Me, me, me … the Elizabethan earl who kept portrait painters busy for 30 years

If you can tell a person by their collection of paintings, what are we to make of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who commissioned more portraits of himself than any other courtier in Elizabethan England?

"If he lived today, we'd probably call him a selfie-addict," said the historian Elizabeth Goldring, who has uncovered details of Dudley's extraordinary collection for a new study of the man who probably won the heart, although not the hand, of Elizabeth I.

Goldring has discovered that Dudley commissioned at least 20 portraits of himself over 30 years. "Of course it is entirely possible he commissioned more than 20," she said.

"However you look at it, he was commissioning vastly more portraits of himself than any other courtier in Elizabethan England. I'm not sure any of the continental Renaissance princes could quite match Dudley's statistics."

He was clearly a man of high self-regard. "I'm sure vanity came into it but I think he was also very astute about the ways in which images could be used to shape perceptions of himself and his family, both in the eyes of contemporaries and posterity."

Goldring, associate fellow at Warwick University's centre for the study of the Renaissance, has spent two decades researching Dudley, piecing together 20 separate inventories of his collection dotted around in different places.

"The really exciting bit has been watching these pieces of the jigsaw falling into place over time."

Most Elizabethan aristocrats sat for portraits perhaps once or twice in their lives. Between Elizabeth's accession to the throne in 1558 and his own death aged 56 in 1588, Dudley sat, on average, once every 18 months.

The paintings hung in his residences – Kenilworth Castle, Wanstead Manor in Essex and Leicester House on the Strand in London – and he sought out the finest artists.

There is, for example, evidence of Dudley in 1565 trying to woo a Florentine painter – possibly even Bronzino – away from Cosimo de' Medici.

More certain is his success in bringing the acclaimed Roman mannerist Federico Zuccaro to England to paint two lifesize paintings of himself and Elizabeth for the lavish Kenilworth festivities of 1575, when the Queen spent two and half weeks at his castle.

Those paintings no longer exist but the preparatory drawings are in the British Museum.

Goldring said: "So far as is known, Dudley was the only Elizabethan to have attempted, much less to have succeeded, in wooing an Italian painter to England – though the quest to do so was to become something of a holy grail for the leading patron-collectors at the Stuart court, including Charles I himself."

Reconstructing Dudley's world has been a challenge because his paintings and personal papers were widely dispersed after his death as a result of his debts. Many of the portraits no longer exist, although there are important ones at the National Portrait Gallery, the Wallace Collection and Waddesdon Manor.

Dudley was self-consciously modelling himself on both Henry VIII, who laid the foundations of the Royal Collection, and the great patron-princes of Europe such as the Medicis and the Habsburgs.

He was also presenting himself as a worthy suitor of the queen, of whom he commissioned at least seven portraits designed to be displayed alongside pictures of himself – "clearly designed to telegraph the idea of them as a couple," said Goldring.

He also had an unusually large number of portraits of the great and good of 16th-century continental Europe and very few family portraits, not too surprising given that both his father, John, and grandfather Edmund were executed as traitors.

Dudley died naturally, although he never produced a legitimate male heir or, of course, married Elizabeth. For all his grand ways – maybe because of them – he was generally detested at court and suspected of murdering his first wife, who fell down a flight of stairs in 1560, to open the way to marriage with the Queen.

How close they were remains open to speculation, although in Goldring's view "there can't be any doubt that, for Elizabeth, Dudley was the emotional centre of her life. Dudley's motivations are more difficult to ascertain but I think he must have felt quite deeply for her."