Painted Love: Renaissance Marriage Portraits

Alesso Baldovinetti, Portrait of a Lady, about 1465, © The National Gallery

The exhibition at The Holburne Museum in Bath, explores the important role played by portraiture in the process of marriage in Renaissance Europe. Marriage portraits were not only documentation of the legal union of spouses, capturing a key moment in the sitters’ lives, intimate and personal as well as public and formal, but they also celebrated the union of families, showcase wealth, power and land, and the solidifying of political alliances.

Painted Love: Renaissance Marriage Portraits showcases the way that marriage portraiture reflected the complex politics of 15th and 16th century Europe. Marriage was often the culmination of years of negotiations, with portraits of eligible women and men being in demand and circulated from an early age. The exhibition will also consider the combination between idealism and realism. In addition to paintings, there will be objects associated with the rituals of marriage, sure as love tokens, rings, gifts, and commemorative tableware.

The exhibition includes prestigious loans from the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Royal Collection Trust, the Ashmolean and the V&A, alongside numerous works from important private collections.

The exhibition is running until 1st October, here is a link to purchase tickets.