This article compares the use of portraits by the Lutheran princes and the Calvinist Palatine princes in the German Empire between 1560 and 1620. If the Lutheran princes used to order numerous portraits of themselves as part of political and confessional strategies, this was rarely the case with the Palatine Court. Not only princes but also the most important Reformators were scarcely represented. This iconographical poverty is first to be related to the difficulties the Palatine princes had with constructing their own instruments of political legitimatization. It is also to be linked with the theological debates about religious and profane images and particularly portraits because portraits were suspected to excite the pride of the represented subject or to encourage idolatry.