ABSTRACT
Da Nono noted that the Carrara owned property in Padua and around the towns of Carrara and Pernumia and that the family had formed advantageous marriage alliances with many prominent families in northern Italy. Paduans considered the Carrara as citizens of the popolo, likely because of the fragmentation of the family's estates and the growing divisions within the family itself at that time. Over the course of the dynasty, artists decorated the large complex using various types of imagery, by turns, with heraldry, figural portraits and narrative cycles. Petrarch's portrait emphasises the original literary context of the heroes and juxtaposes the heroes with their biographer - the keeper of their histories. Francesco Novello acknowledged the primacy of this relationship by incorporating textual and visual references to his father's rule and to his family's various uses of portraiture into his personal library, conflating their significance for his forebears with his own articulation of self as the 'physician prince' of Padua.
