, c. 1514, with a tiny donor couple among the feet of the main figures. Altdorfer was one of the last major artists to retain this convention. During the Middle Ages the donor figures often were shown on a far smaller scale than the sacred figures; a change dated by Dirk Kocks to the 14th century, though earlier examples in manuscripts can be found. A later convention was for figures at about three-quarters of the size of the main ones. From the 15th century
Early Netherlandish painters like
Jan van Eyck integrated, with varying degrees of subtlety, donor portraits into the space of the main scene of altarpieces, at the same scale as the main figures. A comparable style can be found in Florentine painting from the same date, as in
Masaccio's
Holy Trinity (1425–28) in
Santa Maria Novella where, however, the donors are shown kneeling on a sill outside and below the main architectural setting. This innovation, however, did not appear in Venetian painting until the turn of the next century. Normally the main figures ignore the presence of the interlopers in narrative scenes, although bystanding saints may put a supportive hand on the shoulder in a side-panel. But in devotional subjects such as a
Madonna and Child, which were more likely to have been intended for the donor's home, the main figures may look at or bless the donor, as in the Memling shown. Before the 15th century a physical likeness may not have often been attempted, or achieved; the individuals depicted may in any case often not have been available to the artist, or even alive. By the mid-15th century this was no longer the case, and donors of whom other likenesses survive can often be seen to be carefully portrayed, although, as in the Memling above, daughters in particular often appear as standardized beauties in the style of the day. , ca 1470. Standing alongside the
Holy Family, the two fashionably dressed girls, and probably the young man on the right, are donor portraits. In narrative scenes they began to be worked into the figures of the scene depicted, perhaps an innovation of
Rogier van der Weyden, where they can often be distinguished by their expensive contemporary dress. In Florence, where there was already a tradition of including portraits of city notables in crowd scenes (mentioned by
Leon Battista Alberti), the
Procession of the Magi by
Benozzo Gozzoli (1459–61), which admittedly was in the private chapel of the
Palazzo Medici, is dominated by the glamorous procession containing more portraits of the Medici and their allies than can now be identified. By 1490, when the large
Tornabuoni Chapel fresco cycle by
Domenico Ghirlandaio was completed, family members and political allies of the Tornabuoni populate several scenes in considerable numbers, in addition to conventional kneeling portraits of
Giovanni Tornabuoni and his wife. In an often-quoted passage,
John Pope-Hennessy caricatured 16th-century Italian donors: In Italy donors, or owners, were rarely depicted as the major religious figures, but in the courts of Northern Europe there are several examples of this in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, mostly in small panels not for public viewing. The most notorious of these is the portrayal as the
Virgin lactans (or just post-
lactans) of
Agnès Sorel (died 1450), the mistress of
Charles VII of France, in a panel by
Jean Fouquet. 's "
Ecstasy of St. Theresa",
Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Donor portraits in works for churches, and over-prominent
heraldry, were disapproved of by clerical interpreters of the vague decrees on art of the
Council of Trent, such as Saint
Charles Borromeo, but survived well into the Baroque period, and developed a secular equivalent in
history painting, although here it was often the principal figures who were given the features of the commissioner. A very late example of the old Netherlandish format of the triptych with the donors on the wing panels is
Rubens'
Rockox Triptych of 1613–15, once in a church over the tombstone of the donors and now in the
Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. The central panel shows the
Incredulity of Thomas ("Doubting Thomas") and the work as a whole is ambiguous as to whether the donors are represented as occupying the same space as the sacred scene, with different indications in both directions. A further secular development was the
portrait historié, where groups of portrait sitters posed as historical or mythological figures. One of the most famous and striking groups of Baroque donor portraits are those of the male members of the
Cornaro family, who sit in boxes as if at the theatre to either side of the sculpted altarpiece of
Gian Lorenzo Bernini's
Ecstasy of St Theresa (1652). These were derived from
frescoes by
Pellegrino Tibaldi a century early, which use the same conceit. Although donor portraits have been relatively little studied as a distinct genre, there has been more interest in recent years, and a debate over their relationship, in Italy, to the rise of individualism with the Early Renaissance, and also over the changes in their iconography after the
Black Death of the mid-14th century. ==Gallery==