The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam invites you this autumn to a well-curated exhibition entitled REMEMBER ME. PORTRAITS FROM DÜRER TO SOFONISBA, dedicated to Renaissance portraits. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/remember-me
More than 100 paintings, many on loan from European museums and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will be on show until 16 January 2022, including works by Albrecht Dürer, Antonello da Messina, Hans Holbein, Sofonisba Anguissola, Memling, Titian, Veronese and many others, portraits that are well known and often exhibited, as well as less frequently shown works that are in no way inferior to the famous ones. Renaissance painting had its main centres of development on the Apennine Peninsula and in northern Europe – in Germany and Flanders. The selection of paintings represents the achievements of centres on both sides of the Alps.
The highlights of the exhibition include a masterpiece by Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Young Girl, c. 1470, owned by Gemaldegalerie in Berlin or two earliest individual portraits of an African men in the history of European art. One is Albrecht Dürer’s drawing, Portrait of an African Man, from the Albertina Collection in Vienna, c 1508, the identity of the sitter is not known to us. The other one is by Jan Jansz Mostaerd from Haarlem. It is the earliest known painted portrait of an individual African man. There is no absolute clarity who the sitter was but many art historians identify him as Christophe le More, a personal body guard to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.
The curators, Matthias Ubl, Sara van Dijk and Friso Lammertse, have chosen to organise the exhibition based on the motivations that one might assume guided those who commissioned portraits to perpetuate their image in this way. The different sections of the exhibition are therefore called Pray for Me, Down the Generations, Authority, Ambition, Cherish Me, Draw Me, Admire Me, Learned and This is Me. Above all, however, the people in the portraits wanted to be remembered.
The history of portraiture did not begin with the Renaissance, but dates back to antiquity, and the need to preserve one’s image has always accompanied people in almost all cultural circles. This is evidenced by the statues of Egyptian pharaohs, Assyrian reliefs depicting the local rulers, Mayan statues or statues of ancient Greece or Rome. In medieval painting, portraiture had little significance and was limited to depictions of the founders of a church, altar or religious painting. Most often these were small, kneeling figures, placed in the lower corner. The likenesses of funders with greater aspirations were admittedly the same size as the figures of saints, but this did not change the fact that the main emphasis was on the religious content of the painting.
The Renaissance was an age of innovation. Unlike the Middle Ages that preceded it, Renaissance embraced anthropocentrism – an interest in man and his early doings and a greater focus on secular matters. If we combine this with the development of painting techniques, understanding of perspective and changes in the structure of societies, it is easier to understand why the Renaissance is considered the beginning of the history of portraiture as we know it today.
One of the effects of increasing urbanisation was the emergence of a new social group – the bourgeoisie. Many of them amassed considerable wealth through trade or banking services. It was they who, around 1500, often began to commission portraits of themselves and their loved ones, becoming, alongside rulers and aristocrats, important clients of famous painters.
The exhibition perfectly illustrates how much the portrayal of the portrayed has changed. The painting is supposed to show not only their physical appearance, but inform about their spiritual and intellectual life. All the objects visible in the portrait, the colours, religious or mythological allusions, all serve to show psychological depth. Often there are also attributes related to the profession of the portrayed. Either way, the person depicted in the painting is its sole protagonist or heroine and, looking us straight in the eye, seems to be saying “now me, all lights on!”. It is worth adding that the choice of objects seen in the portraits was never random. They were chosen very carefully, and each of them contained information that the portrayed person wanted to convey about himself. It is hard to resist a comparison with today’s “personal branding”.
We live in an age of visual culture, in which images have at least as much power, if not more, than words. We should therefore perfectly understand the people who lived nearly 500 years before us and their stubborn desire to leave us their image, perhaps not always true, but in line with their aspirations. We are exactly the same and we act on the same impulse when we snap another selfie. The thing is, they have succeeded. Thousands of people come to the Rijksmuseum to admire their portraits, and their names and fates are mostly known to us. Will anyone one day marvel at our selfies and write doctoral theses about them? I have my doubts, but you’ll probably have to wait a few centuries to find out.