Donor Portraiture and the Expatriate Experience in Fifteenth-Century Bruges: The Portinari Altarpiece and the Gdansk Last Judgment
The portraits of Tommaso Portinari and Angelo Tani, two remarkable bankers, expatriates, and art patrons who departed Florence to relocate in the cosmopolitan urban center of Bruges, have been preserved from the fifteenth century to this day within two paintings separated by the vagaries of chance but evermore connected by their personal histories: the Portinari Altarpiece and the Gda?sk Last Judgment. Intriguingly, both expatriates similarly decided to send their altarpieces to their hometown of Florence, a detail which prompted the following investigation of the motives behind their commissions and of the functions of the donor portraits embedded in these artworks. While the Portinari Altarpiece and the Last Judgment as a whole reflect the interests of their patrons, their attempts at creating presentable, flattering, and actively useful public selves crystalized in their donor portraits. These portraits represent the subject of this paper, which will analyze the portraits’ aims and expected reception, illustrating the dependence of these images’ meaning on their location and thereby on their targeted viewers’ response.
The donor portraits of Tommaso Portinari and Angelo Tani advertised their subjects’ financial successes within their adoptive community. At the same time, they were intended to contribute to their sitters’ spiritual redemption. This paper will demonstrate that, in addition to these two functions, the donor portraits of the two Florentine expatriates simultaneously performed a role otherwise associated with standalone portraits, namely that of a souvenir destined for their acquaintances. These images therefore enabled the different and at times even contradictory identities of their subjects to coexist, ultimately revealing the protean nature of donor portraiture.