Donor portrait
A donor portrait or votive portrait is a portrait in a larger painting or other work showing the person who commissioned and paid for the image, or a member of his, or (much more rarely) her, family. Donor portrait usually refers to the portrait or portraits of donors alone, as a section of a larger work, whereas votive portrait may often refer to a whole work of art intended as an ex-voto, including for example a Madonna, especially if the donor is very prominent. The terms are not used very consistently by art historians, as Angela Marisol Roberts points out,[1] and may also be used for smaller religious subjects that were probably made to be retained by the commissioner rather than donated to a church.
Donor portraits are very common in religious works of art, especially paintings, of the
Placement
The purpose of donor portraits was to memorialize the donor and his family, and especially to solicit prayers for them after their death.[2] Gifts to the church of buildings, altarpieces, or large areas of stained glass were often accompanied by a bequest or condition that masses for the donor be said in perpetuity, and portraits of the persons concerned were thought to encourage prayers on their behalf during these, and at other times. Displaying portraits in a public place was also an expression of social status; donor portraits overlapped with tomb monuments in churches, the other main way of achieving these ends, although donor portraits had the advantage that the donor could see them displayed in his own lifetime.
Furthermore, donor portraits in Early Netherlandish painting suggest that their additional purpose was to serve as role models for the praying beholder during his own emotional meditation and prayer – not in order to be imitated as ideal persons like the painted Saints but to serve as a mirror for the recipient to reflect on himself and his sinful status, ideally leading him to a knowledge of himself and God.[4] To do so during prayer is in accord with late medieval concepts of prayer, fully developed by the Modern Devotion. This process may be intensified if the praying beholder is the donor himself.[5]
When a whole building was financed, a sculpture of the patron might be included on the facade or elsewhere in the building.
Sometimes, as in the Ghent Altarpiece, the donors were shown on the closed view of an altarpiece with movable wings, or on both the side panels, as in the Portinari Altarpiece and the Memlings above, or just on one side, as in the Mérode Altarpiece. If they are on different sides, the males are normally on the left for the viewer, the honorific right-hand placement within the picture space. In family groups the figures are usually divided by gender. Groups of members of confraternities, sometimes with their wives, are also found.[7] Additional family members, from births or marriages, might be added later, and deaths might be recorded by the addition of small crosses held in the clasped hands.[8]
At least in Northern Italy, as well as the grand altarpieces and frescos by leading masters that attract most art-historical attention, there was a more numerous group of small frescoes with a single saint and donor on side-walls, that were liable to be re-painted as soon as the number of candles lit before them fell off, or a wealthy donor needed the space for a large fresco-cycle, as portrayed in a 15th-century tale from Italy:[9]
And going around with the master mason, examining which figures to leave and which to destroy, the priest spotted a Saint Anthony and said: 'Save this one.' Then he found a figure of Saint Sano and said: 'This one is to be gotten rid of, since as long as I have been the Priest here I have never seen anyone light a candle in front of it, nor has it ever seemed to me useful; therefore, mason, get rid of it.'
History
Donor portraits have a continuous history from
The 6th-century
Donor portraits of noblemen and wealthy businessmen were becoming common in commissions by the 15th century, at the same time as the panel portrait was beginning to be commissioned by this class - though there are perhaps more donor portraits in larger works from churches surviving from before 1450 than panel portraits. A very common Netherlandish format from the mid-century was a small diptych with a Madonna and Child, usually on the left wing, and a "donor" on the right - the donor being here an owner, as these were normally intended to be kept in the subject's home. In these the portrait may adopt a praying pose,[14] or may pose more like the subject in a purely secular portrait.[15] The Wilton Diptych of Richard II of England was a forerunner of these. In some of these diptychs the portrait of the original owner has been over-painted with that of a later one.[16]
A particular convention in illuminated manuscripts was the "presentation portrait", where the manuscript began with a figure, often kneeling, presenting the manuscript to its owner, or sometimes the owner commissioning the book. The person presenting might be a courtier making a gift to his prince, but is often the author or the scribe, in which cases the recipient had actually paid for the manuscript.[17]
Iconography of painted donor figures
During the Middle Ages the donor figures often were shown on a far smaller scale than the sacred figures; a change dated by Dirk Kocks to the 14th century, though earlier examples in manuscripts can be found.
A comparable style can be found in Florentine painting from the same date, as in
Before the 15th century a physical likeness may not have often been attempted, or achieved; the individuals depicted may in any case often not have been available to the artist, or even alive.[21] By the mid-15th century this was no longer the case, and donors of whom other likenesses survive can often be seen to be carefully portrayed, although, as in the Memling above, daughters in particular often appear as standardized beauties in the style of the day.[22]
In narrative scenes they began to be worked into the figures of the scene depicted, perhaps an innovation of
the vogue of the collective portrait grew and grew ... status and portraiture became inextricably entwined, and there was almost nothing patrons would not do to intrude themselves in paintings; they would stone the women taken in adultery, they would clean up after martyrdoms, they would serve at the table at Emmaus or in the Pharisee's house. The elders in the story of Suzannah were some of the few figures respectable Venetians were unwilling to impersonate. ... the only contingency they did not envisage was what actually occurred, that their faces would survive but their names go astray.
In Italy donors, or owners, were rarely depicted as the major religious figures, but in the courts of Northern Europe there are several examples of this in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, mostly in small panels not for public viewing.[8][26] The most notorious of these is the portrayal as the Virgin lactans (or just post-lactans) of Agnès Sorel (died 1450), the mistress of Charles VII of France, in a panel by Jean Fouquet.[27]
Donor portraits in works for churches, and over-prominent
A further secular development was the portrait historié, where groups of portrait sitters posed as historical or mythological figures. One of the most famous and striking groups of Baroque donor portraits are those of the male members of the
Although donor portraits have been relatively little studied as a distinct genre, there has been more interest in recent years, and a debate over their relationship, in Italy, to the rise of individualism with the Early Renaissance, and also over the changes in their iconography after the Black Death of the mid-14th century.[31]
Gallery
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Sant'Agnese fuori le Murain Rome, carrying a model of the church he built.
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6th-century donor portrait of Anicia Juliana, the Byzantine princess who commissioned the illuminated manuscript known as the Vienna Dioscurides.
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12th-century mural with donor portrait of King Canute VI of Denmark in Stehag Church, Sweden.
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Stained-glass window depicting Beatrice of Falkenburg (died 1277) as benefactress to the Franciscans, is the earliest surviving stained-glass donor portrait (Burrell Collection).
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Small donor with enthroned Madonna and Child, ca 1335
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Giovanni di Paolo's Crucifixion with donor Jacopo di Bartolomeo, named in the inscription and with his coat of arms at left
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Master of Vyšší Brod, a Bohemian master, ca. 1350, with donor portrait of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor holding a miniature church, as he had presumably paid for the whole building the painting was intended for.
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Hans Memling; the Madonna looks benevolently at the donor, who is presented by Saint Anthony the Great, and blessed by the Christ-child
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Raising of Lazarus, with five kneeling donor portraits (and perhaps the donor's dog). The very small girl was perhaps an infant death or a later addition to the family and the painting
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Francesco II Gonzaga.
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Rubens, Rockox Triptych, 1613–15
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Aprosperous glassmaker and his family, 1596. The five children holding crosses had died; the two in black-trimmed white garments apparently before the painting was done, on the others the crosses were probably added later.[32]
Notes
- ^ Roberts, pp. 1–3, 22
- ^ See particularly Roberts, 22–24 for a review of the historiography as to the motivations of donors
- ^ James WEALE, Généalogie de la famille Morales, in Le Beffroi, 1864–1865, pp 179–196.
- ^ Scheel, Johanna, Das altniederländische Stifterbild. Emotionsstrategien des Sehens und der Selbsterkenntnis, pp. 172–180, 241–249, Gebr. Mann, Berlin, 2013
- ^ Scheel, Johanna, Das altniederländische Stifterbild. Emotionsstrategien des Sehens und der Selbsterkenntnis, pp. 317–318, Gebr. Mann, Berlin, 2013
- ISBN 0-948462-18-3
- ^ In fact half of the 83 14th-century Venetian images, in what is intended to be a complete catalogue by Roberts, are of this group type. Roberts, 32
- ^ a b Ainsworth, Maryan W. "Intentional Alterations of Early Netherlandish Painting". In Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. Accessed September 10, 2008
- Pratolinonear Florence.
- ^ Handbook, 67
- ISBN 0-8020-3504-3
- ^ Dodwell, 46
- ^ Roberts, 5–19 reviews the tradition
- ^ "example from NGA WAshington". Archived from the original on 2008-09-18. Retrieved 2008-09-10.
- ^ Example from NGA Washington Archived October 18, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 0-300-12155-5- a diptych in the Fogg Museum Harvard
- ^ Burgundian frontispieces
- ^ King, 129. See further reading for Kocks.
- ^ King, 131
- ^ Penny, 110, discussing this. Archived 2017-01-16 at the Wayback Machine and another example by Marco Marziale
- LCCN 98-66510, (also titled The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Schools)
- ^ The elder sons also seem very like younger versions of their father's portrait
- ISBN 0-521-34016-0. The girls' mother may be in a Nativity in Birmingham, if it is indeed from the same altarpiece. Washington attribute the work to the "Master of the Prado Adoration of the Magi", but note that many attribute the girls alone to Rogier van der Weyden, the other's master.
- ISBN 0-7190-4054-X, discusses the donor portraits in the cycle in detail (especially the female ones)
- ^ John Pope-Hennessy (see Further reading), 22–23, quoted in Roberts, 27, note 83. Sentence on Suzannah from M1 Berger & Berger, here
- ^ Campbell, 3–4, & 137
- ^ Campbell, 3–4
- ^ Penny, 108
- ^ Jacobs, 311–312
- ^ Shearman, 182. The frescoes are in the Poggi Chapel, in San Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna.
- ^ Roberts, 20–24
- ISBN 3-00-015752-2
References
- Campbell, Lorne, Renaissance Portraits, European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries, p. 151, 1990, Yale, ISBN 0-300-04675-8
- ISBN 0-300-06493-4
- "Handbook". Art in the Christian World, 300–1500; A Handbook of Styles and Forms, by Yves Christe and others, Faber and Faber, 1982, ISBN 0-571-11941-7
- Jacobs, Lynn F., "Rubens and the Northern Past: The Michielsen Triptych and the Thresholds of Modernity", The Art Bulletin, Vol. 91, No. 3 (September 2009), pp. 302–24, JSTOR 40645509
- King, Catherine. Renaissance Women Patrons, Manchester University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-7190-5289-0. Donor portraits are discussed on pp. 129–144
- ISBN 1-85709-908-7
- Roberts, Angela Marisol; Donor Portraits in Late Medieval Venice c.1280–1413, PhD thesis, 2007, Queens University, Canada (Large File)
- ISBN 978-3-7861-2695-9
- ISBN 0-14-020808-9
Further reading
- Dirk Kocks, Die Stifterdarstellung in der italienischen Malerei des 13.-15. Jahrhunderts (The Donor Portrait in Italian Painting of the 13th to 15th centuries), Cologne, 1971
- John Pope-Hennessy; The Portrait in Renaissance Art, London, 1966
- Johanna Scheel, Das altniederländische Stifterbild. Emotionsstrategien des Sehens und der Selbsterkenntnis, Berlin, 2013