Playing with Space. The Lustr of Power: The Palace: Frame, Picture and History. - The Rhetoric of Title. (original) (raw)

The second part of the book is basically devoted to the framing of the secular picture. In the third chapter I investigate the framing, thus the exaltation, of persons of power (particularly in the halls of the Great Kremlin Palace). Above all this concerns the function of the frame of the ceremonial portrait, which changes in consequence not only of art theory, but of the conception of state power. The power of an imperial portrait consists in its frame’s bearing the formula of a title according to the proper pattern. The frame links the portrait with the historical and mythological context.