donor portrait purpose

All told, then, by this combination of components, there is no question but that Christ is the dominant figure, yet the two emperors still appear formidably authoritative. 1514; Louvre) uses the half-length format seen in the Mona Lisa but tightens the focus on the sitter by highlighting his lively face against a softly lit gray backdrop. Not one member of the retinue rocks his or her head back to gaze at the gods looming above. } Making assumptions, using stereotypes, and sweeping generalizations are no substitute for actual knowledge. Rather, the difference seems to reside in where the attention of the Greek sacrificants is directed. What, exactly, is the iconographic type known as the donor portrait? Although none have survived, there is literary evidence of donor portraits in small chapels from the Early Christian period,[10] probably continuing the traditions of pagan temples. Vatic. It is true that, within the overall pictorial schema of the church, the gift is ultimately destined for Christ in the apse, but the absence in the image itself of the figure for whom it is intended has certain consequences. Then enter the name part Creative personality, esthete with good organizational skills. Each figure now makes the gesture of offering more explicit. III, 2627. 31 M. Boatwright, Hadrian and the City of Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 190202. Now that we have a clearer idea of the category of the contact portrait, let us turn our attention to the subject of this study proper, those scenes that fall squarely within the category for an overview of some of their other characteristics, their history, and the scholarship on the subject. Copy this link, or click below to email it to a friend. Italian painters at the turn of the sixteenth century embraced and refined this formula. Figure 1.8: Emperor Alexios Komnenos, Panoplia Dogmatica, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican, gr. This process may be intensified if the praying beholder is the donor himself. Would it make a difference to your charity comms? Yet despite this, this scene should not be considered a true donor portrait either. In order to understand how this development comes about, and indeed, in order to appreciate the distinctive character of the Byzantine iteration of these scenes, it is beneficial to look at examples of contact portraits in the artistic traditions preceding Byzantium. Are there any trends (location, interests, family situation, occupation) that stand out? 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.'. Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece), Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, Tommaso di Folco Portinari (14281501); Maria Portinari (Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, born 1456), Filippo Archinto (born about 1500, died 1558), Archbishop of Milan, Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino (15141574), With his Armor by Filippo Negroli, Portrait of a Young Man, Probably Robert Devereux (15661601), Second Earl of Essex, Princess Elizabeth (15961662), Later Queen of Bohemia, Portrait of a Woman, Probably Susanna Lunden (Susanna Fourment, 15991628), The Artist's Mother: Head and Bust, Three-Quarters Right, James Stuart (16121655), Duke of Richmond and Lennox, Don Gaspar de Guzmn (15871645), Count-Duke of Olivares, Rubens, Helena Fourment (16141673), and Their Son Frans (16331678), Everhard Jabach (16181695) and His Family, The Nude in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, The Nude in Western Art and Its Beginnings in Antiquity, Painting the Life of Christ in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, The Birth and Infancy of Christ in Italian Painting, The Crucifixion and Passion of Christ in Italian Painting, Peter Paul Rubens (15771640) and Anthony van Dyck (15991641): Paintings, Burgundian Netherlands: Court Life and Patronage, Mannerism: Bronzino (15031572) and his Contemporaries, Painting in Oil in the Low Countries and Its Spread to Southern Europe, Paintings of Love and Marriage in the Italian Renaissance, Patronage at the Later Valois Courts (14611589), Prague during the Rule of Rudolf II (15831612), Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle, Sixteenth-Century Painting in Emilia-Romagna, Sixteenth-Century Painting in Venice and the Veneto. 37 D. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 29294. One of the hallmarks of European portraiture is a sense of reality, an apparent intention to depict the unique appearance of a particular person. It is clear that when the image was executed in the tenth century, it was already laden with historical consciousness in that it refers to times by then long gone. But over time you will build not one, but a series of donor portraits a data-driven analysis of your audience and a deeper understanding of the people that give to your cause. Figure 1.2: Despot Oliver, painting in narthex, Church of the Holy Archangels, Lesnovo, FYR Macedonia, 1341. Portraits of lay supplicants before a holy figure are found the length and breadth of the Byzantine world and its sphere of influence, and at all times. PRINTED FROM OXFORD REFERENCE (www.oxfordreference.com). Muz., Syn. 2), The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, AD 8431261, The Mosaics of Hagia Sophia at Istanbul: Third Preliminary Report, Work Done in 19351938: The Imperial Portraits of the South Gallery, The Emperor at St Sophia: Viewer and Viewed, Byzance et les images: cycle de confrences organis au muse du Louvre par le Service culturel du 5 octobre au 7 dcembre 1992, The Display of Accumulated Wealth in Luxury Icons: Gift-Giving from the Byzantine Aristocracy to God in the Twelfth Century, : , , The Presentation Copies of the Panoplia Dogmatica (Moscow, Gos. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of the Donor Francesca Pitti-Tornabuoni, c. 1485-90, fresco (Cappella Maggiore, Santa Maria Novella, Florence) At the time of this commission, the Tornabuoni were the chief Florentine banking rivals of the Medici. In Florence, where there was already a tradition of including portraits of city notables in crowd scenes (mentioned by Leon Battista Alberti), the Procession of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli (145961), which admittedly was in the private chapel of the Palazzo Medici, is dominated by the glamorous procession containing more portraits of the Medici and their allies than can now be identified. For a long time, portraiture no longer existed as its own genre. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. The emperor does not have to concede anything to a more powerful figure, yet he still appears as pious, fulfilling his religious duty. Rather, it is concerned with differing grades and types of power. Figure 1.27: Basil before the Virgin, Lectionary, Greek Patriarchate, Jerusalem, Megale Panhagia 1, fol. I, 23642. 1.21).Footnote 31 Here, we have a representation of Hadrian (although his head was later reworked to resemble the emperor Constantine) on the right of the image, extending his hand over an altar, in the process of sacrificing to the goddess Diana. On balance, however, despite the increased emphasis on the donation, the overall bearing of the royal figures makes it seem as though they are not really giving their objects with any amount of conviction. Small donor with enthroned Madonna and Child, ca 1335, Giovanni di Paolo's Crucifixion with donor Jacopo di Bartolomeo, named in the inscription and with his coat of arms at left. A mid-fourth-century scene from a floor mosaic of the Constantinian Villa at Antioch, however, marks a decisive step in the transition from the standard Roman sacrifice representation to the Byzantine donor portrait (Fig. Ktetor portraits, in a sense, presume that relationship. Many imperial portraits representing donations of one sort or another that would previously have been loosely labeled as donor portraits may also be profitably analyzed in terms of the way in which the power relationship within the image is structured. Although she does not deal explicitly with the problem, she follows much the same route as Jnsdttir, stating that He [the donor] was usually depicted holding his gift in his hands, and all of the subsequent examples she gives are of this type.Footnote 5 She thus implicitly sides with the view that only donation iconography images should be called donor portraits. 24 S. Eustratiades, Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts in the Library of the Lavra on Mount Athos, Harvard Theological Studies 11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 11. The Justinian scene might, indeed, have looked as though it was only half done. 457r, thirteenth century. Memling seems to have replaced a generalized portrait of the wife of, The elder sons also seem very like younger versions of their father's portrait, John Pope-Hennessy (see Further reading), 2223, quoted in Roberts, 27, note 83. Types of renaissance patronage (article) | Khan Academy To do so would be to show him as less than the powerful force he wishes to be taken for. These naturalistic portraits, the sole survivors of their artistic tradition, were painted on wooden boards and used to cover the faces of upper class citizens during their burial ceremonies. It makes sense, then, to retain the terms donor and donor portraits, but only for those contact images specifically showing donations. gr. A case-in-point is Albrecht Drers self-portrait from 1500. Instead, the scenes adopt some of the same vocabulary that makes the coronations successful: the emperor is upright, frontal, dignified, authoritative, and, not least, bathing in the glow of Christs blessing. [17] A later convention was for figures at about three-quarters of the size of the main ones. The earliest Renaissance portraits were not paintings in their own right, but rather important inclusions in pictures of Christian subjects. Look at your headline numbers. 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. Portraiture in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. InHeilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Although still operating within the paradigm established by the earlier panel, some small but significant changes have been made. In this respect, the images are concerned more with sponsorship of the church in an official capacity than with issues of personal salvation that are found in traditional donor portraits.Footnote 10 Nonetheless, the problematic of power and contact is dealt with in a distinctive way. 7 C. Stornajolo, Miniature delle omelie di Giacomo Monaco (cod. This re-figuring of the sacrifice represents a major conceptual shift, and opens the way toward our contact donor portraits. That means you need to put some time aside to look at what your dataqualitative and quantitativeis telling you. Nonprofit storytelling: 4 steps to create persuasive donor stories As Olivers portrait plainly shows, ktetor-ship is very much intertwined with the worldly aspects of power, status, and social privilege. Syn. An indication of some of the issues involved in defining the type is given not only by the images themselves, but by the names by which they are known. The most relevant distinction to draw in terms of iconography, then, concerns not whether a donation is or is not shown, but whether there is deep personal contact between the lay and holy figures. GrantHomework3 - What is a donor portrait and why did Consider the following range of scenes. (. Rather, he is bolt upright from head to toe, and he does not seem to be asking Christ for anything. 3v, Fig. This reading provides a solution to the unusual features that appeared when the image was taken as a donor portrait. Figure 1.21: Hadrian sacrificing to Diana, sculpture, Arch of Constantine, Rome, after AD 130. One of the most famous and striking groups of Baroque donor portraits are those of the male members of the Cornaro family, who sit in boxes as if at the theatre to either side of the sculpted altarpiece of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Ecstasy of St Theresa (1652). Instead, they turn away from the holy figures, outward, toward the spectator. See also A. Beihammer, S. Constantinou, and M. Parani (eds. 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.[16]. Can you see a picture forming, an outline of your typical charity donor? In addition to recording appearances, portraits served a variety of social and practical functions in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Like the Greeks who had inspired them, Roman artists placed great emphasis on capturing the likeness of their sitter. How to create a great donor portrait - The Access Group Portraiture is one of the most intimate genres in all of painting, and it has reinvented itself many times across European history. One might be tempted to say that it is the difference in scale between human and supernatural figures that is responsible; but this frequently applies to our Byzantine images as well, as we have seen. on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. King, 129. On the other hand, however, the lack of holy recipient is also one of the major strengths of the image as an imperial scene. gr. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Donor portrait". 387; Vatican, BAV, Vat. The full-length format, always a costly and grandiose option, increases the sitters air of power and self-possession. 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. [15] The Wilton Diptych of Richard II of England was a forerunner of these. We have so far been concerned with exploring the broad range of images of lay portraits and holy figures in relation to the classifications of contact or ktetor scenes, using the kind of contact manifested between the figures and the power relations between them as defining features. This is visible in the forward tilt of his shoulders, and his head leaning back to peer up at Christ through slightly furrowed brows. Fols. Let us begin with this one. Not sure if youve got the right information to work with? The Portrait in the Renaissance. [11] In subsequent centuries bishops, abbots and other clergy were the donors most commonly shown, other than royalty, and they remained prominently represented in later periods. A specific example taken from a large range of possibilities is the picture of a supplicant in proskynesis named simply George in the Church of Hagios Stephanos in Kastoria (1338, Fig. Although many are of the high administrative classes, there are also a number of simple citizens with no particular status or rank who appear in the images as well. One of the features that we have already seen of contact portraits is that they are usually commissioned by supplicants seeking mercy in relation to final judgment. Figure 1.22: Huntsman offering a hare to Artemis, floor mosaic in Constantinian Villa, Antioch, mid-fourth century AD, now in Louvre Museum, Paris. The Rijksmuseum employed an AI to repaint lost parts of Rembrandts The Night Watch. Heres how they did it. They were either depicted as themselves or as the reincarnations of gods, and they were always drawn in profile. In medieval art, donors were frequently portrayed in the altarpieces or wall paintings that they commissioned, and in the fifteenth century painters began to depict such donors with distinctive features presumably studied from life. Muz., Syn. In Byzantium, however, the prostration can be much more complete, with the back parallel to the ground and the head lowered. An example of this can be seen in Assyrian art, on the Black Obelisk of around 740 BC, where the subject King Jehu of the Israelites is shown prostrate before King Shalmanesser III (British Museum, London, Fig. In some of these diptychs the portrait of the original owner has been over-painted with that of a later one. See also Hillsdale, Byzantine Art and Diplomacy, 139 and 17980. A painting in the Catacombs of Commodilla of 528 shows a throned Virgin and Child flanked by two saints, with Turtura, a female donor, in front of the left hand saint, who has his hand on her shoulder; very similar compositions were being produced a millennium later. The only thing worse than not enough data is too much of it. It is stiff and awkward as it teeters on the brink of showing a true interaction, but cannot quite allow itself to go that far, as it also attempts to maintain the traditional display of royal power. Donor portraits are depictions of the person/s commissioning the painting that actually feature within the painting themselves. 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. Published online by Cambridge University Press: Figure 1.10: Bishop Ecclesius led to Christ by an angel, mosaic in apse of the Church of San Vitale, Ravenna, consecrated 548. See also S. Kalopissi-Verti, The Peasant as Donor (13th14th Centuries), in J.-M. Spieser and E. Yota (eds. Sometimes the sitters beauty or demeanor is emphasized, as in Nicholas Hilliards miniature portrait of a young man (35.89.4) with luxuriant curls and a straightforward gaze. : Harvard University Press, 1991. Cypriot Donor Portraiture: Constructing the Ideal Family The wall can take many creative forms depending on the campaign. Ownership of an object is relinquished, and is transferred to someone else. the only contingency they did not envisage was what actually occurred, that their faces would survive but their names go astray. [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.' (Giessen: W. Schmitz, 1963), vol. (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2023. But over time you will build not one, but a series of donor portraits a data-driven analysis of your audience and a deeper understanding of the people that give to your cause. New York: Pantheon, 1966. The gifts are extended farther in toward the Virgin and Christ in the center of the image. 0.1, at first sight they all seem to belong within one of the categories suggested earlier, that of the gift-bearing scenes. See also H. Hunger (ed. See also Radoji, Serbischen Kunst, 81. 1.25).Footnote 37. In portraiture, the smallest touches can hold the greatest significance. The effort by these three philanthropic bodies to safeguard and embed donor intent in their operations is the focus of this issue of Foundation Watch. 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. Although this tradition of the upright approach survives in many of the Byzantine images, another new strand develops. All rights reserved. Early Netherlandish painters, bridging the gap between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, introduced a number of features we take for granted today. Figure 1.29: Imperial procession, Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, 1319 BC. Yet, in terms of standard contact portraits, this image is still unusual. In the same volume, see Catherine Jolivet-Lvy, Collective Patterns of Patronage in the Late Byzantine Village: The Evidence of Church Inscriptions, 14162. 1.9). Chapter. 26 J. Oates, Babylon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 175. The purpose of donor portraits was to memorialize the donor and his family, and especially to solicit prayers for them after their death. 2) (Rome: Danesi, 1910); Spatharakis, Portrait, 7983; H. Evans and W. Wixom (eds. Here, each emperor clearly extends to the Virgin and Child the object that he holds.Footnote 14 The image shows none of the hesitations that we have seen earlier. These paintings were called donor portraits, and their purpose was to inspire the commissioner and their loved ones toward prayer. The discoveries at Faiyum give art historians an impression of what naturalistic portraits looked like before the Renaissance, a period which continues to define the genre to this day. Follow these and use them to create sub-groups and start segmenting your audience. A hint of the same position appears in the brief article in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium by Kalavrezou. These images share some elements of the contact-laden donation of Theodore, but ultimately have more in common with coronation iconography. Although large numbers of the scenes do not survive from the pre-iconoclastic period, the tradition was already clearly thriving in the sixth and early seventh centuries. Jan van Eycks infamous Arnolfini Portrait (1434) emphasizes not only the faces of their sitters but their possessions as well: The ceremonial garb, wooden slippers, and partially lit chandelier indicate the couples married status. See also J. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 177210, on the processional aspect of both the San Vitale panels and the Ara Pacis. Endowed funds provide income every year in perpetuity to carry out the designated purpose of the fund. 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. ), A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); F. W. Danker (rev. See also S. Radoji, Geschichte der Serbischen Kunst: von den Anfngen bis zum Ende des Mittelalters (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969), 42. One of the reasons for this is the introduction of proskynesis into the scene. Seriously. [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. Yet even here, the Byzantine gesture can be more extreme. The emperor does not have to appear in a pose of humility because he makes no request. In Florence, where there was already a tradition of including portraits of city notables in crowd scenes (mentioned by Leon Battista Alberti), the Procession of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli (145961), which admittedly was in the private chapel of the Palazzo Medici, is dominated by the glamorous procession containing more portraits of the Medici and their allies than can now be identified. Donor portraits appear in altarpieces and are essential parts of devotional diptychs and triptychs; in these smaller works used for worship in the home, a single sitter, a husband and wife, or a donor and his patron saint face a devotional image, such as the Virgin and Child, in an attitude of prayer. Towards the end of his life, Francisco Goya began painting terrifying scenes directly onto the walls of his house. Figure 1.15: Monk Theophanes before the Virgin, The Gospel of Theophanes, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1960 (7105), fol. Its important to keep a log of key meetings, conversations, email threads, and notes. Here we should clarify that the expression donor portrait as it is employed in the title of this book and in prior instances up to this point, is used as an umbrella term, referring generically to all the iconographic types so far seen. The frescoes are in the Poggi Chapel, in, Ainsworth, Maryan W. "Intentional Alterations of Early Netherlandish Painting". If art from antiquity was inspired by the writings of important thinkers such as Plato and Socrates, European portraits from the Middle Ages were based on teachings from the Bible. 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. 387. 2v of this manuscript, the emperor Alexios Komnenos is represented approaching a seated figure of Christ, extending a manuscript before him in what seems to be a clear gesture of donation (Fig. See thethankQ advantagefor yourself. Professional details:Do you know what your donors do for a living? In this respect, both the Antioch mosaic and the Byzantine images can be contrasted to the standard Roman scene. If youre swimming in numbers it can be hard to make sense of them, so think carefully about the fields you need, and keep your analysis focussed. In some of these diptychs the portrait of the original owner has been over-painted with that of a later one. Submissive, kneeling figures there are aplenty in the art of the early Christian period, of Rome, and of the ancient Near East, from where the gesture is said to have arisen.Footnote 35 It is a striking fact, however, that the posture is generally adopted in front of earthly potentates such as emperors and kings, not gods. It is as though the celebrants cannot see them, and do not believe what the image itself represents: that the gods are present before them. Jacobs, Lynn F., "Rubens and the Northern Past: The Michielsen Triptych and the Thresholds of Modernity". Once we have better defined the category as a whole, we will turn our attention to its chief characteristics, its emergence and development within Byzantine art, and an overview of the scholarship on the subject. 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. Reading the images together, then, they seem to be declaring that the book from which the emperor reads is grounded upon the writings of this most august group of luminaries. 1.29).Footnote 42 Here too, the emperor appears in procession, accompanied by religious figures and attendants as he participates in a religious ritual bringing gifts to the gods, but where no holy recipients are represented. Often, even late into the Renaissance, the donor portraits, especially when of a whole family, will be at a much smaller scale than the principal figures, in defiance of linear perspective. Brilliant, Richard. 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. Donor portraits do just that. However, by and large, the classification does capture the majority of the scenes in the corpus. gr. 1.7). In the coronation, however, rather than being lessened by their encounter with the ultimate power in the universe, the emperors come away from it with their own status enhanced. The illustrations that appear immediately prior to this scene in the manuscript elaborate on and confirm this interpretation. [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. 370. Jacobs, Lynn F., "Rubens and the Northern Past: The Michielsen Triptych and the Thresholds of Modernity", This page was last edited on 25 March 2023, at 14:11. Yet there is also a crucial difference between these scenes: the Justinian panel shows a gift-bearing procession, but includes no recipient. This change reflected a new growth of interest in everyday life and individual identity as well as a revival of Greco-Roman custom.
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