Abstract:

Was there such a thing as an ‘image-right’ before the modern era?
Today, anyone can make an image of themselves. Social media has virtually dissolved the barriers to public self-portrayal, making it much more difficult to appreciate the social conventions once attached to images we call portraits. Yet, behind our ‘right to one’s own image’ and modern-day notions of visual identity lie certain forgotten legal and ethical controls. This talk sketches a history of those earlier beliefs about the rights and restrictions surrounding images. By returning to medieval and Renaissance humanistic and art theoretical sources, it shows how the portrait image (private portraits and public statues) was seen as, even meant to be, a reward, gift or honour – deserved, earned and bestowed. This talk fleshes out one of the most elusive concepts in historical image theory: the Bildnisrecht.

Bio:

Niko Munz is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford, researching the prehistory of image rights (among other things). He studied History of Art at the University of Cambridge and University of York, where he wrote PhD on early Netherlandish painting. His first book, ‘The Arrival of the Interior Scene in the Age of Van Eyck’, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2027. He has previously held an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and an Oxford-Berlin Fellowship at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Niko has also worked as a curator at the Royal Collection Trust and J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, developing a different specialism in seventeenth-century Italian painting and the history of the British royal collection. In October 2023 he published a lost work by Artemisia Gentileschi in the Burlington Magazine, a rediscovery that gained international press coverage. He more recently published on ‘Artemisia Gentileschi in England’ in the Burlington Magazine’s December 2025 issue.