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In his Life of Alexander, Plutarch describes a portrait of Alexander the Great so convincing that it 'smote [King Cassander] suddenly with a shuddering and trembling from which he could scarcely recover'.1 This anecdote is repeated by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise On Painting (1435) as an example of the divine power of painting, and it serves to highlight the familiarity in the modern period with portraits of the ancient king.2 During the Renaissance, portraits of Alexander had a particular appeal to artists because Lysippus and Apelles, two of the most famous classical artists, worked for Alexander as his court portraitists. Thus, to recreate a portrait of Alexander, a modern artist could not only compete with, but also appropriate the status and enduring fame of their ancient exemplars.
One of the most successful military commanders of antiquity, Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), King of Macedon, conquered much of the known world before his death at the age of thirty-two, and his life and the legends surrounding his feats provided a vast repertoire of episodes for artists and authors to embellish, rewrite, and re-imagine in the two millennia since his death. With the fl ourishing of humanism, and the renewal of the culture of antiquity by the mid-flfteenth century, all'antica portraits of the king emerged in the art of Renaissance Italy. This article examines the interest in portraits of Alexander during the Renaissance, tracing the literary and visual models used by artists, the images produced, and the multivalent implications that such works offered artists, patrons, and viewers alike. Although many images of Alexander were created, including examples in manuscripts, for the sake of brevity, this article does not attempt to be a full survey of all of the Alexander 'portraits' in the Renaissance and will instead focus on three main case studies.3
In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder records that Alexander gave three artists the exclusive right to render his portrait: Lysippus the sculptor, Pyrgoteles the gem-engraver, and Apelles the painter.4 Although the works that Pliny describes do not survive, his text was known through translations during the Middle Ages before the Latin version was fi rst printed in 1469 in Venice.5 Because Pliny includes lengthy discussions of the artists of antiquity and the...