Description
Existing accounts of the early modern European sovereign state emphasize institutional evolution, war-driven state consolidation, and other factors, ranging from the Reformation to modern cartography. I propose a complimentary account, focusing not on the institution of sovereignty, but on sovereigns: the monarchs who ruled these states. I foreground the role of court portraiture. I argue the production and dissemination of personally specific images of sovereigns helped to consolidate their exclusive, individual rights of rule. Beginning during the Renaissance, technical improvements in painting made possible more lifelike and individually specific depictions. Visualizing specific sovereigns invested them with new autonomy from existing institutional structures. Such images were used to legitimate monarchs’ status before elite domestic audiences. They were also used in diplomacy, including to arrange dynastic marriages. Access to and mastery of portraiture signaled national achievement and greatness. Artists themselves and artistic techniques circulated, in the elite circuits of early modern Europe. This account helps explain the investment of undivided sovereign authority in specific individuals. The visualized sovereign in turn helps to explain the centralization of symbolic political authority in the institution of the modern state.
