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Second life double sided picture frame12/28/2023 Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated portrait of Mona Lisa (ca. Italian painters at the turn of the sixteenth century embraced and refined this formula. Petrus Christus used this format in his portrait of a Carthusian monk ( 49.7.19), which places the sitter in a simply characterized interior, with a horizontal element like a windowsill at the bottom and a glow of light in the left background. The three-quarter face, which allows for greater engagement between sitter and viewer, was also widely favored. The profile view, which was favored in ancient coins, was frequently adopted in the fifteenth century, for instance, in Fra Filippo Lippi’s picture of a woman at a window, with a young man peeking in ( 89.15.19). This second aspect of portraiture comes across in the considerable conservatism of the genre: most portraits produced in Renaissance and Baroque Europe follow one of a very small range of conventional formats. Each portrait is thus meant to express individual identity, but as Erwin Panofsky recognized, it also “seeks to bring out whatever the sitter has in common with the rest of humanity” (quoted in Shearer West, Portraiture, p. One of the hallmarks of European portraiture is a sense of reality, an apparent intention to depict the unique appearance of a particular person. Hans Memling’s portraits of Tommaso and Maria Portinari ( 14.40.626-27), painted around 1470, were also probably meant to flank the image of a saint in a small triptych, yet each likeness fills a whole panel and has the emphasis of a portrait in its own right. An example is Robert Campin’s Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece) ( 56.70) of about 1427–32, in which the man and woman in the left wing have the specificity characteristic of portraiture. In medieval art, donors were frequently portrayed in the altarpieces or wall paintings that they commissioned, and in the fifteenth century painters began to depict such donors with distinctive features presumably studied from life. The earliest Renaissance portraits were not paintings in their own right, but rather important inclusions in pictures of Christian subjects. The resurgence of portraiture was thus a significant manifestation of the Renaissance in Europe. This change reflected a new growth of interest in everyday life and individual identity as well as a revival of Greco-Roman custom. After many centuries in which generic representation had been the norm, distinctive portrait likenesses began to reappear in Europe in the fifteenth century. The traditions of portraiture in the West extend back to antiquity and particularly to ancient Greece and Rome, where lifelike depictions of distinguished men and women appeared in sculpture and on coins. A portrait does not merely record someone’s features, however, but says something about who he or she is, offering a vivid sense of a real person’s presence. A portrait is typically defined as a representation of a specific individual, such as the artist might meet in life.
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