Portrait imprint in fifteenth-century Italy

• Autores: Joost Keizer
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 38, Nº. 1, 2015, págs. 10-37
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
• Resumen

  • This essay considers a remarkable group of fifteenth-century Italian portraits that were based on masks cast directly from the sitter's face, either during life or shortly after death. All of them explicate their origins in a cast. Rather than arguing that some fifteenth-century artists were simply not skilled enough to overcome the traces of death, I submit that the traces of these masks served a kind of faithfulness to documentation and replication. These portraits are informed by a highly motivated kind of realism, formulated in response to doubts about the veracity of naturalistic pictures around the middle of the fifteenth century. They are better understood, I argue, in terms of imprint or reproduction rather than in terms of invention or enlivenment.