Tre ritratti sono meglio di uno. Plinio il Vecchio, il “paragone delle arti” e la sua fortuna nella ritrattistica rinascimentale

One of the great artistic disputes of the Renaissance era is linked to the “comparison of the arts”: from clever considerations of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, fifteenth-sixteenth century artists staged learned competitions which reached their peak – obviously in favor of painting – in the famous Treatise by Leonardo da Vinci. Portrait genre sees a Plinian echo in the triple images with which painters “challenge” the art of sculpture and demostrating how even a painting, through multiple points of view, could be three-dimensional. In the Venetian context, not coincidentally the city of the Naturalis Historia’s Renaissance editio princeps, masters such as Giorgione, Savoldo and Lotto addressed the theme of the triple-portrait: the latter, with his Triple portrait of goldsmith, will have great influence also in the Baroque era, due to international collecting events and the confusion of attribution,
in favor of Titian, of his work.