Italian Renaissance Portraits [antikvár]

"Le imagini adunque de' buoni e de' virtuosi infianimano gli uomini, come lo dico, alla virtü ed alle opere buone." ["Thus, as I say, the likenesses of the good and the virtuous will induce people to good and virtuous deeds."] Lodovico Dolce (Dialogo della pitrura, 1557) J_ntegrated yet comprehensive, the collection of Italian Renaissance portraits is outstanding even when considered in relation to the rich pictorial material to be found in the Budapest Museum ot Fine Arts. As in other spheres of humán endeavour the art of portraiture developed rapidly in the new era, a development illustrated here by a collection of about fifty paindngs, among them works by the most famous masters. The painting of individual portraits, the representation of the individual, for secular purposes and true to life, is one of the achievements of Renaissance art; however, portraiture can be traced back to medieval religious painting. As early as in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries likenesses were included in religious compositions on altarpieces and murals. Painters commemorated their eminent contemporaries by representing them as characters in holy scenes; Dante's portrait is already to be found in Italian paintings of the fourteenth century. According to Vasari, Giotto was the first to paint living persosn after nature, that is to say, ritratti di naturale; certainly his name is associated with the first famous series of portraits, now perished, the Gallery of Famous Men in the Royal Palace of Naples. As the various city states throughout Italy became more powerful, as bourgeois customs and the new way of life associated with the Renaissance became more widespread, so too there was a new development of interest in the significance of individual humán activity and an increasing importance attached to man's earthly life. The increasing self-awareness of the individual, his sense of high purpose and hopes of glory demanded expression in the fine arts and provided a broad and firm foundation for the development of the art of portraiture. In a treatise on the power and glory of painting by the architect Leon Battista Alberti, portraiture is given first place. In fifteenth-century Italian painting innumerable likenesses are to be found: condottieri and guildmasters, rulers and citizens, scholars and wealthy merchants peopled the Florentine, Umbrian and Venetian paintings of the period, as in the works of Masaccio, Masolino, Ghirlandaio, Pinturicchio, Mantegna and Gentile Bellini. The chronicle type of historical representation providing political, úrban or family self-consciousness was one of the most important ways towards the development of the individual portrait. The murals from Niccolö Orsini's palace at Ghedi, which may now be seen in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, are characteristic examples of this type of portrait (Plate 20). In this fresco, attributed to Bartolommeo