From the museum website
For the first time ever, this exhibition will trace the development of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century portrait painting, in both northern and southern Europe side by side.
Renaissance faces will feature many of the great masters of the Renaissance, including Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Holbein, Cranach, Van Eyck and Dürer. The exhibition will comprise around seventy paintings, along with medals, sculptures, drawings and engravings.
Renaissance faces will explore issues of likeness, memory and identity, examining portraits which were commissioned in connection with courtship, friendship and marriage – including self-portraits of artists themselves.
The evolution of the full-length portrait, and an examination of the relatively unexplored area of counter-portraits and the anti-ideal, will be highlights of the exhibition – along with rare loans and new research into the works on display.
Publication
Renaissance faces: from van Eyck to Titian
Lorne Campbell, Miguel Falomir, Jennifer Fletcher and Luke Syson
Catalogue of an exhibition held in 2008 in Madrid (Prado) and in 2008-09 in London (National Gallery)
304 pp.
London (National Gallery) 2008
ISBN-10: 1857094115
ISBN-13: 978-1857094114