This book analyzes the evolving interaction between court and media from an understudied perspective. Eight case studies focus on different European Empress consorts and Queen regnants from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, using a comparative, cross-media, and cross-period approach. The volume addresses a multitude of questions, ranging from how dynastic women achieved public prominence through their portraits; how their faces and bodies were moulded and rearticulated to fit varying expectations in the courtly public sphere; and the degree to which they, as female actors, engaged with or had agency within the processes of production and reception. In particular, two types of female rulership and their relationship to diverse media are contrasted, and lesser-known and under-researched dynastic women are spotlighted. Contributors: Christine Engelke, Anna Fabiankowitsch, Inga Lena Angstroem Grandien, Titia Hensel, Andrea Mayr, Alison McQueen, Marion Romberg, and Alison Rowley.

In 1479, the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini arrived at the Ottoman court in Istanbul, where he produced his celebrated portrait of Sultan Mehmed II. An important moment of cultural diplomacy, this was the first of many intriguing episodes in the picture's history. Elizabeth Rodini traces Gentile's portrait from Mehmed's court to the Venetian lagoon, from the railway stations of war-torn Europe to the walls of London's National Gallery, exploring its life as a painting and its afterlife as a famous, often puzzling image. Rediscovered by the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard at the height of Orientalist outlooks in Britain, the picture was also the subject of a lawsuit over what defines a "portrait"; it was claimed by Italians seeking to hold onto national patrimony around 1900; and it starred in a solo exhibition in Istanbul in 1999. Rodini's focused inquiry also ranges broadly, considering the nature of historical evidence, the shifting status of authenticity and verisimilitude, and the contemporary political resonance of Old Master paintings. Told as an object biography and imagined as an exploration of art historical methodologies, this book situates Gentile's portrait in evolving dialogues between East and West, uncovering the many and varied ways that objects construct meaning.