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A “True Likeness”: The Renaissance City Portrait*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Jessica Maier
Jessica Maier*
Affiliation:
Mount Holyoke College
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Abstract

Portraits of cities and of human beings shared a nomenclature and developed along parallel courses in the Renaissance. This article traces their common history, examining evolving notions of likeness and approaches to the visual fashioning of identity across both categories of imagery, then considers one urban subject, Rome, that embodied all the challenges of the genre. In representations of the Eternal City such as those by Leonardo Bufalini and Mario Cartaro, artists sought to convey the appearance of Rome in their own time along with that of its glorious past, and to balance what they could see with an imagined, timeless ideal. In this way, images of Rome offer new insight into early modern portraiture and representation in general.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , Fall 2012 , pp. 711 - 752
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Early versions of the ideas in this article were presented as talks at the annual conference of The Renaissance Society of America in Los Angeles in 2009, and at The Johns Hopkins University in February 2010. I am grateful to the audiences in both cases for their helpful feedback, as well as to Julia DeLancey, chair of my session at the RSA conference, and to Herica Valladares, who invited me to speak at Hopkins. Additionally, I wish to thank Chriscinda Henry and Richard Brilliant for their thoughtful comments on early drafts, as well as Evelyn Lincoln for her invaluable critique of a more recent iteration. Finally, my sincerest gratitude goes to the readers who reviewed the essay with such care and insight for this journal. The research for this article was generously funded by fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Newberry Library, and the J. B. Harley Research Trust. Translations are the author’s except where otherwise noted.

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