«In the words of the historian Jacob Burckhardt, fifteenth-century Italy was "the place where the notion of the individual was born." In keeping with this notion, early Renaissance Italy hosted the first great age of portraiture in Europe.» Artists working in Florence, Venice, and the courts of Italy created magnificent portrayals of the people around them—heads of state and church, patrons, scholars, poets, artists—concentrating for the first time on producing recognizable likenesses and expressions of personality.
Written by a team of international scholars, The Renaissance Portrait provides new insight into the early history of portraiture in Italy, examining in detail how its major art centers—Florence, the princely courts, and Venice—saw the rapid development of portraiture as closely linked to Renaissance society and politics, ideals of the individual, and concepts of beauty. More than 160 magnificent works, in media ranging from painting and manuscript illumination to marble sculpture and bronze medals, created by artists that include Donatello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Pisanello, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, and Antonello de Messina, are illustrated and extensively discussed. With abundant style and visual ingenuity, these masters transformed the plain facts of observation into something beautiful to behold.
