Lope de Vega has always been a byword for excellence in Spanish letters, so it is remarkable that portraits of him have until recently received little critical attention. We have to go back to 1935 to find the only monograph on the subject, by Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, the then Keeper of Prints at the Prado, whose Los retratos de Lope de Vega is a model of economic thoroughness that still reads remarkably well today, and provides a comprehensive selection of images. Indeed, until the emergence of the Lope portrait pages on the excellent Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes website (which draws heavily on Lafuente for its images) it has been the sole source of access to portraits in sufficient numbers for purposes of comparison and collation. Although new information has come to light from Pérez Sánchez and Jordán de Urríes in terms of the location and dating of one important portrait mentioned by Lafuente, it is safe to assume that it will remain the benchmark for identifying the various strands of Lope portraiture for many decades.

In fact, there has been a revival of interest generally in Lope's image on the part of art historians and literary critics. Most notable among these is Javier Portús, whose Pintura y pensamiento en la España de Lope de Vega appeared in 1999 and describes the cult of portraiture in Golden Age Spain that gave rise to the vast number of contemporaneous images of this most celebrated of playwrights. His analysis of Lope's role in their deliberate cultivation and their typology has been complemented by the appearance of Antonio Sánchez Jiménez's Lope pintado por sí mismo,which deals with Lope's equally assiduous self-inscription in his writings, but also bristles with discussion of the merits (or otherwise) of his portraits.

The present chapter seeks to build on this renewed interest to make a selection of his portraits once again available between the covers of a book, the illustrations being accompanied by a brief commentary sufficient for the purposes of general orientation. The text provides an opportunity to develop some of Lafuente’s observations about the way some images of Lope have proliferated and prospered in the public imagination, while others — often of superior artistic quality— have not.