Portraiture, like personhood, is a contested category. Vincent Lefèvre selects a variety of examples from early South and Southeast Asia of what portraits in those traditions might be. “This book does not pretend at being a ‘history of portraiture in early India’ but rather a conceptual reflection on the role of portraiture in Indian art” (p. 18). As a meditation on theory and visual evidence, it is an excellent provocation, placing emphasis on “function” rather than “likeness”: “portraiture is something one has to be entitled to” (pp. 13–15). His “Introduction: Portraiture, a Problematic Issue” asserts that “portraiture has been so successful during the Mughal and posterior periods because there was already an old tradition and that some of the characteristics may have continued to live sometimes up to the present” (p. 22) without, however, touching on complex issues of how “Mughal portraiture” functioned.1
“Verisimilitude” may be a better category—truthfulness...
