Notes · History of ArtUK · A-Levels

Theme: Identities in art and architecture

Identities is one of the three themes of Paper 1 Section B, studied across cultures, periods and media. Art has always constructed and expressed identity - of the individual, of status and power, of gender, and of nation and ethnicity - and this topic traces how. It examines portraiture and self-portraiture, the representation of gender and the body and the idea of the gaze, the visual codes of power in the state portrait, and questions of nation, ethnicity and post-colonial self-representation, teaching how to compare the many ways art has given identity visible form.

5 sections~25 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

T·0666 / 12

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge of works expressing identity across cultures, periods and mediaAO2 · Analyse and compare how identity is constructed and expressed, developing a critical response

Operators:analysecompareinterpretcontextualiseevaluatetrace

basic level

AS-Level requires knowledge of the theme in a more limited range of examples.

higher level

The full A-Level requires identity traced comparatively across cultures, periods and media with named works and secure analysis.

Depth

Text

Contents · 5 sections

Theme: Identities in art and architecture

Identity as a theme#

FoundationPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (Identities)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

Dimensions of identity in art

Fig. 1The dimensions of identity art gives visible form to - individual, status and power, gender, and collective belonging (nation, ethnicity, faith).

Identity - who a person or a group is - has been one of art's central concerns, because art is one of the principal ways human beings have made identity visible: recording individuals, asserting status and power, expressing gender, and proclaiming belonging to a nation, faith or people. Studying identity as a theme means examining the many ways art constructs and expresses who someone is, and recognising that these representations are never simply neutral records but are shaped by the values, conventions and power relations of their time. The theme is examined comparatively across cultures, periods and media, so a range of well-chosen named examples is essential.

It helps to distinguish the several dimensions of identity that art addresses, because a single work often engages more than one. There is individual identity (the particular person, their likeness and character, above all in portraiture and self-portraiture); status and power (rank, wealth, authority - the identity of the ruler, the noble, the office); gender (how art constructs and represents masculinity and femininity, and the body); and collective identity - nation, ethnicity, race and religion (belonging to a people, a place, a faith). Holding these dimensions in mind gives you a framework for analysing how any work presents identity and for comparing works that foreground different aspects.

A crucial insight for the whole theme is that representations of identity are constructed, not given - they present an identity in a particular way, for particular purposes, rather than simply mirroring a person. A portrait chooses how to present its sitter (dignified, powerful, pious, fashionable); a state portrait constructs majesty; a depiction of a woman may construct her as an object of male desire; an image of a foreign people may construct them through the fantasies of the culture depicting them. Analysing identity in art therefore means asking not just who is shown but how they are constructed, by whom, and to what end - a critical question that runs through the theme.

The theme also has a strong historical dimension, because ideas of identity have themselves changed profoundly over time, and art both reflects and shapes those changes. The Renaissance saw a new emphasis on individual identity and self-consciousness, expressed in the rise of the independent portrait and self-portrait; the modern era has seen art increasingly used to explore, question and assert identities - of gender, sexuality, race and nation - that earlier art assumed or ignored. Contemporary art, in particular, has made identity a central and often political subject, giving voice to those whom the traditional canon marginalised. Tracing how the treatment of identity changes across the centuries is part of the theme's substance.

For the examination, the aim is to compare works thematically to show how differently identity has been constructed across cultures, periods and media. A strong answer might set a Renaissance self-portrait against a modern one, a European state portrait against a portrait that reclaims identity for the marginalised, or a traditional female nude against a woman artist's self-representation - drawing out how each constructs identity and why. The sections that follow supply the main strands - portraiture and the self, gender and the gaze, power, and nation and ethnicity - and the named examples on which such comparison can be built.

Worked example

Identity as construction

Explain what it means to say a portrait 'constructs' rather than merely 'records' an identity.

State the naive view
It is tempting to see a portrait as a neutral mirror that simply records what a person looked like.
Show the choices
But every portrait makes choices - of pose, dress, setting, expression, attributes, scale - each presenting the sitter in a particular light (dignified, powerful, pious, fashionable).
Identify the purpose
These choices serve a purpose set by patron, sitter and convention: to project status, virtue, beauty or power, not simply to record a face.
Conclude
So a portrait constructs an identity - it presents a version of the sitter shaped by intention and convention - and analysis means reading that construction.

Result: The portrait is shown to construct rather than merely record identity through deliberate choices serving a purpose - the critical premise of the whole theme.

Typical mistakes

Treating a portrait or image as a neutral record of a person rather than a construction shaped by convention and purpose.
Listing examples without comparing how and why they construct identity differently.

Active revision

List five works engaging identity from different periods, cultures and media, and for each note which dimension of identity (individual, power, gender, nation) it foregrounds and how it constructs it.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

Portraiture and the self#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (portraiture)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

What a portrait constructs

Fig. 2The channels through which a portrait constructs identity - likeness and expression, pose, costume, setting, attributes and scale - each presenting a version of the sitter.

Portraiture is the genre most directly concerned with individual identity, and it does far more than record a likeness: it constructs a presentation of the sitter's status, character and role. A portrait works through several channels at once - the face and its expression, the pose and gesture, the costume, the setting, the attributes (objects that identify a profession, rank or virtue), the scale and format - each contributing to the image of the person that the portrait projects. Reading a portrait means analysing how these elements combine to present a particular identity, and asking what version of the sitter, and whose interests, that presentation serves.

A single famous example shows how much a portrait can construct. Jan van Eyck's 'Arnolfini Portrait' (1434) presents a prosperous couple in a richly furnished interior, and every detail - the costly clothes, the imported oranges, the fine brass chandelier, the little dog, the convex mirror - builds an image of wealth, status and (probably) the solemn commitment of the marriage or betrothal, while the astonishing oil technique renders textures and light with a precision that itself proclaims the sitters' worldly success. The portrait constructs the identity of a particular bourgeois couple through a dense fabric of possessions and symbols - identity as status, made visible.

Self-portraiture is a special and revealing branch of the genre, because in it the artist is both the maker and the subject, constructing their own identity. Self-portraits can assert the artist's professional status and dignity (a claim that mattered as artists rose from craftsmen to esteemed creators), explore the self and the inner life, or record the passage of time. Albrecht Dürer's self-portraits, including his striking frontal image of 1500 that presents the artist in a Christ-like, dignified guise, assert the nobility and near-divine creativity of the artist; Rembrandt's extraordinary sequence of self-portraits across his whole life, unsparingly recording his own ageing face, seems to probe character, mortality and the inner self with a psychological depth rare in earlier art.

Portraits also register the identity of their period and culture, not just of the sitter, which is why they repay contextual reading. The rise of the independent portrait in the Renaissance reflects a new emphasis on the individual and on worldly achievement; the grand Baroque portrait projects the hierarchies of an aristocratic age; the intimate bourgeois portrait of the Dutch Republic reflects a mercantile society; and the modern portrait, freed from flattery, has often explored psychology, alienation or the instability of identity itself. A portrait is thus a document of how a society understood personhood, and comparing portraits across periods reveals changing ideas of the self.

For analysis and comparison, portraiture offers rich material precisely because the ways of constructing individual identity vary so widely. You might compare a self-portrait that asserts the artist's dignity with one that probes the inner self; a status-portrait dense with the symbols of worldly success with one that strips these away; a flattering court likeness with an unsparing modern one. In each case the analysis is the same in method - how do the face, pose, dress, setting, attributes and handling construct this identity, and what does the construction reveal about the sitter, the maker and the age? Portraiture, the art of the individual, is one of the theme's most fertile grounds.

Worked example

Reading the Arnolfini Portrait

Analyse how Van Eyck's 'Arnolfini Portrait' (1434) constructs the identity of its sitters.

Status through possessions
The costly clothing, the imported oranges, the fine chandelier and furnishings build an image of wealth and mercantile success - identity as prosperity made visible.
Symbolic meaning
Details such as the little dog (often read as fidelity), the single lit candle and the convex mirror suggest the solemnity and perhaps the sacramental character of the union depicted.
The role of technique
Van Eyck's astonishing oil rendering of textures, reflections and light is itself part of the construction, lending the couple and their world a precise, jewel-like reality and worth.
Conclude
The portrait constructs the identity of a particular prosperous couple through a dense fabric of possessions, symbols and virtuoso technique - status, wealth and commitment made visible.

Result: The Arnolfini Portrait is analysed as constructing bourgeois identity through possessions, symbols and technique - a model reading of how a portrait builds an identity.

Typical mistakes

Describing only the sitter's face and dress, missing how setting, attributes and handling construct status and character.
Treating self-portraits as neutral mirrors rather than deliberate constructions of the artist's identity and status.

Active revision

Analyse how a chosen portrait constructs its sitter's identity through its specific choices, then compare it with a self-portrait that constructs the artist's own identity differently.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art (Department for Education)

Gender, the body and the gaze#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (gender and the body)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

The gaze: subject and object

Fig. 3The concept of the gaze: the tradition of the nude positions an active (male) viewer and a passive (female) object of display - a relation of power exposed by feminist criticism.

Gender is a fundamental dimension of identity in art, both in how art has represented the male and female body and in the roles art has assigned to men and women as makers and as subjects. One of the richest and most examinable strands here is the tradition of the female nude, which dominated Western art for centuries and which feminist criticism has taught us to read not as a neutral celebration of beauty but as an image bound up with gender and power. Analysing the nude, and the wider representation of gender, means asking who is looking, who is looked at, and what relations of power the image constructs.

The concept of the gaze is central to this analysis. The critic John Berger, in 'Ways of Seeing' (1972), argued influentially that the European tradition of the female nude was made by men for a male viewer, so that the woman is presented as an object to be looked at - aware of and displaying herself for the spectator's pleasure - rather than as an active subject in her own right; Berger drew a sharp distinction between being naked (simply without clothes) and being 'nude' (a body put on display for a viewer). Feminist film theory sharpened this into the idea of the 'male gaze' (a term associated with Laura Mulvey's 1975 analysis of cinema), in which the woman is positioned as the passive object of an active, implicitly male, look. These ideas give a powerful critical tool for analysing how images construct gendered power.

The tradition and its questioning can be seen in a famous pairing. Titian's 'Venus of Urbino' (1538) presents a reclining female nude who meets the viewer's gaze, an image of beauty and availability that became a model for centuries; Édouard Manet's 'Olympia' (1863) deliberately echoes Titian's composition but replaces the mythological goddess with a modern courtesan who stares out with a cool, confrontational directness, refusing the idealisation and returning the viewer's look in a way that scandalised its audience. The comparison shows both the deep continuity of the tradition of the displayed female body and a modern moment when a work turned that tradition's terms against it, exposing rather than flattering the relations of looking.

The other side of gender and identity is the position of women as artists, historically excluded and now reclaimed - a story connected to the feminist art history discussed in the Methods topic. Where women were long barred from training and recognition, some nonetheless achieved greatness (Artemisia Gentileschi in the Baroque, Berthe Morisot among the Impressionists), and modern women artists have used art to represent female experience and identity from the inside. Frida Kahlo's unflinching self-portraits, which draw on her Mexican heritage and confront her body, pain and inner life, are a celebrated example of a woman artist constructing her own identity, in pointed contrast to the tradition of women constructed as objects for a male viewer.

For analysis and comparison, gender offers some of the theme's most productive material because it foregrounds the constructed, power-laden nature of representation so clearly. You can analyse a female nude through the concept of the gaze, asking how pose, gaze and address position the woman for a viewer; compare a traditional idealised nude with a work that subverts the convention (Titian and Manet); or set images of women made by men against women artists' self-representations (the tradition of the object versus Kahlo's assertive subject). In each case the critical questions - who looks, who is looked at, who makes the image and who is made by it - reveal how deeply art is bound up with gender, and demonstrate exactly the critical, evaluative reading the subject rewards.

Worked example

Titian's Venus and Manet's Olympia

Compare how Titian's 'Venus of Urbino' (1538) and Manet's 'Olympia' (1863) position the viewer, using the concept of the gaze.

Titian's construction
The reclining Venus is idealised, softly beautiful and available, presented as an object of desire for the (male) viewer within a mythological guise that makes the display acceptable.
Manet's echo and reversal
Manet borrows the same reclining pose but replaces the goddess with a modern courtesan who stares out with a cool, confrontational directness, refusing idealisation.
The effect of the returned gaze
Olympia's frank look and unidealised body throw the viewer's own looking back at them, exposing the transaction of the gaze rather than flattering it - which is why it scandalised its audience.
Conclude
The pair shows the tradition of the displayed female body (Titian) and a modern work (Manet) that turns the convention against itself, using the concept of the gaze to reveal the relations of looking and power.

Result: The comparison uses the gaze to contrast Titian's idealised object with Manet's confrontational subject, demonstrating a critical, feminist-informed reading of gender in art.

Typical mistakes

Reading the female nude as a neutral celebration of beauty, missing the relations of gender and power the concept of the gaze exposes.
Confusing Berger's 'naked' (simply unclothed) with 'nude' (a body displayed for a viewer) - the distinction is the point.

Active revision

Analyse a female nude using the concept of the gaze (pose, gaze, address), then compare it with a work by a woman artist that constructs female identity as an active subject.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

Status, power and the state portrait#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (power and identity)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

The visual codes of power

Fig. 4The visual codes of power in the state portrait - scale, pose, costume and attributes, setting and gaze - the levers by which authority is made visible.

Among the identities art constructs, that of power and status is one of the oldest and most calculated, and the state portrait is its supreme instrument. As discussed under patronage, a portrait of a ruler is rarely a neutral likeness but a deliberate projection of majesty, legitimacy and authority, and the theme of identity invites you to analyse exactly how such images construct the identity of power. Rulers, nobles and office-holders have always used portraiture to make their status visible and impressive, and reading these images means decoding the visual codes by which authority is signalled.

The visual codes of power are remarkably consistent across periods and cultures, which makes them highly analysable. Scale and format enlarge and elevate the sitter (the life-size or larger full-length, the low viewpoint that makes the viewer look up); pose projects command and composure (an erect, still, dominating stance); costume and attributes identify rank and office (crown, sceptre, orb, ermine, armour, robes of state); setting supplies grandeur and context (throne room, column, drapery, battlefield); and the direct or lofty gaze asserts authority over the viewer. Each of these is a lever the portraitist pulls to construct the identity of the powerful, and a strong analysis names them and reads their combined effect.

Concrete examples show the codes at work. Hans Holbein's images of Henry VIII present the king frontally, massive, richly dressed and planted with legs astride, an overwhelming image of physical and royal power that became the enduring picture of the man. Hyacinthe Rigaud's state portrait of Louis XIV (1701) surrounds the king with the full apparatus of majesty - vast ermine-lined robes, the crown and sceptre, a towering columned setting - constructing the identity of absolute monarchy itself. In each, the individual is subsumed into the office; the portrait constructs not just a man but the very idea of kingship, so that to look at it is to be impressed by the institution of power.

The construction of powerful identity is not confined to monarchs, and the codes adapt to other kinds of authority. Popes and cardinals were portrayed with the dignity of spiritual and institutional power; nobles and magnates with the attributes of lineage and wealth; and in the modern era leaders, and the state itself, have continued to use portraiture and imagery to project authority, sometimes tipping into outright propaganda. The identity of power can also be asserted collectively - civic group portraits (the Dutch militia and guild portraits) construct the identity and standing of a corporate body. In every case the analysis is the same: how do the visual codes construct the identity of authority?

For comparison, the state portrait offers sharp contrasts with the other constructions of identity in the theme. Set against the intimate self-portrait probing the inner self, the state portrait subsumes the individual into the public role; set against images that question or reclaim identity, it asserts an established order. And precisely because its codes are so calculated, the state portrait is a superb subject for critical analysis - reading it not as a record of a great person but as a constructed image of power, made to produce awe, loyalty and the sense that the existing order is natural and legitimate. Decoding how authority makes itself visible is one of the theme's most rewarding exercises.

Worked example

Decoding a royal portrait

Analyse how Rigaud's state portrait of Louis XIV (1701) constructs the identity of absolute monarchy.

Costume and attributes
The vast ermine-lined coronation robes, the crown, sceptre and regalia identify the sitter with the full apparatus and office of kingship.
Setting and scale
The towering columned setting, sweeping drapery and full-length, larger-than-life format elevate and monumentalise the king, dwarfing the viewer.
Pose and gaze
The composed, commanding pose and lofty gaze project majesty, control and the natural superiority of the monarch.
Conclude
Every code combines to construct not merely a likeness of a man but the very identity of absolute monarchy, designed to overawe and to assert the king's supreme, legitimate authority.

Result: Rigaud's portrait is decoded as a systematic construction of royal authority, in which the codes of power subsume the individual into the office of kingship - the identity of power analysed.

Typical mistakes

Taking a state portrait as a straightforward likeness rather than a calculated construction of the identity of power.
Naming the attributes of power without analysing how they combine to project authority and legitimacy.

Active revision

Analyse a named state portrait by decoding its visual codes of power, then contrast the identity it constructs with that of an intimate self-portrait.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art (Department for Education)

Nation, ethnicity and post-colonial identity#

AdvancedPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (collective and post-colonial identity)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

Self-representation vs representation by others

Fig. 5A central critical distinction: self-representation (constructing one's own identity) versus representation by others (depicting another culture, often from a position of power, as in Orientalism).

Beyond the individual, art constructs collective identities - of nation, ethnicity and race - and these have become some of the most charged and important subjects of modern and contemporary art. A crucial critical distinction runs through this strand: between self-representation, in which a people or person constructs their own identity, and representation by others, in which one culture depicts another - often, historically, from a position of power that distorts and subordinates the depicted. Analysing collective identity in art means attending to who is doing the representing, and in whose interest, as much as to what is shown.

The most influential critical framework here is the concept of Orientalism, set out by Edward Said in his book 'Orientalism' (1978). Said argued that Western culture constructed an image of 'the East' (the Middle East, North Africa, Asia) as an exotic, sensual, backward and irrational 'other', a fantasy that both reflected and served European power and colonial domination. In painting, the nineteenth-century vogue for 'Oriental' subjects - luxurious harems, slave markets, exotic bazaars, as in works by Ingres and Delacroix - can be read through this lens: these images construct an identity for the Eastern peoples they depict, but it is a Western fantasy, shaped by desire and by the power relations of empire, rather than an authentic self-representation. Post-colonial criticism teaches us to read such images critically, as representations of others serving the representer's interests.

Against this tradition of being represented by others stands the modern and contemporary drive toward self-representation - people constructing their own collective and personal identity, often reclaiming it from the distortions of the dominant culture. Frida Kahlo drew on her Mexican heritage and indigenous traditions to construct an identity rooted in her own culture and body, refusing European norms. In recent decades, artists from once-colonised and marginalised peoples have made the assertion and exploration of identity central to their work: to take one well-established example, the contemporary painter Kehinde Wiley places Black subjects in the poses and settings of grand European Old Master portraits, pointedly inserting figures long excluded from that tradition into its language of dignity and power - reclaiming the codes of identity analysed earlier in this topic for those the tradition ignored.

National identity, too, has been constructed and contested through art and architecture, and this is a rich further strand. Landscape has expressed national attachment to the land (as in Constable's England); history painting has forged national myths and heroes; architecture has embodied national and political ideas (from the classical vocabulary of civic and imperial buildings to the styles adopted or imposed by regimes). Art has been used both to build a sense of shared national identity and, at its worst, to assert the superiority of one nation or people over others. Reading how a work constructs or contests national identity - and whose version of the nation it presents - connects this strand to the wider theme and to the study of power.

For the examination, the strand of collective and post-colonial identity offers powerful, contemporary and comparative material, and it is well suited to the critical, evaluative response the subject rewards. You might set an Orientalist painting (representation of an 'other') against a work of self-representation (Kahlo, or a contemporary artist reclaiming identity), analysing the difference in who constructs the identity and how; or trace how national identity is built across media. The governing critical questions - who represents whom, from what position of power, and with what interest - make this strand a natural home for engaging with critical texts such as Said's, and for demonstrating the awareness that representations of identity are never innocent. Comparing self-representation and representation-by-others is one of the theme's most searching exercises.

Worked example

Reading an image through Orientalism

Explain how Said's concept of Orientalism reframes a nineteenth-century European painting of an exotic harem scene.

The apparent subject
The painting seems to offer a glimpse of life in 'the East' - a luxurious, sensual harem interior, richly detailed and exotic.
Apply Said
Said's concept reveals this as a Western construction: the East is imagined as exotic, sensual and 'other', a fantasy that says more about European desires and assumptions than about any real place.
The power dimension
This constructed image both reflected and served European colonial power, casting the East as passive, backward and available to the Western gaze and rule.
Conclude
So the painting constructs an identity for the peoples it depicts, but it is a representation by others serving the representer's interests - to be read critically, not as authentic record.

Result: The harem scene is reread through Orientalism as a Western construction serving colonial power, demonstrating the critical, post-colonial analysis of collective identity the theme rewards.

Typical mistakes

Taking Orientalist images as authentic records of Eastern life rather than Western constructions shaped by fantasy and power.
Overlooking who is doing the representing - the difference between a people representing themselves and being represented by others.

Active revision

Compare an Orientalist painting (representation of an 'other') with a work of contemporary self-representation, analysing who constructs the identity, how, and in whose interest.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

References & sources

Sources

Pearson Edexcel

Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art

Theme: Identities in art and architecture

5 sections~25 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

Theme: Identities in art and architecture

Key points

Identity as construction

Key points

Reading the Arnolfini Portrait

Key points

Titian's Venus and Manet's Olympia

Key points

Decoding a royal portrait

Key points

Reading an image through Orientalism

Sources

Theme: Identities in art and architecture

Key points

Identity as construction

Key points

Reading the Arnolfini Portrait

Key points

Titian's Venus and Manet's Olympia

Key points

Decoding a royal portrait

Key points

Reading an image through Orientalism

Sources