A Face to the World: on self-portraits, By Laura Cumming

Portraits are an essential part of our daily lives. They have been a significant form of marker in any civilisation, as our pockets and wallets still prove. What do we find – coins, banknotes, identity cards, perhaps a snapshot of a loved one? Portraiture is used to ratify not just currency but membership, access, ownership and belonging.

Yet the study of portraiture has been sporadic and often disappointing. Even today the general histories on this genre are few. Surprisingly little attention has been directed towards the self-portrait, despite its often weirdly compelling intensity. It needs a bold, confident, agile mind to move freely in this field, to negotiate subjects often fenced in by years of scholarship. This Laura Cumming has.

With breadth and flair, she takes her reader on a tour of some of the most intriguing self-portraits in the history of art. Her investigation rests on the belief that self-portraits are very much more than a sub-set. No matter how flattering or deceitful, there is "something deep and incontrovertible", a pressure from within that leaves its trace in every self-portrait. Far from being an introspective form, as has been suggested, the self-portrait, in Cumming's view, rarely shows the artist merely talking to his or her self. There is simply too much going on.

Time and again we are shown how these images become vehicles for publicity, confessions, love-letters, mission statements, anger, protest, even a suicide note. Unlike commissioned portraits, the self-portrait is rarely a source of wealth and prestige. In what then lies its value?

Given their vast range of style and content, Cumming is surely right to offer no unifying theory other than the observation that artists' self-portraits tell us much about ourselves. The examples communicate a great range of human behaviour. They tap into our awareness that all have a public existence and that we, too, have the daily requirement to present a face to the world.

A history of this subject would amount to a compendium of fits and starts. It would offer a fascinating record but be impossible to digest. What is provided here is an enquiry and a celebration. In a series of essays, chronologically ordered, Cumming's mounts a narrative on self-portraiture that is richly informative and immediately engaging.

She evidently finds art historians a stuffy lot. But she does not cold-shoulder the art historical record. Writing about the greats – Van Eyck, Dürer, Rembrandt and Velasquez, David - she is well informed, alert to incongruities, and often, sometimes through her choice of words, startlingly insightful. It's hard to believe that anyone can say new things about Rembrandt' self-portraits or Velasquez's "Las Meninas", but she does.

In his "Last Judgement", on the end wall of the Sistine Chapel, beneath a ceiling heaving with his creativity, Michelangelo portrayed himself as flayed, as a ragged epidermis. It is good to be nudged by the observation that, in so doing, he presents himself as a man completely without power.

Historical facts unfold in the course of analysis. We are reminded that, after Robespierre fell victim to his own revolution, Jacques-Louis David was damned by association and imprisoned. Cumming brings out the agitation and isolation in his self-portrait painted in solitary confinement. A digression follows on the received views of the romantic artist as a free spirit, untethered from society. But as Cumming points out, despite his romantic plight, David, with his deep sense of order and his dedication to art as a form of public address, would have rejected such views.

A similar lack of introspection is also found in Poussin's self-portrait, here described as "a summation of his art as well as himself, neither offering instant disclosure". Not all artists are so reserved. Courbet's blatant self-promotion makes Tracey Emin's artistic strategy pale by comparison. He falls within the essay on Egoists, she within that on Victims, for most chapters focus on types which allows for unexpected comparisons.

Repeatedly, Cumming returns to the notion of mutability, the unfixed nature of our multiple selves. We return to the 20th-century dogma that identity is a construct. Enter Cindy Sherman, famous for the several hundred photographs of herself in which she adopts the identity of others.

As an art critic Cumming is skilled at adopting an informed position on any artist and, with great fluency, combines a lively intelligence with colloquialisms and hip connections. The result is a refreshing book and one that will reach a wide audience. If some passages are over-written, the overall performance is dazzling, piquant and, in places, profound.

Frances Spalding's 'John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art' is published next month by Oxford