It is a long holiday weekend and you have some extra time to immerse yourself in museums and museum culture. So why not visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit "The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello To Bellini." That's exactly what I did.
I went to the museum to view the exhibit for my art history class for the purpose of research for a college paper. However I left with a lot more than research. I left wanting to come back purely for the enjoyment of art.
This exhibit is more than art history. It is about rediscovering the individual portrait. It is amazing to recognize in these portraits from the past the likenesses of people we all know. My husband thought one of the little children looked exactly like my niece Carolyn. I recognized my Italian ancestry in the features of Florentines and Venetians from long ago.
One woman said in the user-friendly library that offers students and researchers a chance to look at a hard copy catalogue from the exhibit and research all day if need be for free that she saw in one of the portraits the features of a male friend of hers from long ago. The catalogue from the exhibit also available in the bookstore for sale if you want to take this enjoyable and unique exhibit home with you. Incidentally the soft cover version of the catalogue published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press in New Haven and London costs only $45 at retail for the soft cover version of the catalogue.
According to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "It has been said that the Renaissance witnessed the rediscovery of the individual. In keeping with this notion, early Renaissance Italy also hosted the first great age of portraiture in Europe." The museum added in its official statement, "portraiture assumed a new importance, whether it was to record the features of a family member for future generations, celebrate a prince or warrior, extol the beauty of a woman, or make possible the exchange of a likeness among friends."
This exhibition brings together approximately 160 work by artists including Donatello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Pisanello, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, and Antonello da Messina, and in media ranging from painting and manuscript illumination to marble sculpture and bronze medals, testifying to the new vogue for and uses of portraiture in fifteenth-century Italy.
During the early Renaissance, artists working in Florence, Venice, and the courts of Italy created magnificent portrayals of the people around them, from heads of state and church to patrons, scholars, poets, and artists, concentrating for the first time on producing recognizable likenesses and expressions of personality. Added the museum in a statement, "the rapid development of portraiture was linked closely to Renaissance society and politics, ideals of the individual, and concepts of beauty. The object may have been to commemorate a significant event—a marriage, death, the accession to a position of power—or it may have been to record the features of an esteemed member of the family for future generations."
Featuring many rare international loans, this exhibition presents an unprecedented survey of the period and provide new research and insight into the early history of portraiture. It is divided into three sections and spans a period of eight decades. Beginning in Florence, where independent portraits first appeared in abundance, it moves to the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Bologna, Milan, Urbino, Naples and papal Rome, and ends in Venice, where a tradition of portraiture asserted itself surprisingly late in the century.
In other words, local Staten Island art historians ought to make this trip. I expect to see some classmates there on my next visit. Four stars out of a possible five stars. In other words, this trip to Renaissance Italy is a visit that any art historian might not want to miss.
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