I was asked yesterday to speculate what it might have felt like to have been one of Moroni’s sitters, based on the experience of sitting for my portrait.   I’m not sure any modern painter paints in the way Moroni did partly because so much of modern portraiture is based on the idea of psychological insight, whereas Moroni strikes me as having been at least as interested in the trappings and appurtenances of the nobility, who mostly stood rather than sat for him, nearly all of them bearded.   What I have to say on the subject is now available at http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/point-of-view-what-its-like-to-sit

I gave myself a sneak preview of our Moroni exhibition which opens to the public later this week.   He was a great favourite of the Victorians, including Eastlake and Morelli, is strongly represented in British collections, and best known for his Portrait of Faustino Avogadro (A Knight with his jousting helmet) and Portrait of a Tailor, both in the National Gallery (the hero of Henry James’s The Liar thought the Tailor one of the half dozen greatest paintings in the world).   His work looks beautiful in the austere spaces of the Sackler galleries, a concise exhibition which shows off the great strengths of this Bergamese painter, particularly his portraits with their spectacular furs, ruffs, brocades and codpieces.