Poses in European royal portraits: profile, three-quarter view, full length and on horseback

This page is about the body in a royal portrait: which way the ruler faces, how much of the body the painter shows, and whether the ruler stands, sits or rides. Each of these choices had a meaning at a European court. A side view recalled Roman emperors. A face turned toward us felt closer and more alive. A full-length figure near life size covered a wall in a palace hall, and a king on horseback looked like a commander. Knowing the poses helps you read any royal portrait, and it helps you picture which pose suits your own dog or cat. For the objects placed around the ruler, see the companion page on symbols of royal power, and for the whole subject, start at the main guide to European royal portraits.

Why the pose mattered

A court portrait had a job. It told everyone who saw it that this person ruled. The person being painted is called the sitter.

Where the ruler looks is one of the first things to read. The National Gallery in London describes Giovanni Bellini's portrait of Leonardo Loredan, the doge (elected ruler) of Venice from 1501 to 1521. Loredan knows he is being looked at, but he does not meet our eyes. The gallery explains that returning the gaze would treat the viewer as an equal, and nobody looking at the picture was his equal.

The profile: the oldest court pose

The profile, a strict side view of the head, is the earliest pose covered in this guide.

The Louvre in Paris holds a small portrait of John II of France, known as Jean le Bon, which the museum dates to 1355 to 1360. It is painted in tempera, a paint made with egg, on a gold background, and measures 60 by 45 centimetres. The king's head is shown in pure side view, and the words "Jehan roy de France" (John, king of France) run across the gold above him. His profile, his long hair and the inscription identify him.

The National Gallery explains where this pose came from. It says the profile was adopted from the heads of emperors on Roman coins and medals, so it became a symbol of power and social rank. Florentine painters kept using it until 1470, by the gallery's approximate dating. The gallery's example is Alesso Baldovinetti's Portrait of a Lady, probably painted for a marriage, in which the side view gives the family's coat of arms on her sleeve as much space as her face.

The profile stayed the normal pose for rulers. The National Gallery says portraits of the doges of Venice had followed the normal convention for portraits of rulers, which was the strict profile, until Bellini changed it.

The three-quarter view

In a three-quarter view, the head is turned partly toward the viewer, so you see one side of the face fully and the other side in part. Both eyes are visible, and the face looks rounder and more alive.

The National Gallery says the three-quarter pose, the dark background and the strong light were innovations from Northern Europe. Its key example is Jan van Eyck's portrait of a man from 1433, painted in Flanders. Antonello da Messina brought the formula to Venice. The gallery dates his Portrait of a Man to 1475 or 1476 and says only 12 of his portraits survive, all men, all shown head and shoulders against a dark background. Other painters in Venice quickly copied him.

Bellini then used the same view for the doge. The National Gallery says he used "the more contemporary three-quarter view", popularised in Venice by artists such as Antonello from the 1470s, to explore Loredan's character. A ruler's portrait could now show a thinking person as well as an office.

Pairs of portraits followed their own rule. The National Gallery says that in a pair of panels, the convention was to turn each sitter three-quarters toward the other. In Lucas Cranach's 1509 double portrait of two future electors of Saxony, a father and son, the painter broke this rule and turned the six-year-old son toward the viewer instead, to give the boy more presence.

How much of the body to show

Painters also chose how much of the body to include.

• Bust or head and shoulders. The National Gallery says Antonello's sitters are cropped at the shoulders, so they look like a carved portrait bust.
• Half length. Bellini painted Loredan to the chest, with the arms hidden, behind a stone ledge. The gallery says this recalls ancient marble busts of emperors, which stood on plinths.
• Three-quarter length. Raphael's Pope Julius II shows the pope seated, from the head to below the knees. The National Gallery says it was probably painted soon after 27 June 1511, and it became the model for portraits of churchmen for the next 200 years. It names Titian, El Greco and Velázquez among the painters who followed it.
• Full length. The whole figure, from head to feet.

The full-length state portrait

A state portrait is the official picture of a ruler. It is usually full length, and it often shows the ruler standing near life size.

Size signalled rank. The National Gallery says that visitors to Gerrit van Honthorst's 1642 portrait of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, would have judged her status and nobility from its near life-size scale and her lace and silks, even before an inscription naming her was added.

The Spanish court used the standing pose for its king. The National Gallery's Philip IV of Spain in Brown and Silver, painted by Diego Velázquez in 1631 or 1632, shows the king full length beside a table covered in red velvet. The gallery says the head was painted from life and then served as the pattern for other half-length and full-length portraits by Velázquez and his workshop.

The Palace of Versailles calls Hyacinthe Rigaud's Louis XIV of 1701 an emblem of absolute monarchy across Europe. The Louvre gives its size as 2.77 by 1.94 metres. The king stands in his coronation mantle beside a throne, with his right leg forward, and the crown and the hand of justice, a sceptre topped with a small hand, rest on a cushion beside him. The Louvre says the king admired the picture so much that he kept it, and had Rigaud paint a second version for his grandson, Philip V of Spain. The Louvre says Rigaud probably borrowed this pose from a statue of the king by Martin Desjardins, put up in Paris in 1686, and that the leg recalls the king's early passion for dance. The museum adds that courtiers copied the pose. The marquis de Dangeau, for one, ordered a half-length portrait from Rigaud in 1702 in the same attitude as the king.

Official portraits were copied again and again. The Wallace Collection in London says Allan Ramsay began his full-length portrait of George III in coronation robes in December 1761, and that over 100 replica versions appear to have been made, many by Ramsay himself. In France, the same museum says, a workshop of copyists at Versailles called the Cabinet du Roi was set up to reproduce official portraits, and copies of Louis-Michel van Loo's Louis XV were sent as diplomatic gifts and hung in embassies and public buildings.

Seated and enthroned

A ruler could also be shown sitting on a throne. Westminster Abbey holds a wooden panel painting of Richard II from the 1390s, which it calls the earliest known portrait of an English monarch. The king sits in the Coronation Chair in his coronation robes, holding the orb and sceptre. The panel is 213.5 centimetres high.

The same seated pose appeared on royal seals. The National Archives in London explains that every English sovereign since Edward the Confessor has used a double-sided great seal, nearly always showing the ruler enthroned "in majesty" on one side and on horseback on the other. The medieval page of this guide, on medieval royal portraits, looks at those seals in more detail.

A seat could also send a quieter message. In Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo's portrait of Queen Mariana of Spain from 1666, the widowed queen sits on a throne-like chair in the royal palace in Madrid. The National Gallery says her pose suggests she is sitting only for a moment, perhaps because her rule as regent for her young son was temporary.

On horseback

The National Gallery says equestrian portraits, pictures of a person on horseback, were a popular way of displaying power for centuries. It names the ancient bronze statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius on horseback in Rome as a famous early example.

Anthony van Dyck's Equestrian Portrait of Charles I, which the gallery dates to 1638 to 1639, is over 3.5 metres high, the largest of his portraits of the king. The gallery says a portrait of the Emperor Charles V on horseback by Titian probably inspired it. The king holds the reins of a powerful horse, a sign of his control over his state. The gallery adds that he lost that control in civil war and was executed in January 1649. The horse's legs are placed in a step from dressage, the fashionable sport of training a horse to move in set patterns.

Generals were painted this way too. The National Gallery says Francisco de Goya painted a large portrait of the Duke of Wellington on horseback in Madrid in 1812, now at Apsley House in London. For uniforms, medals and battle scenes, see the page on military portraits.

Gestures: the hand on the hip and the speaking hand

Smaller gestures carried meaning too. The National Gallery says Pompeo Batoni's portrait of Richard Milles, painted in Rome during Milles's Grand Tour in the late 1750s, uses a swaggering pose with one hand on the hip. The gallery says Titian and Van Dyck had used the same pose to show a sitter's commanding presence.

In Hyacinthe Rigaud's portrait of the royal treasurer Antoine Pâris, probably from 1724, the sitter raises his right hand. The National Gallery says this is the gesture that Quintilian, a Roman writer on public speaking, described as the most fitting for eloquent speech.

Choosing a pose for a pet portrait

The same choices apply to a portrait of your dog or cat. A photo taken from the side gives you the clean outline of a profile. A photo with your pet's head turned partly toward you gives the livelier three-quarter view that Antonello and Bellini used. A photo taken straight on works for a formal, frontal look.

The portrait studio takes one photo of up to 5 MB. The gallery shows example portraits in the Renaissance Royal, Baroque Aristocrat, Regency Era, Victorian Noble and Military General styles, so you can see how different head angles look. For twelve famous paintings of the period and where to see them, read famous Renaissance paintings. The style finder on this page asks a few questions about your pet and suggests one of the six European styles.