Varieties of Family Portrait in Slovak Art Collections

Article deals with family portraits in Slovak art collections and cultural monuments. It describes formal procedures used in sacral art which could lead to several ways of how to portrait family and its members. Those methods were determined by the intention of an author and given time period. We can find paintings which picture married couple of donators, painting of a family as a group on epitaphs, diptych, triptych or the whole collections of individual portraits in family galleries, double portraits and paintings of families as a group. Formal basic variants were introduced to our art during the renaissance period and remained dominant for centuries. From the second half of the 19th century they coexisted with photography which became the main technique for the family portraits from the beginning of the 20th century. The group family portrait as a prevailing variant became the dominant phenomenon only after the beginning of the 19th century. It was related to the emergence of a new bourgeois social class. It did not take much time and photography as a new medium became the prevailing variant.