Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance - In-Person Lecture

This exhibition of a tradition explored in Italy and Northern Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries will be featured for the very first time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.  An intriguing but unknown side of Renaissance painting: multisided portraits in which the sitter’s likeness was concealed by hinged or sliding covers within a box, or a dual-faced format. The covers and reverses of these small, private portraits were adorned with puzzlelike emblems, epigrams, allegories, and mythologies that celebrated the sitter’s character. They represent some of the most inventive and unique secular imagery of the Renaissance. The viewer had to decode the meaning of the symbolic portrait before lifting, sliding, or turning the image over to unmask the face below. Professor Thomas Germano will present a visual lecture related to this unique exhibition.