Statesmans portrait developement

The way of portraying statesmen, that we got intimately acquainted with throughout the 20th century, must be seen in connection with the genre artists have been concerned with since the beginnings of the figurative art. The main topic of this study is the chronological development within which the preceding periods have impact on the following periods. The thesis also reveals significant parallels in the area of formal part of statesmen's and rulers' imaging and the way deities, gods and the God are imaged, i.e. the highest divine authorities, supposing the similarities between these genres are not random. Requisites for portraying leaders of empires and states resulted in defining almost a unified style of such portrayals, which was broken and significantly changed only by the emergence of photography. The new aesthetics and typology of photography imaging brings about new ways of portraying statesmen at the beginning of the 20th century, which are nevertheless influenced by tradition and which thus take the tradition into account