ABSTRACT
I am concerned here with the interpretation of Renaissance symbolic imagery in relation to certain issues of gender construction, particularly in the representation of royalty, but I begin with the question of interpretation itself. How do we know how to read a Renaissance image? In the simplest cases, we have Renaissance guides to interpretation, in the form of iconologies and handbooks of symbolism. But such cases immediately become less simple when we observe that reading imagery through them depends on reading texts, and therefore shares in all the interpretive ambiguity of that process: the reading of texts is a dialectical, and sometimes even an adversarial procedure. Interpretation depends, moreover, on what texts we select as relevant, and even on what we are willing to treat as a text.
