Bust of Faustina the Elder

During the early Renaissance, shifts in attitudes towards the artist affected both his social status and the extent to which he was valued as an intellectual. The favoured court artist in the early fifteenth century might be made a valet de chambre or a familiaris, the title bestowed, for example, on Pisanello by Gianfrancesco Gonzaga of Mantua in 1439. This position gave him a somewhat higher standing within court society than that of other artisans, a position from which he could …