The Portrait in the Renaissance: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

This major work by one of the twentieth century's most eminent art historians is available again in paperback through Princeton University Press. Here John Pope-Hennessy takes as his subject two centuries of experiment in portraiture during the Renaissance. He shows how the Renaissance cult of individuality brought with it a demand that the features of the individual be perpetuated. This concept was first manifested in the portraits that fill the great Florentine fresco cycles and led, later in the fifteenth century, to the creation of the independent portrait by such artists as Botticelli, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Giovanni Bellini, and Antonello da Messina. The author goes on to describe the process by which Titian and the great artists of the High Renaissance transformed the portrait from a record of appearance into an analysis of character.