"Portrait and Imprint in Fifteenth-Century Italy," Art History 38 (2015): 11-37

© Association of Art Historians 2014 11

Portrait and Imprint in Fifteenth-Century ItalyJoost Keizer

Pressed against the right edge of the picture, a donor stands in the presence of the

Virgin and child and the infant Saint John the Baptist (plate 1). The donor – an old

man, almost completely bald – is undressed for the grave.1 By the time the Italian

painter Luca Signorelli made this painting, probably in the late 1480s, the man was

dead. Signorelli indicated this not only by depicting the man in a state of undress.

The colour of his arms is grey and the man’s face seems painted after a death-mask

had been made from the corpse. The weight of the plaster has caused the man’s

cheeks and eye-sockets to sink into his face; and this is also why his nose bridge and

jaws protrude remarkably. Signorelli has opened the man’s eyes and has made him

stand upright, but he amended little more. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of

the man’s portrait is the folded ear. There is no physical cause for the ear to fold so

dramatically; there is no cap or hat.

Flap ears were a regular consequence of the process of making a death-mask. In

order to protect the hair against the wet plaster, a piece of cloth would be wrapped

over the hair – a procedure described around 1400 by Cennini Cennini.2 There were

two ways to do this. The fi rst was to wrap the cotton over the tip of the ears, causing

them to fold tightly against the head; the second was to wrap the cloth behind the

ears, which made them fl ap out from the head.

A terracotta bust of a member of the Capponi family, made around 1500 and

now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which is based either on a

death-mask or a life-cast, is an example of the second procedure (plate 2).3 His

ears do not only fl ap; they also miss their cavities, probably because the caster

had fi lled them with cotton wool in order to prevent the plaster from entering

them, which is what Cennini had recommended. Another terracotta portrait

of a Capponi family member, also at the V&A, was partly made from a mould

and partly modelled by the artist himself (plate 3). The face and neck were cast

after a death-mask, and the artist added the shoulders and hair.4 Parts of the cast

have also been remodelled: the eyes are open and the artist kneaded the sitter’s

hair. The curiously folded ears, however, were not corrected. In common with

Signorelli’s donor portrait, there is no cap or some other headdress that would

help to explain the ears’ projection from the head.

The fl ap ears of the two Capponi busts might have been the result of an extremely

economical way of making portraits. Terracotta was a relatively inexpensive material,

and you could shape it by pressing it into a mould, into a death-mask for example.5

But the same cannot be argued for Signorelli’s painting. It would have been easy

Detail from Desiderio da Settignano (?), Portrait of Niccolò da Uzzano, 1480s (?), (plate 8).

DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12132Art History | ISSN 0141-679038 | 1 | February 2015 | pages 10-37


Joost Keizer

for the painter to correct the fl ap ear in his donor portrait, much easier than for

the artists of the Capponi busts, in order to make the portrait look more alive.

Signorelli enlivened his portrait to be sure, opening the eyes, detailing wrinkles and

recolouring the man’s skin. But alterations remained confi ned to those aspects that

ensured that you were looking at a man in his after-life.

This essay argues that Signorelli’s painting was not an isolated case of a portrait

that shows the signs of death. It presents an array of portraits from the fi fteenth

century that also document their origins in a corpse or a death-mask, and it discusses

one portrait that was based on a life-cast. Rather than arguing that some fi fteenth-

century artists were simply not skilled enough to overcome the traces of the casting

procedure, I submit that these traces served a kind of faithfulness to documentation

and replication. The portraits are informed by a highly motivated kind of realism,

formulated in response to doubts about the veracity of naturalistic pictures around

mid-fi fteenth century. Theirs is a kind of realism that can better be understood in

terms of imprint or reproduction than in terms of invention or enlivenment.

For most of us today, realism is just a style, a way of saying the same thing

differently. Authors like David Summers taught us that Renaissance artworks

do not simply imitate an existing reality but rather construct an altogether new

1 Luca Signorelli, Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and a Donor, c. 1491–94. Oil on panel, 102 x 87 cm. Paris: Musée Jacquemart-André. Photo: Musée Jacquemart-André.

Portrait and Imprint in Fifteenth-Century Italy

kind of visuality, which Summers called aesthetic.6 This is why concepts of

imagination and fantasy mean a great deal for historians of the period. And it

is also why they are very explicit about using the term ‘naturalism’ rather than

‘realism’ to describe the style of Renaissance art. Naturalism does not distinguish

between real things – say a portrait of a contemporary – and ostensibly real

things – take an imagined dragon. Both are rendered in the same realistic way,

as if the artist had witnessed both on the spot. If lifelikeness was once the credo

with which art historians described the Renaissance it is now the simulacrum,

the fantasy image that lacks a stable referent in reality.7 One of the aims of this

article is to show that some fi fteenth-century portraits already show a concern

with the perceived lack of ‘touch’ with the real. The references in some of these

portraits to imprinting, stamping and replicating were meant to introduce a more

stable referent in reality for some Renaissance art.

Posthumous PortraitsIn the fi fteenth century, the making of posthumous portraits was the order of the

day. Death provided the most frequent occasion for a portrait to be made. Family

members liked to have a keepsake of the deceased, in some cases remarkably

uncompromising images of the dead. Statues of dead corpses adorned grave

memorials in many churches in Europe, with the dead person reclining on the tomb

2 Anonymous Florentine artist, Bust of a Member of the Capponi Family, c. 1500. Terracotta, 51.4 cm (height). London: Victoria & Albert Museum. Photo: Victoria & Albert Museum.



Joost Keizer

or carved in relief on a tombstone, in both cases as if placed on a bier.8 From the mid-

fourteenth century onward, portraits of the dead also entered the recently developed

format of the independent portrait, the format of the bust-length portrait painted

on panel.9 A portrait of Rudolf IV of Austria, painted shortly after the king’s death

in 1365 and one of the earliest independent portraits, was placed in the Viennese

church of Saint Stephen over the vault in which Rudolf was entombed (plate 4).10 The

picture is probably life-size – it measures 38.7 × 22.2 cm – and depicts the king’s

face and shoulders. The Austrian portrait does not hide the fact that the king is dead.

The morbid gaze of his half-opened eyes removes the portrait from any effort at

idealization or animation.

Such explicit portraits continued being made. A posthumous portrait of

Emperor Maximilian I, of which several versions exist, shows the emperor with

his eyes closed, his mouth half opened and wearing a death cap (plate 5). An

inscription on the top of the painting makes clear that it had been painted right

after Maximilian’s death on 12 January 1519.11 It was produced when Maximilian

was lying on his deathbed, in a horizontal position: the blanket, adorned

with a cross that covered his shoulders is included in the painting, cultivating

the illusion that the picture should be viewed in a horizontal rather than a

vertical position. Maximilian’s portrait adapts the full length, reclining pose of

traditional medieval tomb sculpture to the modern format of the painted portrait

on panel. The morbid character of portraits like those of Rudolf and Maximilian

results from the fact that they introduce depictions of men and women lying in

wake into the format of the independent format, which was usually reserved for

living (or enlivened) sitters.

Many fi fteenth-century families lived with images of dead family members at

home. Death-masks had probably been made since the fourteenth century. Vasari

3 Unknown Florentine artist, Bust of a Member of the Capponi Family, c. 1500. Terracotta, 50.8 cm (height). London: Victoria & Albert Museum. Photo: Victoria & Albert Museum.



reports that by Verrocchio’s life-time (c. 1435–88) the practice of making death-

masks was well spread in Florence, so that ‘a number of these wonderfully well-made

and lifelike [naturali che paiono vivi] masks may be seen in every house in Florence over

chimney-pieces, doors, windows and cornices.’12 These portraits are all lost, but they

looked animated, as Vasari seems to imply with the phrasing ‘paiono vivi’. Not only

death-masks, but also painted portraits of dead family members hung in the homes of

Renaissance Europe. Vasari tells a story about a painting by Signorelli of his recently

4 Austrian artist, Portrait of Rudolf IV of Austria, c. 1365. Tempera (?) on parchment mounted on a fi r panel, 38.7 × 22.2 cm. Vienna: Dom- und Diözesanmuseum. Photo: Art Resource, NY.


Joost Keizer

killed son: ‘he had him stripped naked and, with extraordinary strength of mind

and without shedding a tear, made a representation of the body, because he wished

always to be able to see, in the work of his own hands, what Nature had given to him

and what cruel Fortune had taken away.’13

Such portraits of the dead are less well known today than posthumous

portraits that make the sitter look alive, even if the latter category is diffi cult to

identify as a category. Most fi fteenth-century painters were trained to overcome

death. When Domenico Ghirlandaio was asked, around 1490, to paint an old man

with a boy, he successfully masked the fact that the old man had just passed away

(plate 6). Ghirlandaio had made a drawing of the recently deceased man to prepare

5 Monogrammist AA, The Corpse of Maximilian I, 1519. Oil (?) on paper, 43 × 28 cm. Graz: Landesmuseum Joanneum, Alte Galerie. Photo: Landesmuseum Joanneum.

6 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of an Old Man with a Boy, c. 1490. Oil on panel, 62.7 × 46.3 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre. Photo: Art Resource, NY.




Joost Keizer

for the painting (plate 7).14 The sketch details the signs of death: the man’s eyes are

closed, his hair is uncombed, his cheeks have fallen into his face, and the corners

of his mouth have dropped. In the painting, Ghirlandaio opened the man’s eyes,

draped his hair orderly, blew life into his cheeks and straightened his mouth. The

man now interacts with a young boy in his lap, presumably his grandson.

Renaissance artists usually took great pains to make portraits of the deceased look

alive, not just painters but sculptors, too. Take for instance the terracotta portrait bust

of Niccolò da Uzzano, once attributed to Donatello and now given to Desiderio da

Settignano (plate 8). Technical evidence has shown that the work partly consists of a

cast of a death-mask, which has been reworked to make the portrait look animated.15

The eyes are remodelled and opened; the face is placed on a bust; and the whole

portrait has been painted in naturalistic colours, making it one of the most lifelike

portraits to survive from the fi fteenth century, even when it was probably made some

twenty years after da Uzzano’s death in 1433.16

It took work to make a dead person look alive. The Florentine artist Alessandro

Alori demanded more money for such portraits than pictures of the living. In a

memorandum of 1589, he wrote:

I have delivered to Ma. Lucretia Capponi de’ Torrigiani a portrait of her

husband Messer Raffaello done after his death, two braccia square, with

much time put in as well on the clothes as on the head, for which I had

nothing but a small clay mould. This I made several months after his

death, and the price of the said portrait, given all the labour and time,

is 30 gold scudi.17

7 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Drawing of a Dead Man, c. 1490. Metalpoint on ink prepared paper, heightened with white, 33.9 × 29.3 cm. Stockholm: Nationalmuseum. Photo: © Erik Cornelius/Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.



In the fi fteenth century, the commemorative capacity of portraiture had come

to epitomize the capacity of mimetic art to make the dead seem alive. ‘Painting’,

said Leon Battista Alberti, ‘contains a truly divine power in that not only does it

make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead

to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with

pleasure and deep admiration for the artist. … Through painting, the faces of the

dead go on living for a very long time.’18 Alberti’s statement is one of the most

well-known defi nitions of the function of portraiture, or about mimetic art in

general, a cliché already repeated in the period itself.19 In the sixteenth century,

Albrecht Dürer echoed Alberti: ‘The art of painting also preserves the fi gure of a

man after his death.’20

Traces of the ModelIn the fi fteenth century, then, two main categories of posthumous portraits painted

on panel had emerged. The fi rst, of which the portraits of Rudolf and Maximilian

formed part, were explicit portraits of dead people. The second, which included

8 Desiderio da Settignano (?), Portrait of Niccolò da Uzzano, 1480s (?). Terracotta and paint, 46 × 44 cm. Florence: Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Art Resource, NY.


Joost Keizer

Ghirlandaio’s portrait of an old man with a boy, enlivened the portrait so that you

could not see that the sitter had passed away.

The category of images represented here by Signorelli’s example sits in between

the two main formats. It enlivens the dead sitter to a certain extent while at the

same time it still makes sure that you do not confuse its model for a living person.

The category seems historically confi ned to Italy and to the fi fteenth century, with

most examples concentrating around the middle of the century. They include

painting, terracotta, and marble sculpture. Take, for instance, a tomb plaque of Neri

Capponi at Santo Spirito in Florence, carved by Bernardo Rossellino and assistants

around 1460 (plate 9). On the front side of the sarcophagus, two putti hold a disk

on which Capponi’s portrait is carved in relief and in profi le (plate 10). The relief

was almost certainly based on a death-mask; the wrinkles pulled in the soft skin

of the dead by the heavy, damp plaster are still present in Rossellino’s portrait. And

9 Bernardo Rossellino and assistants, Portrait of Neri Capponi, c. 1460. Marble, dimensions unknown. Florence: Santo Spirito. Photo: Art Resource, NY.

10 Detail of plate 9 showing Capponi’s portrait with folded ears.

11 Andrea Mantegna, Portrait of a Man, c. 1450. Oil on panel, 32.2 × 28.8 cm. Milan: Museo Poldi Pezzoli. Photo: Museo Poldi Pezzoli.



Capponi’s ears are folded, even if there is no headdress

that could account for this.21 The sculptor must

indeed have lavished a lot of attention on carving the

ears in their awkwardly folded position, not an easy

task in relief.

Posthumous portraits including such signs of

death not only occurred in explicitly funerary contexts

like the Signorelli painting – which invited the living

to pray for the donor’s afterlife – and the Capponi

bust, which forms part of a burial chapel. Independent

painted portraits could also include signs of death.

Around the middle of the fi fteenth century, Andrea

Mantegna painted a portrait of a man in profi le, the

preferred format for the preservation of a person’s

memory at the time (plate 11).22 Mantegna undoubtedly

knew about the story told in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History about the daughter of a potter from the Greek

port town of Sykon, who, before her lover departed

on a long journey, traced the shadow of his face in

profi le on the wall in order to preserve his features in

his absence.23 The story granted a memorial function

to the profi le portrait. And Mantegna was also familiar

with Roman coins that depicted Roman emperors and

dignitaries in profi le, accompanied by a name and

title that secured the memory of these men all the way

into the fi fteenth century. In the 1430s, Pisanello and

Matteo de’ Pasti developed a contemporary version

of the Roman coin, the much bigger medal, which,

without exception, showed the sitter in profi le.24

Mantegna’s portrait explicates the fact that it was

produced posthumously, almost certainly after a death-

mask. The weight of the plaster had caused the man’s

cheeks and eye-sockets to sink into his face, which also

made the nose bridge and jaws to jut out – features that

Mantegna did not disguise in his painting. The man’s

left ear is folded. At fi rst instance, it seem that the ear’s

top is pushed forward by the man’s headdress, but the

turban sits too high on the sitter’s head to allow for the

ear to fold. And the man has a stubble beard, which is

suggestive of the beard’s continuous growth in the few

days after death.25 Cennino Cennini recommended

shaving the face before the clay of the mask is applied,

but his advice was apparently not always followed.26

Two of the best-known death-masks from the

fi fteenth century, those of Lorenzo de’ Medici and San

Bernardino da Siena, in fact have stubble on cheeks and

chin (plate 12). It is not entirely clear when these traces of death started to be introduced in

otherwise enlivened portraits. But it seems that the practice started with Masaccio.

Masaccio’s fresco of the Raising of the Son of Theophilus and Saint Peter in the Chair, painted


Joost Keizer

between 1426 and 1428 and fi nished in the early 1480s by Filippino Lippi, is

fi lled with contemporary portraits of both painters (plate 13). Peter Meller points

out that many of the portraits were posthumous and he also notes that neither

Filippino nor Masaccio disguised that fact.27 The face of a man to the right of

Theophilus, painted by Masaccio, seems to have been based on a drawing of a

dead body (plate 14). His mouth is half opened, his left eye closed and his right eye

is half opened. The low perspective from which the man was painted suggests

that Masaccio drew him when the corpse was lying on a bier. The man’s face

stands out as an awkward insertion in a row of portraits obviously rendered after

living sitters. It would have been easy for Masaccio to animate the dead fi gure:

to open his eyes and to correct the perspective of his tilted head. Nor is this the

only instance in Masaccio’s fresco of an explicitly posthumous portrait. The man

behind the son of Theophilus, whose face has partly been scratched out, has his

eyes closed, and he has folded ears and sunken cheeks, which are both features

associated with a death-mask.

12 Orsino Benintendi (?), Cast of the Death Mask of Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1492. Gypsum-based stucco mounted on poplar panel, 58 × 44 cm. Florence: Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere ‘La Colombaria’. Photo: Art Resource, NY.



13 Masaccio, Raising of the Son of Theophilus, before 1428. Fresco, dimensions unknown. Florence: Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine. Photo: Art Resource, NY.

14 Detail of plate 13 showing a posthumous portrait.


Joost Keizer

The visible traces of death in Renaissance portraiture usually go unnoticed. When

art historians see them, they often remain undiscussed. There are a few exceptions.

In 1930 Heinrich Brockhaus speculated that the posthumous portrait of Niccolò

Soderini that Filippino Lippi had added to Masaccio’s fresco of the Raising of the Son of Theophilus pointed to the hope for Resurrection.28 Soderini indeed stands closest to the

resurrected youth in that fresco. Peter Meller added that Masaccio and Lippi intended

that visitors to the Brancacci Chapel recognize that the scene of the raising could

only have been witnessed by dead people. Yet it is doubtful that the signs of death in

fi fteenth-century portraiture pointed to a religious function. Many donors included

their portraits in religious scenes for the hope of resurrection when they were still

alive, which would not have diminished their chances of resurrection. And there are

many examples of portraits of living people who are witnessing miracles. Jeanette

Kohl has drawn attention to the traces of death in terracotta and bronze portrait busts.

For her, these traces point to a kind of fi delity of replication that could fulfi l social

and political needs. These replicable images made it possible to spread the likenesses

15 Antonio Rossellino, Portrait of Giovanni Chellini, 1452. Marble, 51.1 × 57.6 × 29.6 cm. London: Victoria & Albert Museum. Photo: Victoria & Albert Museum.



of rulers and princes across their territories, even after

their death. And in other cases, they could signal the

untimeliness of death.

The insistence on replication in fi fteenth-century

portraiture was not confi ned to portraits of the

dead. There is at least one example of a portrait of

a living person that insists on imprinting. Antonio

Rossellino’s marble bust of the doctor Giovanni

Chellini, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum,

was carved in 1452, when Chellini was still alive

(plate 15). The bust is dated on the inside and

documents show that Rossellino was working on it

in the following years.29 (It was quite common for

fi fteenth-century artists to date their work to the

moment when they began the work, instead of when

they had fi nished it.) The bust shows all the traces

of a live cast.30 The doctor’s cheeks are indented

under the weight of the heavy plaster, causing his

cheekbones to project. Below his jaws, the ageing

man’s soft, wrinkling skin is pressed against his

jawbone. And his ears are pressed against his head,

the result of the piece of cloth wrapped over the tip

of the ears, as recommended by Cennini (plate 16). It

would have been easy for Rossellino to disguise the

work’s origins in a life-cast. There are no reasons

of expediency that could explain his meticulously

following the model he was working from – the

fi rst impress of the man’s face that set in motion the

process of making the bust.

As I have observed in the introduction, the ears are crucial as a indicator of

replication. They were a point of concern for anyone making a cast of a face, whether

of a dead or living person. Most surviving death-masks from the fi fteenth century

do not include the ears. Their cavities made them too diffi cult to cast, as the Capponi

bust mentioned above shows. And it is doubtful that the cast of Chellini’s face

included the doctor’s ears. What Rossellino was aiming for was not so much a literal

translation of the cast in marble, but the moment when the cast was made.31 The folded

ears do not point to an actual cast, but to casting as a process. It was this process that

Rossellino tried to keep visible.

Taken as a category of objects, the portraits of the Rossellino brothers, the

Signorelli panel, Andrea Mantegna’s portrait of an unknown man, and Masaccio’s

dead bystanders point to a kind of faithfulness of replication, a theory of imitation

strong enough that it would even diminish the verisimilitude – the appearance of

truth – of some of the work. For these artists, it was more important to replicate than

to amend or enliven their models.

Images that ReplicateThe fi fteenth century saw the rise of a whole new range of replication techniques.

It witnessed the invention of the portrait medal, small-scale bronzes, and, perhaps

most importantly, the printing press.32 Prints could be endlessly reproduced if the

wood block or copper plate was still intact. Not considering the wear and tear of the

16 Detail of plate 15 showing Chellini’s folded left ear.


Joost Keizer

wood or copper, every new print looked exactly like the print that came before it.

Medals were even easier to reproduce than prints.33 If a printing plate or woodblock

was lost or beyond reach, a copyist had to produce a new plate by copying an existing

print line by line and in reverse. A medal could itself serve as a mould. You could use

it for making a negative impress of the obverse and reverse to create a new copy. This

could happen, and did happen, beyond the control of the person who had made or

designed the original mould.

Peter Schmidt recently reminded us that the fi fteenth-century print was not

an entirely new invention but rather a more effi cient means of replicating images

than existing practices.34 People had been reproducing images using imprinting

techniques for centuries. Pilgrim badges cast in bronze were a precursor for the

portrait medal and the bronze statuette, and the templates used for the decoration

of textiles preceded the Renaissance print. But what changed in the quattrocento

was the proliferation of reproduction techniques. It was easier than ever before to

replicate existing images. And this resulted in a far greater availability of images.35

Not just a small group of elite men and women could own images; a shoemaker or a

painter could have recourse to private ownership of prints and badges, too. Nor did

the new reproduction techniques entirely replace existing ones. The use of death-

masks and life-casts, for example, continued far into the sixteenth century. Julius

von Schlosser and Aby Warburg have written about the Florentine production of wax

images: lifelike statues of deceased people made with death-masks, with real hair

attached to the face and their bodies dressed in the actual clothing of the deceased.36

None of these images survives, but Donatello’s bust of Niccolò da Uzzano might

represent a smaller version of such a statue in terracotta. Warburg had little sympathy

for these wax statues. For him they were simply too real, the vestiges of some pagan

cult (‘that barbaric custom’) in a society that he believed had otherwise tried hard to

keep the separation between reality and representation in check. As actual imprints of

real bodies, dressed with actual hair and clothing, these images did not qualify as art.

Art demanded skill, invention, and a certain distance from its model – ingredients

that Warburg found were all lacking in these wax images.

Warburg introduced these wax images to art history while at the same time

disqualifying them as a worthy subject for art-historical inquiry. Imprints of actual

bodies without signifi cant changes made by the artist’s hand, these ex voto images were

too close to the bodies they were representing to qualify for real artworks. A similar

line of reasoning informs the critical history of the bust of Niccolò da Uzzano. The fact

that the bust was based on a cast was enough reason for Ulrich Middeldorf to discredit

Donatello’s authorship and to argue against the defi nition of the bust as ‘art’.37

Middeldorf’s and Warburg’s is not the air we breathe anymore. Replicated and

replicable images involving limited amounts of artistic intervention are now included

in modern art-historical accounts. A former emphasis on painting and sculpture

has been softened by the introduction of wax images, pilgrim’s badges, and cheap

woodcuts replicating cult images.38 This is not just a move towards a broader study

of the fi fteenth-century audiences of artworks, including the owners of death-masks,

cheaply produced prints, and mass-produced pilgrim’s badges. It is also a re-evaluation

of Renaissance media. A former privileging of painting has now been balanced by an

increased attention to sculpture in all materials. And with the study of sculpture has

arrived a new appreciation of replication techniques.39 The past few decades have seen

a true revival of publications and exhibitions on medals and bronze statuettes.40

Replicated images did not represent a cheap substratum of the market. Portrait

medals and statuettes were almost exclusively owned by the European elite. A



large bust of an unknown woman in the Bargello, sometimes identifi ed as Caterina

Sforza, cast in the expensive medium of bronze around the middle of the fi fteenth

century is directly based on a death-mask (plate 17). The mask was placed on a frame

and draped with cloth soaked in plaster, which, after it had hardened, created a

negative cast from which the bronze bust could be cast directly. The bronze bust is

an exact imprint of the death-mask and needed very little amending by the artist.

No additional modelling was done to make the bust look more alive. The woman’s

cheeks have sunk into her face, the corners of her mouth have dropped, and her eyes

are still closed.41 The bust accurately records the dead woman’s features with no

apparent intervention of the skill of the artist. Whoever made this work changed even

less about the model than the makers of the Capponi busts. The use of the expensive

medium of bronze suggests an appreciation of portraits made by imprinting that goes

well beyond reasons of expediency or cost.

The development in the fi fteenth century of new replication techniques and

the increase in use of existing techniques also brought into focus the unique status

17 Unknown Italian artist, Portrait of Caterina Sforza (?), c. 1450. Bronze, 38.5 cm (height). Florence: Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Victoria & Albert Museum.


Joost Keizer

of the less easily replicable media, like marble sculpture and particularly painting.

Some fi fteenth-century people started to realize that painting was irreproducible,

that it was the result of a complex working procedure of adding layer upon layer

that seemed almost completely the result of the individual artist’s skill and genius.

Painting started to look like something impenetrable and unique, reproducible only

by those trained in the profession. Only the general sense of a picture – its style

and subject – could be replicated, not the actual object. The technique of adding

thousands of brushstrokes one over the other prevented anyone from knowing

exactly how a specifi c painting was made.

The excessive amount of craft that went into making a picture came to be

understood in terms of invention and authorial intervention rather than in terms of

reproduction. When Leonardo da Vinci compared painting to the reproducible arts of

the print, the medal, and handwriting, he wrote that painting

cannot be copied, as happens with letters, where the copy is worth as much

as the original. It cannot be cast, as happens with sculpture where the

impression is like the original as far as the virtue of the work is concerned. It

does not produce infi nite children, as do printed books.

Resisting replication or to replicate, painting insisted on a different kind of origins:

a beginning in the body of the painter. In contrast to the reproducible arts, painting

was marked by individual authorship. ‘Painting alone honours its author [Autore] and

remains precious and unique and never bears children equal to itself’, Leonardo

concluded.42

Small wonder, then, that a fi fteenth-century painter making medals made some

effort to secure his authorship when he started to produce them. The fi rst medals

made in Italy in the late 1430s by the painter Pisanello all carry signatures.43 A series

picturing north Italian princes and princesses and the Byzantine Emperor John

Palaeologus consistently have Pisanello’s name inscribed on their reverse. In all

cases, Pisanello signed as a painter, ‘OPUS PISANI PICTORIS’, ‘The Work of Pisanello,

Painter’. The potential of the medal to procreate outside of the control of its inventor

produced a sense of anxiety about authorship.

A painting is not only irreproducible in its exact material constitution. The

way it represents a subject, whether it be nature or something else, is entirely

impenetrable. You can never be absolutely certain that a painting exactly reproduces

the object it claims to be imitating. This is why the earliest defi nitions of painting

already point to its deceptive structure. Beginning with Augustine, Christian authors

claimed that in the case of painting you simply could not know if a picture was

faithfully copying an existing object or nature or whether it was based on fi ction

and the artist’s imagination.44 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, writing in the early thirteenth

century, wrote of painting that ‘If it seems something, it is nothing. The forms of

painting dissimulate the forms of things in a deformed way: it seems to be in relief,

but there is nothing within.’45 Painting aims to look three-dimensional but it is fl at.

And this shift from being to appearing was already enough for most Augustinian

thinkers to doubt the veracity of painting. The radical translation from the three-

dimensional world to the fl at world made by painting made it drift too far from the

reality it purportedly described.

Such negative accounts were given a positive twist towards the end of the

fourteenth century, when the skill of individual artists became a topic of praise.

Giovanni Boccaccio, for instance, wrote in 1373–75 that painting ‘is nothing else



than some pigments [un poco di colore] added to a panel [posto sopra una tavola] with some

artifi ce [con certo artifi cio] … making you think that it is what it is not.’46 You never

know what existed before the painting, what its model was, for all you see in a painting

might just be the result of the painter’s fantasy. In the opening pages of his Libro dell’arte, Cennini openly embraced painting’s illusionism by defi ning the task of painting

‘to fi nd things not seen, to seek them beneath the shadows of the natural’ and ‘to

fi x them with the hand, showing that which is not, as if it were’. Cennini then said

that painting can do without an existing model altogether. Like the poet, the painter

‘is given freedom to compose a fi gure, standing, seated, half-man, half-horse, as he

pleases, according to his imagination’.47

This defi nition became the central feature of painting in the early fi fteenth

century. In the opening paragraphs of his De sculptura (c. 1450), Leon Battista Alberti

explained that painting was an art of adding on but that at the same time it could

not be grouped with the other additive arts, like the art of the silversmith. After he

mentioned the arts of taking away (sculpture) and the art of modelling in clay, Alberti

introduced a third kind of making:

The third kind consists of those who work solely by addition [addendo operantur], like the silversmiths who by hammering metal and spreading it out add

continually to its shape until they have produced the fi gure you want. Some

might think that painters should be included here because they work by the

application of colours [colorum appositionibus]. But if you think about it, you will

see that they strive to imitate the forms and colours of objects they see before

them, not so much by adding or taking away, as by another method peculiar

to themselves. But this is not the place to talk of the painter.48

Alberti does not explain what he means by the painters’ ‘peculiar method’. The

procedure of painting remains something deliberately unfathomable. Its process

cannot be reconstructed, because the addition of a new brushstroke always covers the

underlying stroke.

The emphasis on painting’s unfathomable process of making made it shift away

from its original creed to replicate, whether nature or another object. Alberti insisted

that to paint was to select from nature, not to exactly imitate the visible world as it

was. Reality was just not beautiful enough to copy without some additions and some

reordering. He famously recommended the following procedure in De pictura:

The painter should be attentive not only to the likeness [similtudinem] of things

but also and especially to beauty [pulchritudinem] . . . . Therefore excellent parts

should all be selected from the most beautiful bodies, and every effort should

be made to perceive, understand and express beauty.

Alberti presents a successful work of art as the result of an altered depiction of reality.

A beautiful picture consists of a composite of different aspects observed from nature

that in reality could never have been observed in the same constellation.49

By the mid-fi fteenth century, commentators on painting highlighted invention,

fantasy and authorship, rather than the capacity of painting to replicate.50 In 1464,

the sculptor, architect and theoretician Antonio Averlino, called Filarete, simply

assumed that painting is subjective: the result of the painter’s fantasy instead of a pure

refl ection of nature. He wrote that ‘the painter is known by the manner [maniera] of

his fi gures.’51


Joost Keizer

AuthorshipAlberti obtained his ideas about art improving upon nature from ancient

rhetoricians, mainly Quintilian.52 Quintilian wrote that in order to persuade his

audience, an orator should embellish his description of the facts.53 He realized that

words needed something extra to vividly evoke reality.

Central to comparisons between painting and writing were issues of authorship

and artistic agency. A deviation from exact imitation was usually explained as an

affi rmation of authorship. Some fi fteenth-century thinkers claimed that writing

insisted more on authorship than painting because writers traditionally amended

more than painters when they imitated a model. Read, for example, the theory

of authorship in Rudolf Agricola’s De inventione dialectica (On the Dialectics of Invention), composed in large part when the Dutch humanist was residing at the court of Ferrara

from 1475 to 1479. In his book, Agricola compared painting to poetry in order to

make arguments about the latter, apparently assuming that his readers were better

acquainted with theories of art than with poetic theory.54 One of the key points

in Agricola’s argument revolved around the distinction between form and subject

matter. The distinction was easier made in painting than in the art of oratory,

Agricola wrote. ‘In painting most things are very pleasing because of the imitation

alone and we admire not so much the subject matter [res] which is shown in the

painting as the skill of the imitator.’55 A painter was able to report on reality through

the exclusive imitation of nature, but, following Quintilian, Agricola concluded that

the writer needed to add something in order to convince the reader of the importance

of his subject. And this led Agricola to a distinction between the imitation of reality

and the performance of reality. ‘When in a literary composition,’ Agricola argued

the composition succeeds in making the subject matter seem not reported

but rather enacted [non dici sed agi], through a sort of insubstantial image, the

mind of the hearer establishes itself as though in the midst of the action and

its upheavals. This should also be attributed to language since it comes about

through the power of language and not as a result of the nature of the thing

[described] [rerum natura].56

Agricola uses the Latin verbs dicere and agere to distinguish between ‘reporting’ reality

and ‘performing’ reality. Dicere (to say) was to imitate reality exactly how it was.

Without the skill of the painter, a writer needed something extra to persuade. He

needed to perform (agere) the facts rather than just state them. In medieval theories

of authorship, the word auctor was etymologically related to the verb agere. The

performative aspect of a text drew attention to the performer, to the author.57 It was

this performative aspect that fi fteenth-century defenders of the freedom of painting

borrowed: Cennini, Alberti, but also Leonardo when he wrote that ‘painting alone

honours its author [Autore] and remains precious and unique and never bears children

equal to itself.’

Authorship in PortraitureThe emphasis on fantasy, freedom, and authorship in fi fteenth-century theories of

painting had lasting consequences for portraiture. Portraits relied more on what

the artist added to the sitter’s features than on a traditional model of replication.

You could not entirely trust that a fi fteenth-century portrait exactly registered the

features of its sitter. Some portraits became better known because of the name of the

artist that had made them than the name of the person portrayed. A lost portrait of



a woman painted by Domenico Veneziano is described in the Medici inventory of

1492 as ‘the head of a lady, by the hand master Domenico of Venice’, una testa di una dama, di mano di maestro Domenico da Vinegia.58 Apparently, the compiler of the inventory

and whoever accompanied him through the Palazzo Medici did not know who the

picture was a portrait of but did remember who the painter was. Some later fi fteenth-

century portraits might not have been painted as portraits of specifi c individuals

at all.59 Mino da Fiesole’s Relief of a Woman, dating perhaps to the early 1460s and

now in the Bargello, has an inscription that says, ‘I have been given light by Mino’,

an affi rmation of authorship that curiously bypasses the identity of the sitter. It is

possible that the portrait was never made to portray a specifi c individual but was

rather made as a demonstration of Mino’s skills in carving a marble bust and the way

the marble is enlivened by the fall of light.60

Modern art historians adopt the model of invention, imagination and fantasy

in their discussions of Renaissance portraiture. Inheritors of Alberti’s thought, they

point to the subjectivity of painting; they warn against assuming a too rigid copula

between portrait and subject. It is now common to believe that portraits constitute

something of an analogous portrayal of the sitter, a representation that only partly

copies the real, physical features of the sitter.61 The gap left between portrait and

sitter left room for idealization. In addition to individual identity, portraits relate their

sitters to more general concepts such as virtue and beauty.62

But fi fteenth-century people also knew that the art of portraiture was

traditionally an art of replication. In Italian, a portrait was known as a ‘ritratto’, from

the verb ‘rittrare’.63 Rittrare literally means ‘to retrace’, to reproduce with no further

authorial intervention. Its meaning is clear from a passage in Vasari’s Life of Parmigianino. Vasari wrote that Parmigianino ‘fece senza ritrarlo l’imagine di esso Cesare [Carlo V]’.64 He

explained that this procedure involved the artist working from memory rather than

literally copying Charles’s face. Parmigianino had seen the Emperor dine, and from

remembered images, he painted his face, ‘without retracing it’.

Another word for portrait in the fi fteenth century was ‘counterfeit’, the term

we now use for a forgery. Versions of the word in Latin, English, Dutch, Italian, and

French were used to denote a portrait. The noun associated the making of portraits

with imprinting, with copying a model without changing anything. ‘Contraffare’ or

‘conterfeien’ is derived from a conjunction of the Latin words ‘contra’ (over against, or

face to face) and ‘factum’ (made). To make something against is to relate the newly

made object ‘face to face’ with an existing person or object. Isabella d’Este employed

the word when she complained about the diffi culty of fi nding portrait painters in

1493, that is, ‘painters who can perfectly counterfeit the natural face [contrafaciano el vulto naturale]’.65 An entry in Albrecht Dürer’s travel journal records that he has given

‘three pennies to the man I have counterfeited [den ich conterfet hab]’.66

All founding stories about portraiture stress the lack of authorial intervention

in making a portrait. They imagine an art that arose automatically from its model,

outside the material constraints of painting and completely free from artistic

invention. There was the story about the sudarium, the sweat cloth on which Christ’s

likeness was miraculously imprinted after Veronica had wiped his face with it when

he was on his way to Calvary.67 Then there was the story mentioned above about

the daughter of the potter from Sykon, who traced the shadow of the man she loved

directly on the wall. She understood the shadow already as a spontaneously generated

portrait. And even Alberti knew that portraiture had once started out as an art of

exact replication. He imagined the birth of portraiture as the birth of an authorless,

spontaneously generated image. The inventor of painting, Alberti wrote, was


Joost Keizer

Narcissus, who, staring in a pool of water saw his own image refl ected, exactly how

he was. The task of painting, Alberti added, was merely to frame that refl ection, not

to change anything. ‘What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the

surface of the pool?’68

The culture of the portrait did not tolerate artistic invention or imagination.

At least in theory, the art of portraiture was an art of exact replication. And this

meant that the early portraits of Christ and the saints were only able to transmit

true likeness if they were exactly copied by later artists, men and women who

suppressed their authorship, whose names are not known. Listen to this passage

from a sermon of 1305 on the earliest portraits of saints, preached at the Florentine

church of Santa Maria Novella by the Dominican friar Fra Giordano da Rivalto. ‘To

begin with’, he said

all paintings were made by the disciples. In order to provide the maximum

amount of information, the fi rst saints were painted exactly as they were,

showing their appearance, their circumstances and the way they were.

… The disciples made these painting as to give the clearest notice of the

fact; that is, these paintings, and especially the old ones [l’antiche], which

originally came from Greece, are of great authority [autoritade]. Because there

came to live many saints in that place who portrayed such things. [And these

paintings were] copied by everyone [diederne copia al mondo], from which was

drawn great authority [autorità], such as one draws from books.69

The authority of the fi rst images of Christ and the saints relied on their authorship.

Christ’s disciples painted his likeness. Here, the Latin root auctor is not traced back to

agere, to perform, but to auctoritas, authority. In medieval literary theory, an auctor was

not someone who added things, like the model of authorship described above, but

someone to be trusted.70 For Fra Giordano, only the authorship of the fi rst image

counted. The fi rst image would be copied anonymously – seams, cracks and other

irregularities included. Nothing was amended, nothing added to these earliest

portraits. Around the middle of the fourteenth century, Petrarch could still adhere to

such a traditional understanding of portraiture, whose strict ethos of replication he

contrasted to the relative freedom of the writer, even if he put more emphasis on skill

than Fra Giordano:

The imitator must take care that what he writes is similar to its model but not

identical; the resemblance must not be that of a picture [imago] to its subject,

where the greater the resemblance is, the more the artist is praised, but that

of a son to his father. Here, there is often a great divergence in particular

features, and yet a certain suggestion which makes the likeness – what

our painters call an ‘air’ – most noticeable about the face and eyes. Seeing

the son’s face, we are reminded of the father’s, even though, if it came to

measurements, the features would all be different. There is something subtle

which creates this effect.71

The idea that a successful portrait of a saint copied an existing portrait of a saint did

not die out in the fi fteenth century. It continued to exist side by side the new model

of authorship and invention. The model of replication informs the large number of

portraits of Bernardino of Siena. On the occasion of Bernardino’s death in l’Aquila

in 1444, a death-mask was cast and a lifelike portrait painted.72 The mask still exists,



and the portrait can perhaps be found among the dozens of early portraits of the

saint. It is, however, impossible to say which one of these portraits was the fi rst one,

because all later portraits exactly replicate the fi rst picture, or what the makers of the

images considered the ‘fi rst’.

After Bernardino was canonized in 1450, haloes were added to the existing

pictures. In some cases, this was done in an apparent hurry; a number of paintings

have badly fi tting haloes. Perhaps the images with the added haloes had gained some

authority after Bernardino’s canonization because they were clearly older than the

pictures made after 1450 with a fi tting halo. Paintings that copied existing portraits

with an added halo adopted the bad fi t between fi gure and halo, suggesting an ethos

of replication that goes deeper than the mere transmission of the saint’s likeness.

When the Sienese artist Neroccio di Bartolomeo Landi painted an image of the

saint in 1476, he followed a prototype with an added halo. There is a ringlet of blue

between the halo of the saint and his head.73 A similar ringlet appears in Sano di

Pietro’s San Bernardino now in the Pinacoteca in Siena, which was painted in the year of

Bernardino’s canonization.74 The theory of replication that informs Neroccio’s and

Sano’s pictures not only prescribes the exact replication of the saint’s features but also

that the portraits exactly replicate their painted prototype, ill-fi tting halo included.

ImprintThe category of objects represented here by Luca Signorelli, the Rossellino brothers,

and Andrea Mantegna marks a resistance against the model of invention and

authorship that you fi nd in fi fteenth-century art theory. They mark a return to the

foundation stories of portraiture, which all insist on direct contact between the

image and its model. Even if in reality they change things about their models, the

folded ears, stubble beard, and sunken cheeks remain visible as signs of the portrait’s

reproductive function. They are inserted into the enlivened portrait in order to keep

the process of reproduction visible. The signs of reproduction claim that the portrait

passed on the likeness of its sitter like a form pressed in clay, allowing for as little

intervention by the artist as possible.

Recently, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have argued that the early

Renaissance – say, the period up to the 1490s – hesitated between two different

understandings of the origins of artworks. The fi rst is the idea that an artwork

substitutes for an existing artefact, whether real or imagined. This model allows for

a remarkable anachronic theory of images according to which every artefact always

points back to some earlier prototype. The artwork therefore forgets about its own,

historically specifi c origins. A picture might be made in the year 1453, but it also

claims that it is somehow substituting for a (lost) prototype that is much older. This

is the theory that accords with the examples of the San Bernardino images above.

The second model is what Nagel and Wood call the performative mode, which

understands the artwork as the result of the singular performance of an individual

artist at a specifi c moment and in a specifi c place. This is a model that allows artworks

to be marked by the individual style of an artist. These artworks are punctual. Their

origins can be understood as the result of a singular historical gesture.75

In the fi rst instance, the portraits by Signorelli, Mantegna, and the Rossellini

seem to conform to Nagel and Wood’s substitutional model. The portraits, too,

insist on replication rather than invention and imagination. Yet they fail to function

according to the substitutional mode. They do not trace their origins back to some

remote original. They rather insist on copying one singular thing, namely the exact

likeness of the sitter at a singular moment in time. Their insistence on imprinting


Joost Keizer

comes out of an unwillingness to concede to the artist’s imagination and fantasy, but

this does not lead to an anachronic understanding of pictures. The origins of these

portraits are singular, not plural.

It makes more sense to understand these portraits as instances of a highly

motivated kind of realism. Around 1400, the system of the artwork replicating other

artworks that Fra Giordano had recommended had been stretched to include the

replication of nature. When Cennino Cennini explained the procedure of making

life-casts, he recommended it as a means to imitate nature. Under the heading ‘What

is the use of casting [l’improntare] from nature [di naturale]’, Cennini wrote:

I want to acquaint you with something else [than the technique of painting]

which is very useful and gets you great honour in design [disegno], for

retracing [ritrarre] and making things similar [simigliare] to nature, that is, what

they call imprinting [imprentare].

Cennini associates the imprint with the imitation of nature, not with the copying of

earlier artworks. And he explains the technique of casting not only as an expedient

way of making images, but also as a contribution to the artistic culture of imitating

nature, as a form of realism.76 Renaissance realism insists both on replication –

namely nature – and on its own unique moment of making: the moment when it

arrests changing nature in one, singular image. Portraits document the body at a

singular moment in time, at a specifi c age, or even in the days after death before

it starts its decay. This is also why fi fteenth-century painters most committed to

retracing a sitter’s likeness, like Jan van Eyck, included inscriptions on their portraits

that suggested that these portraits were made in one day.77

To make an image that claims to be replicating nature comes with a necessary

avoidance of personal style and intervention. A painting produced under the

conditions of such realism attempts to overcome the fact that it is a made thing in

order not to destroy the illusion that it replicates the phenomenal world. When,

around the middle of the fi fteenth century, the goldsmith Lorenzo Ghiberti related

the recent history of art, he in fact seemed to suggest that realism was not a style at

all. Ghiberti wrote that the 600 years or so in between the fall of the Roman Empire

and his own time were characterized by the ‘maniera greca’ (the Greek Style), a term that

he was one of the fi rst writers to use and that became more current in the sixteenth

century to describe non-realistic medieval art. The maniera greca, Ghiberti proceeded,

was practised by artists up until Giotto, who replaced this style with a ‘new art’ (l’arte nuova), which could also be translated as a ‘new method’. Ghiberti understood Giotto’s

intervention in the history of art not as the introduction of a new style of painting but

rather as the replacement of an existing style (maniera) with what he called ‘the natural

art’, l’arte naturale.78 Ghiberti carefully avoided the use of the word maniera to describe

the art of his own time, which, for him, began with Giotto.

Some of the technical developments in fi fteenth-century art were meant to

systematize the imitation of nature. Cennini’s method of life-casting was one

method; perspective was another contribution to a methodical way of depicting

nature. Piero della Francesca’s De prospectiva pingendi (On Painted Perspective, fi nished around

1485) – the fi rst Renaissance treatise devoted exclusively to perspective – introduced

a fi xed set of rules to the art of painting, a system that, if followed accordingly,

was meant to generate a remarkably uniform result regardless of the person who

used it. Rather than using optical theories, as one would expect from a treatise

on perspective, Piero predominantly used mathematics. Calculus and geometry



provided him with a system of representation that claimed the artwork to be an

exact and measurable representation of visual experience. Piero’s system, defended

in the opening pages of the treatise, imagined a kind of painting that left no room

for stylistic differences between one painting and another, even when they were

produced by wildly different artists.79 In Piero’s dream scenario of every painter

following strict mathematical rules, the idiosyncrasies of individual painters were

levelled, allowing for little difference in personal styles. Mathematics offered painters

a method that allowed for a consistent and measurable imitation of the visible world.

This is also why mathematics was contrasted to a defi nition of painting that

insisted on individual authorship and style. When Leonardo da Vinci, in the note

cited above, insisted on the inimitability of painting, he pitched it against the

imitability of mathematics. In contrast to the work of the mathematician, which

used a system of shared rules, the uniqueness of painting could be traced back to

the unique individual artist, or autore. The portraits that are the subject of this study

are like the systematicity of mathematics and perspective. The traces of imprinting

techniques suggest that the portraits were made directly after their model without

the intervention of an individual artist’s imagination or style. These portraits were

emphatically made things. The strange, folded ears and sunken cheeks were given

lavish attention by the artist. That energy was paradoxically invested in an effort to

distract attention from the fact that they were made by an artist – by a person whose

preferences and individual way of doing things made the portrait drift from its

model, the sitter.

Notes1 Laurence Kanter and Tom Henry believe that the donor is a shepherd;

Kanter and Henry, Luca Signorelli: The Complete Paintings, London, 2002,

118. Duncan Bull pointed out to me that the man is undressed for

the grave. I am grateful to him for discussing some of the examples

included in this article with me.

2 Cennino Cennini, Il libro dell’arte, eds Franco Brunello and Licisco

Magagnato, Vicenza, 1982, 199–200 (§182). Cennini also said that

the ears should not be cast, but this advice was obviously not always

followed.

3 For the bust, see John Pope-Hennessy, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, 3 vols, London, 1964, 1: 210–11.

4 Pope-Hennessy, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture, 1: 211–12.

5 For an explanation of this procedure, see Bruce Boucher, Anne

Broderick and Nigel Wood, ‘A terracotta bust of Cardinal Giovanni de’

Medici’, Antologia di belle arti, 52/55, 1996, 32–9.

6 David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics, Cambridge, 1987, 3.

7 Michael Camille, ‘Simulacrum’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff,

eds, Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago, IL, 2003, 45.

8 Cf. Erwin Panofsky, Grabplastik. Vier Vorlesungen über ihren Bedeutungswandel von Alt-Ägypten bis Bernini, Cologne, 1964; and Paul Schubring, Das Italienische grabmal der Frührenaissance, Berlin, 1904.

9 The modern portrait format was fi rst developed in France in the

second half of the fourteenth century for King John II. For the

development of the independent portrait in France, see Stephen

Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France, Chicago, IL, 2009. For the early format in Italy, see Rab Hatfi eld,

‘Five early Renaissance portraits’, The Art Bulletin, 47, 1965, 315–34.

10 Gustav Künstler, ‘Das Bildnis Rudolfs des Stifters, Herzogs von

Österreich, und seine Funktion’, Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Galerie, 16,

1972, 56–61, 65, 69.

11 Gottfried Biedermann, Katalog: Alte Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum: Mittelalterliche Kunst, Tafelwerke, Schreinaltäre, Skulpturen, Graz, 1982, 171–3.

12 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, 6 vols, eds Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi,

Florence, 1966–71, 3: 543–4.

13 Vasari, Vite, 3: 637.

14 John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance, Washington, DC,

1966, 56, for the relationship of the drawing to the painting. In

his review of Pope-Hennessy’s book, Creighton Gilbert argued

that the old man in the drawing is not dead but sleeping; Gilbert,

‘The Renaissance portrait’, The Burlington Magazine, 11, 1968, 284. But

Gilbert’s argument is unlikely, particularly because of the odd angle at

which Ghirlandaio made the drawing. For a more recent affi rmation

of the posthumous status of the drawing, Charles Rosenberg, ‘Virtue,

piety and affection: Some portraits by Domenico Ghirlandaio,’

in Il ritratto e la memoria, 3 vols, eds Augusto Gentilini et al., Rome,

1989–93, 2: 190; Dominique Thiébaut and Nathalie Volle, ‘Un chef

d’oeuvre restauré: Le Portrait d’un veillard et d’un jeune garçon de Domenico

Ghirlandaio (1449–1494)’, Revue du Louvre, 46: 3, 1996, 42–53.

15 Jane Schuyler, Florentine Busts: Sculpted Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century, New

York, 1970, 131–4.

16 Michaela Marek, ‘Donatellos Niccolò da Uzzano: “ritrarre dal

natural” und Bürgertugend’, Donatello-Studien, Munich, 1989, 263–71.

For the recent dating of the portrait see Francesco Caglioti’s entry in

The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini, New York and New Haven,

2011, 126–8.

17 Alessandro Allori, I riccordi di Alessandro Allori, ed. Igino Benvenuto

Supino, Florence, 1908, 30; cited in Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries, New

Haven and London, 1990, 190.

18 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and on Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De

pictura and De statua, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson, London, 1972,

60–1.

19 In addition, most modern accounts of portraiture open with this

claim; see, for instance Joanna Woods-Marsden, ‘“Ritratto al

Naturale”: Questions of realism and idealism in early Renaissance

portraits’, Art Journal, 46, 1987, 209–16.

20 Albrecht Dürer, Dürer. Schriftlicher Nachlass, 3 vols, ed. Hans Rupprich,

Berlin, 1956, 3: 9.

21 For examples of fl ap ears in posthumous portraits, see Duncan Bull,

Piero di Cosimo’s Portraits of Giuliano da Sangallo and Francesco Giamberti, Zwolle,

forthcoming.


Joost Keizer

22 For additional associations of the profi le portrait, see Alison Wright,

‘The memory of faces: Representational choices in fi fteenth-century

portraiture’, in Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin, eds, Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, Cambridge, 2000, 86–113.

23 Pliny the Elder, The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, ed. E. Sellers

and trans. K. Jex-Blake, London, 1896, 174 (Book 35, §151). Lorenzo

Ghiberti and Leonardo da Vinci repeated the story as a commonplace

known to artists of Mantegna’s time; Lorenzo Ghiberti, Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwürdigkeiten (I commentarii), ed. Julius von Schlosser, Berlin, 1912, 8;

Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, ed. and trans. Philip McMahom,

Princeton, NJ, 1956, c. 49v. (§98).

24 For the correspondence between Mantegna’s portrait and the

portrait medal, see Keith Christiansen’s entry on the painting in Jane

Martineau, ed., Andrea Mantegna, Milan, 1992, 329.

25 For the stubble beard as a feature of the posthumous portraits, see

Eric MacLagan. ‘The use of death-masks by Florentine painters’, The Burlington Magazine, 43, 1923, 303. Not all portraits with stubble are

posthumous. A fi fteenth-century marble portrait bust of Francesco

Sassetti at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence also has

stubble, for example. I thank one of the anonymous readers for

pointing this out to me.

26 Cennini, Libro dell’arte, 199–200 (§182).

27 Peter Meller, ‘La Capella Brancacci: Problemi ritrattistici ed

iconografi ci’, Acropoli, 3, 1960–61, 186–227; 4, 1960–61, 273–312.

28 Heinrich Brockhaus, ‘Die Brancacci-Kappelle in Florenz’, Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 3, 1930, 160–82.

29 Patricia Rubin, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence, New Haven

and London, 2007, 324–5.

30 Laurie Smith Fusco, ‘The use of sculptural models by painters in

fi fteenth-century Italy’, The Art Bulletin, 64, 1982, 183; Schuyler,

Florentine Busts, 151–4; Anne Markham Schulz, ‘The tomb of Giovanni

Chellini at San Miniato al Tedesco’, The Art Bulletin, 51, 1969, 331, n.64.

An inscription inside the hollow base of the bust identifi es the sitter,

artist and mentions the work’s date. Giovanni Chellini died in 1462 at

the age of 83 or 84.

31 Peter Dent, ‘Chellini’s ears and the diagnosis of technique’, in Jim

Harris, Scott Nethersole, Per Rumberg, eds, ‘Una insalata di più erbe’: A Festschrift for Patricia Rubin, London, 2011, 138–50.

32 For replication techniques in the fi fteenth century, Patricia Emison,

‘The replicated image in Renaissance Florence, 1300–1600’, in Roger

Crum and John T. Paoletti, eds, Florence: A Social History, Cambridge,

2006, 431–53.

33 For the production of medals, see Stephen K. Scher, ‘An introduction

to the Renaissance portrait medal’, in Scher, ed., Perspectives on the Renaissance Medal, New York, 2000, 1–23.

34 Peter Schmidt, ‘The multiple image: The beginnings of printmaking,

between old theories and new approaches’, in Peter W. Parshall, ed.,

Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public, Washington, DC, 2005, 37–56.

35 For a recent discussion, Davis S. Areford, The Viewers and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe, Farnham, 2010.

36 Julius von Schlosser, ‘Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs:

Ein Versuch’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, 29,

1910–11, 171–258; Aby Warburg, ‘Bildniskunst und Florentinisches

Bü rgertum [1902]’, in Aby Warburg: Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge der europäischen Renaissance, eds Horst

Bredekamp and Michael Diers, Berlin, 1998, 89–126.

37 Ulrich Middeldorf, review of Hans Kaufmann, Donatello, The Art Bulletin, 18, 1936, 580. Middeldorf was followed by Horst W. Janson, The Sculpture of Donatello, Princeton, NJ, 1957, 2: 237–40.

38 For example, the recent volume on wax statues, Roberta Panzanelli,

ed., Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Body, Los Angeles,

CA, 2008; and the 2005–06 exhibition at the Germanisches

Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg, and the National Gallery in

Washington, Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and their Public.

39 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘La resemblance par contact: Archéologie,

anachronism et modernité de l’empreinte’, in L’empreinte, Paris, 1997,

49ff.

40 For instance, Scher, ed., The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance, New York, 1994; Deborah Pincus, ed., Small Bronzes in the

Renaissance, Washington, DC, 2001; Luke Syson and Dora Thornton,

Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy, London, 2001.

41 For the bust, see A. Campani, Guida per il visitatore del R. Museo Nazionale nell’ antico palazzo del podestà in Firenze, Florence, 1884, 119; and Schuyler,

Florentine Busts, 137–9.

42 Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Paragone’: A Critical Interpretation With a New Edition of the Text in the ‘Codex Urbinas’, ed. Claire J. Farago, Leiden,

1992, 187–91.

43 The fi rst Renaissance medals were those of Heraclius and Constantine,

made in France around 1402; see Scher, ‘The cabinet of a prince and

the origins of the Renaissance portrait medal’, in Philippe Goldman

and Christian Roth, eds, En Berry, du Moyen-âge à la Renaissance, Bourges,

1996, 309–16.

44 See the sources collected in David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, Princeton, NJ, 1981, 41–55.

45 Edmond Faral, Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle; recherches et documents sur la technique littéraire du moyen âge, Paris, 1924, 220. Translation in James

J. Murphy, ed., Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, Berkeley, CA, 1971, 60.

46 Giovanni Boccaccio, Il commento alla Divina commedia e gli altri scritti intorno a Dante, 4 vols, ed. Domenico Guerri, Bari, 1918, 3: 82 (commenting on

Inferno 10: 105): ‘Non è altro che un poco di colore con certo artifi cio

posto sopra una tavola … facendo di sé credere che ella sia quello che

non è.’

47 Cennini, Libro dell’arte, 3–4 (§1).

48 Alberti, On Painting, 120–1.

49 Alberti, On Painting, 99. This is an ancient topos, as Alberti knew.

Both Pliny and Cicero famously told of the Greek painter Zeuxis who

combined the features of the fi ve maidens of Croton into one beautiful

woman.

50 Cennino Cennini already mentioned the role of fantasia in the making

of a picture; see Cennini, Libro dell’arte, 27–8 (§27).

51 Antonio Averlino detto Il Filarete, Trattato di Architettura, 2 vols, eds

Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi, Milan, 1972, 1: 28: ‘Che se uno

tutte le fabricasse, come colui che scrive o uno che dipigne fa che

le sue lettere si conoscono, e così colui che dipigne la sua maniera

delle fi gure si cognosce, e così d’ogni facultà si cognosce lo stile di

ciascheduno; ma questa è altra practica, nonostante che ognuno

pura dicaria o tanto o quanto, benché si conosca essere fatta per una

mano.’

52 Quintilian’s ideas about imitation were revived in the Renaissance.

See Caroline van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 2007.

53 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IV, ii, 63; VIII, iii, 2; VIII, iii, 16.

54 For Agricola’s comparison, Michael Baxandall, ‘Rudolph Agricola and

the visual arts’, in Peter Bloch et al., eds, Intuition und Kunstwissenschaft: Festschrift für Hanns Swarzenski zum 70. Gurtstag am 30. August 1973, Berlin,

1973, 409–18; Peter Mack, ‘Agricola’s use of the comparison between

writing and the visual arts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 55, 1992, 169–79.

55 Rudolph Agricola, De Inventione Dialectica, Cologne, 1539, reprinted

Nieuwkoop, 1967, 396–7 (page references are to the Nieuwkoop

edition). Translation in Mack, ‘Agricola’s use’, 174.

56 Agricola, De Inventione, 396–7. Translation in Mack, ‘Agricola’s use’, 174.

Agricola’s emphasis on persuasion as opposed to reporting comes

from Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IV, ii, 63; VIII, iii, 62–3.

57 A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, Aldershot, 1988, 10–12.

58 M. Spallanzi and G. Gaeta Bertelà, eds, Libro d’inventario dei beni di Lorenzo il Magnifi co, Florence, 1992, 72.

59 This is especially true of sixteenth-century portraits; Elizabeth

Cropper, ‘The beauty of woman: Problems in the rhetoric of

Renaissance portraiture’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen

Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers, eds, Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, Chicago, IL and London, 1986,

175–90, 355–9.

60 The inscription reads ‘Et io da mino o avuto el lume’. For the bust,

Diego Angeli, Mino da Fiesole, Florence, 1905, 68; and Hildegard Lange,

Mino da Fiesole: Ein Beitrag zer Geschichte der fl orentinischen und römischen Plastik des Quattrocentos, Greifswald, 1928, 90.

61 Richard Brilliant, ‘Portraits: The limitations of likeness’, Art Journal, 46,

1987, 171–2.



62 For this argument, Woods-Marsden, ‘Questions of realism and

idealism’; Wright, ‘Memory of faces’.

63 For contemporary terms for portraiture, see Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 1.

64 Vasari, Vite, 4: 542. The distinction between ‘ritrarre’ and a more liberal

rendering of someone’s likeness is commented upon by Campbell,

Renaissance Portraits, 1.

65 Alessandro Luzio, La galleria dei Gonzaga venduta all’Inghilterra nel 1628–28,

Milan, 1913, 155.

66 Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1: 164.

67 On the acheiropoetos, see Edwyn Robert Bevan, Holy Images: An Inquiry into Idolatry and Image Worship in Ancient Paganism and Christianity, London, 1940,

79; E. Kitzinger, ‘The cult of images in the age before iconoclasm’,

Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 8, 1954, 112–15; Joel Snyder, ‘What happens

by itself in photography?’, in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer and Hilary

Putnam, eds, Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, Lubbock,

TX, 1993, 361–73; Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, eds, The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, Bologna, 1998; and Wolf, Schleir und Spiegel: Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance, Munich,

2002. And for the incorporation of the notion of the acheiropoetos into a

modern conception of the image, see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago, IL, 1993, 80–125.

68 Alberti, On Painting, 63.

69 E. Narducci, Prediche inedite del B. Giordano Rivalto, Bologna, 1867, 170–1:

‘Faceano i santi quelle dipinture per dare più chiara notizia alle

genti del fatto; sicchè queste dipinture, e spezialmente l’antiche, che

vennono di Grecia anticamente, sono di tropo grande autoritade,

perocchè là entro conversaro molti santi che ritrassero le dette cose, e

diederne copia al mondo, delle quali si trae autorità grande, sicomme

si tra di libri.’

70 On authorship and authority, Albert Russel Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, Cambridge, 2008.

71 Francesco Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarum libri XVII–XXIV, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Baltimore, MD, 1985, 301–2 (=

Familiares, 23.19).

72 For the portraits of San Bernardino, see Machtelt Israëls, ‘Absence and

resemblance: Early images of Bernardino da Siena and the issue of

portraiture (with a new proposal for Sassetta)’, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance, 11, 2007, 77–114.

73 For a colour reproduction, see Valerio Ascani, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, Rome, 1997, 89 (fi g. 53). The ringlet was noticed by Israëls, ‘Absence

and resemblance’, 83, without offering an explanation.

74 The image is to be found in Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, cat. no. 253.

75 Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New

York, 2010.

76 Cennini, Libro, 198 (§ 181).

77 Jan van Eyck’s Portait of a Man (Self-Portrait) in the National Gallery

in London has an inscription that reads ‘Jan van Eyck made me on 21

October 1433’ (Joh[ann]es de Eyck Me Fecit An[n]o MoCCCCo 33o 21

Octobris).

78 Lorenzo Ghiberti, Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwürdigkeiten, ed. Julius von

Schlosser, Berlin, 1912, 35–6.

79 Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi, ed. G. Nicco Fasola,

Florence, 1942, 64–6.

Documents

"Portrait and Imprint in Fifteenth-Century Italy," Art History 38 (2015): 11-37