The exhibit of Renaissance portraiture that was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art some years ago allows a reconsideration of the tag line from Jacob Burckhardt that the Renaissance saw the birth of individualism. Commentators and art historians at the time of the show invoked Burckhardt as a way to explain what this show was about, even if they used Burckhardt as little more than a mandatory reference: oh yes, his name has to be mentioned, and if the show is not about individualism, what could it be about? Well, it was about the fact that some very, very beautiful pictures had been created; that’s what it was about. Look at the pictures rather than treat them as way stations in intellectual history. Moreover, instead of playing the game of periodicizing art, let us now be analytic and so associate different aspects of art to different aspects of individualism, presuming the forms of individualism to be present at the same time, just as the various features of any art work, such as its subject and composition and its conventions and the external knowledge brought to a painting, are also always all there at the same time. Perhaps not all concepts can be broken down into these four parts, but individualism certainly can be. If that is the case, that the concept of individualism has all the elements that go into visualization, then that is evidence that individualism is not just a concept but a description of something that actually exists in that it can be visualized, while other concepts, such as justice and God, cannot be visualized, and so perhaps do not exist at all.