Royalty and Aristocracy
Kings, queens, emperors and nobles in art, and the portraits, costumes and symbols through which rank was displayed.
No works indexed yet · 9 related artists
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Portraits of rulers were instruments of state, meant to make power present where the monarch was not. Agnolo Bronzino's Eleonora of Toledo with Her Son Giovanni (c. 1545) presents the Medici duchess in a stiff brocade gown as the guarantor of a dynasty, and Hyacinthe Rigaud's Louis XIV (1701) sets out the full apparatus of absolute monarchy: ermine, sceptre, red heels and a sweep of velvet. At the Mughal court, Bichitr painted Emperor Jahangir enthroned on an hourglass in Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings (c. 1615–18).
Aristocrats followed royal models. Rosalba Carriera's soft pastel portraits were sought by travellers passing through Venice, and Jean-Marc Nattier dressed the daughters of Louis XV as goddesses. Francisco Goya's Charles IV of Spain and His Family (1800–01) lines up the royal household in glittering, unidealised detail, and Franz Xaver Winterhalter's portraits of Empress Eugénie and Queen Victoria defined 19th-century court glamour.
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