Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture

Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture is the first major exhibition in the United States to focus on the portraiture of Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1579/80).

A painter of portraits and religious subjects, Moroni is celebrated as an essential figure in the northern Italian tradition of naturalistic painting that includes Leonardo da Vinci, the Carracci, and Caravaggio. This exhibition, shown exclusively at The Frick Collection, brings to light the innovation of the artist, whose role in a larger history of European portraiture has yet to be fully explored. His famous Tailor (National Gallery, London), for example, anticipates by decades the “narrative” portraits of Rembrandt, and his Pace Rivola Spini (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo), arguably the first independent full-length portrait of a standing woman produced in Italy, prefigures the many women that Van Dyck would paint in this format in the following century. 

The Frick presents about twenty of the artist’s most arresting portraits together with a selection of complementary objects — jewelry, textiles, armor, and other luxury items — that evoke the material world of the artist and his sitters and reveal his inventiveness in translating it into paint.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website. 

Image:   "The Tailor" (Giovanni Gerolamo Grumelli) by Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1579/80)