Viri Summi: A History of Portraiture of Medieval and Renaissance Cardinals of the Roman Church Paperback – February 6, 2026

Medieval and Renaissance portraits of cardinals were created to honor their position and status as princes of the Church. Their rise to prominence in the Church came during the Renaissance, and their portraiture documents this important historical development. Their portraits functioned in the pre-Modern age, as social media functions in ours, and very effectively so. In the pre-Modern age, cardinals were famous because they had power, position, status, wealth, and influence. Cardinals were the most important officials of the Church, beside the pope who was head of the Church, specifically, the Roman Catholic Church, or Church of Rome. Cardinals constituted a relatively small number of Church officials (well under fifty during the Middle Ages and under a hundred in the Renaissance) but their numbers belie their prominence. They were at once religious leaders and powerful arbiters of everything else in their society. They came from all over Europe to serve in the Church’s government at the Vatican. They were often from aristocratic or otherwise prominent families; a few were also rulers of territories as well as scholars, intellectuals, and theologians. They—and they alone—were the closest advisors to the pope providing him with their counsel regarding sacred and secular matters. As princes of the Church, their influence was both an individual prerogative and a collective force. They constituted a political body--the College of Cardinals--within the Church unlike any other either within the Church or in secular society. Cardinals, and only cardinals, selected from their own numbers the man who would become pope. Read more