Early Flemish Portraits 1425-1525: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ...

tended as a proper portrait. Its association
with portraiture derives from the artist's de-
pendence upon observation from life, a practice
detected in partial application in Bouts's
Virgin and Child (fig. 5). Still, Adolf of Burgundy
would have seen in the painting an image
of his wife, a concept not as sacrilegious as
it seems today. Contemporary religious practice
emphasized personal identification with
Christ (witness Albrecht Diirer's renowned
self-portrait of 1500 in Christ-like guise in the
Alte Pinakothek, Munich); similarly, the
Virgin was the ideal model of feminine virtue
for all women to emulate.
Excepting Christus's Saint Eligius, the two
works by Juan de Flandes and Gossart, and an
epitaph yet to be discussed, the early Flemish
portraits at the Museum are of three types:
donor portraits, independent portraits, and
half-length devotional portraits. The three
forms were established by the end of the fourteenth
century, although the third seems then
to have been a rarity. Generalizations are dangerous,
but perhaps it can be said that donor
portraits fulfilled a public function in a religious
context and that independent portraits
were of a personal, often secular nature. By
the middle of the fifteenth century, the merging
of these two forms in half-length devotional
portrait diptychs and triptychs seems to
have become common.