Franz Xaver Winterhalter, one of the most sought-after and productive artists of the 19th century, developed various types of portraits in strategically composed portraiture programmes, which shaped the image of rulers and rulers’ wives across different political systems. This example is taken in order to discuss how recognition of rulership is conferred in concrete terms, and to what extent the visualisation of claims to power is dependent on office and gender. The author identifies three reproducible patterns of legitimation, defining new terms of investigation - fashion, regalia and virtue portraits - that will assist future research across epochs. Fundamental study on portraiture of female rulers New perspectives on one of the most successful and productive 19th century court artists Women in positions of political leadership

The portrait has been characterized as an art-form of contradictions since its very beginnings to the art of today. The genre is faced with the challenge of recording an individual and his or her character as a strictly specified object and, at the same time, of creating a work of art in its own right. Hence, various forms of portraiture are faced with an aesthetic conflict of solutions that oscillate between similarity to the subject and greatly abstracted works of invention. This volume collects the contributions of the homonymous "International Warburg College" of the University of Hamburg and is dedicated to the genre of portraiture across various media as well as its entire thematic range. Case studies by international authors examine the broad range of issues involved in this genre: from the exploration of the individual in the portrait, to the political function of the genre; from the stylization of the individual to mask, role, and type; and to the artists' strategies of presentation in the self-portrait.