From an "Art De Memoire" to the Art of Portraiture: Printed Effigy Books of the Sixteenth Century

Through an examination of a group of books containing effigies of the kings of France, this article charts the development of modern concepts of portraiture during the sixteenth century. Several of these books, such as Jean Bouchet's Anciennes et modernes genealogies des Roys de France (1528), derive their understanding of likeness from earlier medieval concepts of visual representation, in which images play a crucial role in mnemonic systems. According to this representational paradigm, images need only be distinctive and memorable to be true; artists could thus produce true images entirely from fantasy. Others, like Guillaume Rouille's Promptuaire des Medalles (1553), articulate a growing sense that true images should rely upon physiognomic likeness in representing their subjects. These divergent theories of representation came into direct conflict during this period, with the preference for physiognomic likeness only achieving widespread acceptance in the last half of the sixteenth century.