Clothing has the capacity to establish social, political and moral codes of the utmost importance, to the point of being questioned from a moral and religious perspective and legislated through so-called sumptuary laws.

The theatrical and discursive power of clothing is very evident in the portraiture of the early modern period. The choice of dress and fabric to be passed on to posterity was decisive in building the identity, underlying the rank and depicting the establishment of the person that it represented, like in this allegorical portrait of Emperor Leopold I as Roman hero, victor over the Ottomans.