The aim of this conference is to promote new thoughts and new approaches to a topic that, though being at the core of the art historical debate since its very beginnings, still proves to be insufficiently investigated: namely the extent to which Medieval royal portraits were intentionally or unintentionally used as visual strategies to evoke and embody either the ruler’s institutional status or his or her personal charism, and the multiple ways by which pictorial or sculptural images exerted an impact on the sovereign’s (and his material body’s) public perception.
A comparative analysis of such issues will be enabled by the fifteen papers offered by distinguished scholars from five countries, each of them focussing on different geographic and historical contexts, including Cilician Armenia, late Byzantine Serbia, the Kingdom of Hungary, Sicily, Naples, France, the Christian kingdoms of Spain and al-Andalus.