Portrait Prints of Rulers and Military Commanders in Sixteenth-Century Italy

This dissertation is the first study to focus systematically on portrait prints created in sixteenth-century Italy that represent rulers and military commanders. The corpus investigated here encompasses both single-sheet and book illustrations, thus cutting across the disciplinary boundaries of art history, book history and bibliography. I draw extensively on both museum departments and library collections to bring together well-known prints that warrant further reinvestigation, with lesser-known ones. To date, art historical and historical analyses of how rulers and men who distinguished themselves in war sought to communicate their aspirations and claims to political power has been largely based on painted, sculpted, and medallic portraits – as well as coronations, funerals, masques, royal entries, and court pageantry. This has left portrait prints at the fringes of scholarly literature. Nor has the topic of printed portraits of rulers and military commanders been studied as a topic on its own – as has been the case of printed portraits of authors and artists. This thesis addresses how to understand the agency of these prints and ultimately their meaning. In particular, the dissertation investigates publishers, printmakers, artists and men of letters involved in the creation and dissemination of such prints, the justifications that, as they report, prompted them to do so, as well as the relationship between the prints and the wider visual culture of the time. The dissertation challenges two perspectives that are commonly found in studies of political imagery: first, the idea that rulers had close control over their own appearance and reputation; and second, the widespread notion that propaganda at the time was deliberately orchestrated. By shedding light on portrait prints, which represent a neglected facet of the imagery of rulers and military commanders in sixteenth-century Italy, the dissertation recalibrates our understanding of power relations at the time.