Handel's music was a key source for Drury Lane entertainments from 1728 to 1745. Ballad-opera writers regularly deployed Handel tunes, generating multiple performances of his music in low-style, native works that long preceded his oratorios. The soprano Kitty Clive, the biggest star of this genre, initially performed Handel airs both in ballad operas and as additional songs. From 1737, Handel compositions helped bolster Clive's ‘high-style’ reputation, while Handel benefited from Clive's audience-drawing power. In its politics, narratives and musical forms, the design of music Handel composed for Clive shows him adhering closely to the soprano's already established star persona.

Whatever divergent views scholars may hold about Farinelli, there is at least one point on which they agree: his legend was unrivalled among the cognoscenti of the eighteenth-century operatic stage. Testimony to Farinelli's supremacy assumed many forms, but perhaps its richest legacy left is the iconography which transmits his presence more immediately than any other historical record. No other mid-eighteenth-century singer's likeness proliferated with the volume, diversity or frequency of Farinelli's representations. That much is obvious: but what role did they play in his career?Addressing this question requires not only an accurate accounting of the range of Farinelli's iconography, but also a grasp of the motivations, relationships, and conventions underpinning each image's production and consumption. Assembled, these pictures can communicate to us the perhaps surprisingly modern story of a star being produced for and by a viewing public. Read from this perspective, the thematic evolution and varying distribution of the castrato's image themselves can be seen as tools of signification that interacted with other texts he mediated, including music.'To call a performer a 'star' implies a persona in the public sphere that has been deliberately constructed and that exercises a measure of control over the work ('star vehicle') that features it. Cinema scholars have developed a body of theory about star production to explain why stars are created, what the star embodies, and how the star's meaning interacts with that of the work as a whole, and these modern perspectives can help us understand the star-dominated enterprise of eighteenth-century opera.' This article will apply to Farinelli's iconography three queries central to cinematic star studies. First, what configuration of signsgraphic and linguisticdid a representation of Farinelli contain? Second, which conventions of representation shaped the production and consumption of this image, and how did they do so? Third, what meanings might spectators have attached to Farinelli's image? Such questions spring from twin findings central to film stars: that the star functions as a sign to be decoded in combination with other signs, and that images of the star are key signifiers within this process of de-coding. For Farinelli, the configuration, conventions and meanings of this code shifted according to the spheressemi-public, urban public or courtin which he performed.During Farinelli's early career in Italy, caricature dominated his pictorial representation. Caricature appears to have served chiefly to nourish a sense British Journalfor Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (zoos), p.437-496 o BSECS o141-867X

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