The Embedded Portrait

A new study of the early Renaissance portrait

In fourteenth-century Italy, ever more women and men¿not only clergy but also laity¿introduced their own portraits into sacred paintings. Images of modern supplicants, submissive and prayerful, shared space with the holy narratives. The portraits mimicked the first worshippers of Christ: Mary, the Three Magi, Mary Magdalene. At the same time, they modeled, for modern viewers, ideal involvement in the emotion-laden stories. In The Embedded Portrait, Christopher S. Wood traces these incursions of the real and profane into Florentine sacred painting between Giotto and Fra Angelico.

The portraits not only intruded upon a sacred space, but also intervened in an artwork. The pressure exerted by the modern interlopers¿their lives and experiences, implied by their portraits¿threatened the formal closure that had served as a powerful symbolic form of the pact between God and humans. The Embedded Portrait reconst