THE TUDORS: ART AND MAJESTY IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND (The Met, 2022-23)
I’ve been thinking a decent amount recently about Tudor England. This is through the guidance of Hilaire Belloc and his succinct version of how the modern world came to be - which is basically just a two-step dance, first Henry VIII seizes monastic lands for the crown, then those lands are passed on to parliamentary hangers-on as a new type of private property, and from there that system is franchised to the rest of the world via British industrialization and British naval might. Thinking in that way, Tudor/Stuart England becomes, in some sense, the only history that one really needs to know - it’s like the founding branch of a chain and then that chain goes on to undercut the market everywhere else. Study that and it’s possible to figure out something significant of the blueprint of our own era.
The Met show on the Tudors does little either to advance or negate that thesis. It’s pretty much just about sumptuous finery - actual fragments of the cloth of gold; a handsome suit of armor worn by Henry VIII and ever-expanded to accommodate his middle-aged waistline, which, as the exhibit notes accurately express, really makes you feel as if you’re in the room with the brutal man himself. The point is that the Tudors were busy constructing a vision of the state - this involved both showing up foreign rivals (stealing away prized artisans both from France and, even more gleefully, from the Vatican) and, more importantly, staying well ahead of the English feudal houses, impressing a recalcitrant realm with the sovereign might of the new dynasty. The exhibit seems fully convinced by itself in the notes to a startling portrait by Hans Holbein - described as “unprecedented in aggression and scale,” a vivid moment of England coming into its power. And that offers a smart-sounding, political excuse for all the portraits of Henry VIII and Elizabeth - as the exhibit notes point out, Henry VIII, although generally frugal, spared no expense on the trappings of power, as part of a sensibility (clearly shared with The Met’s curator) that the finery had a vital political purpose.
In an extensive piece on the exhibit for the New York Review of Books, Stephen Greenblatt argues that its real value is to demonstrate England’s rapid changeover, within a couple of generations, from cultural backwater to culturally-imperial force. To make his point, Greenblatt defames in particular the sports of bear-baiting and of jack-an-apes, contending that these are not really worthy of an advanced civilization and noting the horrified reactions of European travelers forced to attend a jack-an-apes spectacle. The critical turn, in the telling of Greenblatt and The Met was the importation of European artisans. Holbein was the most famous of these, but the sense in the 16th century was that the Italian and Low Countries guilds were lousy with talent - and that their artists could spruce up a royal palace in no time. Probably the most vivid depiction of this dynamic is the ‘Portrait Bust of John Fisher’ by Pietro Torrigiani, a long-forgotten Italian - whose work elicited audible oohs and ahs from the exhibit goers around me. In Greenblatt’s construction, the foreign imports were a vital source of apprenticeship for homegrown talent - and, if England had produced little of anything other than needlework before the Tudor era, the nation was able to take a distinctly nationalist turn under Queen Elizabeth and to nonetheless generate a surprisingly high quality of work.
Greenblatt’s abiding interest is in the royal portraiture on display in the exhibit - the sheer weirdness of the cult surrounding Queen Elizabeth: the cult of the marriageable beauty; the later cult of the Virgin Queen; and, throughout it all, a Pharaonic suggestion of the divine powers of the English monarch. This serves to exoticize a phase of English history that we all think we know pretty well - to place the emphasis on spectacle and a certain sort of alienation that both legitimizes and apotheosizes the state. My interest, in visiting the exhibit, wandered towards the artists themselves - particularly the trio of Holbein, Nicholas Hilliard, and Isaac Oliver. (And the Met’s show often falls like a gallery opening for the three of them.)
Holbein had been such a staple of historical portraiture - his work preserved on the covers of biographies of famous people - that it’s been easy to miss what an extraordinarily gifted painter he really was. The sense with him is of English art coming into its own for the first time - in the “unprecedented aggression and scale” of the portrait of Henry VIII and, maybe most interestingly, in what the exhibit describes as an amalgam of word and image, text (for instance, a letter left barely legible within the portrait) interwoven with the picture. The overall impression of his style, as with Hilliard and Oliver, is of a state of suspension, of various influences (classical allusions, medieval touchstones, the natural world, the visual and auditory planes) all in balance with one another. It becomes possible, as the exhibit delicately does, to link Holbein with the aesthetic of Shakespeare and of ‘negative capability’ - an incomparably rich artistic moment in which no one influence (whether classical, Christian, Gothic, national) prevails over any other, in which the hemispheres of the analytic and imaginative brain seem to be extraordinarily well aligned.
There is the sense, within the work exhibited at The Met, that Holbein himself was being a bit impatient with the constraints of portraiture - and that that impatience was shared by his near-contemporaries. Holbein clearly became obsessed with symbolism - working in multiple meanings for the objects in his portraits (the falcon accompanying ‘Robert Cheseman’ as a good example) - which may well have been a relief from the monotony of touching up his portrait subjects’ smallpox scars or modifying their waistlines in the court portraits he made that were circulated, as often as not, as dating profiles sent to potential matches. And, a generation later, Hilliard and Oliver were engaged in their own experimentation. Hilliard turned in a Mannerist direction - particularly in his enigmatic, Myst-like portrait of Henry Percy the Earl of Northumberland, of which, as the exhibit notes, scholars still haven’t worked out most of the symbols.
Isaac Oliver, whom I hadn’t previously heard of, was, for me, the revelation of the exhibit, recasting the miniature portraits, from which he made his living, in the direction of ‘allegorical narratives.’
These strike me as being the closest contemporary visual representation (at least that I’ve seen) to the imaginative world of Shakespeare’s plays - Oliver’s ‘A Party in the Open Air,’ for instance, serving as compelling analogue to the busy forest and the wayward lovers of As You Like It or A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.