In Thursday’s class we analyzed everyone’s selfies, which was a great introduction to our larger discussion of portraiture. Professor Plesch described the spectrum that portraits can fall on—at one end is a very naturalistic, human portrait, and at the other end is caricature. This was an interesting concept for me, and makes me wonder how much the real people depicted in the portraits we will look at actually look like the version of them we will see. It is likely that the most true-to-life portraits will come from Northern artists, since they were known for including all the warts and weirdness of a person in their portrait, while Italians tended to do a bit of ‘airbrushing’ in their works. We also discussed how Petrus Christus was the first artist to place the sitter in a background with context—he put the sitter in front of a visible corner in a room. This opened up the possibilities for portraiture, because now the background could say more about the sitter than an amorphous background could. But that did not mean that artists stopped using amorphous backgrounds. Rogier van der Weyden was famous for his fantastic character details of his sitters (observing the face as if it were a landscape) with amorphous backgrounds.