Composition of printmaking techniques among dated portraits, per decade (100% stacked). The lithograph band appears only after ~1800 — a built-in dating clock.

place_best is a single field per object — the best available place, chosen by a waterfall: strict production place where known, else broad production place, else the publisher's/printing seat (a proxy), else the catalogue origin field. Publisher seats actually make up the majority (20,150 of 37,224), so read this as "the place associated with the print", not strictly where it was engraved.

Only ~47% of portraits carry a parsed object date. The catalogue often gives a bounded range rather than an exact year: the visible site may show "um 1700", but the source metadata stores bounds like 1690–1710 (wider when the year ends in a zero). Range widths are shown for the dated-but-not-exact objects. Very wide ranges are frequently an artefact — often the object was only bounded by the engraver's lifetime (≈62% of ranges ≥50 yrs have start = creator birth & end = creator death).

The Portraitindex aggregates from many collections. The Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ONB) alone supplies ~50% of the corpus, followed by the Herzog August Bibliothek, Germanisches Nationalmuseum and Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Image delivery mirrors this: onb 50% · direct 40% · hab 10% · Heidelberg <1%.

Prevalence plots each tag as a share of all portraits that decade — the lines are independent, may overlap (a ruler is also counted under nobility) and need not sum to 100%. Social composition is a genuine partition: every portrait is assigned to exactly one stratum by dominant status (ruler → clergy → nobility → non-noble military → other/commoner), so the stack covers 100% of portraits, including the large ordinary-sitter residual. Absolute counts shows raw numbers. (The earlier “100% stacked” view mixed overlapping, non-exhaustive tags and is retired.)

Share of portraits with military elements, by decade (full corpus, decade-level like the curves on the other P: tabs). Uniforms and orders/decorations rise sharply after ~1790 while armor disappears — the militarisation of the portrait runs through modern insignia, not through the old knightly iconography.

Share of portraits with any religious display, by decade (full corpus). Religious self-presentation is stable near 40% through ~1750, then collapses across the Enlightenment to under 10% after 1800 — driven almost entirely by the loss of religious text (name/office inscriptions) and clerical attire.

Clergy carry religious display at 83% vs 16% for everyone else — the prompt cleanly separates the clerical estate. Women (9.7%) rarely carry it, since the signal is dominated by male clerical and scholarly portraits.

Luxury textiles (embroidery, brocade, silk, lace, fur) fall from ~24% of male portraits before 1760 to ~8% after 1790, while worn orders and sashes climb from ~8% to over 30% and the plain sober coat spreads. Men trade ancien-régime finery for uniforms, decorations and dark coats across the revolutionary decades — the “great male renunciation.” (is_male corpus only.)

Distribution of the dress-elaboration score (1–5) over time. Level 3 (“respectable”) dominates; the very plainest (1) and full court dress (5) stay thin. Use “Levels” to collapse to low (1–2) / medium (3) / high (4–5), and “Group” e.g. to compare kings vs civilian men.

Binned: simple (1–2) / medium (3) / complex (4–5)

Nobles dress far more elaborately (mean dress score 3.41; 50% at level 4–5) than non-nobles (2.77; 8%). Clergy are the soberest estate. Dress score uses the full 1–5 scale.

Three example portraits for each dress-elaboration level, from level 1 (plain sober coat) to level 5 (full court / ceremonial dress).

Portrait surrounds simplify sharply across the Enlightenment: mean elaboration falls from ~2.8 (1740s) to ~1.6 (1820s), and the share of “elaborate” surrounds (level 4–5) collapses from ~20% to ~1%. The ornate baroque frame, allegory and heraldry give way to a plain neoclassical ground — steepest in the 1780–1810 revolutionary window.

Binned: simple (1–2) / medium (3) / complex (4–5)

Nobility carry the most elaborate surrounds (mean 2.69; 22% at level 4–5) vs non-nobles (2.41; 12%). The staging of status via allegory and heraldry is a noble idiom that fades with the baroque.

Three example portraits for each surround-elaboration level, from level 1 (bare ground, all attention on the sitter) to level 5 (overwhelming ensemble of frame, allegory, heraldry and inscription).