This article reinterprets Sampson Strong’s 1596 founder portrait of William of Wykeham at New College, Oxford, as a programme rather than a likeness: a visual technology that communicates, tests, and legitimates collegiate merit. Strong’s triad—sitter, vistas, inscription—stages a theory of formation in which conduct (‘Manners makyth man’) functions as a rule, a threshold, and a test. The portrait makes visible a late medieval and Tudor grammar of selection: mores are rendered legible in pose, gesture, and placement, and the vernacular motto serves as a civic lintel between institutional spaces.

New College, Oxford, NCI 2333 [detail]

New College, Oxford