This article discusses the role of the portrait in German and English prose fiction between 1760 and 1800, in the heyday of the cultural use of portraiture, concentrating on novels by Wieland and Radcliffe in relation to the poetic theories of Breitinger and Burke. In many works from this period, the portrait figures not only as a requisite, but as a motor of the plot. In the most prevalent narrative scheme, a young man finds a miniature painting, falls in love with the woman depicted, and goes on a quest to find her; in the best case, a happy union results; in the worst case, he goes mad in a labyrinth of revenants and doppelganger.A frequent variant includes a genealogical (sub)plot, whereby the observer / pursuer is drawn into the abysses of his unknown family history. The article argues that the portrait can be understood as a figure of poetological reflection. Inasmuch as they incorporate the portrait into narrative events, Wieland's and Radcliffe's novels treat important aesthetic and poetic concerns of the day: 1. detachment from established models of mimesis and the problematization of the concept of "original image" [Urbild]; 2. (new) paradigms of the marvelous [das Wunderbare] and the Gothic; 3. models of literary animacy / animation [Lebendigkeit / Verlebendigung] and the superiority of literature over painting.