Anish Kapoor remarked this week that Kensington Gardens, was “the best site in London for a piece of art, probably in the world”. He wasn’t unprejudiced – it does happen to be the setting of his new outdoor exhibition. But he also makes a valid point. With sculpture, the much-quoted estate agent’s slogan is correct: it’s location, location, location that counts. Continue reading “It’s the location of Anish Kapoor’s ‘Sky Mirror’ that counts”

There he saw an extraordinary portrait of a recent acquaintance, Colonel the Hon William Gordon, in progress. More than two centuries later, the picture – which goes on show at the National Gallery next month alongside other similarly over-the-top portraits by Batoni – remains quite a sight.

Colonel Gordon had elected to be painted in uniform with drawn sword, kilt and swathed in a length of Huntly tartan which the painter has made resemble as much as possible a Roman toga. He stands – indeed swaggers – with the Colosseum in the distance behind him, a statue of the goddess Roma at his side, and fragments of an ancient ruin at his feet. He looks as if he has just conquered the city, and in a way he had.

As the art historian John Ingamells once put it, “In the course of the 18th century there was a peaceful British invasion of Italy.” Or as Edward Gibbon – also in Rome in 1765 – observed with a touch of irony, “According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.” Some restricted themselves to France and northern Europe, but for most the classical antiquities of Italy were the main objective. This was, of course, the Grand Tour.

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When he dictated those words, Hadrian – the subject of a major exhibition at the British Museum later this month – had ruled for more than two decades over one of the greatest states the world has ever seen. Its territory covered much of the current zone of the European Union, with the addition of North Africa, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt. In general estimation, Hadrian – a bisexual Spaniard obsessed with architecture, poetry and hunting – was one of the few people to succeed in the task of ruling the western world.

During his rule, the Roman Empire was at its apogee – the point from which the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon began the story of its decline and fall. “Under Hadrian’s reign,” Gibbon declared, “the empire flourished in peace and prosperity. He encouraged the arts, reformed the laws, asserted military discipline, and visited all his provinces in person. His vast and active genius was equally suited to the most enlarged views, and the minute details of civil policy.” However, Gibbon added that Hadrian’s ruling passions were “curiosity and vanity”.

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In the summer of 1521 Albrecht Dürer was travelling in the Low Countries. Just as he was leaving Antwerp on July 2, he received a message from King Christian II of Denmark, who was in town. The monarch asked Dürer to draw his portrait, which he did, in charcoal. Afterwards, Christian asked the artist to dine with him. Dürer noted in his diary, “he behaved graciously towards me”. Dürer’s drawing of the king still exists, and will be included in the exhibition Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian which opens on October 15 at the National Gallery in London.

That little story tells us two things. One is that the artist-superstar, companion of the rich and powerful, is not a modern phenomenon. It dates back at least five centuries. The other point is the importance that portraiture had at the height of the Renaissance. Even a king seized the opportunity to be drawn by a great artist.

Portraiture mattered then, and pictures of people from that era are still prominent now. The most celebrated painting in the world – perhaps the best known single image in existence – is a Renaissance portrait: the Mona Lisa. The exhibition is likely to draw crowds to the National Gallery. So the question arises: why are we so interested in depictions of men and women, dead for centuries, whose identities we often do not know?

In 15th-century European art there was a revolutionary improvement in verisimilitude. David Hockney has suggested that artists such as Van Eyck were influenced by optical images produced by lenses. Whether or not you agree with that hypothesis, it is undeniable that there was a sudden increase in precision of focus, texture and detail. It is immediately evident in a picture such as Van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man of 1433.

On that little oak panel, almost 600 years later we can still see the stubble of the sitter’s beard, the fine wrinkles, the gleam of his eye. Of course, this improvement in surface realism applied to everything – still life, landscape, textiles. But the human face is, of all the objects in the world, the one in which we are programmed to take the most interest. Constantly we scan the features of those around us for clues and cues – hostile or friendly, happy or sad, what sort of life do they lead?

Fifteenth-century Europe was not the first epoch to produce realistic portraiture. Vivid representations of individuals survive from ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt. But there is a huge increase in the sheer volume of surviving portraits from the Renaissance, and in the range of sitters they represent.

There are pictures of the young and the old, the beautiful and also the remarkably ugly, such as the old man painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio, his nose covered in bulbous growths, so touchingly embracing his grandson. Naturally, there are plenty of paintings of the rich and powerful, but also of the relatively humble; people such as Perjerón, a Spanish court buffoon presented with dignity by Antonis Mor in 1559-61. Pietro Aretino, a scurrilous polemical writer, went so far as to complain in 1555 that “even tailors and vintners are given life by painters” – and indeed a tailor painted by Moroni, shears in hand, is included in the show.

The portrait explosion, as the exhibition emphasises, was a Europe-wide phenomenon. The mesmerising evocation of surfaces and textures – the lustre of velvet, the glistening of skin – was a northern speciality. It originated in Van Eyck’s Netherlands, but his style was by no means realistic in other ways. For example, he habitually made his sitters’ heads much too big in relation to their bodies.

There was also an Italian contribution: greater anatomical accuracy derived from classical sculpture. The two currents, northern surfaces and southern structure, came together in a painting such as Giovanni Bellini’s Doge Leonardo Loredan (1501-04). The Venetian ruler has the gravitas of a Roman emperor, but his silk mantle, its gold and silver threads catching the light, creates an illusion of reality that is still astonishing.

The new portrait idiom was the product of cultural cross-fertilisation. Bellini was a Venetian painter influenced by Flemish techniques; Dürer and Holbein were German artists affected by the art of Italy. It was such an attractive invention that it spread across the continent, stirring in a Danish king the desire to be painted by Dürer, and luring Holbein to distant, backward London. In the latter’s later paintings and drawings, for the first time in history, English faces suddenly appear – looking much as they still do now.

All of these Renaissance portraits were painted because the sitters in some way mattered. Some were celebrated people in their day. But most were of husbands and wives, friends, relations, and prospective brides and grooms. The last were important because in an era of arranged marriage an accurate portrait might be the only way to find out what your intended spouse looked like before it was too late to change your mind.

Five centuries later, the sitter’s identity is less crucial. The Van Eyck Portrait of a Man may well be a self-portrait, but even if it isn’t, it is still an enthralling picture. The cliché about the Renaissance used to be that it was the period that saw the rise of the individual. Whatever the truth of that, it was definitely the age that first depicted humanity in specific detail and on a massive scale. And of course, we are unquestionably in an age of individuality today, obsessed by faces and celebrities. Looking at the portraits of Renaissance men and women, we see ourselves.