The visualization of power takes place until today quite significantly via visualizations of the body. Expressed pointedly: there is no power without pictures of the body. This also applies in particular to the European societies of the Middle Ages and early modern period, in which the body of the ruler was both a guarantee and a preferred projection figure for the political order. In this body, not only was power legitimized, but also constituted in the first place by means of countless documents of representation and thus through pictures of the body in actu.This volume strives for the first time to spell out an iconography of the political in action.

Jörge Bellin, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Ulrich Pfisterer, Director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich