Morts des hommes et des femmes illustres: récits et illustrations dans les livres de portraits de la Renaissance

The theme of the illustrious men benefits from an extraordinary fortune from the beginning of the Renaissance. The works entitled "De uiris illustribus" are more an more numerous. The illustrious women are not forgotten since Boccacio dedicated them a whole work De mulieribus claris in 1375. This exempla are surrounded with a function of stimulant or unlike repulsive as their life was -or was not- an exemple. But it is to their death that we will dedicate ourselves, in particular in the representation of their death which carries a moral education clarified in their biographies and illustrated in the portraits which accompany the lives of the illustrious men and women from the beginning of the XVIth century. Portrait or absence of portrait moreover because the damnatio memoriae deprives certain characters of effigy or biograph