The most conspicuous evidence for the kind of interpretation I have developed in this book is the dramatic frontispiece to Leviathan, reproduced at the front of the present volume. Frontispieces were an important component of books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when society was still in transition to a print culture. They were intended to be studied at some length and not given a cursory perusal, and they amounted to something between an introduction to and summary of the entire book. The frontispiece to Leviathan is especially significant, since Hobbes probably designed it himself and included a hand-drawn copy of it in the manuscript copy of Leviathan that he presented to Charles II (Brown, 1978).

What first catches the eye on this engraving is the image at the top of the page of the sovereign, the mortal god who rules under the immortal God. His most prominent feature is his face. Scholars have argued whether this is a stylized representation of either Cromwell or Charles I. It has even been suggested that it is a composite of both. On this hypothesis, Hobbes must be imagined to have lacked the foresight to anticipate that Cromwell might recognize only Charles's features and Charles recognize only Cromwell's, or, perhaps worse, that they would recognize the duplicity of representing both. (See also Goldsmith, 1981, p. 237 n. 25.) Anyone tempted to think that both are represented should also try to imagine Hobbes instructing the artist about how to draw Leviathan.