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Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
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Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History. Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Whichever way you look at it, the art of the Tudors was really something special. Think of all the H's. The Horemboots, Holbein, Hilliard. Some of the greatest artists of all time graced the Tudor courts. But art for the Tudors was far more than the painted image. In fact, portraits weren't even the most valuable, valuable or prized of the arts. That honor went to tapestries and to armour, both the work of workshops. Not single individuals, which may be why we, with our focus on the lone genius, have overlooked them. And art as a category, was even more capacious than that. We distinguish too readily, I think, between art and craft. But to tell the full story of art in the 16th century, we need it all. Classicism in architecture, carpets from Turkey, the visual art of the local parish church, all of it. And that is what my guest today has done in her new book, for the full 118 years of the Tudor dynasty. Dr. Christina Faraday is a historian of art and ideas and an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Her beautiful new book is the Story of Tudor Art, and that's what we're going to be discussing today. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and you're listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Christina, welcome to the podcast. Hi.
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D
Hello. Nice to be back.
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A
Yes, it's lovely to have you back on. And we're talking about this book that you've written, the Story of Tudor Art. And I remember at your launch that you said you had originally this, because it didn't have a single volume that you could direct students to that covered the sort of totality of art in this period. So I want to ask you to start with what are the parameters of art as you're considering it?
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D
I think that the art historian can look at anything that was made, at least partly to be looked at. So for me, it's not just the fine arts, which in any case were not recognised as the most important genre in Tudor England, but also what we would now call the decorative arts. So tapestries, embroideries, but also household objects. So I got teased a lot by my friends for talking about candle snuffers and beer jugs a lot. But there are candle snuffers and beer jugs in the book. And really, the point is to think about how images, design, craft and artistry suffuse the Tudor environment.
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A
And although many artists working in the Tudor period in England were not English or had trained abroad, you do think we can say that there's something distinctive about Tudor art, don't you? What would you say that is?
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D
I think the patrons have particular expectations of objects and images. There isn't a sense of art for art's sake. Artworks are expected to communicate, so to actually say something on behalf of the person who paid for them or who commissioned it or who appears in it. So there's a sort of communicative element there, that it's actually meant to tell people things and that can be true also of everyday objects in the home. So there's not that sort of aesthetic. Oh, I just like this because it's pleasing. It is, of course, pleasing and beautiful and entertaining as well. But it has that practical role to play. And I think for that reason, when Tudor patrons ask for portraits and tapestries and the kinds of things that people on the continent are also commissioning, they look slightly different because of this utmost problem of how to tell the story, how to talk about something for a wider audience.
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A
Well, let's start then, where you begin with the Tudors and indeed the sort of origin figure of the Tudors, Lady Margaret Beaufort and ordinary stuff. You say that we can look at the inventory of Lady Margaret Beaufort's final possessions and learn something from it. What is it that we can learn?
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D
She is surrounded in the last years of her life by objects with Tudor royal symbolism and Beaufort symbolism all over them. So everything she owns practically has a pearl colis or a Tudor rose or the Yale, which was her sort of heraldic animal symbol. And these things are on bed frames, they're on bed covers, they're on chairs and even on little trinket boxes and in plate and gold and silver objects that she had around the house. And for her to have come from, you know, she was a 13 year old mother of a son whose father had died. She spends decades trying to make peace for him with the successive monarchs who reign in the 15th century. There's no expectation that she's going to end up as the most important woman in the country, I think, including Elizabeth of York. And the images and the objects that she has with her at the end of her life show that transformation. She has arrived. The Tudors have arrived.
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A
Recent research by Charlotte Bulland and Andrew Chen has pointed to the work of an artist who's painting portraits in this late 15th century, early 16th cent context. Can we talk about this sort of first portraiture? I suppose, if that's the right way to term it and what we see in it.
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D
There are examples, albeit rare, of monarchs having sort of realistic likenesses painted. I mean, the famous one is the Wilton diptych in the National Gallery with Richard ii, but you don't see it to a large degree until really Henry vii, maybe a little bit Edward iv. So Maynard Wirwick is the artist who is very popular at Henry VII's court. We'd known for a long time that there was an artist called Maynard Wirwick. Working for him. We also have a collection of surprisingly realistic paintings of Henry VII and members of his court. And they have particular features, like this artist is really interested in the philtrum, the bit over the mouth, and he has slightly fleshy, pouchy eyes as well in all of his pictures. It's not hugely flattering, but obviously real estate representation. And until recently, we couldn't make those two join up. But then Andrew Chen was looking in the Account Books in St. John's College in Cambridge, and he found the name of the artist attached to a portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort, which, it turned out was still in the college collection. So it had been mistaken for a late 16th century picture. But then Dendro dating showed from the wood that it was actually early 16th century. And so finally we could make this link. And now a whole cascade of attributions based on this one painting have completely changed our picture of that early period. I mean, literally, we can see these.
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A
People and know who they are and know that we're looking at lifelike or lifetime portraiture, which is quite something, isn't it?
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D
Yeah. And this is something you see actually in Henry VII's reign. He's interested in naturalistic portraiture also in other contexts. So he's the first king to put his face on the coinage. In the past, there was this generic image of kings, and after Henry VII, around 1504, his very pronounced nose tells us that this is actually a real person on the coins. So he's very aware that there is so much power in a likeness.
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A
Yes, let's talk a bit more about that, about the ways in which he used artistic patronage and architectural patronage, and for what end.
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D
He seems to be the first monarch to really realise what artworks can do for him. He has a very weak claim to the throne by blood, so he has to reinforce his right to rule with any means possible. And one of the ways he does this is by looking to the architectural projects that were started by his ancestor Henry vi, who is his half uncle, but who had founded King's College, Cambridge, for example, and who, it was rumoured, was a saint. There were miracles around Henry VI's tomb. So Henry VII continues the work on King's College Chapel. He makes a plan that never comes to fruition to bring Henry VI's body to create a shrine at what is now the lady chapel, Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey. So he's very aware of the kind of ways that art can express a relationship with the people of the past. He's Also commissioning objects, tapestries, sculpture for his new palace at Richmond, which again, place him surrounded by sculptures of other brilliant kings from the past. So he knows how an image of himself can be used to kind of frame his reign in a very, what we might call sort of propagandistic, or maybe in the 21st century kind of personal branding way.
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A
That's so interesting because of course, the word propaganda was used by 20th century historians who had lived through the war and so had an idea about propaganda. But of course, now we're reflecting on it through the filter of Instagram and we're talking about personal branding. Yeah.
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D
And I think, you know, the trouble with the word like propaganda is that it suggests a kind of top down totalitarian ability to impose your will on a populace. And the Tudors were never quite that powerful. Certainly the artist is not seen by enough people to create that kind of mass communication. It's really a message for the nobles and the people who can keep Henry VII in power. For me, this idea that the Tudor rose, you know, it becomes the logo of the Tudor dynasty, you really see it everywhere. And that, to me, does as a product of the very late 20th century, early 21st century, it's like marketing.
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A
He's marketing the Tudors, marketing himself, but just to his, you know, 2,000 followers or whatever. Yeah, and we talked quite a lot already about portraiture and stuff, but actually we haven't mentioned yet the most precious form of art at this time. Can we talk about what we know of the subject and style of tapestries? Royal tapestries especially?
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D
So royal tapestries are a genre apart because they use real gold and real silver thread, and this is something that only the monarch could afford. Henry vii and then to an even greater degree, Henry VIII are really interested in using tapestries not for practical purposes. They warm up the room, you know, they give you something to look at. You can hide behind them, to eavesdrop. There's all kinds of ways people use tapestries in this period, but they also tell a story on a grand scale. And by choosing the narratives carefully, you can make points about your rule and ask people to compare you with figures, say, from the past. So Henry VII is using tapestries of Vespasian, for example, who was an emperor famous for ending a period of civil war and bringing a new kind of peace, peaceful era to Rome. And he's deliberately chosen that as a comparison with himself. Of course, at the end of what we now call the wars of the Roses, Henry VIII does this to an even greater degree. He's obsessed with various Old Testament figures. King David is one of them. David is a cultured, musical Old Testament king. He has a direct relationship with God. He defeats a giant. Henry VIII saw himself as defeating the giant of papacy. So he loves images of David, and particularly in tapestry form, you find them throughout his reign as a sort of strong steer on how people should interpret his actions.
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A
We're jumping ahead slightly here. We'll come back to think a bit more about the early 16th century. But in the 1540s, Henry has a psalter made for him. And you see some very interesting things about it. It particularly picks up on this iconography of Henry as David. Tell us how much you think it represents Henry VIII's self image and how much it's sort of being applied to him by this artist.
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D
This manuscript is really interesting. It's the Psalter, and David was supposed to have written the Psalms. And there are several miniatures throughout the manuscript which show Henry VIII as King David. And they play on lines from the Psalms. So there's an image of Henry reading in his bedchamber, and in the background there's a doorway where you can see a bright daytime. And this is probably a reference to a line in the Psalms that the godly man meditates on the word of God day and night. There's also an image of Henry with his fool, Will Sommers. And there's a line in the Psalms that says, the fool says in his heart there is no God. So there are various kind of little references to actual lines in the Psalms. But then there's also an image of the penitent David. Now, a lot of the Psalms are penitential, but one of the important parts of the story of David is that he commits adultery with a woman called Bathsheba. And the artist who made this psalter had already made a psalter like this for Francois I of France. And in the image of Francis as David. So this is a trope the artist is really using Several times. There's a hint about adultery in the background. Francis is shown spying on Bathsheba and then repenting for it. In Henry VIII's Psalter, there is no reference whatsoever to any crime that Henry might have committed at all. He's not interested in the complexities of the role model that David provides. He also underlines the psalter and we see him ignoring the stuff about the penitent David and underlining the parts that say, God will punish my enemies. And this is at the time when Katherine Howard is awaiting execution. So it's a really key moment, you might think, for a bit of self examination for Henry, you know, wife number five. It's all gone wrong, but he's not interested. It's all about David as this faithful and favoured king.
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A
You have just made me realize something that I cannot believe I didn't realize before, which is that Henry, of course does not consider himself to be guilty of adultery. It is what he accuses two of his wives of doing. And yet, like so much with Henry, it's projection. Yeah. He's the one who had a relationship with Anne Boleyn when married to Catherine of Aragon. He's the one who starts a relationship with Catherine Howard when married to Anne of Cleves. He's the adulterer, but he accuses his wives of it. How fascinating that this story is chosen but that of course is stripped away.
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D
Yeah. A more self aware king would actually have something maybe to sort of identify with in that role of David. Because of course David, you know, he's still forgiven by God. He makes good on this sort of misstep. But no, Henry has not got that self awareness.
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A
Yes, God describes David as a man after his own heart, but Henry is very legalistic. Well, let's come back to royal portraiture in a second. Most people at this time would have been seeing visual art in their parish churches. Can we talk a bit about that?
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D
Yes. So before the Reformation, the parish church is probably the key place where people saw beautiful imagery, sculpture, wall paintings. Many churches had multiple altars, multiple images. Local saints were venerated. It was part of the Catholic culture to donate money for the repair or adornment of those sculptures or for lights to be sort of lit in front of them. And this is a kind of act of charity. It's seen as a good deed which will in part help ease your way into heaven through purgatory, which is of course this in between place that Catholics believed their souls would go to to sort of work off any penitents that they hadn't got around to kind of making up during their lives. So the whole of the church environment would have been richly decorated. It was beautiful. But it also had this role to play in Commemor the dead and keeping that community of dead and living together.
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A
Yes. And of course we're going to see an attack on this even from the 1530s. We most associate it with the late 1540s and 1550s. But you show that there's damage to things like the Virgin of the Annunciation, where it's actually often quite violent damage.
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D
Yeah. So people punished the images. There are examples of images being hanged or put on trial and then burnt. And anthropologists have studied this and thought, well, you know, why are people treating images as though they are people, you know, as though they have power at a time when supposedly the reason for removing them is to say they don't have any power, you know, they can't help us, so why do we have them? And there are various explanations that have been put forward. It could be that this is akin to heresy, the punishment that is meted out to heretics or possibly to traitors. It does mark a sense of betrayal. People have been told one thing all their lives, and suddenly the church authorities have turned around and said, actually, not only were those images not helping you, but in fact they might be preventing you from going to heaven. There does seem to be a real sense of vengeance in the behavior that people sort of enact on these images. There's also a sense of this paradox of iconoclasm that you say the image is not powerful, but you take off its head and you take off its hands, and those are the ways that a human acts in the world. So you neutralize the image, you take away its power. So by showing they weren't afraid of images, they actually showed they were afraid of images. It's quite a strange paradox.
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A
It's very interesting. I am struck by that parallel to the treatment of heretics. I mean, some of the work on religious violence in the period has shown how people's corpses were dug up and desecrated, burnt, various things happened to them in order to punish them. There's also the examples about how we see the treatment of, say, cats and dogs in this period of time, who can be strung up for. And so it's punitive, but it feels also that it's a society in some ways seeking some sort of redress from the perceived criminal. In this case, an image. In a society where justice has to be seen to be done, these things are happening to objects as well as animals and corpses.
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D
Yeah. And I think the visibility of the iconoclasm is important as well. Often images are left in situ once they've been attacked. So you still have, in many cathedrals and churches across the country, even today, headless sculptures just sort of left in situ. And the question is, you know, why did people leave them there? Why didn't they just take them down? And it may be just. It's too expensive. It's a lot of manpower. You know, there's a lot of physical work involved in Iconoclasm. But there's also a sense that actually it's deliberate to say these were the errors of the recent past, let's not fall into them again. There's also a third element, which is that in places where actually the Reformation was not welcome, and that's true of a lot of rural areas in England, particularly in the middle of the 16th century, the fact that the images are left actually could be a slight statement of resistance. Like, okay, we've done the bare minimum, we've taken the face off, but we're actually going to leave it here and maybe one day we'll get round to repairing it and Catholicism will be back.
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A
Okay, let's head back to portraiture because in the 1520s we get our earliest portrait miniatures, which seem to be the work of the Horenboot family. Do they have a distinctive style?
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D
Yes. The Horenbout family are descended from manuscript illuminators and that's really where the miniature portrait comes from. It gradually detaches itself from the pages of illuminated manuscripts to become this kind of wearable, giftable locket like jewel. The Hornbaut family, particularly Lucas Hornbout, has a very distinctive stipply style. So he has very light, feathery brushwork. You can see each of the individual strokes is almost like pointillism. It's a very fuzzy style. It's difficult for us to securely attribute miniatures to particular people. We know that Lucas Hornbart was producing these for Henry viii, but then there are some other miniatures, particularly of women, which have a similar but slightly distinct style. Slightly less stippled, but still a bit stippled. And we know that Lucas had a sister, Susannah Horenbaut, who was in her own right, a very well known artist. The artist Albrecht Durer bought a painting of Christ from before she moved to England and said what a wonder it was that a woman could paint so well. But the fact that she comes ahead to Henry VIII's court, she's working as a lady in waiting. That's her position. But she has access to this royal women we know she could paint. It makes sense that she's creating these very intimate works. So it seems, although we can't prove it with documentary evidence, that she might have been one of these women artists working at the Tudor court.
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A
Now, although they are creating this important new form of painting at this time. You say that Holbein's portraits define the era for us. Why do you think that is?
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D
I think they're like nothing else. And I think artists in the rest of the century, and even artists from abroad recognize that. So Federico Zucchera, for example, is an artist who works for the Medici, comes to England in the 50s, 1570s, and he sees a few Holbein paintings in aristocratic collections. He sees the murals that Holbein created for the steelyard, the Hanseatic League workshop, and for the rest of his life he is returning to these sketches he made of them. He's thinking about them. He thinks Holbein is one of the greatest artists who ever lived. And I think if you make it on an international stage as well, you know, even an Italian artist recognises how great you are. I think that shows that you've got something special. Whether Henry VIII realised quite what was so special about Holbein or whether he just thought, great, I've got a foreign artist who's famous, he can present me like, you know, Francis I has Leonardo, I've got Holbein. It's not clear if he really notices what is so incredible about Holbein and what we see in his work today.
- [25:58]
A
Talking about portrait otters, in, you point out that Edward VI is the most portrayed child in English history. I'd never thought of this before. So can we talk about the different portraits of Edward both and after he becomes king, and how they signify kingship or his lead up to it, and the artistic variety that we find in them?
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D
Yes. So Edward is first shown, I think, in a little drawing of the procession for his christening. It's not actually, you know, a likeness. He's just a baby swaddled in the arms of his godmothers. It starts the trend. And then, of course, Holbein is employed when he's about 18 months old, to paint him as this incredibly sort of relatably pudgy toddler. There's something really kind of real about that child. And the sketch that Holbein did for it as well is so minimalist that you really get the sense that Edward wouldn't sit still. He had to work really quickly to just get the face down. And then the rest of it he sort of filled in afterwards, maybe thinking about his own children back home as well, in Switzerland. So there's already this picture of Edward as a baby, holding the kind of rattle, like a sceptre, like a ro. Staff of authority, with the inscription, you know, be like your father and the world will see nothing greater, really. It's a gift for Henry. It's a flattering comment on Henry's reign, but then again, when he's sort of 8 or 9 years old. He's being painted by William Scrotts, who's a brilliant artist who works, first of all for Henry VIII's court after the death of Holbein. But Edward is shown in Henry's pose, the image that we have of Henry, that kind of arms, akimbo strong, that power pose. Edward is shown as a model of his father, even though he was a fairly small boy at this point. And then again, he's portrayed multiple times and changes to the paintings show that he must have been being painted for one of these images as his father died. And the royal arms and the sort of regal symbolism of a monarch is added while the picture is being painted or just shortly after it's been finished. So he's being painted almost constantly in the run up to becoming king.
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A
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C
Bucks for your phone service at Boost Mobile? Just 10 bucks for your phone service at Boost Mobile? Yeah, I totally do.
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D
I totally do.
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B
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- [29:31]
A
And then, of course, we get some interesting innovations that happen whilst Edward is king in how he's depicted.
- [29:38]
D
Yeah, so there's a fantastic, weird picture by, again, William Scrotts, this artist that he inherited from his father, which, if you view it from the front, looks like a horrible caricature or a mistake. Edward is very stretched out. He's got a horrible long nose. But if you move around and you view it from the side, the picture resolves. It's an anamorphosis. So it's a play on perspective. And the picture is then a sort of proper medallion portrait of Edward vi. And of course, in England, the most famous anamorphic painting for us is the Skull in the Ambassadors by Holbein. It's not clear that Scots would have seen that. He may have heard about it, but prints with the same kind of stretchy portraiture were circulating a lot on the continent in the run up to Scrotts coming to England from the Netherlands. So he would have been familiar with this sort of playful genre of portraiture at a time when artists, you know, many of them had mastered single point perspective, they'd mastered this kind of naturalistic representation with mathematical grids. Now they were playing with it. They're making points about where you stand, changes what you see. Which, of course, in the context of the great debates on religion in the 16th century, is a philosophical argument as much as an artistic one.
- [31:00]
A
And I was struck by the fact that both with the Holbein and the Scots, the perspective point, the place where you need to stand to see it, resolve, is the same. So we don't know if he saw that one. And maybe there's no signification at all that it's the same side, but I was just struck by it being exactly the same point.
- [31:17]
D
Yeah. I think the skull also works from beneath, so you can look at it now in the National Gallery from the right hand side of the frame. But I think where it was hung in Jean Danville's castle, it would also have worked from directly below. We know that the Edward portrait had a device that was attached to the frame, which is now lost, which helped to really guide you to look at it from the right place. And certainly I would have been grateful for that. I can never get it to work when I'm in the National Portrait Gallery, sort of moving backwards and forwards and crashing into the other poor visitors who are trying to look at the pictures from the front. It does help to have that advice, I think, that guidance.
- [32:00]
A
We're talking also about architecture and there becomes a sort of association between Protestantism and classicism in the mid 16th century. Can we talk about that and how it morphs as a form over the second half of the century?
- [32:17]
D
It's interesting that in the middle of Edward's reign, suddenly there are a lot of classical buildings being built. And John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, Edward ii, sort of protector in all but name, has had a burgeoning interest in Italian architecture for some time, and he's sent several servants to Italy to take note of the culture. But then one in particular, John Shute, is sent to look at the ancient monuments and buildings that are available and to take drawings and to bring them back. And you might think, well, Edward's reign is incredibly Protestant. What are these Protestant advisors doing sending servants to the heart of the papacy to take advice about architecture? But classicism has a much longer history. It's also the architecture of the time of Christ. And I think that when Protestants are thinking about resetting the religious clock and saying, we're not doing anything new, we're just putting things back to how they were in the time of the apostles, the time of Christ. The architectural statement is a similar one that they're saying, we're just trying to kind of reclaim something that has been lost under centuries of Catholicism.
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A
That's really interesting now. At the same time, I find it fascinating that in the mid century artists are being chosen to for their skill and not for their religious affiliation. So some of the people who've been foremost under Edward remain so under Mary. But you point out that there are differences in the images by people like, I never thought whether we should say Hans Eworth or Hans Eworth, but him and Antonis Moore. Can we talk about the differences that we see and what they're trying to say to their different audiences?
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D
Yeah. So Mary is accused of not really using her image effectively. I don't think that's fair. I think she has a very good idea for how her image might circulate in different contexts. And she employs these two artists, as you say, Hans Ueth and Antonis Moore in different contexts. So Hans Uerth creates pictures that seem primarily to be aimed at an English audience. And they draw on a very long tradition of royal female portraiture that goes back to Holbein and the famous picture of Christina of Denmark that's now in the National Gallery of the woman standing usually against a fairly plain background, a kind of triangular body shape with the skirt coming out at the bottom, hands clasped very neatly. So there's a kind of power there, but also a certain primness. That's what we see in youth's portraits of Mary. At the same time, or almost immediately after that, she's being portrayed by Antonis Moore, who is the premier artist of the Habsburg Empire at this time. And More is sent as a sort of gift from Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, to Philip ii, who's just married Mary. So More is immediately drafted into Philip's employ. The picture that More has been commissioned to produce of Mary, possibly with input from Charles V, shows her seated and very much in the tradition of royal Habsburg women. So a lot of pictures of Isabella of Portugal, Charles V's recently deceased wife, which have very similar pose, we might also think of Raphael's pictures of the Pope. So kind of Catholic tradition there, it's richly elusive. And it's not a set of allusions that an English audience would have recognized, but it is a set of allusions that the Habsburg courtiers would have recognized. So it Seems that Mary is simultaneously talking to two interest groups. And whereas in youth's pictures she's shown as a sort of regal, kind of upright, standing on her own two feet, kind of monarch ruling alone, in more's pictures she is very much embracing the role of the consort. Actually. She's proud of being Philip II's wife, and that's not something she could have expressed in an English context.
- [36:25]
A
What do the jewels in her portraits represent?
- [36:29]
D
She's shown always wearing a set of jewels that can be traced to different inventories. So there's a lot. Large table cut diamond. We can spot that it's a diamond because it's black. In Tudor pictures, diamonds are painted black. And this is, it seems, because jewellers actually put black foil, black resin behind the diamonds when they set them to bring out a kind of depth of lustre rather than a sparkle, as we might expect now. So she's wearing a black table diamond with a kind of flat cut, surrounded by antiques, which are little kind of figures of Roman soldiers in enamel. And it's not clear whether this was a gift from Philip ii. It does correspond to a description of something he gave her, but it also, because infantries are not super specific, corresponds to a description of a jewel that was owned by Catherine Parr, who was her last stepmother and the one that she kind of got on really well with. And there are lots of pictures in Catherine Parr's sort of life of her also in this kind of standing pose, the triangular kind of Holbein pose, which are then imitated in pictures of the Princess Mary. So she has a habit of referring to Catherine Parr in the art that she commissions or art that is made of her. So it could be that this table diamond is actually a kind of tribute to Catherine. She's also wearing something called the Tablet de Bourbon, which is a reliquary that had been in Henry VIII's collection for quite some time. But at the start of Mary's reign, because it's a reliquary, it's got bits of saints or saints clothes or their bones tied up inside it. It's fallen out of favour because that's not at all something Protestants like, she gets it out again, she finds it in the collection, she has it repaired and then she's shown wearing it in all of her portraits.
- [38:23]
A
Now, portraits by this point in time aren't just for the elite. We have the innovation of portraits of members of what we might call the middling sort. What sort of function were portraits serving for those people?
- [38:38]
D
These people are a kind of newly important section of society. They have important status in their local communities. They also have a surprising amount of disposable income. And they are looking for ways to kind of reinforce that status and present themselves to their peers, but also to their servants and their clients and the people who kind of work for them and show off that they are reliable, trustworthy, upstanding members of society. So you get this new genre of portraiture, typically waist up, sombre clothing that, although black, reveals very fine textiles, quite a lot of the textiles. So they're expensive, even though they're kind of dull to look at. And then emblems as well. So a clock, for example, in the portrait of John Isham, who was a merchant, and the clock hangs over his account books. And we know they're account books because of the way that they're bound so they can be opened to lie completely flat for double entry bookkeeping. And by having the clock over those, it says, I am regular in my business dealings, you can trust me, my business runs like clockwork. So these people don't have heraldry, they don't have bloodlines to advertise or to sort of fall back on as a justification for why they're there. This is still a very hierarchical society, so they have to make their own justification. And it depends much more on individual virtues and professional success. And that's what we see in the pictures.
- [40:14]
A
And also by this point, we have people who are not members of the elite with wall hangings in their houses. And this is fascinating because I've always known about tapestries and fine tapestries like Arras, but not that actually this was quite common. But the reason we don't know about it is that so few of them survive. What sort of things do we know that ordinary people had in their houses?
- [40:36]
D
So inventories pretty much always mention painted or stained cloths in the houses of the less elite members of society. And these unfortunately are very rarely described in detail, but they could have certain kind of mythological or religious subjects. So there's an incredibly rare surviving example in Ipswich, which shows Hercules slaying the Hydra. So a classical reference and something that in terms of its form, there's quite a large figure of Hercules. It seems to look back to these kind of Raphael inspired tapestry designs that become so popular at Henry VIII's court. So they are kind of looking up the social scale, but you also get painted and stained cloths that perhaps are just patterns or colors. And there are some in the VA that resemble wooden paneling. So a kind of Cheap way to evoke a slightly more expensive material in the home. But sadly, they were used until they fell to pieces and they weren't mostly considered worthy of preservation in the way that, you know, royal tapestries were. So the evidence that we have for them today is really, really scanty. And again, in inventories, they just don't bother to tell you most of the time what's even on these things.
- [41:46]
A
How frustrating. So let's return to portraiture for the royals because we've had the example of Edward looking like his father as a king. We've got Mary in this depiction as a consort. We get to Elizabeth, we have the challenge of how to represent an unmarried queen. How do artists respond to that?
- [42:08]
D
Yes, she's a woman, she's young, she's Protestant. They can't draw on, you know, the kind of Catholic representations that they might have done for Mary. And at first I think they're really stumped. The early images of Elizabeth are very strange to us. Now, if we're used to something like the Armada portrait, she looks very androgynous. Almost none of her skin is showing. Her features are quite ambiguous. Her hair is covered up by a cap. She wears quite sombre clothing, even in what appears to be a marriage portrait, the Gripsholm portrait of Elizabeth that is sent to Sweden when she's thinking about marrying King Eric xiv. Even there, she looks quite masculine. And it seems that this is her artist kind of responding to their legal justification that was made first of all in Mary's reign to say that the queen ruling alone is both king and queen, emperor and empress. And in Elizabeth's own self fashioning, she quite often draws on male exemplars as well. So when she becomes queen, she compares herself to Daniel released from the lion's den. She's survived the reign of her Catholic sister. So there is a certain ambiguity, there's a certain amount of uncertainty about how they go about promoting this actually rather small young woman and making her look like Henry VIII, you know. But then in the 1560s, they start to get the hang of it a bit more and the image that we recognize of Elizabeth starts to emerge. And that pose that Holbein created for Henry viii, it comes back again. She's shown in the Hampton portrait, which is a beautiful full length portrait. She's wearing a bright red dress with little bits of white linen poking through the slashes. So she looks like the embodiment of the Tudor rose. And although she hasn't quite got her hands on her hips like Henry viii does she's got them slightly in front of her. So she still has a kind of square, broad shouldered triangular pose whilst still appearing feminine.
- [44:07]
A
And it very much being a picture of fertility and potentiality as a woman.
- [44:12]
D
Yes. There's a whole band of trompe l' oeil foliage. It's got fruit and flowers and pea pods which are sort of bursting open and all of those fruits and flowers appear in pairs in twos.
- [44:40]
B
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A
It's fascinating too that Elizabeth I was commissioning an allegory of the Tudor succession, which is a picture that people might well be familiar with. Can you describe it and what it has to say about Elizabeth's view of her reign?
- [45:37]
D
Yes. So this is a picture which has Henry VIII in the middle on a throne and then the Tudor children are sort of fanned out on either side of him. So to our left as we look at the picture, there's Mary and Philip and then behind them there's a dome that looks a lot like St. Peter's in Rome and there's sort of stormy skies and they're accompanied by a very muscular figure of Mars, the ancient God of war, who's got all his weapons. If we look to the right as we're looking at the picture, Henry is actually handing the sword of state, first of all to his son Edward, who is shown as he would have been during his reign, so roughly aged nine. And Edward's kneeling before the throne. And then right next to Edward is Elizabeth, shown as she was when this picture was painted, so about 1575. And Elizabeth is holding hands with a figure who holds a cornucopia. And there's a woman behind them who's trampling on weapons that look like the ones Mars is holding, so representing plenty and peace. And then behind them through a sort of arcade, it's a very strange structure. They're all standing in. There is a kind of orderly knotwork garden and a little Gothic church. So nothing too threatening, all very Familiar English bits of the landscape. And around the edge of this, on the frame of this picture, is an inscription about how each of the monarchs actually have different virtues. And then a little message that said that the Queen, this tablet to Walsingham sent to mark of her peoples and her own content. And it seems that this was a gift from Elizabeth to Francis Walsingham, who had just negotiated the Treaty of Blois, which was in response to attacks on the Huguenots in France. So it's a statement of English Protestant rule and a rare example of something that we can actually say seems to have been paid for by Elizabeth. She didn't really want to pay for anything if she could help it. This is an unusual example of something she did actually give to someone.
- [47:39]
A
Meanwhile, lots of her courtiers were using images of Elizabeth and sometimes of themselves, to advance their own agendas. Can we talk about some of those?
- [47:50]
D
I think my favourite example of this is one of the sieve portraits, which is in the Siena Pinacoteca.
- [47:56]
A
My favourite too. It's gorgeous.
- [47:58]
D
It's so beautiful. It's by Quentin Matzies. It's an incredibly sort of well painted portrait of Elizabeth and it was painted in the 1580s when she was negotiating her last sort of possible marriage agreement with Francois, the Duke of Anjou. And this seems to have been the closest she ever actually came to marrying someone. She really liked Francois, he liked her. He was a lot younger than her. She called him her little frog. Apparently he thought that was nice. And she's really kind of getting serious with this kind of negotiation. But her courtiers, and in particular a man called Sir Christopher Hatton, are not happy about this possible match. Elizabeth's in her 40s. It never looked like she would be able to have children very easily anyway. The things about the Queen's periods and the regularity of them were sort of common knowledge. And she didn't have have regular periods. So Hatton is worried that if she gets pregnant while she's married to a Frenchman, dies in childbirth, then England becomes a possession of the Duke of Anjou of France. So he's very against the match. And in the background of this sieve portrait is a tiny little person with no neck, which is how you can spot Sir Christopher Hatton. Unfortunately, this man, born in a time of roughs, had a very short neck and he's got a golden hind on his sleeve, which was Sir Christopher Hatton's symbol. So it seems that he paid for this picture. And it shows Elizabeth carrying a sieve, which is an Emblem of the Vestal virgin Tutia. And she was accused of not being a virgin. So to prove her virginity in the ancient myth, she took a sieve down to the Tiber, filled it with water and carried it full back to the temple without spilling a drop. So sort of proving that she was still a virgin. The sieve is actually marked with an inscription that makes it into an emblem of discernment as well. So it's saying, come on, Elizabeth, you know very well what to do. You know, you can rely on your own judgment here. But she is standing in front of a Jasper column, which is an emblem in Petrarchan sonnets of the untouchable Laura, the unmarriable subject of Petrarch's love sonnets. And it's studded with images of the doomed love affair between Dido and Aeneas. So Aeneas wants to be with Dido, but he gets called away. He's told he's got a bigger job to do, which is to found Rome. And Dido throws herself on a funeral pyre. She's so miserable she kills herself because she can't have Aeneas. And that might seem quite an on the nose thing for Christopher Hatton to be saying, like, oh, you know, love is doomed. But actually there is also in this picture, a globe. And Elizabeth is not being compared to Dido, she's being compared to Aeneas. And Hatton is saying, don't waste your time getting married. You know, don't think about that now. You've got to create an English empire, you've got to think about the Atlantic, look overseas, think about expanding your reign. Don't get distracted by matters of love.
- [51:11]
A
It's interesting because Hatton seems perhaps with Leicester, to have been among all her courtiers, someone who, as close as we can tell, actually did love the Queen. I mean, they're all playing this game of courtly love and they're wooing the Queen as part of their kind of political discourse. But his letters to her are extraordinarily ardent. And I do think that either he's just really quite sort of dramatic and very good at turning a verse, or that he did feel some of this stuff for her. So maybe there's something else going on there as well as this is a really good idea not to marry and let's establish an empire.
- [51:48]
D
Yeah, well, Hatton himself never married and of course, you know, you could sort of take that in various directions. But certainly his letters to Elizabeth and the gifts that he gave her, he's a true adept in the art of Courtly love. You know, he really nails the over the top tone of, you know, he goes away for a few days and he Sundays, it is 12 days since I saw the brightness that is the sun. I whacks an amazed creature. He just can't bear not to be in her presence. And he's obviously worried that while he's away, Walter Raleigh is gonna get in with the Queen a bit more.
- [52:20]
A
Well, I'm sure Elizabeth enjoyed being wooed with quite such enthusiasm. Can we finish by looking at how the Elizabethans were inspired by the wider world? And this takes us back to stuff as much as it to portraits. What do we see there?
- [52:36]
D
This is a time when England is being cut off from mainland Europe as much as Spain can manage. The Armada is part of that. Philip ii, you know, having been spurned. Actually, he did offer his hand in marriage to Elizabeth after she became queen. She didn't fancy that. He doesn't want England to have those close trade relations insofar as it's possible with mainland Europe. So England is having to look further afield. And one of the places that Spain is being so successful is in the New World. So England think, right, we want a piece of that too. They send a sort of settler party to Virginia, what they called Virginia, the land of the Algonquin people, with the idea of, first of all establishing good relations, maybe some trade networks, and then essentially a base for piracy to kind of attack Spanish shipping. But they're also looking east, amazingly, to the Muslim Ottoman Empire, where there's a huge amount of shared enthusiasm for attacking the Catholics. And actually, at one point, Elizabeth seems to be negotiating a possible shared invasion of Spain with one of the North African Ottoman kings. So there's a surprising amount of interest in Islamic objects, isn't it? Pottery, Turkey rugs. I mean, they've been popular since Henry VIII's time. He was obsessed with what he called the Turks. He was always dressing up as one. And this idea of sort of the exotic other, you know, really appealed to Henry as it did to the Ottomans. The Ottoman emperor is also dressing up as a Christian king. So there's a certain amount of equality there. But Elizabeth is really interested in forging more links across the Mediterranean. There are also ambassadors who go to Russia and bring back objects. So a lot of this is through stuff and through drawings. And in the New World, you have John White, who is an English amateur gentleman artist, who captures some of the first images of North America for a European audience. Flora and fauna and people and their customs. And of course, that has a propagandistic element. He's trying to bring this information back and say, oh, look at what all the stuff they've got over there, you know, fund my next voyage. But there's also a genuine interest in this new set of people who until recently weren't even known to exist. Their lands weren't even really known to exist.
- [55:00]
A
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Christina Faraday, for this walk through the story of Tudor art. It has been utterly fascinating and full of revelation. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast.
- [55:14]
D
Thank you. Thanks very much.
- [55:18]
A
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. And to my producer Rob Weinberg, we are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line and notjusthetors@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.
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B
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