The old man gazes benevolently at the angelic boy on his lap. Outside the window, a winding road disappears into the distance. Your eyes – like those of the boy – are drawn irresistibly to the old man’s diseased nose, as lumpy as a lobe of cauliflower. The painting, by Domenico Ghirlandaio, is one of contrasts – youth and old age, beauty and ugliness, innocence and understanding.
It is one of the masterpieces in the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit, “The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini,” which brings together some 160 works by mostly Italian artists from about 1425 to the early 1500s.
The Renaissance didn’t invent portraiture. Thanks to Roman sculptors and the painters of Egyptian funerary portraits, we know what the people of the ancient world looked like. But the rising tide of the Renaissance elevated portraiture into a subtle and complete art form.
The story begins with the crisp profiles of the Florentine painters who liked that format for its simple clarity and because such an image could be easily stamped into metal. The painter Pisanello is credited with inventing the portrait medal, which became all the rage among the Florentine elite as tributes to the living and memorials to the dead.
You can see how drawings translated to medals in Pisanello’s portraits of the dimunitive general, Niccolo Piccinino, who must have compensated for his stature with a tall, floppy hat. Legend has it that the “tiny one” escaped from an unsuccessful battle by having himself shoved in a sack and carried over the shoulder of one of his soldiers.
In its painted form, the profile led to games of abstraction in which everything becomes a flattened shape. In Fra Filippo Lippi’s witty composition, “Portrait of a Woman and a Man at a Casement,” a man improbably pops into woman’s space as if he had squeezed himself through a mail slot.
No less of a surprise is the appearance here of Sandro Botticelli who, while adhering to the Florentine preference for profiles, brought such style and decorative verve to the tradition, that he seems to belong to another place and century. Two portraits of the beauty Simonetta Vespucci, with her golden hair wound into a combination of braids and beribboned free-flowing tresses, have the presence of a real woman among antique representations.
Her imaginative hair treatment is one of the few cases where a female can stand up to the males in this exhibit. Most of the tonsorial distinction belongs to well-dressed young men. So smooth and full are their coiffures that it’s hard to believe that the blow dryer had not been invented yet. A popular style with long bangs and long hair with an under-curve below the ears makes the subject look like he’s wearing a helmet.
Some of the portraits connect in memorable stories. The expression of triumph on the face of Andrea del Verrocchio’s famous bust of Giuliano de’ Medici, may have to do with his triumph in a joust that he fought in the name of Simonetta Vespucci. Alas, Botticelli’s portrait of the same young Giuliano was posthumous. He was killed by 19 stab wounds in the assassination plot that his brother, Lorenzo, narrowly survived. Lorenzo, who went on to become “Lorenzo the Magnificent,” is depicted several times, here, including the death mask, which captures his strong jaw and wide, handsome mouth.
Personality – which didn’t show up much in pre-Renaissance portraits is in abundance here, from the haughty sneer in Andrea del Castagno’s “Portrait of a Man,” to the heartbroken expression on Luc Signorelli’s portrait of an old man thought to be Dante to the iron will in Andrea Mantegna’s portrait of the warrior-Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan.
In later centuries, portrait painters came to be known as notorious flatterers, but in the beginning that doesn’t seem to have been the case. There are enough facial flaws depicted here to give you confidence that you are seeing the real person. And in some cases, such as Ghirlandaio’s portrait of the man with the cauliflower nose, the flaw is the focal point of the picture and conveys the dignity of the sitter more than perfection ever could.
