For the penetration of the portrait idea from the Renaissance, cf. Langedijk 1981 portraits in marble, bronze, tapestry, oils, and fresco, and on civic monuments, coins and medals, prints, gems, miniatures, pietre dure and cameos, as well as on funeral monuments. Other media and materials catalogued include mosaic, leather, porcelain, gold, enamel and silver;
We tend automatically to accept that a portrait must be a likeness of a living human being, but this is far from the only application we find at Popolo.
Working from Egyptian foundations, Greece and then Rome developed portrait conventions which usually required a blemish-free nobility of countenance, often with dreamy, far-sighted eyes which are never intended to engage the spectator. ("realistic" portraits, warts and all, are relatively rare, except during the late Republic. During the Middle Ages, we find little true portraiture - "true" in our modern convention of having a likeness - although there are representations of the great and the good, portrayed according to their status.
The Renaissance revived antique traditions - and there are good reasons for believing that the first spur was the survival of large quantities of antique portraits on coins, medals, statues and bas-reliefs. Most of these were conventional; and we have sufficient semi-reliable text-descriptions to know that (for example) the portraits of Augustus or Claudius were in no sense "photographic" (Julius Caesar's balding pate is probably accurate: late Republican verismo).
Such idealism - the representation of human beings almost as if they were gods or at least heroes - is strongly emphasised in Renaissance art, because the artists and their patrons wished the conjuring of an ideal world without the banalities, filth, disease or clutter of the real world.
In SM del Popolo, we can chart the longevity of such idealism by examining the tombs, and chart how the influence of the antique survives, albeit with an increase in the impedimenta of death - hour-glasses, skulls, skeletons, weeping figures - from the 17th century. To find a skull in close association with a portrait, as in
There are several kinds of representations of the deceased to be seen:
