ABSTRACT
Veronese’s portrait of Sidney is known only from written sources, chief among them the fragmentary surviving correspondence of Sidney and Languet. In June 1574 the completed portrait was delivered to Languet in Vienna, the catalyst for the commission having been Languet’s request some months earlier for a portrait in which Sidney’s “noble nature” would be rendered visible “in his face”. The scholarly advances outlined notwithstanding, considerable scope remains for new work on the seventeenth-century Sidneys as patrons of the visual arts. The wide range of visual responses to, and depictions of, the Tudor-Stuart Sidneys from the eighteenth century onwards offers another potentially rich seam, but one which, to date, only Michael G. Brennan has mined. The Longleat painting seems to have been the original, or prime, version of a “type” which enjoyed wide circulation in the late sixteenth century, both during Sidney’s lifetime and after his death in 1586.
