Event Item: 00108

The Renaissance Portrait

Exhibition: 3rd Jun 2008 to 7th Sep 2008

Source: http://www.museodelprado.es

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.

When did the autonomous portrait emerge? Around 1335 Simone Martini painted Petrarch's beloved Laura, and the poet devoted a sonnet to the portrait, describing the characteristics of the modern portrait: a likeness that is substitutive (evokes the absent person), moving (arouses emotions) and movable (transportable). It includes a reference to the mythical artist, Pygmalion, who made a sculpture that came to live.

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.

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.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Paseo del Prado, 28014 Madrid