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The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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Officials name senior vice president, chief of staff
By Fiona Riley, Assistant News Editor • March 26, 2024

Classic ‘Beauty’ changes face

The image of the female has permeated visual media since humans etched their first mark on a cave wall.

The National Gallery of Art’s “Virtue and Beauty” is a collection of mostly female portraits created in Florence between 1440 and 1540 during the Renaissance. The show seeks to express the Renaissance interpretation of the image of the female. The flourishing of female portraiture also exemplifies a change in the tradition of portrait painting.

“Virtue and Beauty” features works by the great masters: da Vinci, Botticelli, Raphael and Filippo Lippi, to name a few. The galleries dedicated to the exhibition are teeming with medals, coins and sculpture from the time period and contribute to the viewers’ sense of how this kind of imagery made its way beyond the canvas.

The sheer splendor of these paintings is astounding. The delicacy and electrifying colors on the canvas create a real rapport between 2001 and the 15th and 16th centuries. Da Vinci’s “Ginevra de’Benci,” possibly the most powerful work in the show, is a timeless painting that shares with his “Mona Lisa” the penetrating stare of the sitter as well as an exceptional but fragile balance of color. This portrait is part of the museum’s permanent collection, but the exhibit has expanded its historical significance by adding the sculpture that influenced the work and da Vinci’s prerequisite drawings.

A major theme in “Virtue and Beauty” explores painters’ concentration on the change in the tradition of portrait painting from the side-view of the sitter to the three-quarter to full-frontal view of the sitter. Earlier portraits are seen in the first two galleries: works by Fillipo Lippi and Ercole de’Roberti represent these earlier trends of side views.

What is so intriguing about the change in the stance of the sitter is the psychological element added. The sitter becomes more engaged with the viewer as the paintings progress through the 100-year period. But this is not the introspective self-awareness of the sitter that we are used to in modern portraiture.

These are portraits that depict a certain kind of identity of woman: the individual seen in her social status and embodying the paradigms of ideal female virtue and beauty. Like the super-models that fill our visual media today, these portraits were canons of female beauty, the ideal of their day.

The sitter herself is also a change in tradition that appears in this exhibit. The subjects are no longer relegated to the aristocracy. These portraits include women from the merchant class. The portrait itself also becomes larger, and this size increase is most commonly associated with the representations that feature the sitter looking out from the canvas in the full-frontal pose.

The influence of the change came from the northern Flemish painters and the sculpture of the Italian master, Verrochio, who was also da Vinci’s teacher. These influences are conveyed to the visitors with the actual sculptures and preparatory drawings that show the direct connection between the Florentine painters and Flemish masters such as Hans Memling and Van der Weyden, as well as Italian sculptures producing full-frontal portrait busts.

The show’s curator is David Alan Brown, also curator of all Italian Renaissance paintings at the museum. The exhibit is filled with masterpieces from some of the greatest painters of all time. The objective of the show is clearly laid out and beautifully displayed, and its timeless and absorbing interpretations of the past only help us to understand our own visual culture.

“Virtue and Beauty” is at the National Gallery’s West Building
and is on view until Jan. 6.

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