ABSTRACT
Long before the emergence of an early modern “Republic of Letters,” there was a renaissance of letters – a self-conscious rebirth of the meaning and purpose of correspondence. Barbarigo’s portrait bears witness to a transformation that began in the fourteenth century. During the fifteenth century, letters began to penetrate the consciousness of many different kinds of people. Renaissance artists not only painted portraits with letters but also cultivated their own correspondence. As the goals of Renaissance portraiture evolved, representations of letters attempted to capture the full range of human activity and emotion that they indicated. Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man with a Letter probably depicts a Tuscan merchant resident in Bruges who commissioned the German painter, popular with Italians, to paint his portrait. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, portraits of diplomats and their secretaries began to appear.
