Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture

What is a portrait meant to do? In the Italian Renaissance, one primary aim of portraiture was to make someone who is absent seem present by imitating his or her appearance so closely in a painting or sculpture that he or she seems to be right here in front of you. Giovanni Battista Moroni was particularly praised for his portraits that seemed to capture his sitters exactly as they appeared before him. He was a painter active in the mid-16th century in and around Bergamo, just northeast of Milan. His portraits seem to record in extraordinary detail his sitters, their clothing, and their things. Here, for example, the spectacular outfit of John de Rolimo Grumelli, more popularly known, for obvious reason, as the man in pink. In his most famous painting, The Tailor, we appear to have interrupted the handsome young man just as he's about to cut black cloth along white chalk lines. Moroni gives us the sense, especially in his comparatively few portraits of women, that he has not idealized his sitter, not conformed her face to prevailing ideals of beauty, but rather presented her as she was, warts and all, though always with dignity. Of course, Moroni wasn't just copying the world around him. His celebrated effect of having captured people exactly as they looked was just that, an effect, when enhanced by various tactics like dramatic lighting, close crops, and nuanced facial expressions. This exhibition underscores how inventive he was, all while creating the illusion of having recorded reality. Displayed alongside the portraits is a selection of rare and exquisite Renaissance objects and one antique sculpture. They represent types of objects that appear in Moroni's paintings, and they bring to life the vibrant material and visual world of Moroni and his sitters. For an artist best known for his naturalism, what did he see? He convincingly conveys the brocade of this young woman's dress through dabs of paint. You can almost see his brush dancing on this canvas. But to fully appreciate his translation of a luxurious textile into shorthand strokes of paint takes understanding what Renaissance brocade looked like. This kind of textile was a work of art in itself, in which extremely thin strips of silver or gilt silver were laboriously wrapped by hand around silk thread and woven in. This is just one of the rich encounters in the exhibition between Moroni's portraits and the visual world that served as his point of departure. Moroni never achieved the fame of contemporaries like Titian or Bronzino. He's not known to have ever traveled to the major artistic centers of his day, like Venice or Florence. But he innovated portraiture in spectacular ways, experimenting with formats, genres, and ways to make a portrait seem to come alive. In this first major exhibition on Moroni ever held in North America, we invite you to discover or rediscover one of the most breathtaking portraitists of Renaissance Italy. The exhibition is on view in the Oval Room and East Gallery until June 2nd, 2019. For more information, please visit Frick.org.