You’d think our understanding of self-portraiture might have shifted a little since, oh I dunno, Egyptian artist Ni-ankh-Ptah chiseled his own mug onto block of limestone back in the heady days of 2350 BC. I mean, loads of people have had a crack since then. Albrecht Dürer, Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo. Those monkeys in Indonesia.You could say the need to record one’s own image is an intrinsic part of human nature. Something that’s driven artists such as, say, Rembrandt, to be leaving the house, catch a glimpse of his funny, little hat in the mirror and think, ‘You know what? I should get a quick likeness of this over to m’lady in the approximately two to three years it’ll take to complete an oil on canvas work’.Thankfully our methods are somewhat quicker today. In 2018, the ubiquity of the mobile telephone means that every man and his dog can take a quick selfie and upload it to Instagram. But how much have those selfies changed in the last four and a half thousand years? And what do they have to say about the visual representation of self?To find out, we took some of the best images from Phaidon’s new Five Hundred Self-Portraitsand, well -- we obviously cross referenced them with posts from Kim Kardashian’s Instagram, didn’t we? Yes we did.Read the full article on i-D