The honest answer starts with a little bit of disappointment: we don’t know of a single portrait of Vlad painted from life. Unlike other rulers of the Region, like Steven of Moldavia, Vlad didn’t leave behind a church fresco or a votive painting of himself that he commissioned. Every image we have was made by someone else, and a lot of those someones really hated him.

For facts about Vlad’s life, click here. For a full video of this post click here.

Let’s start with the one everyone knows. This is the Ambras Portrait, an oil painting about two feet tall, made in the second half of the 1500s by an unknown German artist – roughly a century after Vlad died.

It hangs at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck, Austria – once part of Archduke Ferdinand II’s collection of portraits of famous rulers and warriors, and an inventory of the collection from 1596 lists the sitter simply as the “Duke of Wallachia.” Historians think it’s a copy of a lost original from the 1400s.

Charicature, or true portrait of a ruler?

Although some suggest this portrait was deliberately made a little spooky, almost like a caricature, art historians point out that it actually presents him as a dignified, respectable prince in rich clothing, and its style closely echoes Gentile Bellini’s famous portrait of Sultan Mehmed II. It reads as a ruler’s portrait, not a caricature. The propaganda images are a different set of pictures, and we’ll get to those.

So what do we see? He wears rich clothing. He has large, intense eyes, arched brows, a strongly hooked nose, long dark curly hair and a big, prominent mustache with no beard. It’s a striking face.

Propaganda images of Vlad the Impaler

Now for the hostile propaganda images. Stories about his cruelty were already circulating in German by 1463, and starting in 1488, printers turned them into illustrated pamphlets about “Dracole Waide,” packed with the most gruesome tales they could find.

The most infamous woodcut, from an edition printed in Nuremberg in 1499, shows him calmly eating a meal surrounded by impaled bodies. That image, more than any other, made him a monster in the European imagination.

Crypto-portrait of Vlad the Impaler

There’s also a category historians call “crypto-portraits,” which I think are just a fascinating case for how reputations and images spread across media.

There are multiple paintings where, when depicting someone particularly villainous, the artist uses Vlad’s features. This one literally depicts Vlad as one of the most evil figures in Christian Europe, Pontius Pilate, ordering the execution of Jesus – made around 1463.

He’s shown as an evil Roman governor in this painting of Saint Andrew’s martyrdom c. 1470, They don’t even change his clothes or hat.

It’s a move by artists who know that, in the zeitgeist of Europe, people will associate this template of Vlad with evil. It says everything about his perception on the continent, showing that even during his lifetime, Western European artists were casting Vlad as the man who sends saints to their deaths.

Vlad as described by someone who met him:

So the images at least give us a consistent face, and we are lucky to have one description of Vlad by a man who had met him.

Niccolo Modrussa was a Croatian bishop who visited the Hungarian King’s court during the exact years Vlad was being held there. It is important to note that Modrussa wouldn’t have been a very friendly source, given that he was allied with the Hungarians.

But, here’s what he tells us, in my own paraphrase:

Vlad wasn’t very tall, but he was stocky and powerfully built, with a cold, frightening look about him. He had a strong, hooked nose with flared nostrils and a thin, reddish face. Very long eyelashes framed large, wide-open green eyes, and his bushy black eyebrows made those eyes look threatening. His face and chin were shaved except for a mustache. A thick, bullish neck joined his head to his body, and black curly hair hung down onto very broad shoulders.

This obviously lines up neatly with the features on the Ambras portrait, which is why historians really do think it’s a copy of a lost original.

So, I’m showing Vlad in his early thirties, at the height of his second reign, which is also close to the age Modrussa would have seen him.

So let’s see the face of Vlad the Impaler, now: