ABSTRACT
Portraits were but one means by which Renaissance princes affirmed their right to rule. In the Burgundian realm, the visual representation of the ruler took many forms, as the dukes were very wise patrons of the visual arts and masters of the culture of display. When women came to power, they adopted this strategy as well, as much recent scholarship has shown.1 In the case of Mary of Burgundy (1457-82), the last Valois ruler of the expanded Burgundian state, the bulk of imagery that survives to us, however, was commissioned after her death. Mary’s heirs, and in particular her husband, Maximilian I (1459-1519), Archduke of Austria, King of the Germans, and Holy Roman Emperor, manipulated her image to their own advantage. Of particular interest are seven surviving images that represent the last Duchess of Burgundy seen in profile. These images, six panels and a drawing, date from the 1490s to the early sixteenth century, so they are all posthumous. Most of them date from the reign of Maximilian and most of them have south German or Austrian connections. This group of images bear enough similarities among them to suggest that a prototype on which they are all based was created by the 1490s. The meanings and functions of this portrait type and its variants will be explored in this essay. I will examine the sources and rhetoric of this formula to argue that Mary’s image was constructed to portray her as an eternally youthful and passive conduit of power and wealth for her husband.
