rmal tomb sculpture had a parallel, for example, in the memorial portraits that began to be painted in the mid-fifteenth century. These memorial portraits displayed the person in profile and, despite the painters' basic realism and attention to detail, there is a distinctive lack of any "intimation of the sitter's mood [or] his personality [or] the way his mind works." Though the Northern influence is clear in terms of the formal aspects of these paintings, there is none of the psychological insight that is found in Flemish full-face portraits of the same period. Jan van Eyck's portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife is an example of the individualized portrait that addressed the nature of the sitters' personalities. It was not until the vogue for classical examples brought a new interest in the portrait as a picture of the living being that the Italians attained this same degree of individuality and psychological penetration in portraiture.
When the Italians began to imitate or to adapt antique models they were faced with classical works that, despite their vigor and interesting compositional ideas, were mainly portrayals of gods and idealized men, not of the true human experience. "This psychological emphasis was to be the innovation of the Renaissance, built, it is true, on the inspiration of antique Roman portrait sculpture." Appropriat
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