The volume presents a wide-ranging investigation of the ways in which Petrarch's legacy informed the relationship between visual and literary portraits in sixteenth-century Italy. Petrarch's vast literary production influenced the intellectual framework in which new models of representation and self-representation developed during the Renaissance. His two sonnets on Laura's portrait by Simone Martini and his ambivalent fascination with the illusionary power of portraiture in his Latin texts -- such as the Secretum, the Familiares and De remediis utriusque fortune -- constituted the theoretical reference for artists and writers alike. In a century dominated by the rhetorical comparison between art and literature (ut pictura po
