The importance of the arts in Tudor England is surveyed in a new exhibition at The Met.
By James D. Balestrieri
In school, Shakespeare sat on the highest literary pedestal. His genius seemed to come from out of the blue, and flourish on a rarified plane all its own. In truth, as “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England”, the new exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, attests, the age Shakespeare was born into was a theatrical, dramatic and sometimes tragic age, one in which an upstart Welsh family—the Tudors—would marshal every art, myth and motif as they sought to assert their dynastic legitimacy after the end of the long War of the Roses, fought between the houses of York and Lancaster. Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I, would be the Tudor rulers of England. Of these, Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I, would become household names. Henry VIII—“Henry the Eighth”—remains famous for his wives, his appetite for power and his eye for objects of great beauty, from books to castles. Elizabeth I—“Queen Elizabeth”—remains famous for her authority, her virginity and the myth of benign yet absolute power she and her court wove around her with pageants, masques and, like her father, objects that enhanced the qualities she sought to project.
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) Henry VIII, ca. 1537. Oil on wood, 11 x 7 7⁄8 in.
Image © Museo Nacional Thyssen- Bornemisza, Madrid.
Tudor England was one stage on the larger stage of Europe and the Middle East, where hereditary monarchs with long pedigrees required convincing before accepting interlopers like the Tudors. Yet all of them relied on displays of wealth and magnanimity to maintain control over noble families with designs of their own.
Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” from the melancholy Jacques in “As You Like It”, resonates deeply in light of the Met exhibition. As the catalogue essays reinforce in numerous ways, “Tudor” doesn’t merely describe the period from Henry VII through Edward VI (roughly 1485-1553). “Tudor” outlived the Tudors, even as our fascination with Henry VIII and Elizabeth I outlived them. Tudor is a style, a style of architecture and decoration, of brown beams crisscrossing white plaster, of warm, carved wood and brocaded tapestries. The very invocation of the word—“Tudor”—awakens a yearning for a cozy, pre-industrial, pre-urban age of quiet, well-kept gardens of foxgloves and roses, and of hand-hewn objects, where nature and culture live side-by-side. Yes, we are also attracted to the darkness of Tudor England, to the private lives of the rulers, the tragic ends of the wives of Henry VIII—the musical “Six”, on Broadway, for example, lets the wives tell their own stories—and to the mysteries of Queen Elizabeth. Did she ever love? And if she ever loved, who did she love? In some ways, our definition of “Tudor” is diametrically opposed to the notion of public power and modernity that the Tudors wished to project. But those who make history can never exert control over how posterity will make use of that history.
The War of the Roses had been waged by the House of York, whose symbol was the white rose, and the House of Lancaster, whose symbol was the red rose. To get an idea of the effect the Tudors wanted to create, the Tudor rose was red and white, a representation not only of the union of York and Lancaster, but of the transcendence of the strife between them. Tudor roses abound in the exhibition, from book illumination to the ornaments on garments in the paintings of the rulers and the members of their courts and entourages.
Hans Eworth (ca. 1520–1574), Mary I, 1554. Oil on wood, 40 15⁄16 x 30 11⁄16 in.
Society of Antiquaries of London Image © The Society of Antiquaries of London
The Tudors were acutely aware of the revolutions in the various arts that formed the Renaissance in Italy and Northern Europe and they encouraged artists from the continent to bring their talents to England. Where homegrown arts had remained somewhat isolated and tethered to Gothic, Romanesque and Celtic traditions, new techniques in everything from rendering three-dimensional likeness in two dimensions to casting large, complex bronzes depicting the body twisting in space injected visual dynamism into the dynastic ambitions of the Tudors.
Benedetto da Rovezzano and his metalworkers came from Italy to London around 1520. The bronze Angels in the Met exhibition—which did double duty as a candleholder, utility being one of the hallmarks of Tudor arts—drew from the artist’s work and time in Florence and Paris. Even without the wings that would have been slotted into their backs, the figures seem alive, caught in the moment, bearing the weight of the candlestick in the lifelike contrapposto of Donatello and Michelangelo. Originally done for the tomb of Cardinal Wolsey, once Wolsey fell out of favor with Henry VIII—for having failed to secure the annulment of the king’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and for having amassed power nearly equal to Henry’s—he was executed. Henry seized Wolsey’s property, including Rovezzano’s Angels, who, considering this story, now seem to look on in a kind of helpless shock, like extras in a theatrical murder mystery that has suddenly become all too real.
The most famous of these European expatriates was Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98-1543), the subject of a singular exhibition lately on view at the Morgan Library.
Holbein’s exactitude in representing likeness—and the number of portraits, drawings and prints from his hand as well as the hands of his studio—makes the visual record of the Tudors unique among early European dynasties. Portraits between rulers were exchanged as diplomatic surrogates, offers of marriage, or simply as gifts of friendship. Holbein’s bust portrait of Henry VIII as well as the famous full-length portrait of the king offer significant insight into the image Henry wished to project. As the catalogue makes clear, “Holbein’s use of precious materials gives an indexical quality to his depiction of regal splendor…[T]he portrait’s ‘relatively small size and its lavish use of gold and the precious blue pigment ultramarine…make it a precious object as much as a painting…’ In the words of Stephanie Buck, ‘By renouncing the spatially defined surroundings that would have served to localise them, by instead setting them against a flat plane of colour, Holbein…lifts his sitters out of the temporal dimension.’ The relatively flattened and ornamental surfaces of these royal portraits point the way toward the aesthetic that flourished under Henry’s daughter Elizabeth.”
Attributed to William Scrots (active 1537-1553), Edward VI, King of England, ca. 1550. Oil on wood, 22 13⁄16 × 26 3⁄4 in.
Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park. Image © Compton Verney. Photograph by Jamie Woodley.
With this stately flatness, sure line, single-color backgrounds and emphasis on the luxury of the garments and jewels, Holbein captures the man, but emphasizes the king. By contrast, the full-length portrait, attributed variously to Holbein and to the artist’s workshop, depicts the king in high dudgeon, as they used to say, on the knife edge of displeasure, one hand squeezing a gauntlet, the other close to his dagger. Wealth surrounds him in the form of wall hangings. He stands legs apart, squared-up to the viewer, on a sumptuous Islamic carpet, ready to meet any challenge. It’s a pose that actors playing Henry VIII—and any character with a similar penchant for refinement and violence—often emulate.
Even as Henry VIII moved England away from Roman Catholicism toward what would become the Church of England, the classicism in the wake of the rediscovery of Rome and Greece in Italy and elsewhere offered the Tudors opportunities to leapfrog beyond more recent European models of virtuous rule and rectitude and connect their dynasty to the mythical past.
One of the spectacular objects in the exhibition is the Triumph of Hercules tapestry, designed by Raphael—who almost certainly would have made it to London, had he not passed away so early—woven in Brussels, and purchased by Henry. Similarly, the theme of another tapestry, Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books, alludes to Henry’s image of himself as a “defender of the faith,” despite the apostasy that stemmed from his un-Catholic attitude toward marriage. Paul, it should be noted, would become an Anglican alternative to the Vatican’s Peter.
In both works, the art of the tapestry reaches its apogee. Like the panels in a graphic novel, the sequential art of the Hercules tapestry, depicting the 12 labors of the Greek demigod in three tiers, pop out at the viewer, signifying Henry as a monarch laboring to clean house and craft a modern, independent England. Similarly, the smoke of the fire in the Saint Paul tapestry and the books spilling out from the picture plane lend the scene dimensionality and immediacy.
By the time Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, assumes the throne, in 1558, allusions between the Tudors and classical figures were common in their portrayals. Where her father was Hercules, Elizabeth became Diana, goddess of the hunt and avowed virgin. Elizabeth’s court also featured spectacles such as tournaments and jousts, masques and strolls through fairy gardens—complete with wise “wild men,” sleeping knights and mock contests for the hand of the virgin queen—recast the ages of King Arthur and medieval chivalry in the costumed livery and service of the Tudors.
Attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561–1635/6), Elizabeth I (The Rainbow Por-trait), ca. 1602. Oil on canvas, 50 3⁄8 x 40 in.
Reproduced with the permission of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House. Image ©Hat-field House, Hertfordshire, UK/Bridgeman Images.
Portraits of Elizabeth and her predecessor, Mary I, by Flemish expatriates Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, (1561–1635/6) and Hans Eworth (ca. 1520–1574) present the queens as formal, idealized, beautiful, formidable and distant. To be a woman and a head of state was perilous in a world that did not value women, so these images, of women who seem to be not quite of this world, are simultaneously astonishing and unsurprising. Mary—and Elizabeth in particular—are deae ex machina, goddesses out of the machinery of state, deities out of the machinations of politics. In Gheeraerts’s—as with many of these works, the attribution is debated—1602 portrait, known as The Rainbow Portrait, the symbolism is densely layered. An armillary sphere and a serpent on the queen’s sleeve indicate her cunning and learning. Eyes and ears on her orange mantle suggest omniscience. The rainbow she holds conveys the divine covenant of her reign and the sweep of her sway under heaven.
Underneath the mythology and the artistic beauty that sprang from it, the gears of the Machiavellian machinations of the Tudors and their European counterparts ground on. A breathtaking painting by an unknown English painter, of Abd al-Wahid bin Mas’ood bin Mohammad ‘Annouri, secretary of Ahmad al-Mansur, sultan of Morocco, underscores this.
As described in the catalogue, in 1600, Annouri visited England, “ostensibly to negotiate trade relations with Elizabeth I… but in fact with clandestine orders to propose an Anglo-Moroccan alliance against Spain.” In the painting, Annouri stares back at the viewer, clear-eyed, taking us in, a man to be reckoned with, just as surely as Henry VIII in Holbein’s full-length portrait.
Mythology, identity, power, murder, piety, beauty, nature, culture, conspiracy, art, artifice, love, betrayal—the Tudors ran the gamut. Their arts revealed and concealed it. With such a world as his model, Shakespeare could hardly miss.