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"I Am Not Who You Think I Am": Attributing the Humanist Portrait, Identifying the Art-Historical Subject

Context and contribution: Loh’s essay examines the anonymous panel known as the Portrait of Five Florentines variously attributed to Masaccio, Uccello, and numerous other famous Renaissance artists, It appears as a chapter in the edited volume Fictions of Art History. The anthology is based on a symposium convened by the editors Mark Ledbury and Michael Hatt at the Clark Institute in 2010, in a session moderated by Dario Gamboni, which addressed the complex relationship between art history and fiction, the art historians’ need to tell stories, their viewing practices, their rhetoric, their writing, and the interest of art historical work beyond the academy.

Research imperatives and process: In Loh’s chapter, an anonymous panel, the Portrait of Five Florentines which now languishes in a corner of the Salon Carré in the Louvre Museum, is examined from the perspective of the connoisseur’s thesis, the historian’s antithesis, and the fabulist’s synthesis. All three points of view claim, each in their own way, to be “based on a true story.” Loh uses this paradoxical image —an image possessing a surplus of authors yet lacking a stable author in the same instance— to serve as a case study for a larger consideration of the fraught discursive process through which desire is often manipulated into truth and fictions become history.