ABSTRACT
In Renaissance Italy, portraiture played a key role in promoting the family dynasty, and portraits of children often asserted a family’s dynastic ambitions.1 Inheritance customs in place for generations privileged the male over the female line: a family’s dynastic objectives hinged on its boys, who were the first to succeed to their father’s patrimony. The patrilineal relationship between father and son was considered reciprocal if not equal: while a son benefited from his father’s wealth and social position, the youth, while certainly dependent on his forebear’s goodwill, assured his father a measure of immortality in the continuity of his line.2 As the humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote in the later fifteenth century, a son was like a ‘branch of his [father’s] own life which had taken root.’3 Such was the prevailing view in court centers such as Urbino, where Duke Federico da Montefeltro commissioned Justus of Ghent to paint a portrait of himself with his son Guidobaldo in 1476 or 1477 (Fig. 5.1).4 Federico’s dynastic concerns come to the fore in this image, which depicts the four-or five-year-old Guidobaldo holding the scepter that signifies inheritance. The ducal dynasty will continue without impasse, so the painting informs us, with Federico’s patrimony and all of the claims to power it bears passing seamlessly from father to son.
