I love Paul Strathern’s The Medici too. The same portrait is used on Miles Unger’s Magnifico. I think that’s a really good comparison as Lorenzo was’t a good looking man but he is quite fascinating to look at and you can see how, despite it, he may well have been terribly attractive. Quite a challenging cover image, but one that works. More of that!

I think The Borgia Bride has a rather good cover. It is intriguing and slightly different while also fulfilling the more mundane tasks of a cover (suggesting genre and hinting at subject matter) and apart from Sanchia (who I presume this to be, having read the book) having a head, it’s stylistically similar to the headless women so the publicity dept probably wasn’t having palpitations worrying that people wouldn’t realise it was a historical novel.

I’d love to see more imaginative book covers which suggest some of the ideas and themes in the book. It’s so nice when a cover stands out, like the one for The Whores’ Asylum by Katy Darby which is very simple and old fashioned but is such a huge contrast to the headless-woman-in-long-frock standard.

Tudor necklines were especially low and being square-cut tended to be more revealing. Sometimes women would cover up a little more with the addition of some gauzy material so there wasn’t quite so much skin on show but that tended to depend on the individual and temporary fashions for modesty.

Personally, I don’t like it much. I like eyes. If a figure is used in an advertising image (which is essentially what the cover of a book is), I like them to look me in the eye, or for their eyeline to tell me a story. For example, the image above from the cover of The Borgia Bride – that tells me a story. I can’t see her face, but I can see that her attention is elsewhere and I react by wanting to know what is preoccupying her, why is she not looking at me? The Philippa Gregory cover, on the other hand, tells me very little other than ‘this woman is pretty in a somewhat unchallenging way’.