It was inevitable that a period which laid such emphasis on individual talent and virtue, on fame and umanita, should devote so much of its creative energies to the problem of commemoration. Portraits had uses that went beyond matters of individual prestige. They could act as accurate records of a future spouse, or as exotic curiosities (Gentile Bellini’s portrait of the Sultan Mehemmed II) (plate 24). But their usual purpose was to convey, with decorum and vivacity, what Vespasiano da Bisticci called, in his Lives, umanita — the sitter’s interests, personality and likeness. In the north, particularly in Flanders, portraiture extended its social range from the kings, princes and high ecclesiastics of the fourteenth century to a clientele of wealthy townspeople. To these serious and sober citizens Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden gave an extraordinary presence, submitting them to intense scrutiny, turning them to a three-quarter face pose to the viewer, restricting their format to head and shoulders (to concentrate thereby on face and sometimes hands) and suggesting personality and achievement by such devices as held letters, chains of office or details of costume. In the second half of the century, first in the Netherlands and then elsewhere, this closed format could be broken into by descriptive or symbolic backgrounds, most notably the ‘window portrait’ — pioneered by Dierec Bouts in Portrait of a Man (1462) (plate 8) — where the sitter now interacts, visually, and at times symbolically, with the wider world behind him, and, by implication, with the viewer in front of him.
In Italy the humanists’ notion of umanita was coloured by their nostalgia for Antiquity and their own scholarly priorities. Vespasiano da Bisticci’s Lives devotes its longest section to scholars, as if greatness lay not in rank but in virtue and wisdom. The Quattrocento sanctioned all kinds of personal commemoration, not just for holiness or birth, but for political, military, literary and artistic achievement. No artefact encapsulated this democracy of fame more neatly than the portrait medallion, inspired by antique coins, but made into a virtually new and independent art form by Antonio Pisanello (1395—1455). With a strongly characterised profile portrait on the front and an allegorical device alluding delicately and often abstrusely to the subject’s virtues on the reverse, the medal immortalised a broad section of Italian society, from princes and ecclesiastics to a prominent category of teachers and philosophers (plate 9). Its quasi-heraldic profile portrait probably accounts for the persistence of the profile portrait in Italy through much of the period (see Giovanni da Oriolo’s portrait of Lionello d’Este, London, National Gallery, c. 1447) until it finally gave way, in the hands of Botticelli and Antonella da Messina, to the Netherlandish format of the three-quarter pose, or even a (rarer) frontal presentation.
The spatial settings of group portraiture encouraged a much more expansive relationship between sitter and surroundings. Beginning with the tradition of the donor portrait, promoted from a diminutive and marginal accent (Ghent altarpiece) to a full-size, if still secondary, witness to the main events, the group portrait in Florence emerged as a dominant force in Ghirlandaio’s almost ostentatiously prominent depictions of Lorenzo de’ Medici, his family and household, in the Sassetti chapel in S. Trinita (c. 1480). Henceforward, it was easy to jettison the sacred setting altogether, and devote whole fresco cycles to the lives of great men (Pinturicchio’s Life of Pius II in the Piccolomini Library in Siena cathedral, 1502—8). In Mantegna’s The Gonzaga Court in the ducal palace at Mantua (complete 1474) any attempt at a religious or secular istoria was abandoned, and the Gonzaga family are intimately presented to us as the painter knew them (plate 10). Grouped informally against an illusionistic background of terrace and sky — the precursor of the fictive loggias and landscapes of sixteenth-century villas — the Gonzaga court has become the exclusive subject of art.
Durer’s definition of the second aim of painting, to preserve the appearance of men after their deaths, had been the task of sculpture far longer than painting, and in Italy the revival of the most distinguished commemorative genres of Antiquity — the portrait bust and the bronze equestrian statue — provided some of the most incisive portraiture of the century. The earliest busts, such as Mino da Fiesole’s Piero de’ Medici (Florence, Museo Nazionale, 1453), combine the Roman format with echoes of medieval reliquary busts; while Donatello’s bronze equestrian statue of Gattamelata in Padua (1445—50) (plate 11) revives a tradition that goes back, through the fourteenth-century Scaligeri riders in Verona, to the bronze horses of St Mark’s and the Marcus Aurelius in the Roman forum. These had been monuments to princes and emperors; Gattamelata was merely the successful captain-general of the Venetian Republic, raised, in the spirit of Petrach’s Trionfi, ‘pro insigni fama ipsius’, above the square in front of the church of St Anthony, as a commemoration of individual heroism and of the ideals of Roman civic life. Revivals of antique genres were matched by wholly new types of memorial. In contrast to the magnificenza of Gattamelata and its imitators (Verocchio’s Bartolomeo Colleoni, Venice, 1480—8), Leonardo Bruni’s tomb in S. Croce in Florence (c. 1445—50), the first of a progeny of classical wall tombs extending to Spain, England and Poland, presents an idealised portrait of the great humanist, crowned with laurels, a book in his hand. Intellect, not rank, is his claim to immortality. Poised between the emblems of classical learning beneath him (the eagles of Zeus, the winged genii) and the Madonna with angels above, Bruni serves as an examplum virtutis of humanist learning and Christian hope.
The restraint of Bruni’s tomb found no echo in the proud triumphal-archlike monuments of the Venetian doges, or the megalomaniac visions of Filarete for the tomb of Giangaleazzo Sforza. Tomb sculpture could always degenerate into ostentation. To such monuments of vanitas as the tomb of the Infante Alfonso in the Cartujade Miraflores in Burgos (1489—93), with its Spanish format of a kneeling figure of the deceased enframed by a suffocating decor, or the lavish micro-architectural canopies crowning the effigies of English tombs (Bishop Beaufort’s in Winchester cathedral, c. 1447) the fifteenth century counterposed an horrific emblem of humilitas: the image of the decomposing corpse, or transi, laid beneath the splendour of the clothed effigy as a gruesome reminder of death. The popularity in northern Europe of this and other didactic-moralistic themes, such as The Three Living and The Three Dead, or The Dance of Death, is not simply a reflection of the cultural morbidity and pessimism that haunted the plague-torn Europe of the later Middle Ages. The appearance of a transi in the most rational and enlightened of contexts, Masaccio’s Holy Trinity in S. Maria Novella in Florence (c. 1427), underlines the function of the tomb, not simply as the vehicle of fame, but as the reminder of salvation.