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While images have often been used in Western art as effective storytelling tools, from religious paintings to photographic portfolios, their documentary value has always been far more ambiguous. On the one hand, images have been recognized as reliable historical evidence - along with material documents - since at least the middle of the sixteenth century. Additionally, the detailed vividness of a visual description was often perceived as more effective than a text. On the other hand, however, images could be simply dismissed as undecipherable records, relics of the past completely useless if not paired with written words. Moreover, images could be easily manipulated, through the use of specific visual and rhetorical strategies, and become instrumental in constructing and negotiating ideas of truth, ultimately shaping people’s beliefs. The uncanny power of images to create a tangible truth, or a convincing history has been always widely recognized - whether with fear (iconoclasm) or admiration (as in Plutarch’s admission that “the most effective historian is he who (...) makes his narration like a painting”).

With the religious controversy and political disputations of the sixteenth century, the question of images as both historical evidence and powerful tool of narrative persuasions became intimately related with broader questions of historical method and historical narrative.

This session welcomes papers that explore the agency of images and engage with the notions of truth, fiction and persuasion in the construction of historical narration and visual history (or histories), from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.