The portrait is a very ancient genre, which has always been present in art. It is precisely a writer of ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder, who tells us about its origins through an ancient legend according to which a girl, daughter of the Greek potter Butade Sicionio, having to part with her beloved who was about to leave, would have stared with lines the outline of the shadow cast by the light of a lantern on the wall, so as to immortalize the man’s face using a charcoal taken from the hearth (Naturalis Historia XXXV, 15 and 151). The aim was to preserve the image and therefore the memory, as happens with photographs.

It is not at all easy to translate the human features and characteristics of the represented subject into an image and since Antiquity those who were able to do so were recognized with great merit and relative honors. Finally, the portrait is transversal both in the subjects represented, being images of illustrious characters or ordinary people, and in the choice of techniques to be used: the marble busts of Roman emperors or the pictorial representations of Spanish sovereigns are portrayed. Certainly, the GAM allows you to observe how this artistic genre has transformed over the centuries.