ABSTRACT
One of the cardinal elements in the formation of publics as they are construed in this volume is the development and dissemination of a public taste or fashion for particular ideas or for the particular style of specifi c things. One might well see the operation of this process in regard to all sorts of things in early modern Europe. We have chosen to examine a particular material object, a rare and perhaps even unique surviving example of its type, which illuminates for us the dissemination of secular portraiture as fashionable innovation in early modern England. While England did come to adopt the fashion for secular portraiture emanating especially from the studios of professionally trained virtuoso artists, operating fi rst in Italy and then in various parts of transalpine Europe, with its formal conventions of more naturalistic form, it did so later and perhaps less extensively than most other areas of Europe. This and other factors make portraiture in England an appropriate exemplar in the wider study of the formation of public taste. Indeed, as Habermas has suggested, artistic taste is one of the key originating factors of an organized and inclusive public life.1
