The main goals of the present paper are to study the iconography of the 1st Marquis of Pombal and to establish a genealogy of images that allows us to better understand the evolution of Pombaline portraiture. The inexistence of a monographic work on the portrait painting of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (1699-1782) is a singular fact given the historical and cultural relevance of this historical character. The efforts undertaken by other authors in the past, of which one should highlight Ernesto Soares, José-Augusto França and, more recently, Luísa Arruda, did not exhaust the subject and, therefore, there is much to research on this theme in the wider context of the second half of the 18th century. As the present moment is not conducive to such mission, which requires longer-term research given the considerable number of portraits to be taken into account, the paper has attempted to outline a brief overview of the genealogy of Pombaline iconography, integrating it into space and time and highlighting the examples present in the Pombal Palace at Oeiras, namely the magnificent canvas by Louis-Michel Van Loo (1707-1771) and Claude Vernet (1714-1789), now in the Oeiras City Hall, and the painting of the Concordia Fratrum by Joana Inácia Monteiro (1711-1781), also known as Joana do Salitre.
