Last year’s hoopla over the Obamas’ official portraits proved that painted likenesses of prominent folks (or the rest of us) remain fascinating, even though many of their conventions date back to the Renaissance. This low-key show assembles portraits by Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1579/80), who worked in the middle of the 16th century and won acclaim for the lifelike appearance of his sitters. He’s not so well known today, in part because he never strayed far from home, the region around the small northern Italian city of Bergamo. The Frick pairs Moroni’s paintings of Bergamese nobility and notables with some of the luxurious objects seen in the pictures. Thus, a weird and fabulous gem-studded head of a marten, with an actual animal’s pelt attached, glitters near the regal, full-length, seated Isotta Brembati (circa 1555–56), who wears a nearly identical critter draped around her shoulders.
Moroni made the bulk of his backgrounds so minimal and generic that they predict the products of a Sears portrait studio, all the better to highlight his subjects’ lavish clothing, jewels, and accessories, as well as their presence. Presenting his contemporaries so convincingly that they seem living and breathing individuals endures as his most lasting achievement. Unsmiling, they look directly at us from the past, although their turned heads result in most of them giving us the side-eye. An unintended but quietly glorious effect of this exhibition is that it often feels like we stand among a group of slightly reproving ancestors.