein’s parody mirrors More’s own ironic personality and unconventional social ideas, as well as larger attitudes toward hierarchy and social identity in Renaissance humanism.

Over the years since Jehan roy de France was painted in the fourteenth century, it experienced a series of changes in its status. Beginning in the seventeenth century, a number of problematic assumptions were made that inform its current interpretation: that it is a precocious member of the modern genre of images known as portraits, that it constitutes the earliest surviving work of the "French school," and that it represents its subject as a protomodern individual. A new, more historically plausible interpretation of the panel can be arrived at only after these assumptions have been challenged and explored.