by During the Renaissance in Europe, a strange genre of portraiture rose to prominence and flourished: the so-called hidden portrait. These portraits were generally completed with a cover that fit over the portrait or another side to the back of the portrait, which contained clues like a puzzle, symbols or a secondary portrait that added to the depth of the main work. A new exhibition at the Met combines many of these similarities with their covers to provide a fascinating look at a largely lost art.
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According to exhibition curator Alison Nogueira, these portraits had various uses, from providing an entertaining centerpiece at a gathering to celebrate a woman’s betrothal, to commemorate a great journey, or to commemorate a death. They could even be political propaganda. In this evidence, Nogueira showed a particular hidden portrait made by the painter Lucas Cranach at the behest of the famous Protestant revolutionary Martin Luther. In the year 1525, the wedding of the famous cleric with the former nun Katharina von Bora raised Luther in great renown, as at that time there was little disallowance for clerical marriages, especially for a woman who had taken her own vows. “Luther was a former clergyman, and his wife was a former nun who facilitated his release from a convent,” Nogueira told me. “So their marriage was considered very controversial.”
Luther adopted a new strategy to embrace his marriage and the broader idea of relaxing the church’s traditions around celibacy: he commissioned Cranach – long a leader in creating propaganda in support of the Reformation – to to create linked coins bearing a pair of portraits of Luther and von Bora. These coins come in a small box that could be widely distributed, effectively marketing the idea of Luther and von Bora’s wedding. “The purpose of these portraits was to strengthen the legitimacy of Luther’s marriage,” Nogueira said.
The portraits of Luther and von Bora show that hidden portraits were often important means of fostering communication. Although Luther’s work was an example of great craftsmanship, these works often functioned much more closely. For example, that their enigmatic qualities and multiple interpretations would encourage satisfying, meaningful conversation during an evening meeting. They were also commonly used in courtship, and were a way of expressing intentions as two lovers made their way through the various stages of romance. Because these works provide elaborate details about the identity, talents and purpose of the guardian, contemporary researchers have used them to gather invaluable information about the complexities of life lived hundreds of years ago.
According to Nogueira, this genre of painting is believed to have originated from the painting of double-sided coins in the Netherlands in the 1400s. As time passed, these works became more and more complex, eventually developing a repertoire of imagery that would become familiar to the genre. Concealed portraits increased through the 16th century, and gradually the format became smaller and smaller, until the portraits came to reside in personal objects, such as lockets and watches. Although the tradition largely died out in the 17th and 18th centuries, Nogueira pointed out that it still exists to some extent, citing Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World as a work that has continued in a covered format into the contemporary era. .
When the genre flourished, it was strongly associated with Shakespeare’s notion that we were all players on the world’s stage – or, alternatively, that we sometimes wear masks, especially when taking our likeness . “It draws attention to the idea that a portrait is a false representation of the sitter,” Nogueira said. “On a more philosophical level, there’s the idea that everyone has their own mask and that there’s a kind of theater of life.”
An example of this is Ridolfo Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of a Woman, on loan to the Met from the Uffizi Gallery. The cover of this painting features an image of a mask, along with a Latin inscription that translates to “to each his own mask”. Ghirlandaio’s cover is notable for the physical heaviness the artist felt, like an iron castle gate designed to keep out all unwanted people. The cover’s imagery of ghostly dragon-like creatures adds to the idea of the ecclesiastical gatekeeper, and yet, the portrait below is very different, showing a beautiful woman in an elegant dress, a gossamer headdress adding to her fragility. For all the sitter’s vulnerability, however, his closed expression calls back to the portrait’s protective cover.
As Nogueira said, the facial features of the mask that Ghirlandaio put on the cover are very similar to the woman’s face he depicted, suggesting how the woman in the portrait could mask her true self in different ways. “It’s really fun, especially with the self-referential inscription,” Nogueira said. “It’s one of the most exciting images of the role these portrait covers really played.” A video offered in the Met exhibition recreates the experience of the portrait’s unveiling, allowing the viewer to see, as the panel is removed, the mask on the cover is revealed to be positioned directly over the subject’s face.
The genre of shrouded portraits remains largely unknown, and Hidden Faces aims in part to bring greater awareness to these fascinating pieces. The exhibition began with Nogueira’s research on a pair of bilateral portraits in the Met’s Lehman collection, which led her to investigate the larger European context in which they were made. Once she started immersing herself in the genre, she felt that this could be the subject of a great exhibition. While the show is based on The Met’s collection, it also features work from collections across the US and Europe. In particular, Hidden Faces is a real opportunity for viewers to see these portraits united with their covers, as they are often not displayed as such in their home institutions.
For Nogueira, this show helps to shed light on the fact that portraits are much more than the physical likeness of the sitter, which raises the question of what a portrait is. “These allegories and emblems and symbols were integral parts of what we call portraiture,” she said. “A complete portrait, we believe, is a fragment of a larger object that has been lost over time.”
