¶ … Icons and Early Modern Portraits" adds a fascinating new twist to the investigation of the material culture of the Renaissance, which may be brought to bear directly on the study of Renaissance art. Nagel is concerned here with a question of artistic influence, which he sees being transmitted through a lively trade in Greek and other eastern religious icons. To a certain extent, this fact is self-evident but Nagel persuasively argues for several reasons that it has been underemphasized in discussion of the subject. Nagel first notes that contemporary Renaissance viewers of these icons made several erroneous assumptions about them, which may have obscured the inability of contemporary art scholars today to view these pieces through the eyes of the Renaissance, as it were. Nagel notes from papers related to acquisition and provenance dating from the early modern period that the antiquity of these objects was greatly exaggerated, and on many occasions we can see direct...

Nagel also traces broader issues of visual influence: he analyzes the frequency of depiction of portrait subjects in the Renaissance and discovers that, while sculpture had numerous ways to depict a portrait bust (whether in bas relief on coinage or life-size and in marble), the only reliable visual depiction of the human figure in bust format in painting had come from icons and provided a sort of model as painters discovered ways of using that template with the advanced Renaissance techniques of perspective and color. Classical portrait busts were structured as objects in themselves, with rounded bottoms that completed the object in three-dimensional space -- whereas the Byzantine and Greek icons were usually cut cleanly at the bottom of the image, glimpsing it as though through a window.
Nagel then follows this…