The Courtesan in the Italian Renaissance Art: Portraits of Barbara Salutati by Domenico Puligo

The paper addresses a long-debated issue of whether and how courtesans were represented in Italian Renaissance painting. The first part presents a historiographical review of the art-historical literature on the subject, demonstrating which types of Renaissance painted images used to be associated with courtesans, and how radically approaches to interpreting these works have changed in recent years. The second part analyses a unique set of three portrait images – the only one that can be plausibly linked to the historical figure of a specific courtesan, the Florentine Barbara Salutati, who was in a relationship with Niccolò Machiavelli. The analysis of these works in the context of the early 16th century female portraiture allows us to make assumptions about the strategies courtesans preferred for their public self-representation.