Identity, Indeterminacy, and Audience: The Semantics of Portraiture in the De Brailes Hours

Abstract

MEDI EVAL PORTRAITS RELIED ON elements other than physiognomic likeness to communicate the identity of their subjects. The portraits embedded within the De Brailes Hours—of the manuscript’s illuminator, William de Brailes, and its owner, an unidentified woman— provide a case study for the semantics of later medieval portraiture. Comparison of the illuminator and the owner portraits reveals the distinct means by which each signifies. While the illuminator portraits follow contemporary portrait conventions, especially in utilizing inscription to communicate identity, the owner portraits eschew these identifying elements, embracing ambiguity in order to present their subject simultaneously as a specific woman, a personification of prayer, and in one case a thirteenth-century avatar of the biblical Susanna. Using reception aesthetics, this essay argues that manuscript owner portraits emerged in the thirteenth century as flexible images capable of communicating on multiple levels to enhance their subject-viewers’ experience of prayer.