Petrarch famously wrote of the ‘bel viso leggiadro che depinto | porto nel petto’ [lovely smiling face, which I carry painted in my breast] (Rvf 96.5–6). In the sixteenth century, it became possible to literalise Petrarch's words: as Gemma Cornetti points out in this volume, printers produced images of Petrarch and Laura in heart-shaped frames. Likewise, readers could carry a ‘bel viso leggiadro’ close to the heart, as collections of printed illustrated biographies developed into the portrait-book genre. The earliest of these volumes, published in the decades between 1517 and 1560, were in fact small enough to carry around. While Petrarch's Laura was constructed from an idea, an ideal ‘pattern’ of what a beloved should be, early sixteenth-century printmakers used traditional beauty tropes to create images of Roman empresses for books of ancient coins. Female portraits comprised a significant proportion of these early volumes, only to disappear by the 1560s. Portraits of women were almost entirely eliminated at the very moment that the coin-volume genre evolved into the portrait book, which typically displayed a large image of a famous person alongside their biography. The disappearance of women's images has far-reaching consequences, since portrait books evolved into the biographical encyclopaedia by the seventeenth century: women were eliminated from illustrated histories just as these volumes became widely disseminated and more standardised through print.

This chapter will look at interactions between text and image in several sixteenthcentury portrait books from Italy, France, Switzerland, and Austria, to ask if and how Petrarchan canons contributed to the elimination of women's images from early popular histories.