The Art of the Portrait (Masterpieces of European Portrait Painting, 1420-1670)

The portraits presented in this book are selected exclusively from works executed between the late Middle Ages and the seventeenth century. There are good reasons for limiting study to this period, for it was then that portraiture came into its own. It was this era that witnessed the revival and genuine renewal of the individualised, "au vif" depiction of privileged or highly esteemed persons, a genre largely neglected since Classical antiquity. From the fifteenth century onwards, not only princes, the high clergy and noblemen, but members of other social groups - merchants, craftsmen, bankers, humanist scholars and artists - sat for their portraits, keeping themselves, quite literally, in the public eye.