The Elizabethan Image: An Introduction to English Portraiture, 1558–1603 - Hardcover

Strong, Roy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300244290 ISBN 13: 9780300244298

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Fifty years after his seminal Tate gallery London exhibition, ‘The Elizabethan Image’, leading authority Roy Strong returns with fresh eyes to the subject closest to his heart, The Virgin Queen, her court and our first Elizabethan age

From celebrated portraits of the Queen and paintings of knights and courtiers, to works depicting an aspiring ‘middle class’, Strong presents a detailed and authoritative examination of one of the most fascinating periods of British art. Enriching previous perceptions and ways of seeing the Elizabethans in their world, he reveals an age parallel in many ways to our own—a country aspiring professionally and changing socially. The gaze is from the inside, capturing the knights, melancholy lovers, poets (including Sidney, Donne and Sir John Davies), court favourites and their ‘Gloriana’—as they mirrored and made themselves. 

Beginning with the great portrait of the Queen in grand procession with her Garter Knights, Strong pinpoints the characters and key motifs that run through the rest of the book: chivalry, changes to the social order, emblems and imagery – the full richness of the Elizabethan imagination. These pictures were intimate—personal commissions by private individuals, and not necessarily for public view. As such they are a glimpse into private worlds and sentiments and speak eloquently for the people who paid for, painted and lived amongst them, reversing an academic tendency to treat the portraits as if they had a life of their own, not grounded by the real people who commissioned them.

Roy Strong concludes this richly illustrated volume with the famous and complex Rainbow Portrait, unpicking the iconography of this final painting of an ageless Elizabeth in her ‘Mask of Youth’. Within a year of its completion the queen was dead—her portraits increasingly demoted and replaced by Mary Stuart’s—as the splendour of the Elizabethan age and ‘the cult of the queen’ made way for new monarch James VI, who was to rule over a united England and Scotland.

About this title

Book Description

Synthesizing recent scholarship and research, this book presents a beautifully illustrated introduction to the Elizabethan aesthetic and its success.

About the Author

Roy Strong is a historian, a writer, a broadcaster, and a leading authority on Elizabethan portraiture. He was director of the National Portrait Gallery from 1967 until 1973 and of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1974 until 1984.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0300244290
• ISBN 13: 9780300244298
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224