Constructing the College as a Collective Body Post-Tridentine Cardinals and the Codification of their Portraits (1593-1630)

The post-Tridentine period saw the publication of several series of portrait prints of cardinals. Cardinals’ portraits emerged as a new genre in printmaking, and also contributed to the codification of this particular subgenre in painting. Research on these images has focused on individual printmakers, publishers, or artists; moreover, this subject has been approached on the basis of the visual material itself, with no consideration of its relationship with the textual information surrounding it. Three print series, produced by Leonardo Parasole, Paul Maupin and Andrea Brogiotti, are discussed in this chapter in order to see how they provide visual evidence of representational, organisational and ideological issues that were topical during the late sixteenth century. Each series can be seen to reflect the particular relations between the respective pope and the College of Cardinals. At the same time, the sitters had no say over the way thet were portrayed, since the artists worked for the papal printing press or were closely collaborating with the ecclesiastical authorities, and thus these series question some widely held assumptions about portraiture and individual identity in the early modern period.