Interdisciplinary by nature of the questions it poses, Naïma Ghermani's book takes on the important topic of German princely portraiture. The genre saw an explosive rate of growth during the sixteenth century, when such images appeared in large numbers and artists began depicting their subjects in ever more impressive poses and formats. The multiplication of the images and their iconography are linked, according to the author, to tumultuous changes in the political landscape of the Holy Roman Empire in the period between the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, as princes saw themselves in a position to rival the emperor for power. Their portraits embody their ambitions, but, despite the political nature of the images she discusses, Ghermani rejects as anachronistically facile other historians’ characterization of these princely portraits as propaganda.

Ghermani tests her thesis by examining the portraiture of the Saxon electors and the dukes of Bavaria, leaving out the electors Palatine. That means that a major but neglected princely dynasty remains as shadowy as it has always been, but Ghermani has made an otherwise sound choice. Saxony and Bavaria not only represent extremely ambitious families in opposite geographical areas of the empire, but also typify the deep split between the Lutheran and the Catholic confessions.

The author constructs her argument more or less chronologically. The first four chapters focus largely on images of the Saxon electors either painted on panels or available to a broad audience in the form of prints. Chapter 1 deals with princely portraiture before the Reformation, and here Ghermani brings in as comparisons some portraits from outside Saxony. Chapter 2 posits that the Reformation ushered in not only new iconographic forms, but also norms, whereas chapter three deals with portraits of the Saxon electors (and likenesses of those princes in polemical works) from the 1540s, especially after the Protestants’ defeat at Mühlberg in 1547. Historians and art historians familiar with the visual culture of the period will be reminded strongly of the work of Carl C. Christensen (Princes and Propaganda: Electoral Saxon Art of the Reformation [1992]), to whom Ghermani explicitly refers, as anyone must who discusses this topic. Ghermani updates and expands upon Christensen and comes at Saxon imagery from a different perspective, asking not how Saxon princes lent their authority to the Reformation, but, rather, how the Reformation added to their authority. This is the particular theme of Ghermani's chapter 4, which discusses Luther's evolving political theory and the Protestant mirrors for princes and other pedagogical works that began rushing on to the German book market from the mid-1530s. Including a survey of the smaller number of similar works written for Catholic princes, the chapter serves as a hinge in the text, leading the reader to Ghermani's discussion of the Bavarian dukes, who followed patronage patterns diverging from those of the Saxon electors. Chapter 5 traces the Bavarian focus on programmatic portraits and collecting at and near the ducal residence, and chapter 6 discusses their genealogical imagery, particularly in publications of the later sixteenth century. The author connects the latter efforts to Bavarian imperial ambitions, but she is mistaken in stating (224) that the dynastic goal of gaining an electorate originated at the time of Wilhelm V; the first actively to pursue it was his grandfather, Wilhelm IV. Ghermani's final chapter offers perhaps the most intriguing new line of questioning in its discussion of armor in portraits and in collections. Here the author shows how much insight is to be gained from thinking about objects intimately connected to the princely body and its literal incorporation of power.

This is a very good and even inspiring overview, but it is unfortunate that the press did not give the book to a better copyeditor. It contains multiple errors in German usage and spelling in transcriptions and other parts of its footnotes. A weightier error is the caption incorrectly labeling as a portrait of Wilhelm IV of Bavaria a painting by Barthel Beham that in actuality shows the duke's father, Albrecht IV. Since the image does not even conform to the painting that Ghermani describes (168), the reader can rest assured that the mistake is once again editorial, not authorial.