Portrait tradition in East and West art in terms of subject - object aesthetics

Along with the history of humanity, human beings, applied to the external reality to objectivize their inner reality, tended to make portrait in the act of describing their own face for the visible part of the external reality. The most mentioned and described subject, portrait has caused perceptions and formations among geographies throughout art history as a common way of creation of humanity. These differences in the formation, when handled in terms of subjective and objective approach, seem to play vital role in cultural, religious, social and philosophical formations of societies. This work focuses on the tradition of portrait, changing and being described on the basis of the formation of perceptions in geographies, divided as East and West. This thesis has been made in order to examine the differences and similarities in the face depictions, which are handled in their own production, in geographies where the aesthetic understanding of the East and West differ, without departing from tradition. For this purpose, the portraits, painted by Eastern and Western artists were tried to be analysed on the basis of subject and object aesthetics. The examined works have been gained by the way of literature scanning and document examination. They have been examined on one chosen sample from the Near East and European art due to being wide of eastern and western geography. In the data obtained, it was seen that the artist and his works were similar and different between east and west in their understanding of seeing and depicting. Individual studies conducted within this scope show and suggest that art should be seen as a common application field of humanity as a synthesis of east and west rather than a separation or polarization.