Giovanni Battista Moroni: Renaissance Portraitist (review)

Giovanni Battista Moroni: Renaissance Portraitist. Edited by Peter Humfrey (Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, 2000) 80 pp. $21.95

This catalog for a small, but important, exhibition--just ten ravishing portraits by Moroni, the sixteenth-century Lombard artist--is a heartening indication of the growing interaction between historians and art historians. One could imagine such a catalog focusing entirely on style and technique--on such classic topics as the use of color, the structure of poses, or the influence of other artists or traditions. But the foreword, a number of the essays, and the annotations to the works themselves move beyond these concerns to raise larger historical issues. Placing Moroni in his social and cultural setting, they make a case for his art as a reflection of new emphases in Renaissance thought and society.

The central feature of Moroni's output that they seek to understand is his remarkable concentration on portraiture. Alone among the sought-after artists of his age, he devoted almost half of his oeuvre to portraits. Although, in general terms, this focus can be related to the interest in the individual that was characteristic of Renaissance Italy, the contributors also make more specific connections. In the very first paragraph of the foreword by Timothy Potts, the director of the Museum, the tone is set: "The interest in good government and citizenship; the celebration of virtue and refined behavior; and the . . . discourse on man's place in nature--all were premised on . . . individuals of outstanding talent, character, and intelligence" (7). The wish to display such individuals became one of the driving forces of the day, and, hence, the justification for the specialty at which Moroni so single-mindedly excelled.

Yet, it was a particular social segment on which Moroni focused. Except for a brief visit to the city of Trent--rich in patrons because of the large number of powerful ecclesiastics who were attending the long-running Church Council--he spent his years in Bergamo, Brescia, and other cities of the Venetian terrafirma empire. What set this region apart was that it lacked the usual wellspring of portraits, a court awash in aristocrats. As a result, Moroni concentrated on sitters of a different social stratum: intellectuals, professionals, and government employees. In his essay, Creighton Gilbert sums them up as "brain workers, in professions using verbal skills; although that excludes the few soldiers, they too work at trained professional skills and make this their claim to identity, not rank, property, or wealth" (39).

Gilbert goes further, and citing both Jacob Burckhardt's magisterial 1860 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York, 1890; trans. S. G. C. Middlemore) and Stephen Greenblatt's 1980 Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago), he points out that the Renaissance was notable precisely for the new prominence that it gave to secretaries, ministers, and poets (thanks, no doubt, to the humanists' ancestry as rhetoricians). Given that cultural shift, Moroni's portraits can be seen as the very embodiments of the age.

It is this ability to cast light on social change as well as on artistic development that is the hallmark of the interdisciplinary approach. That we also learn a great deal about Moroni's artistic sources, his patrons, and his particular skills--particularly his pioneering attachment to the full-length portrait--is only to be expected in a catalog of this kind. But the interest in the implications of these paintings for the wider society, which is notable also in Jane Bridgeman's discussion of the social meanings of the clothing that Moroni's sitters wore, indicates the extent to which art historians are coming to draw on, and instruct, the work of their historian colleagues.

T. K. R.

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