Poster Portraits In Renaissance Painting

The fifteenth century saw an explosion in the development of portraiture, part of a larger cultural phenomenon during which the arena for individual accomplishment expanded dramatically. The growth of trade, together with a new emphasis on self-governing in the political units of Italy, resulted in a sizable number of wealthy and powerful individuals who wanted to record their features for their own time and preserve them for posterity. Men of learning played a new and important role by also providing advice on the intricacies of self-fashioning. The range of possibilities was vast. A portrait could function as a way of announcing one’s piety, virtue, learning, and prosperity—or even one’s inner soul. In the early fifteenth century the value of portraiture was already being promoted through influential texts. Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise on painting (c. 1435) strongly endorsed portraiture as a demonstration of the “divine force of painting”:

Pomponius Gauricus, writing in the early sixteenth century, refers to the enormous power that the sense of life in a portrait could convey:

Ippol...

Portrait of a Young Man by RAFFAELLINO DEL GARBO