The Portrait Database

This will be an extremely long-term project. I am attempting to catalogue all portraits that I can locate from Western Europe between 1550 and 1600. I have barely touched my own library as yet and already have several hundred. My main goal is a better understanding of the smaller changes in style in five- or ten-year increments and how those styles differed from place to place. In my experience, there is not a complete chronological record published of clothing in this era. Publications are generally arranged thematically (as in Arnold's Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd or Linthicum's Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries) or jump from decade to decade and country to country too quickly to gain a true picture of the progression of styles (as in Ashelford's Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth Century) or lack enough images to clarify the styles being discussed (as in Cunnington's Handbook of Costume in the Sixteenth Century).

Hundreds and hundreds of portraits exist from this time period, and only a few of them are represented, over and over again, in the most accessible costume history texts. One of my goals is to provide an index whereby a researcher could search out a particular time, place, gender, type of clothing, etc., and come up with a list of relevant portraits, who owns them, and on what page of which book they can be found.

N.B. The database does not include images of the portraits for two reasons. First, it would take more time than I have to scan them all, and second, should I ever wish to publish this database, the copyright issues would be overwhelming.