“It has been said,” according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in regards to its current special exhibition of Renaissance portraiture, “that the Renaissance witnessed the rediscovery of the individual. In keeping with this notion, early Renaissance Italy also hosted the first great age of portraiture in Europe. Portraiture assumed a new importance, whether it was to record the features of a family member for future generations, celebrate a prince or warrior, extol the beauty of a woman, or make possible the exchange of a likeness among friends. This exhibition will bring together approximately 160 works—by artists including Donatello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Pisanello, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, and Antonello da Messina, and in media ranging from painting and manuscript illumination to marble sculpture and bronze medals, testifying to the new vogue for and uses of portraiture in fifteenth-century Italy.

“Featuring many rare international loans, this exhibition will present an unprecedented survey of the period and provide new research and insight into the early history of portraiture. It will be divided into three sections and will span a period of eight decades. Beginning in Florence, where independent portraits first appeared in abundance, it moves to the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Bologna, Milan, Urbino, Naples and papal Rome, and ends in Venice, where a tradition of portraiture asserted itself surprisingly late in the century.”

“The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini” runs through March 18 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

Franklin Einspruch is an artist and writer. He blogs at Artblog.net.