son provides the best guide for understanding this theoretical change. Most of Richardson’s values can be traced back both directly and through seventeenth century French sources to the Renaissance trilogy of grazia, grandezza, and decoro. Each of these terms and their derivatives, however, undergo a “sea-change”. Whenever he pairs “grace” and “greatness” he puts “grace” in the key position. “Elegance” and “genteel” add to the polite associations of “grace”. The Renaissance ideal with its associations with “decoro” had conferred a graceful dignity to portrait painting. But this was not what Richardson intended to emphasize in his general argument. His basic approach was moral. One of the first English writers to make a substantial contribution to the debate on the moral function of the portrait was William Aglionby. He outlined its high aim of transmitting to posterity the virtues of the great and listed as examples the majesty of Alexander, the genius of Caesar, the calm magnanimity of Scipio, and the beauty, itself having a moral value, of Cleopatra. According to Richardson, history painting records the great actions of the past, portraiture the men who conceived and executed them. He does not claim equality in so many words, but the impression he leaves is that the portraits of a great master come close to the highest position reserved to Biblical subjects. An account of changes in the categories of painting in this period can follow the Orthodox sequence with one alteration, the raising of portraiture to the second place and the consequential relegation of landscape to third. This is justifiable both by the theories of Richardson and Aglionby and so is the failure of any English painter to catch the spirit as distinct from the manner of classical landscape before Richard Wilson. After the landscape co...
