THE EMBEDDED PORTRAIT

In fourteenth-century Italy, ever more women and mennot only clergy but also laityintroduced 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 sacre...[Read more]