The Met’s delightful show “Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance” illuminates a curious trend in 15th- and 16th-century painting: the slow reveal. The works on view, originally concealed in special cases and behind sliding or reversible panels, gamify the experience of looking at portraiture; they have to be moved, before they can move us.
Of course, we can’t actually handle these artworks, many of them on loan to the Met from European museums including the Courtauld in London and the Uffizi in Florence. But we can peer at them from double-sided glass cases and watch animations of faces emerging from sliding panels. The covers are marvelous works in their own right, with elaborate emblems and allegories that are themselves a form of representation.
The interactions between the different components can be quite playful, with a literary and theatrical flair. A mesmerizing portrait of a Florentine lady in a flowing sheer veil, attributed to the early-16th-century Italian painter Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, is accompanied by a decorative panel with the Latin inscription “To each his own mask” and a trompe l’oeil face covering to match.
Among the show’s many examples of Netherlandish portraiture, a clever narrative unfolds through a double-sided work by Hans Süss von Kulmbach, a protégé of Albrecht Dürer. On the front is a bust-length image of a man who seems to be looking at the upper left corner of the painting — or, perhaps, he is gazing up at the woman sitting in a window who appears when the panel is flipped.
The Renaissance practice of covering paintings was rooted in earlier religious traditions and liturgical rituals, a point made in the show by a work borrowed from the Cloisters: a private devotional shrine with wings that open to display images of a female donor and her husband next to Saint Catherine.
The catalog essay by Alison Manges Nogueira, the organizer of the exhibition and the curator of the Met’s Robert Lehman Collection, goes deeper into history — back to the second century and a curtained statue from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. And, as Nogueira writes, artworks from antiquity to the present have also been concealed for a variety of secular motivations, prurience being the most obvious one. (Gustave Courbet’s famous close-up of female genitalia, “Origin of the World,” was originally concealed by a sliding shutter.)
Yet another reason, mentioned in the catalog, was suggested by the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin, in a 1648 letter to the collector Paul Fréart de Chantelou: “The intention of covering your paintings is excellent, and to make them visible one by one will mean we do not grow tired, for seeing them all at the same time fills the senses too much at once.” The idea was to create a measured, controlled aesthetic experience, lest the viewer succumb to the psychosomatic disorder we know today as Stendhal Syndrome.
The show interprets “cover” somewhat liberally, including multisided works alongside those incorporating sleeves and containers. But the concept is the same: that a painted portrait could be enriched and enlivened by a secretive and complementary image, often one that spoke to the character or lineage of the subject.
A double-sided painting from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden depicts a serious man with a furrowed brow and a hand resting on an open book; he is thought to be the Burgundian cleric Guillaume Fillastre. On its reverse side is an arrestingly naturalistic rendering of a holly branch with light glinting off its spiky leaves. An inscription at the top of the panel reads, “I hate what bites” — a cryptic motto that has been interpreted as a gesture of self-defense against intellectual critics.
The exhibition itself is double-sided, roughly split between the Netherlands and Italy. And it has a kind of symmetry, in that both halves contain many works commissioned from merchants and bankers — middle-aged men who were looking to solidify their social status and family lineage. When women appear, it is in the role of wife, daughter or paramour. (The Florentine lady with the mask, for instance, is thought to be a member of the city’s powerful Antinori family.)
Heinrich zum Jungen, a Frankfurt trader, was a typical client; his portrait by an unidentified artist includes a coat of arms, painted in a matching palette of red and green, on its verso. It was painted the same year his father established a burial site for the family, and comes across as a transparent but nonetheless poignant bid for legacy.
Sending a different message — “you can’t take it with you” — is a painting from the circle of Jacometto Veneziano, a Venetian artist credited with introducing the Netherlandish style of portraiture to Northern Italy. Its rosy-cheeked female subject wears a loosely draped yellow scarf that identifies her, per city law of the time, as a prostitute. An inscription in Latin on the reverse, made to look as if it had been carved into marble, translates as: “Satisfy the soul with delights, for after death there is no pleasure.”
This work is one of many that play with illusionistic surfaces. One of the exhibition’s standouts is Jacometto’s portrait of a boy, tender yet almost Dürer-esque in its precision, with a flip side painted to look like porphyry (a precious stone with an imperial, funereal history). Covers such as this associated portrait subjects and their families with substance and permanence.
In a gallery of “capsule portraits,” or small-scale, portable keepsakes, covers are more of a practical necessity than a poetic device. Images of loved ones (the mistress of an Elector of Saxony) and leaders (the Protestant reformer Martin Luther) nestle in boxes, cases and bags, and in one piece a spectacularly luxurious watch, for wearability and ease of transport.
It would have been interesting to see the show extend from portraits with removable lids and twin faces to encompass the many artworks in the Met’s collection that have curtains and veils painted into the scene. For that, you’ll have to head upstairs to the Titians and Vermeers in the European Paintings galleries.
Still, the discrete physical barriers in “Hidden Faces” are mysterious, compelling intermediaries. The cover, here, is a gateway between the sacred and the secular, or between this life and the next. It seems to say that portraiture exists in a magical realm that remains off-limits to mortals, even as the artwork itself invites us to manipulate a physical object. And in a matter-of-fact way, it reminds us that art is precious and extremely vulnerable.
Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance
Through July 7, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.
