Abstract
Readers of Vasari’s Vite will be aware of the lively Renaissance tradition of the artist’s embedded portrait within commissioned works. We are told of numerous embedded self-portraits, a notion that earlier authors including Alberti, Filippo Villani, and Ghiberti, corroborate. This dissertation argues that the Vite, our most extensive source on the subject, set up ideas and expectations that continue to pervade our understanding of their purposes and functions. A primary aim here is to move beyond Vasari’s assumptions and examine self-images from the standpoint of their audience rather than their creators. Chapter One examines aspects of our current knowledge concerning Vasari’s historical context and his motivations as an artist, courtier, and writer in order to understand how his views informed his interpretation of the genre. Chapter Two examines a manuscript self-portrait by Pietro da Pavia and a sculpted self-portrait of Andrea Orcagna. It investigates issues of artistic identity and authority and how these notions were displayed and commemorated to discern how self-portraits may have served the aims of the commissioner(s). The third and fourth chapters delve into the history of Quattrocento Florentine embedded self-portraits. First with Masaccio’s self-portrait in the Brancacci Chapel, and then with self-images of Benozzo Gozzoli, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi and Domenico Ghirlandaio, these chapters examine aspects of the Renaissance culture of art commissioning to establish the patron’s role with regard to embedded self-portraiture. Discussion here suggests ways in which a patron might have understood the artist’s embedded self-portrait during the early Quattrocento. It further explores the notion that while professional, intellectual, and social-status driven concerns may have dominated the creation of embedded self-images, not all of these were the concerns of the artists. The final chapter investigates transitional images between the embedded and autonomous self-portrait traditions by examining two fictively autonomous self-images – one by Perugino in Perugia’s Collegio del Cambio and the other by Pintoricchio in Santa Maria Maggiore, Spello. The case-studies presented here illuminate neglected aspects regarding Renaissance embedded self-images, and cast light on both sides of the transaction between artist and patron that resulted in the inclusion of the artist’s embedded self-portrait in narrative paintings.
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