donor

donor. A term applied to a person who commissions and pays for a work of religious art and has his or her portrait incorporated in it as an act of devotion. By having themselves included in the picture, donors sought to associate themselves in a special way with the sacred figures portrayed there, either in thanks for favours received or in the hope of future protection and salvation. A famous example is Giotto's portrayal of Enrico Scrovegni in the Arena Chapel, Padua (c.1305); Scrovegni, who had the chapel built and decorated in expiation of his father's sins, is shown kneeling in front of the Virgin Mary and presenting her with a model of the building. In Netherlandish art of the 15th century, a favourite format for donor paintings, popularized by Rogier van der Weyden, was to show the Virgin and Child on one wing of a diptych and a portrait of the donor in prayer facing them on the other. None of Rogier's diptychs of this type survives intact, the two panels in all cases having been separated, with one sometimes lost, but a well-known intact example by Memlinc is the Nieuwenhove Diptych (1487, Memlingmuseum, Bruges).