(; ) or for short is an iconographic collection of wood engravings authored and published by French humanist, numismatist, publisher and bookseller Guillaume Rouillé in Latin, French and Italian in 1553, in Lyon, France. The book's initial editions contain 828 portraits, designed as medallions, of figures some of whom are mythical and some historical. The portraits are listed in chronological order, beginning with those of Adam and Eve and ending with those of renowned individuals from the mid-16th century, each accompanied by a summarized biographical text. In a 1577 edition, approximately 100 more portraits were added.
The contents are divided into two parts: ('first part') covers those who supposedly or historically lived before the birth of Christ while ('second part') deals with those who did during or after his lifetime. The two parts are usually bound into one book, albeit with separate pagination. The book does not mention the engraver's name; the portraits have been typically attributed, however, to Piedmontese engraver . Many of the portraits were based on depictions from ancient coins, but Rouillé did not intend his work to be a numismatic or academic reference text. The book instead appealed as a collection of brief, well-written and illustrated history lessons to a broader audience and became a bestseller in its era.
Iconographic basis
Portrait books, which featured genuine or fictitious woodcut portraits of renowned individuals of different eras and places, were highly popular in the 16th-century Europe. Guillaume Rouillé, an established publisher and bookseller in Lyon by mid-century, saw an opportunity for a profitable business in the genre like many of his competitors did. Rouillé got the idea for the medallion portrait format from the 1517 book ('Images of the famous') by Renaissance humanist Andrea Fulvio, which contained 204 busts of individuals engraved in the styles of antique coins. Rouillé humorously states in his preface of that he included fictitious images of individuals who were supposed to have lived before the biblical account of the Flood or the invention of the art of painting and engraving, in order not to be accused for having spread counterfeit money to the public. He admits that such portraits were drawn with the help of imagination, yet in accordance with the characteristics of the individual's deeds, customs, personality, and the region they were said to be from; likewise for the images of historical figures whose attested iconographic traces did not exist.
As for the rest, the portraits were either based on paintings and numismatic, sigillographic, and intaglio collections Rouillé and the engraver had access to—for example, Rouillé based the portrait of Alexander the Great on a Macedonian gold stater that had Athena on the obverse, mistaking her depiction for that of Alexander while getting depictions of Demetrius I of Macedon and Mithridates VI Eupator from the correct coins—or copied from earlier portrait books. The portraits of French monarchs were copied from the 1528 book ('The ancient and modern genealogies of the Kings of France') authored by poet and the 1546 book ('Epitome of the deeds of the 58 kings of France') published by . Most portraits of the early Caesars were copied from the 1534 book ('Lives of Emperors and Caesars') authored by historian .
Rouillé's book does not disclose the portrait engraver's identity; however, 19th-century Lyonese bibliographer attributed the portraits to Georges Reverdy from Piedmont, whose engraving skills he praised. Reverdy was a resident of Lyon at the time of the book's authorship and had gained wide recognition, having been compared to Hans Holbein the Younger. Either Reverdy modeled some of the engravings after drawings and paintings of Dutch painter Corneille de Lyon, or Reverdy and Corneille worked jointly, because the artistic style in some of the book's contemporary portraits—such as that of Marguerite de Navarre—very closely matches Corneille's.
