In this class, we continued our discussion on portraiture in Renaissance art. We first looked at how the intention of a portrait affects the composition, looking at the more modern representation of this through the examples of the class’s selfies. One of the first innovations in portraiture that we saw was the movement from black, amorphous backgrounds to portraits with backgrounds that put the subject in context, both physically and through connections to their character, class, and familial history. An example of this comes through the comparison of Campin’s Portrait of a Man and Woman, and Christus’ Edward Grymeston. While the former has a portrait with the aforementioned amorphous background, the portrait of Edward Grymeston has a background that contains much to give information on Grymeston. The background contains a household that would have been contemporary at the time, with Grymeston holding a necklace and the coat of arms of his family in the background. We also saw how the different focuses of Italian and Northern artists in the Renaissance affected portraiture. Where Italian portraits might have come off as more airbrushed and were focused more on the wholistic portraiture, artists like Van Eyck created portraits that were more naturalistic and focused on small, accurate details.