Emerging faces: The Figure-Ground Relation from Renaissance Painting to Deepfakes

The chapter addresses five theoretical attitudes with regard to portraiture: (i) the Renaissance painting tradition, (ii) the Baroque era tradition, (iii) the representation of heads in portraits by Francis Bacon, (iv) the conception of photographic portraits espoused by Roland Barthes during his seminars at the Collège de France, and (v) the contemporary facial images used to produce deepfake videos. These five theoretical attitudes are performances of theoretical positions of portraiture and are exemplified in this text by some famous portraits. The fundamental objective is to study the transformation of the figure-ground relation through the centuries and to analyze how the relations between the totality of the visual composition, and its parts are modeled and remodeled in these five different types of portraits in order to understand the relation between portraits and various conceptions of individuality.