Virtue & Beauty

This Web site is patterned after a museum exhibit that presented information on Renaissance women portraits. Learn how Europe was without images of living people, except in the religious sense, before the fifteenth century. Artists then decided to devote their time and energy to the figures that had always been a part of them. The site focuses on the flowering of female portraiture in Florence from c. 1440 to c. 1540. These works of art also illustrate the broad shift the occurred in this period from the profile portrait to a more frontal view of the models.