Portraiture is one of the most controversial genres, praised by some as the absolute peak of artistic creativity, despised by others as not art at all. One of the reasons is the fact that its fate is is indissolubly connected with the ever changing conception of self.

From time immemorial, there have been endless discussions about who deserved to be portrayed, if portraits should be tolerated at all, and, if so, what they should render: one's face or soul, or both? These questions remain open and scholars still do not agree on that apparently simple issue: what does a portrait actually represent? It is clear that today almost anything can be denoted by the word "portrait". Therefore, a discussion of these artifacts must be specific; it must concern portraiture in a given society, at a given time and in a particular milieu.

Among the uncountable portraits produced to this day, those of ancient Romans occupy a special position. They belong to the most attractive Graeco-Roman antiquities and, moreover, they are in many respects considered as a main clue to Roman civilization.

This booklet started to be written as a history of modern thinking on Roman portraits and it ended as something like an introduction to portraiture in general. This is seemingly a reverse of the normal approach aiming directly at the analysis of artifacts, but this normal approach, because it is the sum of all previous attempts is always their implicit history. Any art historical research inevitably turns out to be a fixation of some stage of our thinking to the given subject in which all previous stages are contained. So, no matter how we approach works of art, artifacts and the history of our thinking on them always form a whole.
(Introduction)