The Portraits:

Approaches towards the characterization of the individual in the works of Leonardo and Raphael.

In the last decade of the fifteenth century the independent portrait finally emerged as an autonomous work of art. The general revival of descriptive art in the Renaissance signaled a return to portraiture and to such antique portrait forms as the medal and the bust.

Initially, the role of the Renaissance portrait was commemorative. This was in line with the Renaissance belief that human beings were important in themselves and deserved to be recorded and remembered. (refer to study book Pg75 The cult of personality).
*High Renaissance attempt to suggest character and emotional range in the portraiture.

Leonardo's developments

Raphael's developments


Leonardo's Portrait development

Leonardo believed that the portrait should portray what he described as "the motions of the mind".
Leonardo's invention: full-length portrait, let the subject looks larger and grander than in Quattrocento portraits, in keeping with the new dignity of the High Renaissance.
*his approach to portraiture has considerable beauty and psychological power, which is registered as sullenness and feline languor. This emphasis on a heightened expression of personality, as well as the general shape of the head and the pose of the figure.


Examples from Leonardo:
Ginevra de Benci
Cecilia Gallerani
Mona Lisa



Ginevra de* Benci (1474)

*is still a Quattrocento portrait
-- e.g. Pose: typical Quattrocento bust portrait
*the painting is lit direct and rather harsh, by setting it in open space. (different from Cecilia Gallerani).
*Feature objects: the juniper leaves in the background of Ginevra de* Benci allude to her name (ginevra = juniper in Italian). This gives that portrait a special poetic quality.
*Leonardo was to call the “motions of the mind*; a sombre, misty riverscape behind echoes the mystery of her heavy-lidded eyes.
*introduce the idea: reveal the character's inner life of the person; change the psychology in a portrait. Individualized: tell us about the figure by what he painted with it.


Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with the Ermine) (1483)

*Milan woman, associated with the Duke of Milan.
*she was the mistress of Duke of Milan, and the ermine she is holding was one of his symbols. This use of emblems in portraiture was common in the Renaissance but as usual Leonardo manages to transform an old tradition.

STYLE
*develop new approaches to portraiture:
form, style, format. * the painting is lit from above, this increases the contrast between light and shadow and throws the features into greater relief. (achieved this effect by shown it in restricted space: another innovations).
*Pose: (different from Ginevra de* Benci) a half-length portrait which includes the hands and arms. This type of portrait became the model for most subsequent portraits.
*painted with chiaroscuro: the first time in the history of portraiture a sense of the mystery and uniqueness of the human personality.
*telling us about the person by the animal (ermine): a clean, noble animal, the characteristics of ermine tell us about her personalities. The ermine would die rather than soil itself.
*Cecilia turns and reacts, a gentle smile of welcome sparkling in her eyes and playing across the corners of her mouth as she glances at a companion outside the formal limits of her picture space.
*the primary pools of light reflect with wonderful subtlety from form to form: the coat of the ermine casts a secondary radiance on Cecilia’s hand and arm; her neck and chin play intricate games with bouncing light; and the ermine's cheek shines softly through its veiling shadow.
*first painting ever that conveyed such a living sense of the sitter's deportment -- the carriage of the head, the slope of the shoulders, the slim elegance of an aristocratic hand, and the total courtly grace.
>>Both these portraits feature objects associated with the sitters.



Mona Lisa (c.1503-06)

He had created a portrait that was in effect a whole treatise about portraiture as an art.
*first modern portrait: 3/4 profile (innovation), continues the figure well below the waist, and both arms appear complete.—bBased upon the calm and balanced arrangement.
*the left forearm lies along the arm of the chair, the right hand falls across it, the fingers sloping down. Both hands are utterly relaxed, completing in their unity the gentle spiral turn of the torso and head.
*Mona Lisa occupied space as a pyramidal form: treated the single figure much as he had the intertwined group in the Madonna and Child with St. Anne. This pyramid established the 3-D picture space, with depth then being taken further into the mysterious atmosphere of the landscape background.
*the whole figure has volume and solidity, broadening towards the base so that it occupies the whole foreground. This makes the subject look larger and grander than in Quattrocento portraits, in keeping with the High Renaissance ideal of human appearance.
*Leonardo captured people's imagination, by painted her in the mysterious way.
*Spprezzatura: disdain, cultivated civilized person, lack of concern about ordinary things, but to focus on more worthwhile interest. These are shown in Mona Lisa's expressions, she is focused in things beyond us.
*Interaction with the landscape: the locks of hair falling over her right shoulder blend with rocky outcroppings through which a road winds; the folds of the scarf over the left shoulder are continued in the line of a distant bridge.
*individualized: the manner in which this woman challenges traditional cultural assumptions about appropriate female behaviour, ie. Woman should never look directly into a man's eyes.
*FACE: both individual characteristics and an idealised form; the portrait is naturalistic, but not realistic, as 15th portraits were. The famous smile was achieved through the use of a tonal technique sfumato.
*this gives her the mysterious and ambiguous expression.
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Raphael's Development in Portraiture

Raphael is one of the most acute of all portraitists, effortlessly cleaving through the external defenses of his sitter, yet courteously colluding with whatever image the soul would seek to have portrayed. This duality looking beneath the surface and yet remaining wholly respectful of the surface, gives an additional layer of meaning to all his portraits.
*The work of Raphael had achieved a particularly brilliant fusion of personality portrait-- with a record of status.
*He set his Florentine patron, against a background of landscape and sky delicately adjusted to the shapes of their bodies and the forces of their personalities, therefore the subject-- character is suggested as never before in Italian portraiture.
*Leonardo's use of sfumato attracted Raphael.


Examples from Raphael:
Agnolo Doni
Portrait of the Cardinal
Portrait of Baldassar Castiglione
Portrait of a Woman
Pope Leo X with Cardinals


Agnolo Doni (1506)

The impact of the Mona Lisa on Raphael is best demonstrated by the two portraits commissioned from him by the young merchant Agnolo Doni.
In his Maddalena portrait, Raphael closely followed the compositional model of Mona Lisa, without the mystery of Leonardo's painting.
* same pyramidal format, but Raphael's open receding Tuscan countryside forms a very different background to Leonardo’s fantastic rocky landscape.
* Maddalena's position in society is established by her clothes and jewellery, and by the still pose that dominates the landscape background, rather than by the individual features of her appearance.
*His personalities/position are shown by the landscape:
-relaxes outdoors with one arm on a balustrade, the shaggy masses of his hair reflected in the trees at the lower right, the bulky shapes of his arms and hands in the low hills of the background.
-the matronly forms of his wife, Maddalena Strozzi Doni, are also integrated with the landscape, to the point that the artist repeated the pattern of the beaded border of her transparent shoulder veil in the foliage of the slender tree.
*the wealthy young wool merchant is impressive cool, self-contained, firm.
This was the beginning of Raphael's psychological insight in the portrait which was to remain always more formal and less penetrating than Leonardo.
His portraits were to be a model for European patrons and thus artists for the next 400 years.


While in Rome, he developed the independent portrait, when he became a great portraitist.
Raphael's frescoes in the Papal Apartments featured the collective portrait.


Portrait of the Cardinal (1510*1)

The painting is one of Raphael's more successful portraits. It is principally known for its chromatic and psychological content.
*still close in style and composition to his Florentine portraits.
*the Young Cardinal's pose is in his handling of coulours: the subtly observed changes of tone over the surface of the Cardinal’s red watered-silk gown.
*a neutral dark background which focuses the viewer's attention on the figure.


Portrait of Baldassar Castiglione (1515)

Raphael painted this portrait of his friend, Castiglione, who wrote the Book of Courtier (which defines the ideal of spiritual and adsthetic perfection as a guide to the behavious and character of the High Renaissance gentleman). Like many High Renaissance portraits, it is painstakingly designed to look both simple and sophisticated. The count displays the inner calm, the ideal of restrained, and learned manners required of a gentleman.
*exemplifies the riposo (inner calm).
*refined his use of Leonardo's example.
The composition is made up of large oval forms that relate to each other in imaginary 3-D space: the shoulders and arms, the sleeves, the face, and the hat which completes the upward movement of the spiraling oval forms.
*shows the subtle relationships of forms and tones. The harmony, sensitivity and sureness, self-possession, elegance and courtesy that Raphael implied about the character of his subject paralleled the new ideal of Humanist taste in the High Renaissance.


Portrait of a Woman (1516)

*appears to have been one of Raphael's favourite models in the last years of his life.
*this portrait represents an ideal, with such formal and tonal richness.
*this figure pyramid is built out of oval or elliptical forms, but the handling of tone is much more lustrous. The perfect oval of the face is repeated by the line of the necklace and the bodice and the ruffled form of the sleeve.
*a neutral, shaded background focuses attention on the figure. This work became the basis of Classical portraiture for centuries to follow.


Pope Leo X with Cardinals
Giulio de’Medici and Luigi de’Rossi (1518/19)

The pope's right stands his cousin, Cardinal Giulio de* Medici, subsequently Pope Clement VII; on Leo’s left stands his nephew Cardinal Luigi de* Rossi.
*a major influence reflected in group portraits of Popes and their associates in later Italian painting.
*develops the motif of the seated Pope by placing its figures in relation to a startling diagonal perspective that begins with the table upon which Leo X displays his learned refinement by leafing through an old illuminated manuscript.
*the effect of the diagonal perspective is place the three heads in a horizontal frieze across the picture plane, with the deeper tonal shadows on the faces of the Cardinals establishing depth.
*Leo's power is expressed by his position and by the deference of his Cardinals, and some of his ruthlessness in his features.
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