Putting a brave face on them
Michael Levey
RENAISSANCE PORTRAITS by Lorne Campbell
Yale University Press, £35, pp.290
Like clocks, portraits are among the most significant phenomena that define the Renaissance as a period distinct from the Middle Ages. In frequent metaphors Shakespeare celebrates new consciousness of them both; and it is almost too pat that the then novel mechanism of a watch might actually carry on it the image of a person. Some deeper relationship could probably be established between the more precise grasp on concept, of time, provided by the clock, and the more precise grasp on likeness and personality expressed by the portrait. Man and mechanical object are agonisingly fused in Richard II's imagina- tion as he feels he has become Time's `numbering clock'. Laws of space as well as time can be defied by the vivid reality of the Renaissance portrait: So, either by the picture or my love, Thyself, away, are present still with me.
Some of the human images created in the period are present still with us, to an uncanny degree. No accident that the most famous picture in the world is a quintessen- tially Renaissance portrait (though one unreproduced and barely discussed in the book under review): the 'Mona Lisa'. No- thing better exemplifies the boasted power of the Renaissance artist (`So long as men can breathe and eyes can see . . .') than the composite image we call `Holbein's Henry VIII', whereby the king lives for ever.
Admittedly, the Renaissance did not invent the portrait as a category of picture. What it did — or, rather, what all over Europe a succession of great and varied painters, fostered by a responsive social climate, did — was to give portraiture such creative impulse and such sophisticated interpretation, as well as popularity, that the result was virtually a new art form.
The scope of Dr Campbell's text is daringly yet rightly broad, ranging over three centuries, from the 14th to the 16th, and managing additionally to touch on Van Dyck and Velasquez. Nearly every page of a book outstandingly handsome, even by the high standards of the Yale University Press, contains the image of a human presence so vivid and accomplished — at once natural and yet artful — that the total impact is of a vast pageant of mankind. And again and again, the interaction of artist and sitter is seen to have created a memorable portrait that is also a master- piece of painting.
Dr Campbell's book is neither an anthol- ogy nor a strict history of Renaissance portraiture. It assembles an erudite dossier of telling, sometimes entertaining facts, drawn from an astonishingly wide variety of sources, offering detailed evidence ab- out specific aspects of portrait-painting: types of portrait, functions, poses, settings, sitters and costumes. This impressive mass of scholarly material has been skilfully and cogently marshalled, to hold the attention of the 'ordinary' reader no less than that of the expert. Generalisation and speculation appear to be not so much to the author's taste (nor, to judge from the occasional example, so much his forte). Where he excels is in the provision of fascinating petit-point detail and crisp, factual observa- tion.
This banquet of documentation is served up with a generous dose of personal opinion — with, indeed, one earnest, pronounced purpose: to correct the com- mon Italianate bias in dealing with the period and especially its portraiture. In principle, one must applaud Dr Campbell's revisionism, and it is cheering to find Northern achievements — like those of Jan van Eyck and Fouquet and Cranach recognised as neither irrelevant nor in- ferior but as fully 'renaissance'.
The author breaks a lance — or possibly brandishes a claymore — in the cause particularly of the portraits of Antonis Mor, a painter he believes previous art historians have treated as 'a superficial and provincial imitator of Titian.' That may be so; yet many a non-art historian must have been profoundly impressed, even fright- ened, by the pungent conviction of Mor's `Queen Mary I', though perhaps unable to name the painter.
And when Dr Campbell's enthusiasm leads him to declare that Mor approached his sitters with 'considerably more fore- thought and artifice than Titian', bias has run in the opposite direction. Some of the striking Italian omissions from the book like Titian's thoughtful and thought-out group-portrait of the Vendramin Family — Raphael's portrait of Joanna of Aragon, 1518 begin to look not just fortuitous. At Dr Campbell's hyperborean table the garlic of Lotto's idiosyncratic images proves too strong, while painfully lacking is the noble vintage of Veronese's portraiture (where women assume the stature of Shakespeare's Portia). As dubious philo- sophically as aesthetically is the author's conclusion that 'most Italian portrait- painters . . . limited themselves to depict- ing people as they actually were.'
Given these prejudices in the book, it was bold of the publisher to relegate a Van Eyck to the back of the jacket and put in pride of place on the front Raphael's portrait of Joanna of Aragon. But perhaps we should enjoy the sly joke, for this is a rare instance of a Renaissance portrait where all is splendid except the sitter's face, insipid in features and vacuous in expression. The final irony may be savoured in Dr Campbell's own words: 'There is . . . no evidence that Raphael saw Joanna.'
Previous page
