Among the many forms of sixteenth-century dedicatory text, there is one in particular that shows interesting analogies with portraits in the visual arts: paired dedicatory poems to rulers and their spouses. This type of text was first brought to scholarly attention by Maria Antonietta Terzoli, who, in her study of dedications in sixteenth-century poetry books, established a preliminary corpus:1 the pair of sonnets addressed to Henry II of France and Catherine de’ Medici, which opens the encomiastic and occasional section of Gaspara Stampa's Rime (1554); the two sonnets dedicated to Duchess Eleonora de Toledo and Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici at the beginning of Laura Battiferri's Primo Libro delle Opere Toscane (1560); the pair of sonnets dedicated by Modesta dal Pozzo de’ Zorzi (also known as Moderata Fonte) to the Grand Duke of Tuscany Francesco I de’ Medici and his wife Bianca Cappello at the opening of the Tredici canti del Floridoro (1581); and, finally, the dedicatory titles of the two sections of Maddalena Acciaiuoli Salvetti's Rime toscane (1590), which are dedicated to the Grand Duchess and Grand Duke of Tuscany, Christina of Lorraine and Ferdinando I de’ Medici.

This paper will be concerned exclusively with those dedicatory sonnets in Terzoli's corpus that are conceived as pairs and which are indicated here as ‘diptychs’. Although these diptychs appear in texts belonging to different literary genres, this does not seem to influence the form of the sonnets themselves, which conform instead to the strictly rhetorical norms and conventions of dedication, so the wider issue of genre will not be addressed in the present analysis.