When Beauty Was Virtue

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Mercifully, although the catalog essays give an excellent account of the motives behind the portraits (the claiming of sexual and family territory, the presentation of the bride as property and so on), they don't overdo the vintage feminist rhetoric. Perhaps it is true, for instance, that the profile portrait implies male control over its subject. But where does that leave the fact that Renaissance husbands were also painted in profile? Is a woman dressed and jeweled to the nines a symbol of passivity, a man similarly kitted up one of power?

Historians today have thrown out one of the more optimistic ideas set forth in 1860 by Jacob Burckhardt's pioneering study of the Italian Renaissance, that in the 15th century women began to gain equality with men, acquiring a new social influence as individuals in their own right. The portraits in this show neither confirm nor deny this idea. Although they do show women getting more spectacular, the act of wearing jewels that still belong to their husbands doesn't mean independence.

By far the most beautiful of the pure-profile images, not only in this show but in Renaissance painting as a whole, is the portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni, circa 1488, by Domenico Ghirlandaio. She died in childbirth in 1488 at the age of only 20, and it's possible that the image was made after her death, as a kind of monument. (J. Pierpont Morgan, who kept it in the study of his library in New York City, doted on it because it reminded him of his own dead wife, Amelia Sturges.) What is certain, however, is that Ghirlandaio's rich, hot colors and formal precision, his exquisite control of all the microforms within the larger silhouettes--the serpentine waves and knotted bun of hair, the lovely complexities of brocade and embroidery--make this one of the greatest panel paintings of the 15th century and one of greater interest than Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci.

Gradually, the goddess of the palazzo comes closer. She turns toward you in three-quarters view, in imitation of Flemish painting. (There had been a big vogue in Florence for artists like Hans Memling and Petrus Christus.) This shift is just beginning in Botticelli's portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, but her pearl-encrusted beauty still has the idealized remoteness of myth. From the turn toward the viewer's eye would be born the modern idea of portraiture as the making of a "speaking likeness"--speaking, that is, to a viewer, rather than holding itself aloof. But absolute truth to nature? That remains a fiction now, as it was then.