'A copy of my countenance': Biography, iconography, and likeness in the portraits of the Duchess Mazarin and her circle

My dissertation considers the 17th-century female portrait as an outgrowth of the practice of social typing by means of which women at the English, French, and Italian courts were identified and understood. Through a case study of the written and painted portraits of Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin (1646-1633), I explore the ways in which the names of these 17th-century women were fused by a viewing and reading audience with the notorious circumstances of the women's lives, and how the familiarity of their stories led to their being "type-cast" through recurring code words and iconographic formulae. I argue that such verbal and visual typing linked them implicitly with other women of like social stature, subject to similar public perceptions. My dissertation provides historical and theoretical grounding for the proposal that the portraits called "Hortense Mancini" were read as depicting generalized female type(s) with which the sitter was linked and as representing the (hi)stories of those types, as much as they were understood to depict uniquely referential physical features. In this sense, I argue for a reconsideration of the portrait genre, itself: as embedded in and productive of narratives resulting from the collaboration of sitter, image, and viewer.;In many cases, the mythologies created around women at 17th-century European courts harnessed the iconographic force of earlier mythologized figures. I examine, for instance, multivalent representations of court women that reappropriated the myths of the goddesses Diana and Flora, the histories of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt and the quasi-historical Amazon queens, as a means of figuring their early modern subjects.;I also examine the "cult of series" in 17th-century Europe, addressing in particular the popular genre of the "beauties series." Portrait series "type-cast" their multiple subjects, retaining the individuality of separate sitters by means of discrete canvases at the same time that the cohesiveness of the series depended upon conceptual and formal "likenesses' among portraits. I argue--in the context of the genre's popularity during the 17th century--that the beauties series provides a paradigm for the reading of portraits of women during this time as dually referential: to the typed as well as to the individualized sitter.