Venus of Urbino

~As if to signal the demise of the traditional hierarchy of subject matter which placed portrait and landscape on a lower level than ‘history’ painting, Castagnary, in his review of 1867, announced that the portrait demanded the highest faculties of the painter, and represented the culmination of the art of painting. His reason was that ‘With a single portrait of Clouet, Holbein, Van Dyck, Titian, Rigaud, David, you can reconstruct, with the person who served as model, the entire epoch when that person lived.’ Castagnary, Salons, I,...