The first person we encounter on entering the intriguingly titled “Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance,” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Lehman Wing, is well-known to anyone who frequents the museum and probably memorable to occasional visitors as well.1 His face is not hidden. Quite the contrary, we are confronted by the grave expression, narrow visage, and elegantly arched nose of Francesco d’Este, the illegitimate son and designated successor of Lionello d’Este, the fifteenth-century marquess of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio Emilia. Francesco was painted about 1460 by the Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden and his workshop, when the elegant young man was receiving military training at the Burgundian court of Philip the Good.
Long one of the pleasures of the Met’s Northern Renaissance galleries, the portrait of the Italian aristocrat reminds us of the complex relationship between Northern and Southern Europe in the Quattrocento, when the Low Countries had a considerable population of Florentine bankers and wool merchants. These expatriates were attracted to the meticulous detail and glowing color in the works of such local masters as Rogier, Hugo van der Goes, and Hans Memling, commissioning paintings from them and sometimes even sending them to Italy. Northern artists occasionally immigrated to Italy, too, while Italian painters, at times, strove to equal the acute clarity of Northern portraits, evidence of rich cross-fertilization. We can, as we usually do, study Francesco’s distinctive features, puzzle at the pairing of the hammer and the ring that he holds in his long, boneless fingers, and wonder at the unusual white background.
But there’s more. The installation in “Hidden Faces” allows us to see the coat of arms, the emblem of Francesco’s father, on the back of the portrait: a shield with fleurs-de-lis and eagles, flanked by rampant beasts (leopards?) and surmounted by a helmet and another animal, this one seated and blindfolded. The presence of Lionello’s carefully rendered heraldry confirms the identity of the painting’s subject. It also alerts us to what is to come: an exhibition full of engaging works and constant surprises. As we move through “Hidden Faces,” we encounter pitiless accounts of craggy Northerners and elegant depictions of suave Italians, of beautiful young people and older subjects who show the effects of time—all of which sounds like a contradiction of the exhibition’s title. But everything is more complicated than we thought. Throughout, we are constantly informed of the various and often unexpected ways the exhibited works were presented and viewed when they were made. The result? Our ideas about Renaissance portraiture are expanded, altered, and even permanently transformed.
We’re accustomed to considering paintings as confrontational objects, hung on the wall, to be studied from a single point of view. Of course, we must also take into account altarpieces with folding wings, painted on both sides; yet even these multiple panels were meant to be visible, like conventional paintings, either when closed or open. But we learn at the Met that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, portraits were often conceived as what the curators call “interactive objects,” designed to be handled and pondered. They could be double-sided, like that of Francesco d’Este, with meaningful information on the reverse; concealed behind hinged or sliding covers, painted with symbolic or allegorical images; hidden in boxes or lockets; and more. Rather than being displayed on the wall, they were stored away, brought out to be studied and savored. Some covered works, we learn, were tokens of affection, obscured to hide the identity of lovers; others had political associations. Viewers shown one of these hidden portraits were supposed to decipher the emblem or unravel the allegory’s relation to the sitter. (People obviously had longer attention spans, at a time free of all the visual distractions that inundate us. Paintings were meant to be “read,” with every element noted and carefully considered, not walked by at high speed or even more rapidly consumed via cell-phone snap.)
At the Met, a few judiciously placed animations show us how the sliding covers of several exhibited paintings once worked, and if we read the object labels or the catalogue essays, we get some help in interpreting the coded messages—although in at least one tantalizing example, no one is quite sure of precisely what was meant. Believed to be a cover for a lost portrait, a little painting by Memling (1479–80, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris), with its young woman half-hidden by a jagged boulder and its pair of lions with golden shields, in an idyllic landscape, may indeed be an “Allegory of Chastity,” as titled, or may have something to do with the legend of Saint Barbara. Or not.
Despite the popularity of works of this type in Italy and Northern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and despite the fact that such major artists as Memling, Lucas Cranach, Lorenzo Lotto, and Titian made multisided paintings, the tradition remains little known. Few covered works have survived as they were intended to be seen. Hinged companion panels and sliding covers have been separated from the portraits they were made to conceal, original frames have been removed, and the portraits themselves have been treated as independent objects, displayed on the wall like conventional paintings, no matter their previous incarnations. All of which makes the Met’s “Hidden Faces” a remarkable event. Organized by Alison Manges Noguiera, a curator of the Met’s Robert Lehman Collection, the show assembles about sixty works from the Met’s collections and other American and European institutions. Some of the individual portraits are well-known, some are even spectacular, worthy of attention entirely for their own merits, but seeing them in this context changes how we think about them. Did they, too, once have covers? What’s on the back?
Because of that history of separation, there’s a certain amount of speculation about the original roles and relationships of some of the works on view, but it is speculation based on exhaustive scholarship. A near-monochrome tondo by Titian, Cupid and the Wheel of Fortune (ca. 1520, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), for example, is believed to have been a timpano, a “cover.” An image of this type is unusual for the artist, but there is a reference to highly valued timpani by Titian, now lost, in an important Venetian collector’s “treasure room,” so it is certain that he made some. The allegorical subject of Cupid and the Wheel of Fortune would be appropriate for a cover, and it is suggested that the chubby winged boy embracing the wheel, almost as tall as he is, embodies the idea that love can be strong enough to overcome time and fate. There is no doubt about the original function of another tondo by Titian in the exhibition, The Triumph of Love (ca. 1543–46, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford). By contrast—and most unusually—there is clear documentation that the image of Cupid balanced on the back of a fierce, roaring lion, about to fire an arrow, against a distant view of the Veneto was once a timpano, made to cover a now-lost portrait by Titian of a Venetian noblewoman. The painting is believed to illustrate the ability of virtuous love to conquer the wilder passions, a variant on the familiar theme of amor vincit omnia. Once a rectangle, The Triumph of Love was transformed into a circular painting, probably in the late seventeenth century.
“Hidden Faces” abounds in fascinating examples such as the two Titians and fascinating information about them. We are often surprised by what we find on the backs of even familiar exhibited works, such as the portrait of Francesco d’Este, not only because we are not usually permitted to see them, but also because the paintings on the verso are sometimes as interesting (or more interesting) than the portraits they accompany. The front of the badly abraded Portrait of a Young Man (ca. 1508, Metropolitan Museum of Art) by the Nuremberg portrait painter Hans Suss von Kulmbach, Albrecht Dürer’s colleague and contemporary, makes us wish that the image of the sweet-faced subject were in better condition, but it’s the reverse that holds our attention: a young woman sits in a window making a garland of forget-me-nots, watched by a white cat seated on the opposite side of the sill. At once allegory and genre painting, the image is both enigmatic and a scene from everyday life.
Similarly, Portrait of a Man with an Open Book (Guillaume Fillastre?) (1430s, Courtauld Gallery, London), a somewhat less compelling effort from Rogier van der Weyden’s workshop than the portrait of Francesco d’Este, proves to have a delightful, spiky spray of holly on the verso, under a puzzling motto that translates as “I hate what bites.” The two sides of Memling’s Portrait of a Man (late 1480s, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) are equally absorbing. The handsome subject, seen through a window against a sliver of landscape, clasps his hands in prayer. Once part of a triptych with a center panel of the Virgin Mary, the verso of the portrait would have been visible when the wings of the devotional picture were closed. It is startlingly beautiful: a majolica jug holding a bouquet of flowers on a ledge covered with an oriental carpet, bathed in a shaft of light against a dim background. For all its immediacy and realism, the still life has yet another function. The jug is painted with the monogram of Christ, and the flowers—columbine, iris, and lily—all symbolize the Virgin.
“Hidden Faces” reunites some portraits with their long-separated but documented covers. We can see Lorenzo Lotto’s incisive Bishop Bernardo de’ Rossi (1505, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples) together with what is described in an early inventory as its coverta—an elaborate allegory that itemizes the sitter, his age, the artist, and the date of execution. The complex image on the panel that once slid to cover the portrait (now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) includes the bishop’s coat of arms, a blasted tree, a shipwreck, a satiated satyr, a crouching boy with a compass, and more, in a luminous landscape under a stormy sky. The bishop’s guests would have had a lot to talk about. Other pairs are still together, such as the elegant young woman with a book in a loggia high above against a distant Tuscan landscape in Portrait of a Woman (La Monaca), attributed to Ridolfo Ghirlandaio; the painting is shown with its sliding cover, which boasts an illusionistic mask that resembles the subject, grotesque decorations, and a Latin inscription that translates as “to each his own mask” (both ca. 1510, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence). A tiny and otherwise not very distinguished German portrait of a woman, from the middle of the sixteenth century, commands our attention because it retains its original frame and sliding cover, plus an inscription. More absorbing are two relief portraits in pearwood by the German Master of the Capsule Portraits, depicting Friedrich the Wise of Saxony and his mistress Anna Rasper (or Dornle) (1525, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), a pair of works described as “an intimate and personal token” of the couple’s long, acknowledged love affair. (Friedrich never wed, and he remembered their children in his will.) The vivid images are sheltered by a raised rim with the names of the subjects and the date. The covers of the “canisters” with the portraits carry the symbolic images of a centaur, for Friedrich, and a hybrid siren, for Rasper, in lower relief. Who owned these? Why the need for concealment? How were they used?
Elsewhere we find lockets, watches, and other portable intimate items with concealed images, as well as medals with portraits and related images on opposite sides. Ingenuity dominates. A pair of miniature portraits of a vividly characterized young couple by the Bolognese artist Lavinia Fontana (possibly late 1570s or early 1580s, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts) once fit together as a small round box (four inches in diameter), with the male portrait painted on the inside of the lid, covering the female portrait below. An even smaller German portrait, an oval colored-wax medallion from the late sixteenth century, possibly the model for a medal, is displayed with its cover and its original little leather carrying bag. Strangest of all? A five-inch-tall, half-length relief in colored wax, Portrait of Elisabeth Krauss (ca. 1639/40?, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg)—the slightly uncanny image of an elderly woman, known for her philanthropy, still protected by its original box and sliding cover. Apparently, Elisabeth Krauss was so renowned for establishing scholarships for theology students and a foundation to aid foundling hospitals and feed the poor—which existed through the end of World War II—that multiple copies of this relief were made, believed to have been given as gifts to people who ran the foundation. Is this more or less mysterious than any of the other concealed portraits?
We leave “Hidden Faces” ready to think about each Renaissance portrait in the museum in a new way. Should it really be on the wall?
“Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on April 2 and remains on view through July 7, 2024. ↩
