(S2 E3) Reading Renaissance Portraits, 1420-1500 | A Narrative Art History of the Renaissance

Photography today is deeply ingrained in our lives, something we're exposed to or engage in probably every day. Why do we take photographs? To memorialize, to document or narrate, to expose, maybe to immortalize someone, something, a feeling or an experience. Photographs make this nostalgic, reflective, they inspire every emotion within us. We call them pictures. But in a 15th century context, the word picture applies not to photographs but to paintings, drawings, and prints. In the last two episodes, we've seen how early 15th century artists in Florence and Flanders are rethinking and perfecting their approaches to depicting the natural world with unprecedented realism, geometric accuracy, and naturalistic detail. This episode traces the evolution of the portrait, both as an independent genre and as an artistic idea at large, because realistic portraits were the photographs of the Renaissance. They captured someone's personality and expression such that we can still get to know them six centuries later. They're commemorative objects, ways to keep someone's face in your memory when they're gone, but also snapshots of life experiences. Many of the subjects, the sitters, are now nameless, but paintings offer us windows into their lives and stories. As art historians, we reconstruct those stories, and in doing someone, we deliberately include scenery in the background. Other times, we want to get a clean, dignified shot with no distractions. Renaissance portraitists faced these same choices. Take a moment to look closely at this double portrait. Both figures are shown in profile, or strictly from the side. They face each other across a casement window in this domestic interior, and we can even see out the open window onto the street running along a riverbank, and even follow this river into the distant mountains. This is the first Italian portrait to include any of these elements. But did you notice the four rings on her fingers? Or the pearl-studded partial inscription, Lealta, on her sumptuous velvet robe, meaning loyalty, pointing us in the direction of a marriage or betrothal, formal engagement. Or indeed, the curious gesture of the man's fingers, possibly sexual in connotation, or the coat of arms giving away his family lineage, or his bright red hat indicative of social status, or his shadow. If not initially obvious, you won't be able to unsee his shadow once you notice. There's a wonderful story in Roman writer Pliny's Natural History, repopularized by Leon Battista Alberti, that the art of painting was born when someone traced their lover's shadow. This painter, Fra Filippo Lippi, might be referencing that with his unusually prominent shadow here. Notice, too, how small the man is compared to the woman. From afar, you might miss him altogether. Lippi foregrounds the sumptuously dressed bride, subverting traditional gender dynamics. So this portrait is really revolutionary in so many ways. He also made a number of changes to the composition in the underdrawing, or pentimenti, visible thanks to infrared reflectography. Notice this faint outline of the man's raised hand. He looks like he's gesturing to her, something never realized in paint. And this tendency to experiment with compositional design is signature of Lippi's work. Like Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi was a friar painter and extensively employed by the Medici. And being at the forefront of the Florentine art world, he must have been aware of developments in northern European painting. There were extensive commercial connections between Italy and Flanders, and paintings did travel across the Alps. But this landscape outside the window, completely new to Italian painting, raises a key question. Is this a Florentine invention, or a product of Flemish influence? Was it inspired by early Netherlandish depictions of nature? Without concrete documentation, the question of influence versus innovation is difficult to answer. But by tracing the narrative, we can certainly theorize about the flow of artistic dialogues. And in a sense, that's what art history is all about. Pull up the last picture of someone else that you took, or even a selfie. Is it a frontal view of the person where they directly face the camera? Is it a three-quarter view between frontal and profile? Or is it a profil perdu, from the back at an angle? In any case, it probably isn't a profile view, which doesn't tend to be very common anymore. But in early Quattrocento Italy, profile was actually the preferred format for a portrait. Part of the credit for this goes to relief sculpture. We saw Donatello's Pazzi Madonna, where both figures are shown in profile. But another part of the credit goes to Pisanello, the most celebrated painter of the early Quattrocento in Italy in his time. If you were a European ruler or noble, you wanted a portrait by Pisanello. And he worked at the courts of Milan and Mantua and Ferrara, all centers of Renaissance humanism full of classical learning and Roman artifacts. So he's in constant contact with great Roman and medieval art, which included a range of medals and coins, both Roman and otherwise, featuring profile portraits. In emulating this format, Pisanello invented the portrait medallion, where the front, or obverse, shows a profile portrait, and the back, or reverse, honors the subject's accomplishments. The same idea applies to the modern US penny. The obverse shows Lincoln in profile, and the reverse, the Lincoln Memorial. If you're looking at the first portrait medal Pisanello ever made, and the first of the Renaissance, the inscription tells us he's the Byzantine Emperor John Palaiologos, who was in Italy to negotiate the eventually failed reunion of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. His empire was in a state of decay, but you couldn't tell from this medal. Indeed, the reverse celebrates his piety. He's praying to this vision of a cross, which, if you watched episode 2, is the exact same iconography Pisanello uses in the Saint Eustace. And by the 1440s, the portrait medal was booming in popularity. Its connection with Roman Imperial portraiture made it erudite and respectable, especially for rulers who wanted to follow the classical tradition. But just as it is today, for the person being portrayed, the most pressing concern was always to look flattering. Patrons had to approve of how portraits reflected them. Often their appearances were beautified. The portrait served as a filter and photo editor, glorifying their subjects. Now, making a medal begins with a preparatory drawing, which would be shown to the patron for their feedback and approval. Then, from that design, a wax model and eventually mold would be made. Pour metal into the mold, chase and polish the surface, and the medal is ready. Filippo Maria Visconti was a ruthlessly violent, expansionist duke who waged the wars in Lombardy against Florence. And personality aside, which he was monstrous, he was very overweight and was very insecure because of it. He'd wear loose clothing to try to hide it. And luckily, Pisanello cuts off the profile at the chest here, and he angles the duke's head slightly forward. We feel the sense of a formidable military commander charging forward. Pisanello completely glamorizes the duke's appearance. And this type of commemorative portraiture wasn't limited to men. This is Cecilia Gonzaga, Princess of Mantua in northern Italy. And the reverse of this medal is even more fascinating, because look at the creature being tamed by a young woman, not unlike Cecilia herself. We see the maiden in profile, but also the unicorn in profile. This is the medieval legend that unicorns, these mythical, immortal, pure beasts, emblematic of Christ, could only be captured not by hunters, but by a virgin maiden. And it's salient that Cecilia was extremely well educated in the classics, and also a devout nun, a chaste maiden, like the one in the unicorn legend. Now, one reason Cecilia chose a monastic life was to pursue her own studies and interests, free from the restrictions of married domestic life. She was an academic, but many other nuns were artists, manuscript illuminators. Indeed, they comprised the majority of 15th century European women artists. In episode 1, we saw Andrea da Castagno's Last Supper for Santa Bologna, a community of Florentine nuns. This similarly overlooked folio is from a prayer book called A Breviary. It's illuminated by a nun named Maria, a descendant of the Albizi family that had been exiled from Florence by Cosimo de Medici. And we know that because she tells us on a scroll that adorns her self-portrait in prayer, almost a frontal view. It's revolutionary, and it's a prominent self-portrait by a woman artist, which would have been acceptable only in her cloistered monastic environment. In most portraits, however, the identity of the sitter is unsatisfyingly unknown. It's an artist's and patron's best interests to help us here, because identity links a portrait with its sitter's legacy. So family emblems and heraldic devices, coats of arms, are common giveaways. It's fruitful to approach a portrait as we would a living person. When we meet the sitter, we ask first for their name. These symbols are the sitter's ways of answering that question. In this Florentine profile, the lady doesn't face us, but directly confronting us are the three palm leaves on her sleeve. And it's just this tantalizing symbol, begging us to link it to her identity. Palm in Italian is Palma. So for years, this lady was called Countess Palma of Urbino. But dig deeper and you'll find there is no such person. So what if it's a surname? Was there a Well, kind of. There was a family from Urbino whose emblem was the palm leaf, but they only changed their name to Palma in the 16th century, so it's only a slim possibility. Notice her features. We're so obsessed with maintaining our hairlines today, but in the 15th century, the higher a woman's hairline, the more attractive she was. Large foreheads were fashionable, and hair plucking was a form of beautification. See how the black band, called the lenza, actually draws attention to her high hairline. There were all sorts of chemical methods to artificially recede your hairline, and indeed also various makeup recipes that involved both beneficial antioxidants and sometimes toxic whitening agents. And this Valdo Venetti must have been knowledgeable of the wet-on-wet oil technique that Van Eyck had pioneered, because he attempts it here in Tempera. Cross-sectional paint analysis tells us he applied paint without waiting for lower layers to dry, but the result is less shiny, less vibrant than the sheen of an oil blaze. So we've now seen several Italian profile portraits, but I mentioned the trans-Alpine conversations, meaning across the Alps, playing a role in the evolution of both Italian and Flemish portraiture throughout the century. To get there, let's look at some early Netherlandish portraits and the innovations they bring. In Van Eyck's presumed self-portrait, we saw him inscribe his motto, as I can, on the frame. And we also saw inscriptions identifying the sitter on Pisanello's medals. But sometimes they're more cryptic. We see this man in three-quarter, but he doesn't look at us. He wears a chaperon, holding a scroll we can't really read. But on the stone parapet, separating us from his space, are three mysteries. The lowest tells us this was acted, or done, on October 10th, 1432, by Van Eyck. Oddly specific and formal, it reads like documentation. And then this perplexing phrase, carved into the parapet, Leal Souvenir, French for loyal remembrance. And finally, in Greek above that, the name Timotheus. And it's hard to read the writing because Van Eyck wasn't exactly fluent in Greek. But try connecting the dots. What does it all mean? There's a chance Timotheus alludes to a very well-known Greek musician of that name, implying we're looking at a musician of the Burgundian court. Some people think that the formality of the signature points instead in a legal direction, that he's a lawyer. But Leal Souvenir, in either case, suggests he's already passed on. Maybe this portrait serves as his memorial, and the parapet as his tombstone. As we look at portraiture, also pay attention to the sitter's gaze. Gazes transcend the pictorial space, entering our space, breaking the fourth wall. Here his gaze conveys a certain emotional distance from us, a kind of aloofness accentuated by the physical barrier that is the parapet. Leal Souvenir might have been painted posthumously, but in most cases, artists would take a quick sketch from life and use it as the basis for a portrait of any medium. In Florence, artists would punch tiny holes into the outlines of their preparatory drawings and easily transcribe it onto their panel in a process called pouncing. We know less about Flemish drawings of this period because not many survive, but the ones that do are exquisite masterpieces in themselves. Making this particular drawing would have been much harder than it looks. First, paper would be prepared with a white chalk ground, and then a silver stylus would be used to draw on the chalk. This technique, called silverpoint, made softer, more delicate marks than charcoal sticks. Graphite was not discovered until the 16th century. So Jan van Eyck dies in 1441, he's 51 years old, but he leaves a lasting legacy through not just his body of work, but also his pupils, his workshop. His student Patrus Christus would succeed him as the leading painter in Bruges, and Patrus Christus introduces Italian linear perspective to Flanders. He may have even met with painters in Italy, and he's keen on developing three dimensional settings in his portraits. He sets this Carthusian monk in a strongly illuminated red room. There's a further source of breaking light shining on him at an angle from the front. His eyes meet ours. He stares at us with curiosity and alertness. He paints an illusionistic frame at the base of the panel too, inscribed Patrus Christus made me. And there's a fly on it. This is one of the first example of tomp l'oeil, a visual device that means trick the eye. Is Christus showing off his mastery of his craft, his ability to paint so realistically we're duped into thinking the fly is real? After all, the insect appears right above his name. Or is this more traditional iconography symbolic of sin? I tend to think both fly and frame are clever devices of visual deception. Applying his fascination with Italian linear perspective, in this portrait Petrus Christus situates his sitter in a three dimensional room. We can almost conjure an image of him sketching the likeness of this young girl sitting in a room of the house whose back wall we can see. How do you feel looking into her eyes? There's a confrontational quality to her gaze. Who is she? The identity and story of the sitter now hide behind the extensive craquelure of oil paint. But we is just barely visible. Below that, a coat lined with the fur of ermine. So she's a typical middle class or bourgeois lady, a 15th century Bruges, maybe using this portrait to advertise herself to potential suitors for marriage. Petrus Christus has chosen realism over idealism and preserved the asymmetry of her eyes. She wears a henin, a headdress in the form of a truncated cone secured around her neck inspired by Mongol headdresses called gugu hats, another reminder of the trade flourishing all across Eurasia. And henins were particularly fashionable because they accentuated the verticality of the face and the size of the forehead, which was viewed as beautiful, similar to the verticality of Gothic cathedrals. She casts a shadow onto the wall behind her, but her figure is well illuminated. It's as if she's spotlit. Christus's approach to rendering light and shadow certainly reflects his training in Van Eyck's workshop. There's a sensitive contrast between the gentle shadows and the paleness of her skin. But her eyes are confidently fixated upon us. She's observant, acute. Her gaze is calm, yet deeply penetrating. It's almost unsettling. Five and a half centuries later, she continues to captivate her audience. We continue to scrutinize her just as she scrutinizes us. So thinking about this notion of the gaze, in the Florentine profile portraits we saw, there is no possibility for eye contact between sitter and viewer. So consider how revolutionary then this Florentine portrait would have been. Andrea del Castagno's man looks directly at us, but is also rendered in three-quarter, breaking with Italian tradition and aligning with Netherlandish norms of portraiture. And there is that question again. Is this something Andrea del Castagno here independently invented? Or did he borrow it from early Netherlandish painting? This is the first Florentine example of three-quarter portraiture that survives. And here's the thing. Artists themselves didn't have to travel across the Alps for their styles to diffuse. Many of their patrons, whether merchants or politicians, already made that journey regularly, bringing foreign artwork with them and indirectly causing stylistic mixing. Florence had close commercial ties to Bruges. Indeed, Bruges was home to a major branch of the Medici Bank. And the manager of this branch was a Florentine, Tommaso Portinari. And we know Portinari, with all his wealth, commissioned works from the most renowned Flemish painters during his time in Bruges. We saw Petrus Christus rise to the forefront of the Bruges art scene after the death of his master, Jan van Eyck. But Christus' spotlight would be stolen in 1465 when a German Boer painter, Hans Memling, settled in the city and made a splash. Memling became a sensation, instantly attracting many high-profile commissions and becoming very rich himself. And he's particularly well known for the quality of his extraordinary for their anatomical precision. The modeling of the faces in three-quarter, just a hint of a faint beard, a slight rosiness in the cheeks, highlights on the nose, shadows giving volume to the face, even the inner corner of the eye, the subtle color gradient in the iris. Maria wears a bejeweled necklace and a long conical hennan, leading us to this illusionistic trompe-l'oeil stone frame. The hennan's veil seems to extend out of the frame as a result. Tommaso and Maria married in 1470, and these portraits were probably commissioned to commemorate their union. But when you consider their birth dates, you realize that he's in his 40s and she's 14. Today, Maria would be in 8th, 9th grade. This kind of age difference was typical in the Renaissance, and young girls were seen as particularly desirable because of their virginity. But Memling here shows Maria as a mature woman rather than a naive young girl. You may have noticed that their hands are both clasped in prayer, but it's odd because they look like they're praying to each other. That's because there's actually a missing piece to the puzzle here. These portraits initially flanked an image of the Virgin and Child, and together they formed a hinged triptych. We know that from historical records, but the central panel is now lost. This reconstruction is hypothetical, but I think it succeeds in showing how the holy image would have provided a vibrant divine counterpoint. This is a hypothetical reconstruction, but I think it succeeds in showing how the holy image in the center would have provided a vibrant divine counterpoint to the austere, earthly realm of the pious couple in prayer. I'd like to show you some elemental maps of these portraits obtained using X-ray fluorescence imaging. Shining X-rays of a certain wavelength on a painting affects different chemical elements present in the paint layers to reveal their presence and distribution. So these scans show us what artists used to achieve the we see, but also revisions or pentimenti they made in the process. When we look at Maria's henna, for example, it's a plain black headdress in the final product, but the copper distribution map shows that, in fact, initially it was studded with pearls forming the letters M and T for Maria and Tommaso. We also see this design in the lead map. Now copper is associated with the mineral azurite, a blue pigment, and lead is associated with the pigment lead white. So the M and T design were originally done in blue and white before being abandoned in favor of the simpler black velvet. Now ultimately, patrons dictate how they want to be shown, so perhaps Maria wanted to appear more modest in the presence of the religious image originally in the center. Flaunting material wealth wouldn't be appropriate here. It so happens that Tommaso was descended from Falco Portinari, who in 1288 founded a hospital in Florence, the Santa Maria Nuova, which is still operating today as the oldest hospital in the city, and it's surreal to see a modern ambulance there now. Well, Tommaso Portinari had a family chapel inside the hospital and he commissioned for the altar of this chapel a massive triptych from Hugo van der Hoes, a specialist in large-scale altarpieces based in Ghent. What did this mean? Well, it meant that a major Flemish painting was going to travel to Florence and go on permanent display, and Hugo van der Hoes, who synthesized the styles of Jan van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, certainly didn't disappoint. In fact, if the most iconographically complex Flemish painting of the early 15th century is the Ghent altarpiece, its late 15th century counterpart would be Hugo's Portinari altarpiece. Like we saw with the Ghent altarpiece, the closed state of Hugo's triptych shows the Annunciation in Grisaille, and since this event leads logically and chronologically into the birth of Christ, when the triptych is opened on Holy Days, we see the adoration of the newborn Christ in the stable at Bethlehem. Rays of heavenly light emanate from his figure. The first to arrive at the scene, even before the three magi, are three shepherds. Here, Hugo gives them astoundingly individualized faces and gestures, from piety to speechless surprise. And they've brought their agricultural tools, his straw hat. They've just come from the fields. And, I mean, Hugo van der Hoes is a virtuoso portraitist, both in his sensitivity to facial structure and his ability to imbue figures with a certain psychological depth. Below the shepherds are angels with lavish robes. The one closest to us has wings of peacock feathers, the eyespots alluding to the all-seeing eye of God. And he wears this cloth of gold with pomegranate motifs, a signature of Florentine weaving workshops that specialized in producing these textiles. Unbelievably expensive objects. Indeed, we know Portinari was also a cloth merchant, who, like Giovanni Arnolfini, imported luxury textiles into Flanders. Moving clockwise around the Christ child, we arrive at two vases of flowers and a bundle of wheat, consecrated as the body of Christ in the Eucharist. That wheat echoes Christ's corporeal form. Count the number of blue flowers, columbines, in the glass vase. Seven, reminding us of the Virgin Mary's seven joys, but also seven sorrows, many relating to Christ's sacrifice. Then we see irises, symbolic of Mary's chastity, as well as two red lilies evoking the color of blood, again pointing to Christ's death on the cross. Notice how Hugo approaches the optics of rendering translucent glass and the shadows cast onto the ground. The ceramic vase is based on an imported Valencian type, a good reminder that Europe was interconnected with sprawling commercial networks. I love these two angels on our left. One is painted in profile, the other in three-quarter. The former wears a stalk of red coral on his head. It's a protective talisman, here protecting the Christ child. All of these angels wear highly specific liturgical vestments, robes worn at church rituals. Remember that this triptych was commissioned for a chapel altar. These vestments connect the pictorial space to the viewer crane to the triptych at the altar, where they'd see these vestments physically worn. The pictorial space is continuous across the central panel and the wings. In the left wing, aside from the elegant drapery, there is actually a familiar face. The man kneeling in prayer is Tommaso Portinari. Here his portrait was painted separately and attached onto the panel, which suggests he was sketched from life. Towering over him, protecting him, is St. Thomas or Tommaso, his namesake and patron saint. Behind him are his two sons. And look in the far background. There's someone in the central panel wearing the same blue robes. This is the pregnant Mary, accompanied by Joseph and their donkey, en route to Bethlehem, the prequel to the story here. Across the triptych in the right wing are the female counterparts, Maria Portinari and her daughter with their respective patron saints. At this point, Maria was in her early 20s and Tommaso in his 50s, but again there's no visible age difference. Her head in this time has the exact M&T pearl design Memling had abandoned, which is curious. We're unsure why. And her necklace looks familiar too. She wears the same one in Memling's portrait. When the Portinari altarpiece arrived in Florence after a protracted journey by ship overseas, to say that it absolutely dazzled Florentine artists is an understatement. To them, Hugo's realism was not just impressive, it was thoroughly shocking. Painters were eager to emulate the Flemish technique and before long we see Domenico Ghilondaio, a rising star in Florence, quoting the Portinari triptych in his own adoration but with a classical spin. Look at those Corinthian columns in the background and the Roman arch. And larger-scale landscapes would increasingly find their way into the backgrounds of Florentine paintings in the coming years. And I hope you notice in each of these that painters are increasingly paying attention to the individualized faces of each figure in their composition in a way they're integrating portrait painting into altarpiece production. So even if we're not looking at a portrait as such, I hope you still notice how artists are approaching this question of The Portinari triptych may have survived intact, but many times altarpieces are split up and sold separately and once they're scattered it becomes a puzzle we have to piece together and it's very difficult to do. If you're in a gallery of early Renaissance paintings, chances are many of the works hanging on the walls are fragments of now separated altarpieces. The National Gallery in London owns this pair of Memling panels. They're the wings of a triptych whose central panel was lost until the 90s when an art historian noticed that a Virgin and Child in the Uffizi had suspiciously similar dimensions. On the wings we see stock imagery of Saints John the Baptist and Lawrence and although they may appear individualized here, if you look at other triptychs by Memling you quickly realize that these are essentially copied and pasted using pouncing in Memling's extremely busy workshop. So in fact they're generic faces, generic images. What I really want to show you is the reverse of these wings, the outer wings. Nine magnificent cranes in a clearing under rosy twilight. There's the outline of a predator in the background just barely visible, maybe a fox watching the flock waiting to strike. But there's a sentinel crane here to stand guard holding a rock in its claw. If the crane fell asleep while standing watch, its foot would be relaxed, the stone would fall, and it would be woken up. That's a medieval legend and cranes thus became symbolic of vigilance. But why would they be included here? Well the coat of arms offers a prominent clue. It's been traced to the Paganiotti family, Florentine clergymen and friends of the Medici. The crane happened to be their family emblem so everything clicks into place, this nocturnal scene. Memling approaches these cranes much as he approaches portrait painting. The interplay of light and shadow, those careful highlights, the supple sinuous forms of their necks form a dance across these two panels. And just like the portraits of people we saw earlier, some of these cranes are in profile, some are in three-quarter, and some are even more contorted positions. So both the Portinari triptych and the Paganiotti triptych that we just saw were exported from Bruges to Florence. But if you've ever had a lost package, you know that it's not easy for shipments to reach their destinations, especially international shipments. For a painting to reach Florence from Bruges in the Renaissance, it had to survive a harrowing voyage overseas. Overland routes were typically too mountainous to be practical. But here's the issue, there were privateers on the open seas, essentially state-sanctioned pirates or maritime mercenaries. A string of merchant towns from the Netherlands to the Baltic states had organized themselves into the Hanseatic League, this defensive association to protect their commercial interests. And in the 1470s, they waged a maritime war against their competitor, England. Bottom line is, the oceans weren't safe. This triptych by Memling was commissioned for Florentine banker. It was supposed to reach Pisa first by ship, and then Florence by wagon. Now it just so happened that on its merry way to Pisa, it was intercepted by a privateer of the Hanseatic League, who captured it and brought it instead to Poland. Well, when they heard of this, the Florentine patrons sued the entire Hanseatic League in papal court. But the privateers justified their seizure, because the ship transporting this triptych was English. It was an enemy ship. So the patrons ended up losing the case, and Memling's last judgment remains in Poland today. And so we see this network of commercial connections facilitating interesting two-way dialogues across the Alps, whether for good or for bad. And likewise, the dialogues between Florentine and Flemish painters then becomes unsurprising. By the final decades of the 15th century, Hans Memling and Hugo van der Hoes were the stars of the show on the Flemish end. And we see one final evolution in portraiture, which is the incorporation of sweeping open landscapes into the background. Shaky dating, again, makes it challenging to determine who did it first, the Florentines or the Flemish. But Memling's portraits contain open landscapes as early as 1470. This slightly later example is interesting because it shows two modes of portraiture in one. The man is in but he holds a Roman coin with the Emperor Nero in profile. Now remember, this is by an artist working in Bruges, so the inclusion of a classical element is unexpected. But it's very possible that in fact this man, like Tommaso Portinari, is an Italian merchant living in Bruges who requested the inclusion of this humanist iconography. The landscape may actually provide clues to his identity. Palm trees are certainly more common in Italy than in Flanders, and the palm, the swan, even the choice of Nero might all be puns on his name, although really it's all guesswork. What's interesting is that around the same time, if not slightly earlier, Sandro Botticelli, then a rising star at the Medici court, painted a strikingly similar composition. A youth in an open landscape holding a medal of Cosimo de' Medici, who had just died and was being honored as the pater patriae, the father of Florence. Notice how the gilded metal actually projects out of the paint. It's modeled in a hard substance called gesso and affixed onto the panel, a technique called pastiglia, enhancing the sense of three-dimensionality but also providing an interactive tactile element to this work. It'd be touched. Perhaps Botticelli was influenced by Memling's landscapes, and then Memling was inspired by Botticelli's inclusion of a medal. Whatever the case, the similarity in design certainly points to a degree of interaction between the two, even if only through exported paintings. Now, by this point in the 1480s, the possibilities of portraiture had multiplied. Profile versus three-quarter, eyes looking away versus direct gaze, black background or interior versus open landscape, the continuum of photorealism and idealization. Painters were free to mix and match. But what if you're unsatisfied with a profile portrait, and you also don't want a static three- quarter view? What was the best way to deliver maximum visual impact? Well, Botticelli, as a member of a new generation of Florentine painting after Andrade Castagno, offers one solution, the frontal view. This young man is a landmark in portraiture. He has the penetrating gaze of Petrus Christus's young girl, but now he faces us squarely, challenging us directly. We're forced to engage and return his searching gaze. But there is another solution. This whole time, we've been tossing and turning in the realm of two dimensions. What about three dimensions? When viewing a portrait bust, we, the viewer, have the liberty of choosing the angle. If you want to switch from frontal view to three-quarter, just walk two steps, and as we do so, we see the shadows and highlights shifting location and shape, revealing different nuances to her expression. There's a certain spontaneity to her posture, as if she's turning her head, slightly startled by our presence. Many early busts were meant to be displayed against a wall, so the back of the head would be left incomplete. This one, however, is sculpted in the round, meaning completed all around, although the back is much less detailed. But notice how her hair is tied up. It was indecent for a woman to let her hair down. Long hair tempted men, it was said. Hair tied up high also draws attention to her high forehead, which was again considered a hallmark beauty. To end this episode, I want to share a genre of portraiture that's often overlooked. We've seen young couples, successful adults, people who've passed away with all souvenir, but I find portraits of elderly people uniquely moving. Who do you think of when you look at this couple? I'm reminded of my grandparents. To me, Memling captures such wisdom and sagacity in the intensity of his gaze. Look at the wrinkles just outside the corners of his eyes and on the bridge of his nose, the white highlights on his hair, and the hints of a gray stubble beard. The raw realism of old age reminds me of varistic Roman portraiture, where wrinkles were accentuated and emphasized in busts of Roman patricians to convey gravitas, this idea of dignified wisdom and authority. The background might initially seem black, but look again and you'll see it's bluish green. This region was painted with azurite, so originally it would have been a rich blue, but the darkened pigment, I think, actually throws his head into sharper relief. This couple seems like they're engaged in intimate conversation, if not with words, then with their eyes. They're not praying. They're not trying to flaunt social status. These are photographs, snapshots of this aging couple, honoring them before they pass on. And when I look at this couple, the abundance of experience and intelligence that comes across, I begin imagining their life story. We don't know who they were or who commissioned Memling to paint this. Was it the couple themselves to memorialize their marriage of probably many, many years, or perhaps their children to immortalize their visages? In any case, I'd like to think that these works commemorate two lives well-lived. Most people in the Renaissance didn't live to even see adulthood, so living to old age itself was worth celebrating. And isn't it so subtly wonderful that they live on five centuries later? Portraiture, photography ensured that they weren't forgotten. We might even see ourselves or our own grandparents in them. And they've taken on new lives, too. He's in New York and she's in Houston. Yes, they're now separated. And to reunite them here on the screen up close is quite moving. In this work, the relationship is intergenerational. A grandpa in three-quarter and his grandson in profile. You might have been drawn to the older man's nose. It's a skin condition, rhinophyma. But look beyond that and you'll see delicate white hairs and also the dots of paint highlighting the foliage outside the window. It's beautiful, serene, and heartwarming. The Florentine painter, Domenico Ghilandaio, captures this wonderful moment of intergenerational bonding forever. It reminds me of my time with my grandfather and it urges me to cherish it. What is it that makes a portrait compelling? Whether Renaissance or modern, is it the angle, the degree of realism or surrealism, the emotional impact, the historical context, or simply the fact of seeing the world of a fellow human being? Getting to know them just a little bit. Getting a snapshot of their lives. Renaissance painters were asking this very question, developing the genre throughout the 15th century in a way, collaborating across the Alps to do it, whether it be productive dialogue or parallel development. And the results are extraordinary. How privileged we are today to look at and learn from these Renaissance faces. Next time, we'll expand our geographical and chronological horizons by considering Renaissance Europe in the context of multiple conversations. We'll look at the Iberian Peninsula, tracing Portugal's interactions with Africa in the Age of Discovery, and also the Inquisition in a newly unified Spain. We'll expand on the idea of transalpine dialogue beyond Florence and Flanders, looking at Paris, Ferrara, Rome, and Naples. And we'll consider interactions between different media with the advent of printmaking in 15th century Germany. I hope to see you then. Thank you for watching A Narrative Art History of the Renaissance.