The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
*Starred Review* This excellent, sumptuously illustrated book accompanied the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that ran from December 2011 to March 2012. It has six introductory essays and analyzes 138 portraits in painted panels, pencil drawings, marble sculpture, and bronze medals. In time, Flemish realism brilliantly fused with Italian humanism to create a new sense of the value of the individual personality and to place a correspondingly high value on the portrait itself. This innovative art justified Hans Holbein’s proud inscription on his portrait of Derich Born, who lacked only breath to seem truly alive and responsive: “Add but the voice and you have his whole self, that you may doubt whether the painter or the father has made him.” These Renaissance artists explored their ideal of beauty—women with blonde hair, high foreheads, fair complexions, and long necks—and also sought to reveal virtue, the inward character, through the subject’s outward appearance. Techniques of portraiture evolved from the simple to the complex forms that have endured to the present day. In about 1425, subjects were depicted in stark profile or as dual portraits against a dark background. Later they were presented full face, establishing eye contact with the observer, set against a deeper space and an open window with an expansive background. Subjects might have a suggestive gaze or gesture, accompanied by symbolic animals and attributes, and a three-quarter pose that turned reflectively away from the viewer. These magnificent portraits justify Leon Alberti’s claim that they bestowed eternal life and fame by preserving the memory and virtues of the subject: “Painting possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present, but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist.” --Jeffrey Meyers