[MR] Exhibition @ the MET, NYC: The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini

[David Chessler]

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Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 21:16:35 -0400 (EDT)
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Subject: [EK] Exhibition @ the MET, NYC: The Renaissance Portrait from
	Donatello to Bellini
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* * * * * Greetings from Godiva in NYC. * * * * *


Opening in December, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be having an
exhibition on portraiture in 15th century Italy.


Website: 
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2011/the-renaissance-portrait-from-donatello-to-bellini


Or for a detailed description of the show, see below:



The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini

December 21, 2011?March 18, 2012


It has been said that the Renaissance witnessed the rediscovery of the
individual. In keeping with this notion, early Renaissance Italy also hosted
the first great age of portraiture in Europe. Portraiture assumed a new
importance, whether it was to record the features of a family member for
future generations, celebrate a prince or warrior, extol the beauty of a
woman, or make possible the exchange of a likeness among friends. This
exhibition will bring together approximately 160 works?by artists including
Donatello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Pisanello,
Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, and Antonello da Messina, and in media ranging
from painting and manuscript illumination to marble sculpture and bronze
medals, testifying to the new vogue for and uses of portraiture in
fifteenth-century Italy.
During the early Renaissance, artists working in Florence, Venice, and the
courts of Italy created magnificent portrayals of the people around them?from
heads of state and church to patrons, scholars, poets, and
artists?concentrating for the first time on producing recognizable likenesses
and expressions of personality. The rapid development of portraiture was
linked closely to Renaissance society and politics, ideals of the individual,
and concepts of beauty. The object may have been to commemorate a significant
event?a marriage, death, the accession to a position of power?or it may have
been to record the features of an esteemed member of the family for future
generations.
Featuring many rare international loans, this exhibition will present an
unprecedented survey of the period and provide new research and insight into
the early history of portraiture. It will be divided into three sections and
will span a period of eight decades. Beginning in Florence, where independent
portraits first appeared in abundance, it moves to the courts of Ferrara,
Mantua, Bologna, Milan, Urbino, Naples and papal Rome, and ends in Venice,
where a tradition of portraiture asserted itself surprisingly late in the
century.