ABSTRACT
Political leadership is highly visible, much talked about, and complex to assess. The visibility of leadership has been markedly enhanced by the mass media, and in particular by television, but it always was large. Great leaders of the Antiquity, of the Renaissance and of the modern period were all well known to their contemporaries, despite the fact that they could only be seen and heard by relatively small numbers. Their qualities and defects were probably the object of many conversations; scholarly work was at any rate devoted to them. Indeed, studies of historians were primarily concerned with the description of their actions, while the concept of leadership began to be analyzed.
