Wedding Portrait in Renaissance Germany

This thesis is devoted to the phenomenon of the German Renaissance wedding portrait. The relevance of this work is due to the lack of comprehensive studies in the field of wedding portraits in Northern Europe. The object of the study is male and female portraits of rulers, court nobles and burghers, created in the 15th and 16th centuries in Germany or painted by German masters. The main criterion in forming a representative sample was the social position held by the model, from which the iconography of wedding portraits, as this thesis has shown, varies. The following methods of art history analysis were applied to analyze the iconography and patronage traditions: formal and stylistic analysis, historical and cultural method, social history of art, gender studies and iconographic analysis. The work is divided into two chapters which examine the wedding portraits of rulers (with sub-chapters for the Habsburgs, Saxon nobles and courtiers) and burghers respectively. The study identified characteristic and distinctive features of the iconography of wedding portraits for different segments of the German Renaissance population. In this way several iconographic groups could be formed which can be applied in the following studies.