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Renaissance Worlds Apart
John Haberin New York City
Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance
Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and Jan Vos
You have to be an egomaniac to keep your most precious possession hidden. So at any rate was the speaker in "My Last Duchess," the dramatic monologue by Robert Browning.
He alone unveils a portrait of the wife he killed, "for none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I." When he speaks of her as "looking as if she were alive," he knows all too well that she is not. Five years ago, the Frick presented Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and a Carthusian monk as themselves a world apart—only that world was Bruges. Was art, then, to be public or private, in the North and Italy? And where were what the Met now calls the "Hidden Faces" of the Renaissance? 
My last portrait
Browning's speaker reveals more than he intends, but such are madness and poetry. Was this the face of the Renaissance? The Met looks at its most vivid testimony to individuals, portraiture, and sees only hidden faces. In real life, patrons of Renaissance art had other motives than egomania. They were not just making art safe from prying eyes. They were out to share the artist's vision and their own.
They were putting on a show, and the curtain, if any, was just part of the act. The Met, though, sees only reticence and ownership. With "Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance," it calls up the devices that kept Renaissance portraits hidden, if not exactly under lock and key, from some of the period's finest artists. It could be literally the obverse of textbook histories and modern museum displays, but were these faces truly under cover? And what, then, were they doing in paint? You may well wonder what the show is hiding.
From the very start of "Hidden Faces," you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Religious art thrived on triptychs with wings that spoke of adoration of the central scene—wings that often folded shut. The donor portraits in the Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck occupy just two of twenty panels, both on the outside. Rapt in their piety and vision, they give way to that glorious vision as the wings open. You will not see that painting or its kind here. Instead, the Met opens with a single panel, a portrait of nobility and restraint by Rogier van der Weyden.
It does, though, have a heraldic device on its back, and it may well have hung from a chain, back facing front, until the man choose to swing it around. Here and in other works, heraldry, text, or the illusion of an official document attests to fidelity and ancestry. Do they sound more like obstacles than invitations to see more? One Latin inscription reads Noli Me Tangere, or "do not touch"—and the risen Christ's words to Mary Magdalene could apply to the viewer and the painting as well. A panel could also slide over a portrait, an open and shut case. As for curtains, an illuminated manuscript depicts one, drawn aside from a Madonna and Child.
As constructions grew more sophisticated, so did the mask. With Hans Memling, heraldry gives way to still life. The leaves of the first have become a finely glazed vase holding flowers, sharing its warmth and illusion with the man's shadow and beard stubble. Still others present an allegory, often as not more vivid than the portrait. With Lorenzo Lotto in Venice, petals shower down on Virtue, a woman, while Vice lurks, sinister but ineffectual, behind a tree. In a rare grisaille, or monochrome, Titian places Cupid beside the wheel of fortune, in command of fortune or its subject. It is chastening to think that painting like his on canvas, rather than panels, caught on as a natural cover.
Do not rejoice too soon at your own fortune. Most of these coverings are lost to time, and the curator, Alison Manges Nogueira, must settle for second-rate artists or clever recreations. On video, wood can still slide open and shut. Too much else is left to medallions or to the backwaters of Germany and the southern Netherlands. Jacometto Veneziano learned from Antonello da Messina, perhaps the first in Italy to experiment in oils. His portraits are lifeless all the same.
The real cover-up
Just as scarce is an appreciation of art's motives. Sure, the Met concedes, covering could protect a work from the elements, and smaller works in lockets had the advantage of portability. One could keep them close to one's heart. Otherwise, the emphasis is on privacy, privilege, and hiding. It might do better to think of publicity and revelation. In that illuminated manuscript, nuns draw aside the curtain for a vision to refresh a weary traveler.
A curtain speaks not only of masking, but also of theater, and the whole point of a folding altarpiece is vision. It could be celebrating itself as a vision onto real and imagined worlds. This was after all the Renaissance with its greater realism and self-reflection. As with an altarpiece, that vision could take place in a public place, too, a cathedral. Lucas Cranach made his miniatures of Martin Luther and his wife, a former nun, not just to please them, but to spread the word to those still outraged at their marriage. But then, as another Latin inscription has it, "to each his own mask."
Does the Met argue for Renaissance portraiture as a world apart, known only to few? Nothing offers a world apart from the madness of New York so much as the Frick Collection. The Lehmann wing, a donor's world to himself where "Hidden Faces" hides, cannot match it. And nothing offers a world apart within the Frick so much as a modest Virgin and Child begun by Jan van Eyck. It is a thoroughly familiar world at that, even for someone who can never have known Renaissance Bruges.
Now, though, it has a companion with much the same cast and composition by Petrus Christus, who had assisted van Eyck. A Carthusian monk, Jan Vos, commissioned them both, and they reflect the changes in his life in nearly a decade between. They also reflect changing conceptions of the secular and religious in painting. In each one, the monk kneels as Barbara, his patron saint, presents him to Mary and the child holds out a blessing. The saint stands closely behind Vos with one hand on his shoulder in comfort and support. Thanks to the tower in which she was imprisoned, she also offers a bridge onto a thrilling panorama of the city.
Vos turned to van Eyck on becoming prior of the Charterhouse of Bruges, in today's Belgium, in April of 1441. (A charterhouse is a Carthusian monastery.) He looks intent, serious, unamazed, and fully meriting a blessing. The Frick's painting is no less magisterial at that, for all the infant's nudity and the Virgin's delicacy. She stands erect in a broad, lushly bordered robe of royal blue, with a tapestry behind her and beneath her feet, befitting a queen of the heavens. Arches to either side mark the interior as privileged, too.
The donor liked the work so much that he took it with him when he left years later for yet another monastery, in Utrecht. He arranged things so that others could pray to it as well, each prayer shortening his term in purgatory. He must have felt over the course of time that much closer to death—although the curator, Emmas Capron, proposes that he intended the earlier work as a memorial. His prayers brought him back to van Eyck's circle as well for the Exeter Madonna, on loan from Berlin. The paintings may share the background of a Renaissance city, but each unfolds in its own world.
A patron, a city, and the heavens
Architecture for van Eyck always tells a story, too, about the spiritual and the observed. His Madonna in a Church from around 1425 stands within a cathedral barely taller than she, identifying the two as embodiments of the true church. The room in his Arnolfini portrait from 1434, many have argued, serves as the site of a couple's wedding vows, with the artist as witness. Another donor, Chancellor Nicolas Rolin, prays to Mary in yet another room with Bruges visible behind them, while gawkers turn their back on the interior, marking it as a space apart. Conversely, when van Eyck draws or paints Saint Barbara, he leaves the tower that identifies her as just one more element of the city. For him, the sacred is not just a symbol but all around him.
The Frick's work has a still larger and busier city beyond its arches—recognizably the early Renaissance, but with a striking density and modernity. It is also, though, an idyllic city. Tiny people go about their business, including a boat ride, much as in the gardens of a medieval illuminated manuscript. Barbara's tower still stands outside, but now way too large to blend in with the background. What has changed? For one thing, just two months after taking on the commission, Jan van Eyck passed away.
Historians still debate who completed the painting, soon to be back on display in front of sculpture by Edmund de Waal, much like such twentieth-century legends as Erwin Panofsky and Max J. Friedländer. Did van Eyck even have a hand in it? Some have dismissed the background as repetitive, while others see van Eyck's design in all. The fine brush delineating Mary contrasts with the broad whites and shadows of the donor's Carthusian dress—which for some point right to Petrus Christus. Panofsky spoke of the artist's house painter's brush, and he meant that as a compliment. More literal minded than his teacher, Petrus might also have rebelled against letting a saint's precious emblem like the tower disappear into landscape.
Petrus captures some of art's very first fully middle-class characters, but each with a fixed place in the scheme of things. The Frick also borrows a portrait of his from the Met, of a man in a monk's dress, with a beard and youthful allure that mark him as instead a lay brother—and with wide eyes and a ruddy complexion that modernize van Eyck for a second generation. Clearly Petrus maintained a connection to the monastery, and sure enough Vos was back to him around 1450 for another shot at the donor, the Virgin, the infant, and the saint. The Exeter Madonna would have hung in the monk's cell for private contemplation. It also shows a more private place apart from the world. Now the tower has moved inside beneath Barbara's left arm, and the city has shrunk to a cluster of more modest homes in the near distance, with a mountainous open country on the horizon.
Vos back in 1441 had taken on a new role, and he was not leaving his past altogether behind. He had been a Teutonic knight, a cult dedicated to the relics of Saint Elizabeth. And the earlier painting completes its symmetry with a second saint, Elizabeth herself. Her nun's robe, her beady eyes, and a crown for Mary in her hands have a charm that might belong to van Eyck or a third hand. Could the martial role of a knight also explain another enigma—a statue labeled Mars in the window of Barbara's tower? Regardless, ten years later Elizabeth and Mars are gone, along with much of the work's subtlety and detail.
At the same time, the sacred space has opened up. A silverpoint, possibly by Petrus, copies a lost painting by van Eyck. It goes lightly on the Gothic architecture, leaving what could almost be open sky. And the Exeter Madonna unfolds in an airy upper story like a balcony or loft, with a translucent canopy above Mary's head for a halo—much like one that might have stood in church above her son's presence in the Eucharist. Was Vos, who died in 1462, thinking ahead to his place in heaven? The Frick throws in a handful of other artifacts related to the artists and the Carthusian order. The uncertainties surrounding the paintings are going nowhere fast, but the Northern Renaissance and its emergence come more clearly into focus.
"Hidden Faces" ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 7, 2024, "The Charterhouse of Bruges: Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and Jan Vos" at The Frick Collection through January 13, 2019. A related review, among the very first on this Web site, considers Petrus Christus in retrospective. You will excuse me if it seems best to restate some of the same points after a gap of twenty-five years. Another review looks more widely at Renaissance portraits.