Museo Nacional Del Prado in Madrid Shows Renaissance Portraits

Monday, 02 June 2008 20:38

Madrid, Spain - The broad time span covered by this exhibition (1400-1600) and its Europe-wide approach make it the first to provide an overview of Renaissance portraiture. It explores portraiture as a genre in its own right, focusing principally on painting but including medals, sculptures, drawings and engravings while leaving aside the donor portrait. The aim of the exhibition is to show that the Renaissance marked not only the beginning and maturation of portraiture but also a period of sophistication in which many of its formal and conceptual possibilities were explored and in some cases even exhausted.

The exhibition reveals two constant features in the evolution of the Renaissance portrait. The first is its “democratisation”, as although portraiture was initially reserved for the privileged classes, it eventually embraced the whole social spectrum. The second is an increase in size as a result of portraits becoming incorporated into the decoration of interiors. The earliest examples were designed to be viewed and stored away in chests, not to be hung on walls.

In demand from very heterogeneous sectors of society, portraits served diverse purposes and acquired a social, symbolic and even documentary dimension that gave rise to an extraordinary variety of types. The exhibition includes portraits of individuals proclaiming their intellectual pursuits, social aspirations and religious devotion; portraits designed to seduce, attack or convince; portraits as impressive images of power; and portraits that illusionistically project the sitter beyond the picture plane or distort the image.

Between the Netherlands and Italy. Origins and development of portraiture

The emergence of independent portraits is indissolubly linked to thirteenth-century developments in painting. It is therefore not surprising that Giotto (c. 1267-1337)—who, to use Giorgio Vasari’s well-known expression, “resuscitated” painting after centuries of decadence —is the first painter mentioned as executing independent portraits; or that the earliest known definition of portraiture originated from his circle, when Pietro d’Abano stated around 1310 that portraits should reflect both the appearance and the psychology of the sitter. Portraiture received decisive impetus at the French court of the Valois between 1360 and 1380, and the earliest surviving examples are from this period. The earliest portraits in the exhibition date from around 1400.

The chosen works illustrate the typological and conceptual differences between the two main centres of portraiture of the time—Italy and the Netherlands—and the progressive influence Flemish models enjoyed in Southern Europe. During the fifteenth century Netherlandish portraits surpassed their Italian counterparts in prestige, a fact which explains their early presence in Italian collections and Italian and Spanish rulers’ practice of sending their painters to train in Flanders. It was not until the sixteenth century that a change of trend was witnessed as a result of the compositional and conceptual complexity attained by Italian portraiture, which was capable of exploring practically untrodden ground such as representing states of mind and developing sophisticated visual strategies to enhance the interaction between portrait and viewer.

The Renaissance gave rise to a cult of friendship that was deeply influenced by the classical writings, mainly Cicero and his De amicitia (1st century BC). The Roman politician and writer stated that the memory of friendship makes the absent present and brings the dead to life—ideas taken up by Leon Battista Alberti when writing on painting in 1435—and although he did not specifically mention portraiture in this connection, Renaissance humanists soon became aware of its evocative powers. Portraiture allowed friendship to overcome distance and, in many cases, made it possible to visualise the physical appearance of those who were friends only through correspondence, as was the case with Erasmus and Pirckheimer, who never met personally.

In addition to capturing the sitters’ physical features and arousing the empathy of the viewer, portraits also revealed their intellectual pursuits and social aspirations and proclaimed the models of moral or religious conduct they aspired to imitate. Portraits thus transcended their mimetic function and took on a symbolic dimension, surrounding the sitter with a wealth of sacred and profane iconography that became increasingly codified.  As a “living image” of the individual, the portrait was furthermore an ideal vehicle for reflecting on the fleetingness of time and the inevitability of death, often becoming a melancholic, eloquent vanitas.

Lastly, portraits possessed an important social dimension as they conveyed the person’s position in society. To show the sitter’s status, painters resorted to representative elements ranging from a coat of arms to particular clothing, or depicted him exercising his profession. A magnificent example of such a portrait is Moroni’s celebrated Tailor, which attests to the irresistible democratisation of the genre during the sixteenth century—a process that was not well regarded by everyone, as evidenced by Pietro Aretino in July 1554, when he complained that one of the great misfortunes of his day was that even tailors and butchers had their portraits painted.

Portraiture provided painters with an ideal vehicle for communication: the self-portrait. No other work of art enabled the artist to convey his social aspirations and intellectual concerns with greater sincerity, express his artistic ambition or reflect his deepest feelings. Therefore, few pictures are more honest or experimental than some of the self-portraits included in the exhibition.

Portraitists were the first specialist painters. Not all painters were qualified to paint portraits; indeed, outside Germany, Italy and the Netherlands portraitists were in extremely short supply and in countries like France, England and Spain they were recurrently imported during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, chiefly from the Netherlands.

Although the court portrait lies at the very origin of the genre and many of the portraits shown in the first section of this exhibition are of rulers or members of their circles, it was not until the sixteenth century that the court portrait acquired very specific features. The progressive “democratisation” of portraiture forced painters and patrons to seek ways of setting court portraits apart from the ordinary kind, and new types of images such as full-length, seated and equestrian portraits emerged in response to this demand.

After decades of experimentation, the second half of the sixteenth century witnessed the progressive standardisation of court portraiture based on a model that remained in use, with slight variations, until the eighteenth century. This model took shape around 1550 with the portraits painted by Titian and Anthonis Mor for the Habsburgs, a magnificent and harmonious blend of reality and idealisation which became increasingly standardised and spread across the whole of Europe, crossing political and religious boundaries.

“One paints with the brain, not with the hands”
Michelangelo, Letter, October 1542
Visit Museo Nacional Del Prado at :  www.museodelprado.es/en/ingles/

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