The search of identity in the context of the Lithuanian portraiture art of the 17th century

Nowadays, an understanding and apprehension of ones identity becomes more and more urgent. The search of identity can take a variety of directions. One of such directions or origins can be ancient portraiture art in which a complicated relation of culture, personality and image is opened. It is evident that the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles are not only distinctive combinations of forms, but expressions of a corresponding world understanding and sense, too. These epoch styles contain things of art and more general occurrences of cultural life. Due to its specific qualities, portraiture art, especially of the 17th century, becomes a favorable medium of identity searching. Paraphrasing Emanuel Kant, general talking about portrait is senseless, while a special historical reasoning is blind. In search for the golden mean, two points of view for the investigation are selected: the portrait function and its conception. Thus this article deals with the aspects of the conception and function of the Lithuanian portrait art in close relation with the national identity of personality in the context of the European art. Such effort to analyze the aspects of conception and function is rather productive as the priorities of an individual thinking on the mental level in the perception of a portrait can be evidently seen. On the one hand, the role of social representation (being not an end in itself) is the most important. On the other hand, the function of the persons’ immortalization, deeply rooted in the development of earlier Lithuanian portraiture, is also significant. Besides, the wish to have the ancestors’ retrospective and „reiterated“ images witnesses a persons’ relation with the ancestors rather than a Baroque need of representation. Because of this relation, the images take the features of eternity and become sacral. [...]Vytauto Didžiojo universiteta