Donor portrait

The terms are not used very consistently by art historians, as Angela Marisol Roberts points out,[1] and may also be used for smaller religious subjects that were probably made to be retained by the commissioner rather than donated to a church.

[2] Gifts to the church of buildings, altarpieces, or large areas of stained glass were often accompanied by a bequest or condition that masses for the donor be said in perpetuity, and portraits of the persons concerned were thought to encourage prayers on their behalf during these, and at other times.

[8] At least in Northern Italy, as well as the grand altarpieces and frescos by leading masters that attract most art-historical attention, there was a more numerous group of small frescoes with a single saint and donor on side-walls, that were liable to be re-painted as soon as the number of candles lit before them fell off, or a wealthy donor needed the space for a large fresco-cycle, as portrayed in a 15th-century tale from Italy:[9] And going around with the master mason, examining which figures to leave and which to destroy, the priest spotted a Saint Anthony and said: 'Save this one.'

Although none have survived, there is literary evidence of donor portraits in small chapels from the Early Christian period,[11] probably continuing the traditions of pagan temples.

For example, a chapel at Mals in South Tyrol has two fresco donor figures from before 881, one lay and the other of a tonsured cleric holding a model building.

A comparable style can be found in Florentine painting from the same date, as in Masaccio's Holy Trinity (1425–28) in Santa Maria Novella where, however, the donors are shown kneeling on a sill outside and below the main architectural setting.

[21] By the mid-15th century this was no longer the case, and donors of whom other likenesses survive can often be seen to be carefully portrayed, although, as in the Memling above, daughters in particular often appear as standardized beauties in the style of the day.

the only contingency they did not envisage was what actually occurred, that their faces would survive but their names go astray.In Italy donors, or owners, were rarely depicted as the major religious figures, but in the courts of Northern Europe there are several examples of this in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, mostly in small panels not for public viewing.

[8][26] The most notorious of these is the portrayal as the Virgin lactans (or just post-lactans) of Agnès Sorel (died 1450), the mistress of Charles VII of France, in a panel by Jean Fouquet.

[27] Donor portraits in works for churches, and over-prominent heraldry, were disapproved of by clerical interpreters of the vague decrees on art of the Council of Trent, such as Saint Charles Borromeo,[28] but survived well into the Baroque period, and developed a secular equivalent in history painting, although here it was often the principal figures who were given the features of the commissioner.

One of the most famous and striking groups of Baroque donor portraits are those of the male members of the Cornaro family, who sit in boxes as if at the theatre to either side of the sculpted altarpiece of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Ecstasy of St Theresa (1652).

[30] Although donor portraits have been relatively little studied as a distinct genre, there has been more interest in recent years, and a debate over their relationship, in Italy, to the rise of individualism with the Early Renaissance, and also over the changes in their iconography after the Black Death of the mid-14th century.