The portrait, as a literary genre, is a written description or analysis of a person or thing. A written portrait often gives deep insight, and offers an analysis that goes far beyond the superficial. It is considered a parallel to pictorial portraiture. The imitation of painting is apparent in the name of the genre itself, which is a painting term. Historians of antiquity recognised the task of the portrait as representation; we find the beginnings of the narrative portrait in Livy and Tacitus. However, the portrait began to emerge from the need to describe yourself (self-portrait) or one's contemporaries, as in the Essays of Montaigne. This latter work develops a line of questioning around the movement of the representation of the individual (or of a society) from the pictorial mode to the discursive mode. The portrait can be realised in prose or in verse. Its objectives vary according to context: sociocultural, sociopolitical, historical, or again according to the subjectivity of the portraitist (the writer). Thus one can speak of a fictional portrait (corresponding to the characters who populate the fictional universe of each author) as much as a realist one (representing real-life people). The portrait oscillates between reality and fiction, between eulogy and satire, between one portrait which imitates its original and another which moves away from it (such as the caricatures found in newspapers or in Molière). Nevertheless, the objective portrait which describes the flaws and qualities of the individual represented (or equally the object or the idea) is quite widespread. The literary portrait evolved through the centuries and its development has been shaped by writers as well as literary critics and theorists. Source: Wikipedia (en)