Modern portraiture can be defined as what happens when portraiture as an art form abandons what had preoccupied it ever since it arose out of Christian art, which was  the representation of people to show off how the subjects were powerful, or had something of interest in their faces, or were somehow beautiful. The something else that portraiture came to be about was that it was the occasion for the artist’s musings about human consciousness or the state of the world or anything else that caught his attention, Van Gogh making his portraits just as strange and luminescent as he did his presentations of chairs and beds, and so portraits no different, in that sense, from what landscapes or cityscapes were supposed to accomplish, which was to provide the artist’s point of view, as when Julian Freund provides not just a portrait of how unpleasant can be the sight of a realistically painted human body, warts and all, but his sense of the human condition as grossly biological and filled with sloth and gluttony, a perception that would have appealed to Dante.