Civic portrait: friendship and tribute

Abstract

This research analyzes the typology of civic portraiture which is part of a basic genre that permits to understand the history of art from the nineteenth century until today. This work makes an approach to a group of works of art that belong to the public collection of the Region of Murcia, and that show some common characteristics of this kind of works as the technical and stylistic freedom. In one hand we’ll find a bunch of portraits that are made thanks to the friendship between the artists and the models, as the examples of Benjamín Palencia or Vicente Medina, but in the other hand we’ll find a group of works that are born as an intellectual tribute from the artists to the models, as we can see in the cases of Antonio Machado’s portrait or the work from the Equipo Crónica about Picasso.