Thinking of Answers by A. C. Grayling

Author:A. C. Grayling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hewer Text UK Ltd
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

Renaissance Portraits

What does Renaissance painting, and especially portraiture, tell us about the history of ethics?

Since at least classical antiquity there have been portraits of individuals as opposed to generic representations of human faces. Apelles, antiquity’s most famous painter, was celebrated for his portrait of Alexander the Great, and many of the luminaries of the Greek and Roman worlds, especially emperors, were frequently portrayed. The purpose was chiefly either propagandistic or exemplary – emperors’ statues gazed over Rome’s far-flung subjects with marmoreal authority, while busts of philosophers and poets celebrated cultural achievement.

Unquestionably the most striking ancient examples are Roman Egypt’s Fayum mummy portraits of the first three centuries ce. Had those wonderfully warm, realistic, vivid depictions been known in later centuries they would assuredly have inspired emulation. As it is, the surviving portraiture of medieval times, largely restricted to illuminated manuscripts and recumbent tomb sculptures of knights and bishops, focused on a narrow range of individuals only.

The explosion of portraiture in the Renaissance is striking enough in itself, but its comparison with the preceding period of nearly a thousand years since the decay of Western classical civilisation makes it even more so. For suddenly it was no longer just nobles and churchmen who were portrayed, but individuals from right across society. Kings and popes continued to have official portraits, and princesses were painted so that possible royal spouses could inspect them; but it is the burghers, wives, children, artists’ self-portraits, family groups, youths, beauties, scholars, artisans, old men and women – portraits known to us now by anonymous labels such as ‘Portrait of a Young Man’, ‘Portrait of a Man with a Glove’ – that appeared in large numbers, and with them studies of physiognomies and types, ‘tronies’, peasants, deformed faces, and even – as in the eccentric work of Archimboldo at the Prague court of the even more eccentric Rudolf II – portraits made out of vegetable still-lifes.

The reason for this efflorescence of portraiture is the same as the reason for the Renaissance itself. The late-medieval mind saw the world as a vale of tears, a risky place where one’s soul was at risk of snagging on the everywhere-surrounding thorns of sin; one had to struggle through temptation, disease and danger, in the hope of heaven at last – the place pointed to by Gothic cathedrals trying to escape earth through their soaring spires and flying arches. Grim contemptus mundi literature bemoaned the fallen condition of man and the world, which latter it portrayed as the anteroom of hell.

Consider by contrast the beautiful hues and expansive, sunlit, airy temper of Renaissance art, with its picnic scenes and flowery landscapes, its exquisite faces and flowing garments, its musical instruments, books, and portraits of real people living in a world where joy and beauty are to be found. What a revolution in sensibility, philosophy and morality had occurred! It was the reawakening of the possibility of good in the here and now, a lesson taught by the poets and thinkers of the

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