CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

THE VISUAL ARTS

‫ﱙﱚﱙ‬
Richard L. Williams

T he visual arts in Elizabethan England have until relatively recently been held
in what can only be described as cultural disdain. The opening sentence of the
1964 volume Sculpture in Britain, 1530–1830, which was to remain the standard
textbook on the subject for the next thirty years, declared that ‘The history of
English sculpture in the sixteenth century is a sorry tale.’1 The equivalent standard
history of painting dismissed Elizabethan portraiture as ‘of an even mediocrity’.2
A similar contempt was broadcast to a wider public by Kenneth Clark in his
magisterial survey, Civilisation (1969), in which he considered it ‘debatable how
far Elizabethan England can be called civilised’.3 His dilemma was only alleviated
by recalling such names as Shakespeare, Spenser, Dowland and Byrd. Within this
list of poets and musicians there was clearly no place for individuals associated
with the visual arts. It would appear that Elizabethan England had singularly failed
to produce its Michelangelo, its Titian or even its native successor to Holbein.
Although such attitudes still retain an influential force today, many art historians,
particularly since the 1980s, have questioned and challenged the very assumptions
on which these judgements have been made. This chapter will seek to set out some
of the alternative perspectives from which the visual arts in Elizabethan England
have been interpreted in more recent years. These approaches do not seek to
rehabilitate the aesthetic reputation of Elizabethan art by asserting for it a position
within the canon of ‘high art’, but rather to set aside the aesthetic concerns and
judgements of the connoisseur, in order to examine Elizabethan imagery across a
broader range of media and to situate it more specifically within its historical and
cultural context.

THE NOTION OF ‘ART’ AND THE ‘ARTIST’

Elizabethan culture has stubbornly refused to conform to the expectations placed
upon it by traditional art history. For example, the art historian’s search for ‘great
artists’ within a given period formed part of a tradition dating back to Giorgio
Vasari in the mid-sixteenth century. According to this tradition, historical periods
that failed to produce individuals deemed worthy of inclusion within the canon of

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great artists, judged according to a restrictive and essentially Italianate aesthetic,

would thereafter be dismissed as backward. Vasari’s conception was to be developed
further by the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century to create the charac-
terisation of the artist, still potent today, as a creative genius who employs his
(rarely ‘her’) art as a vehicle for creativity and self-expression. Yet, to apply these
conceptions retrospectively to the radically different culture of sixteenth-century
England seems anachronistic and destined to result in the disappointed assessments
of the Elizabethan visual arts quoted earlier.
The word ‘art’ was not used in sixteenth-century England in the sense it was
later to acquire. Rather, the arts were understood according to a much older classifi-
catory system that had pervaded European culture since antiquity. This distinguished
the more prestigious liberal arts from the lowly mechanical arts. The seven liberal
arts, including mathematics and music, were characterised as intellectually demand-
ing accomplishments expected of the highly educated gentleman. By contrast, the
mechanical arts comprised menial skills, such as cooking or spinning, associated
with manual labour. Painting and sculpture suffered a lowly reputation since they
had traditionally been classed in the lower, menial category. Although attempts to
raise their status to liberal arts had begun in Renaissance Italy, few beyond a tiny
elite in sixteenth-century England seemed to have embraced this foreign notion.
Thus, painters and sculptors were generally regarded as nothing more than lowly
craftsmen, who had to work with their hands to earn a living.
The social position of Elizabethan painters is neatly encapsulated in the 1579
self-portrait by George Gower, who was later to become Serjeant Painter to the
Queen (Figure 33.1). Very unusually for a professional painter, Gower had been
born into a gentry family. In the verse inscription at the top right of the picture
Gower mused on this dual identity, asking himself which he esteemed more: his
skill as a painter or his status as a gentleman. The juxtaposition is also expressed
visually in the portrait through symbolic imagery, in this case a pair of scales in
which his family coat of arms on one side is literally weighed against a pair of
dividers, representing his painter’s craft, on the other. This combination of symbolic
image with an inscription being used to convey a personal thought or message was
termed an impresa or ‘device’ and was a highly fashionable convention of Eliza-
bethan portraiture. Far less conventional, however, was Gower’s verdict in which
he esteemed his painter’s skill more highly than his pedigree, thereby going very
much against the grain of contemporary values. However, it is telling that Gower
felt the need to go to such lengths to justify his choice of career and that the very
terms of his argument acknowledged that to be a painter and to be a gentleman
were considered binary oppositions in Elizabethan cultural discourse.
In place of the prestige of ‘the artist’, the esteem in which the visual arts were
held in Elizabethan England was governed predominantly by their potential in the
display of magnificence. The virtue of ‘magnificence’, from its initial formulation
by Aristotle, had come to exert a governing influence on the patronage of the visual
arts in medieval and early modern Europe. Individuals of high standing were
expected to make an outward display commensurate with their social status. Elite
members of society had traditionally achieved this by favouring objects fashioned
from the most expensive materials. The corollary of this was that in Tudor England
the visual arts were still largely valued according to their material cost, and thus a

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THOMAS GOWER.

Figure 33.1 Engraved print after the self-portrait by George Gower

(private collection) (1579). Printed copy by James Basire in 1800, mistakenly labelled
‘Thomas Gower’. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

painting, which was nothing more than a piece of wood or canvas covered in oil,
could not compete in magnificence with artefacts renowned for being prohibitively
expensive such as tapestry or goldsmiths’ work.
In later centuries, European art theory established and entrenched a hierarchical
relationship that privileged the so-called ‘fine arts’ over the ‘decorative arts’. By the
nineteenth century this difference had been institutionalised by founding national
galleries solely for paintings and leaving museums of decorative arts to house what
remained. It would, however, be a gross distortion to view Elizabethan culture accord-
ing to these values since the hierarchical relationship which they embody was
effectively reversed in sixteenth-century England. Painting for most English patrons
at the time occupied an inferior position compared with such ‘decorative arts’ as
jewellery or tapestry.
The inferiority of painting is apparent from those Elizabethan painted cloths and
wall paintings which were deliberately intended to resemble tapestry. Paintings on
cloth were often displayed like tapestries, without frames and suspended as wall
hangings. Their painted borders might be closely modelled on the decorative borders
found on tapestries, as in the case of four painted cloths surviving at Hardwick
Hall in Derbyshire (Figure 33.2). The latter were painted at the end of the sixteenth
century for the Countess of Shrewsbury, whose coat of arms and initials they bear.
A similar effect was achieved at Hill Hall in Essex, in which wall paintings not

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Figure 33.2 John Balechouse (?), close-up of painted cloth depicting the
Conversion of Saul (National Trust, Hardwick Hall) (c. 1600–1).
Photo ©NTPL/John Hammond. Source: The National Trust Photo Library.

only mimicked the fruit, flowers and other motifs of tapestry borders but even
introduced a trompe l’oeil effect in which the corner of the fictive tapestry apparently
curled away from the wall. Paintings could thus only give the illusion of magnifi-
cence, by pretending to be something that afforded the sort of prestige they failed
to command themselves.
The prestige of certain materials enhanced the status of the producer as well as
the consumer. Since long before the reign of Elizabeth I, goldsmiths had been widely
considered a superior class of craftsmen on account of the precious materials with
which they worked, and also because of their connection with the production,
regulation and even lending of money. A 1563 royal proclamation concerning the
pay and conditions deemed appropriate to various craftsmen recommended an
annual remuneration for goldsmiths that was precisely double that for a painter.
The two crafts came together in the production of portrait miniatures. It became
highly fashionable to have portrait miniatures set by goldsmiths into elaborate
jewelled lockets which could then be worn about the body. Unfortunately, very few
of these original settings survive, but the Gresley Jewel (Figure 33.3) is a rare excep-
tion. Encasing portraits painted by Nicholas Hilliard, the locket illustrates
contemporary skill in working with gold, enamels and semi-precious stones. Today
it is Hilliard’s portraits that are the focus of numerous scholarly books and exhibitions
devoted to miniatures, whereas in the eyes of an Elizabethan observer, the intricate

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lockets of the goldsmith seem likely to have taken precedence over the paintings
within. Referring to a portrait miniature, Shakespeare’s Olivia commands the
disguised Viola, ‘Here; wear this jewel for me, ’tis my picture’, suggesting that it
was conceived primarily as a jewel containing a portrait rather than as a portrait
in a jewelled frame.4
The taste for goldsmiths’ work and indeed tapestry was not restricted to the court
elite, however. These were the status symbols to which much of the rest of English
society aspired. Such aspirations are evoked quite compellingly by a poster printed
in 1567 to advertise the first English lottery (Figure 33.4). In order to tempt the eye
of potential subscribers, the poster illustrated the prizes to be won. These included
bags and chests of money but the most numerous prizes were cups, bowls, spoons
and other ware of the goldsmith. The only prize on the poster not to be connected
with goldsmiths’ work was a tapestry. These then, were the goods calculated to be
most desirable to the mass market of lottery-ticket buyers. It embodied a taste that
the gentry, merchant classes and even the yeomanry were increasingly able to indulge
as the sixteenth century progressed. Household inventories confirm that objects such
as silver or pewter vessels, sets of silver spoons and the like were becoming more
affordable to a wider section of society. The same was true of painted cloths which,
by the reign of Elizabeth I, were to be found in the houses of bakers and grocers.

Figure 33.3 Nicholas Hilliard, The Gresley Jewel

(c. 1580s). Image courtesy of Victoria & Albert Museum,
London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.

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A very rich Lotterie generall without any Blackes.

Figure 33.4 A Poster for the First English Lottery (1567).

By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Wall paintings intended to mimic tapestry were to be found not only in the country
houses of great courtiers but also in more modest manor houses.
Although certain parallels suggest themselves with the ‘conspicuous consumption’
associated with modern capitalist societies there were important differences. The
preference for goods fashioned from costly materials had very practical advantages.
In an age before bank deposit accounts the purchase of an item of goldsmiths’ work
was a convenient and socially advantageous form in which to store wealth. Should
the need for ready cash arise, assets such as jewellery or gold plate could be realised
immediately by having them melted down. Tapestries could easily be sold in a
thriving market for second-hand goods that held none of the stigma that it often
has for the modern consumer.

PORTRAITURE
The vast majority of paintings to have survived from the Elizabethan period are
portraits. These were the sorts of painting most likely to be preserved by succeeding
generations within a family or an institution, no matter how old-fashioned they
might come to appear, on account of the importance of the persons depicted. By
contrast, other sorts of painted work have mostly disappeared over the centuries
through neglect or being deliberately discarded. These chances of survival have
effectively distorted subsequent perceptions of Elizabethan painting, leaving the
misleading impression that it was restricted in scope to portraiture alone (a point
that will be addressed below).
Nevertheless, the demand for portraiture in Elizabethan England was undoubt-
edly increasing, and was doing so among a broader section of society. While most
scholarly literature has been devoted to portraits of royalty and of courtiers,
attention has recently been paid to the large numbers of paintings of successful
merchants and other members of the ‘middling sort’. Portraits of civic dignitaries
were also commissioned in increasing numbers, although these have remained largely
unstudied in provincial collections.
In spite of their relatively low status as mere paintings, formal portraits were
valued for the various useful functions they could serve. Images of the Queen,
whether commissioned by the monarch herself or by others, were always required
to meet certain expectations and to fulfil particular political functions that render
them a quite distinctive category. These are issues that are discussed separately in
Susan Doran’s chapter in this volume.
As for portraits of her subjects, these could vary widely in function, although
many were generally commemorative in purpose. Appointment to an office –
whether at court or in the regions – could be the occasion to commission a portrait.
So too might participation in prestigious events, such as the tilting matches held to
mark the Queen’s accession day, after which young knights might pose for their
likeness dressed in extravagant suits of armour. It was often in portraits of courtiers
such as these that the allegorical language of the impresa was employed. Landmarks
in one’s personal life might also be celebrated in this way, be it a coming of age,
betrothal, marriage or even on the eve of childbirth. What have been termed
‘pregnancy portraits’ seem to have been an innovation in Elizabethan England in
which the heavily expectant mother was portrayed in celebration of the forthcoming

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birth or alternatively as a memorial should she not survive it. Portraits specifically
painted as a memorial or those simply intended to serve a didactic purpose might
include visual elements from the memento mori tradition, such as a skull, in order
to chasten the viewer into leading a more morally responsible and godly life. These
functions were often indicated through the inclusion of an explanatory text either
within the picture itself or on the frame (that so few original frames survive is thus
potentially a great loss). Inscriptions might include dates, the age of the sitter, a
learned phrase or even lengthy poems, as in George Gower’s self-portrait (Figure
33.1).
In contrast to these more formal and public projections of the individual associated
with portraits painted in oils, the tradition of the portrait miniature cultivated a
greater sense of intimacy. The earliest miniatures produced in England date from
the time of Henry VIII but they achieved an unparalleled popularity among a more
socially varied clientele in the reign of Elizabeth. The word ‘miniature’, however,
was not adopted until the seventeenth century. In Tudor England, miniature painting
was referred to as ‘limning’, from the same Latin root as ‘illumination’. In fact, the
technique of the miniaturist was fundamentally the same as that of the manuscript
illuminator: painting on vellum using a water-based medium together with thicker
paint bound in egg white or gum arabic. The miniaturist would, however, paste his
vellum onto a stiffer surface for support, and, as surviving examples show, the
reverse side of a playing card was found to be ideal for this. Freed from the confines
of a book or manuscript a portrait miniature might be kept separately in a draw
or cabinet, perhaps in an elaborate box, or else, as with the Gresley Jewel mentioned
earlier (Figure 33.3), set into a locket to be worn about the body.
The great popularity of miniatures in Elizabeth’s reign might in part have been
encouraged by the example of the Queen, who gave portraits of herself in miniature
as a token of her special favour. Living up to her parsimonious reputation it would
appear that Elizabeth usually gave only the painted miniature as a gift, leaving it
to the recipients to commission and pay for their own jewelled locket. As with
large-scale oil paintings, miniatures of the Queen could serve as a public sign of
her political endorsement of an individual or even of a particular faction at court,
in addition to the more conventional functions of gift-giving that were an established
part of international diplomacy.
However, beyond the protocol of political exchange, the portrait miniature was
more commonly used as a love token. It is in this regard that the apparent intimacy
of the miniature is most significant. Although large-scale oil portraits were
sometimes kept behind a set of curtains which had to be drawn back to reveal the
painting, the locket of a miniature not only had to be opened but its size required
that it was held in the hand of one viewer at a time and brought up close to the
eyes. A sense of closer proximity to the sitter might be further enhanced by adopting
a bust-length, close-up format, as in the Gresley Jewel (Figure 33.3). The latter has
the unusual feature of a second portrait in the lid, presumably of Gresley’s wife,
so that when the locket was closed the lips of the two figures would meet in a
perpetual embrace.
The role of the miniature as a love token is repeatedly alluded to in Elizabethan
drama and poetry. In turn, some miniatures borrowed from the Petrarchan tradition
of love poetry, as in the portrait of an unknown man painted by either Hilliard or

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Figure 33.5 Nicholas Hilliard or Isaac Oliver, Unknown Man against a Background of
Flames (c. 1600). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Isaac Oliver, in which the flames of his passion flare around him quite literally
(Figure 33.5). The object of his desire is surely depicted within the closed locket
he wears around his neck and which he might be about to hold to his heart. The
lovesick melancholy that is tormenting him is also manifested in his dishevelled
appearance, wearing only a shirt that is open to the navel. Such a lack of decorum
in dress can appear quite startling compared with the stiff formality of most
Elizabethan portraits. It appears to reveal deep emotion rather than just the sitter’s
social status, to move behind the public façade and enter the realm of experience.
However, the ideal of the portrait as an exposure of the private self or as a
revealing index of individuality belongs to a later tradition. In contrast, portraits
of the Renaissance period, especially of humanist scholars, would often include
inscriptions stressing that, no matter how skilled the painter, an image could only
reproduce the outward features of the sitter and no more. Thus, miniatures such
as that of the unknown man (Figure 33.5) can only create an illusion of greater
intimacy, as though the person has been observed in an unguarded moment. In
reality they are no less artificial than the more formal portraits intended for public
display; they simply conform to an alternative set of conventions. The role of the
lovesick gallant was merely one of many stereotypes available for upper-class young
men to imitate. The open shirt, flames and the like were standard signs to signify
that chosen identity in a similar way that official robes, a chain of office and a coat
of arms might serve to construct a sitter’s identity as a mayor, for example.
If Elizabethan portraiture followed a different set of priorities compared with
portraiture in later centuries, this might help to account for its highly distinctive

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Figure 33.6 British School. A young lady aged twenty-one (1569).

Image © Tate, London 2010.

mode of representation. Many portraits, in oils and in miniature, often depict the
sitter in an icon-like composition with the body flattened into a highly stylised,
almost abstract shape on the surface of the picture. For example, the body of an
unidentified young woman as depicted by an unknown painter in a portrait at Tate
Britain dated 1569, gives little sense of three-dimensional form (Figure 33.6). The
left arm appears almost flattened so as to display the pattern on the sleeve with
the minimum disruption by modelling. The face is not painted to mimic the surface
texture of skin or to suggest plasticity through subtle effects of light and shade but
is mask-like and seemingly devoid of expression and individuality.
This style of portraiture did not conform to the later expectations of traditional
art history. Following the model formulated by Vasari, art history had been written
as an unfolding narrative of evolutionary progress in which the visual arts came to
achieve a greater sense of naturalism. Painting in England failed to observe such
an evolution; in fact, it seemed to be in regression. The illusionistic and ‘life-like’
portraits painted by Holbein at the court of Henry VIII had come to be replaced
by highly ‘unnatural’, stylised icons in Elizabeth’s reign. The principal reason given
by many art historians in the twentieth century to account for what they considered
a decline was that the visual arts in England were effectively isolated from the
European mainstream following the Reformation.

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It is certainly true that, since the break with Rome, foreign travel had become
increasingly problematic (although still possible since Nicholas Hilliard travelled to
France and fellow miniature painter Isaac Oliver is recorded in Venice in 1596). It
is also true that Italian painters and sculptors who had worked in England early
in the reign of Henry VIII were now inhibited from coming to a Protestant country,
especially after Elizabeth was excommunicated by the Pope. However, the prevailing
notion that England was culturally isolated has been largely determined by another
bias, the discipline of art history inherited from Vasari, which privileges the Italian
visual arts over those of northern Europe. Italian art asserted a canonical status
against which other work was to be measured. The direct impact of Italian art on
Elizabethan England was very limited, but to conclude that this amounts to cultural
isolation requires the downplaying or disregarding of the continued flow of
influences and craftsmen coming from France, parts of Germany and, above all,
from the Netherlands.
England imported large numbers of printed pictures from the Netherlands,
whether narrative, allegorical or ornamental, which were used as models by crafts-
men working in virtually all media from metalwork to needlework. Netherlandish
painters and sculptors came to England, many as refugees fleeing religious persecu-
tion, and established thriving workshops in Southwark. These immigrant craftsmen
came from a tradition of portraiture famous for its astonishing effects of naturalism,
both in paintings and in sculpted figures such as effigies on funerary monuments.
In contrast, the highly stylised portraits attributed to native English painters, such
as the Tate’s Young Woman (Figure 33.6), might be assumed to be the product of
the inadequate training available to painters in England, together with a sorry lack
of talent. This assumption underlies the damning summation of the Elizabethan
visual arts by Kenneth Clark and others quoted at the opening of this chapter.
However, it is possible to interpret the latter type of portrait as being painted,
quite self-consciously, according to a highly distinctive aesthetic. For example, there
are Elizabethan portraits in this style signed by Hans Eworth, an Antwerp-born
painter whose earlier works exhibit full mastery of illusionistic painting. His
adoption of the icon-like style suggests that, at least in some instances, this was a
visual idiom demanded by the English patron. Why a sitter might choose to be
depicted in this way is hinted at in anecdotal evidence such as Nicholas Hilliard’s
record of a conversation he had with the Queen when painting her in miniature.
Elizabeth and her painter agreed that her face ought to be painted as though brightly
illuminated and without shadow since the latter would only serve to obscure her
features when painted at such a small scale. Additionally, Hilliard seems to have
invested the issue with a moral dimension in believing that shadow corrupted the
truth and clarity of line.
If the expressionless, mask-like representation of the face in these portraits
deliberately followed a visual convention then the rationale underpinning this can
be interpreted in several different ways. One suggestion is that these Elizabethan
‘icons’ consciously evoked earlier medieval depictions of monarchs and saints in
order to invest contemporary sitters with a similar air of authority and of time-
honoured lineage. Another suggestion views the stylised nature of Elizabethan
portraiture as attractive to those Protestants seeking to mitigate the dangers of
idolatry. The risk was considered especially virulent in effigies sculpted for funerary

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Figure 33.7 Bartholomew Ayte and Isaac James, Monument to Richard

Kingsmill and Family (Highclere, Hampshire, 1601). Image courtesy Conway Library,
The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

monuments since these were positioned in the numinous atmosphere of a church.

Prior to the Reformation, such monuments often encouraged the viewer to experi-
ence an empathy with or compassion for the deceased in the hope that prayers
might be offered to aid the soul in purgatory. In Protestant England such prayers
for the dead were unlawful and so it is conceivable that a less ‘life-like’ representation
would be preferred as being less likely to evoke such an emotional identification
with the figure.
Post-Reformation funerary monuments served more as a record of the pedigree
and achievements of the person commemorated, sometimes with a lengthy inscrip-
tion reading like a curriculum vitae (Figure 33.7). Alongside coats of arms, a tomb
chest might include subsidiary figures of the deceased’s sons and daughters kneel-
ing in profile where they decrease in scale according to their age. The faces in each
group of siblings can often appear identical, the only means of differentiating the
eldest son from his younger brothers being the order of precedence in which the
figures appear and their size. These marginal figures perhaps indicate most clearly
that the mode of representation of Elizabethan monuments as a whole is one which
values the dynastic over the mimetic.
Painted portraits might be read in a similar way. It was not the primary function
of a formal court portrait to capture the personality or even the individuality of
the sitter. This was true in other European courts such as the court of Saxony,

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where portraits painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop in the first
half of the sixteenth century share many of the characteristics associated with the
Elizabethan portraits in question. Unlike Cranach’s earliest portraits, those painted
at court, particularly of women, include whitened, featureless faces that can
sometimes defy differentiation. As with funerary monuments, painted portraits such
as these seem more concerned with marking social status.
Elizabethan painted portraits could make a prominent display of a coat of arms
or include an inscription to create a formal record of the sitter’s status but other
visual signs could reinforce the message (Figure 33.6). Costume, jewellery and other
accessories such as a feather fan denoted wealth and class. The contemporary
preoccupation with fabrics, and even the different grades of silks, velvets and other
materials would have made Elizabethan observers far more adept at reading the
visual language of dress than a modern viewer. For such a discriminating audience,
therefore, it is hardly surprising that the mimetic skills of Elizabethan painters were
applied to reproducing with great fidelity every detail of the adornment the sitter
wished to be seen wearing. Each stitch of golden embroidery, each rivet and joint
in a suit of armour, and even the intricate pattern of a lace ruff was often recorded
with extraordinary precision. Court portraits were formal representations of the
public image of the sitter and so informal expressions or emotions would have
offended against decorum which governed the codes of behaviour and display
deemed appropriate to members of the highest social classes. As mentioned above,
even apparently informal portraits such as the man among flames (Figure 33.5) can
be seen to follow equally standard codes of display.
However, these visual codes of outward display were far from static, and there
was not one uniform style of court portraiture. Particularly from the final decade
of Elizabeth’s reign, some courtiers favoured portraits which employed modelling,
light and shade and other illusionistic effects. This growing fascination with lifelike
representation was reflected in late Elizabethan poetry and drama where it was
commonly termed ‘curious painting’. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, brought from
the Netherlands as a child, and Isaac Oliver, the son of a Huguenot, exemplify the
fashion for ‘curious painting’ in oil portraiture and in miniatures respectively. This
development suggests that the criteria employed to evaluate paintings could come
to include a greater stress on the aesthetic qualities of the work, at least for a
minority within the court elite.

THE IMPACT OF THE REFORMATION

The destruction of religious sculpture, paintings, embroidery, metalwork and
imagery in other media in the churches and cathedrals of Elizabethan England would
undoubtedly have acted as one of the most conspicuous manifestations of the
reassertion of Protestant reform in Elizabethan England. Elizabeth’s bishops resumed
an official programme of iconoclasm that had begun to be implemented by the
regime of Edward VI. Although Henry VIII had ransacked the monasteries and
pilgrimage sites, his new laws and regulations governing images in parish churches
and other places of worship had remained unclear. Church images had still been
permitted provided that they were not ‘abused’. The confusion lay in the failure to
offer a precise legal definition of the word ‘abused’ in this context. After Henry’s

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death in 1547 the ambiguous legal position of ecclesiastical imagery persisted in

the first year of the reign of Edward VI until, finally in February 1548, the ruling
Privy Council issued an order for the removal of ‘all’ images from the churches.
It was this order, reflecting the lurch in religious policy to radical Protestantism
that began the more systematic destruction of the rich collections of church art that
had accumulated in England over many centuries. Although iconoclastic riots did
break out in some hotbeds of Protestantism, these were rare occurrences. Rather
than at the hands of violent mobs of religious zealots, images were more usually
dismantled by carpenters or other craftsmen hired for the job, calmly following the
directions of form-filling officials.
Following the short-lived attempt by Mary I to reinstate as much ecclesiastical
imagery and other paraphernalia as was practicable, the government of Elizabeth
declared a return to the legal position governing church images established by the
Edwardian regime. What it failed to specify, however, was whether it intended to
reinstate the Edwardian policy that was in force before or after February 1548
when the destruction of ‘all’ images had been ordered. What must have been
intended as a deliberate fudge reflected and accommodated divisions at the heart
of the Elizabethan regime. The Queen herself, together with some of her more
moderate bishops, believed that religious images could still have a legitimate role
in churches provided that ‘idolatrous’ practices associated with Catholic worship
were avoided. The Chapel Royal thus retained a silver crucifix with the corpus of
Christ and traditional flanking figures of the Virgin Mary and Saint John on top
of the communion table, despite being attacked and damaged on three separate
occasions. Elizabeth’s more radical bishops feared that the Queen’s example would
set an unwelcome precedent, but, owing to the subtly ambiguous legal position, in
their diocese they were able to enforce the post-1548 policy established in Edward’s
reign that had shifted to uncompromising destruction. Many of the church images
that had escaped the Edwardian destruction were now removed and destroyed,
together with any replacements that had recently been introduced in the reign of
Mary. Walls were whitewashed once again, with religious paintings often substituted
with text panels quoting passages from the Bible or with the royal coat of arms.
Divisions among Protestants on the image question inevitably turned on the
interpretation of Scripture. All sides agreed that ‘true religion’ comprised only those
practices and beliefs that were verifiable by reference to the Word of God in the
Bible, and in the second of the Ten Commandments God had condemned graven
images as idolatrous. However, moderate Protestants tended to emphasise the part
of the commandment that forbade the worshipping of such images, believing
legitimate uses of images to be an issue of individual conscience, whereas radical
Protestants understood the commandment to require the destruction of all church
images as a matter of theological imperative.
Some modern scholars have claimed that the radical interpretation of the
commandment became increasingly extreme in Elizabeth’s reign, so that not just
religious images in churches were affected but all imagery came to be condemned.
According to this interpretation, after 1580 English culture could be described as
‘iconophobic’, which is defined as the total repudiation of all images, irrespective
of either subject matter or context. Furthermore, this sudden switch to such an
extreme position was not restricted to a radical Protestant minority but supposedly

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swept across the nation as a whole. In other words, every form of pictorial repre-
sentation found in private houses and every other location was entirely unacceptable
in late Tudor England. The indiscriminate eradication of all imagery apparently
resulted in a new generation starved of visual stimulation having virtually never
seen a picture.
Although this interpretation has remained the standard model of later Elizabethan
visual culture it seems increasingly difficult to sustain. It fails to recognise the
fundamental distinction between images in churches and those in a secular setting
that even the most radical Protestant theologians, from Calvin to Zwingli, freely
acknowledged. Churches were places of worship and thus a special case. For example,
English Protestant catechisms which explained the Second Commandment for the
benefit of the young stressed that a comprehensive rejection of all imagery was not
intended. The same image which in a church would be condemned as idolatrous
might be perfectly legitimate within the secular setting of a private house.
Not only do the most important theological sources rule out the fundamentalist
position demanded of ‘iconophobia’, there is a steadily increasing body of visual
evidence that demonstrates the continued access to imagery by all levels of society.
Framed paintings might have remained relatively uncommon, for the cultural reasons
set out earlier, but visual imagery including narrative depictions of Bible stories
continued to flourish in those other media that, until now, have been neglected or
ignored by art historians. Gentlewomen continued to illustrate figurative scenes in
their needlework, and the merchant classes often chose biblical subjects for the
decorative schemes in wood and plaster for their private houses. Other figures might
adorn drinking vessels, pottery and the like, whereas the ubiquitous painted cloths
became a common sight in local taverns where even the poorest members of society
might see depictions of the parable of the Prodigal Son or other popular subjects.
Printed books did not cease to be illustrated. Their numbers certainly remained
limited, but this is likely to have been owing to such factors as the prohibitive costs
involved rather than a radical Protestant rejection of illustration per se. Two of the
books dearest to the radical Protestant movement in Elizabethan England, John
Foxe’s Actes and Monuments and the Geneva Bible, not only continued to be
illustrated in all their editions, but these pictures also expanded in both number
and scale. Even at the bottom of the market cheap print allowed the most modest
households to display broadside woodcut prints on their walls. Particularly popular
were printed ballad sheets that typically used printed pictures to advertise their
subject matter to potential consumers. In this way, printed pictures, such as of
Christ raising his hands in benediction, were sold openly under government licence
to the broad mass of England’s Protestant population throughout the Elizabethan
period (Figure 33.8).
There is still much research to be done in order to understand how different
groups of Elizabethan Protestants selected the subject matter of the visual imagery
they owned and how traditional religious subjects might have been modified to
conform to reformed sensibilities. Yet an impression is already emerging that no
longer caricatures the impact of the Reformation on the visual arts in England as
wholly destructive but also acknowledges the ways in which Protestantism
stimulated a more creative cultural adaptation and transformation.

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Figure 33.8 English, Christ in Glory Illustrating the Ballad ‘The Sorrowful
Lamentation of a Penitent Sinner’. (Ballad Collection of Samuel Pepys, Magdalene
College Cambridge, volume II, no. 13). Image courtesy The Pepys Library,
Magdalene College, Cambridge.

FROM IMAGES TO ‘ART’

The Reformation had raised fundamental questions concerning the function of
visual images. If their former role as a stimulus to prayer and devotion was
condemned as idolatrous what now was their purpose? The answers given to this
question varied from a continuity of those traditional, pre-Reformation uses of
images that remained legitimate to the adoption of new ideas that required a re-
evaluation of the status of the image itself.
Traditional functions of images would include the painted portraits and carved
funerary monuments, which, as discussed earlier, were adapted to the changing
religious culture. The use of images as a didactic tool and as a means of remembrance
had been the two other primary justifications of the value of images promoted by
the medieval Church which, unlike the devotional function, remained relevant in
Protestant England. In fact, the didactic power of the image could be exploited to
further the Protestant cause, as in the famous case of John Foxe’s Actes and
Monuments mentioned earlier, in which woodcut illustrations captured in horrific
detail the sufferings of those who died for their Protestant faith. This was, however,
an exceptional and very expensive publication. Elizabethan Protestants did not
employ the printed image as ‘propaganda’ in the modern sense of a calculated
programme of mass communication. Prints were not distributed free of charge to
the general population but had to be purchased by those sufficiently interested and
with sufficient means. Preaching was the preferred and far more effective means of
communication in the sixteenth century.
Nevertheless, the ability of the visual image to reinforce more general moral and
religious messages continued to be recognised by many Protestant householders.

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Broadsheet prints addressed to the ‘godly householder’ sought to inculcate Protestant

family values through daily exposure to its message. The more prosperous might
commission painted allegories in the memento mori tradition, in which illustrations
based on the Seven Ages of Man or the Dance of Death would serve as a
remembrance of mortality and a warning to follow the godly life.
The medieval and Renaissance tradition of the image as exemplar seems to have
continued to inform the choices of imagery found in the houses of the wealthy.
The biblical and historical figures that comprised the Nine Worthies were still to
be found painted, sculpted and printed as moral and religious role models. It was
presumably with a similar aim that the Countess of Shrewsbury displayed paintings,
embroideries and carvings of virtuous women from the Bible and classical mythology
at Hardwick Hall. Other virtuous individuals were commemorated in battle scenes
or among the series of painted portraits found in the houses of aristocrats, gentry
and even university academics. Next to contemporary figures might be ‘portraits’
of Plato and other notables of the ancient world such as Roman emperors.
Conversely, those considered notorious or villainous people are also sometimes listed
among the paintings in household inventories, including the ‘Great Turk’. This
accounts for the otherwise anomalous presence among the Protestant Earl of
Leicester’s portraits of the Pope and Mary, Queen of Scots.
Towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth, however, paintings are described in
the collection of the Queen and some of her courtiers that do not appear to conform
to the traditional uses of images. After a conducted tour of Whitehall Palace in
1599, Thomas Platter, a medical student from Switzerland, noted in his diary that
‘A picture of a Dutch cook with fruit was also very life-like and artistically painted.’5
Other still-life paintings answering a similar description are recorded in the
possession of the Earl of Leicester, the Earl of Pembroke and Lord Lumley. Although
Netherlandish paintings of this nature often included subsidiary scenes of biblical
stories, the descriptions of these pictures in English houses and palaces make no
mention of any didactic content but rather marvel at the skill of the painter. The
fascination with life-like or ‘curious painting’, as mentioned above, was reflected
in late Elizabethan drama and poetry and resulted in an alternative to the icon-like
style of court portraiture. Although the idea of celebrating a painting primarily for
its aesthetic worth rather than its subject matter was still largely a foreign concept
in sixteenth-century England, there is evidence of change in this regard.
Attitudes to painting, sculptures and the like had been transformed at the great
courts of Europe as a result of the fashion for collecting. From its earlier origins
in Italy this fashion had rapidly spread throughout the rest of Europe as the sixteenth
century progressed. Paintings and other visual arts did not, however, form the
entirety of these collections but were characteristically aligned with a cabinet of
curiosities, comprising rare and exotic objects from across the world. Such
collections had become an immense source of prestige for their owners, a fact that
the English court could hardly fail to note, prompting the more internationally
aware and ambitious to emulate the trend.
Thomas Platter was told that Queen Elizabeth ‘took pleasure in such strange
and lovely curios’ which included a stuffed bird of paradise, pictures fashioned
from peacock feathers, an immense whale rib ‘besides other curiosities’. The Earl
of Leicester kept curiosities such as a ‘Tuske of a Sea Beare’ with his paintings,

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and Sir Francis Walsingham is known to have owned similar objects. The best
documented of these collections was that of the courtier Sir Walter Cope, whose
treasures from China, Africa, America and elsewhere became something of a tourist
attraction for important visitors to London.
Inevitably, this small elite of collectors in England were either well travelled
themselves or else had access to agents on the Continent. What is significant in the
present context is that these foreign contacts were used to acquire paintings as well
as curiosities, following the Continental models. The Earl of Leicester had sought
the services of a painter in Florence, secured the visit of the painter Federico
Zuccaro from Rome, possibly imported pictures from Venice and was reported to
have sought out paintings by specific Flemish artists when leading the troops in the
Netherlands. Lord Burghley used the diplomatic agent Andrea de Loo to acquire
‘pinture d’histoire’ at Antwerp in 1586, and ten years later his son, Robert Cecil,
employed the English ambassador in Paris to arrange the purchase of a painting he
was particularly keen to acquire. The painter John de Critz also operated in Paris
in the 1580s but on behalf of Sir Francis Walsingham, sending a picture of Saint
John and a story taken from Ovid before offering to extend his field trip to Italy.
Queen Elizabeth herself is reported to have made a bid for the altarpiece of the
Lamentation by the famous Flemish painter Quentin Metsys which came onto the
international art market in 1577. Her interest in this picture might have been what
prompted the burgers of Ghent the following year to suggest sending Van Eyck’s
celebrated Ghent Altarpiece to her as a gift. The names of other painters from the
Netherlands and elsewhere (including Holbein) feature in the 1590 inventory of
Lord Lumley’s pictures, which is exceptional in including names at all.
Although the aesthetic skills of foreign painters might always have been
appreciated in England, this collecting activity marks a significant cultural shift.
For example, when John Norden described Whitehall Palace in 1593 as ‘adorned
with manie fair galleries, stately furnished with most artificial, and delectable
pictures, tables, and such like princely ornaments’, he was assessing this display
within the tradition of ‘princely magnificence’ described earlier.6 However, ‘princely
ornaments’ were no longer restricted to objects of high material cost, they could
now include ‘delectable pictures’.
It had become possible, therefore, for certain paintings to claim a cultural value
on account of the fame and the prestige of their painter. English books and plays
of the late sixteenth century sometimes name famous artists, such as Sir John
Harrington’s Orlando Furioso of 1591 which lists Leonardo, Mantegna, Giovanni
Bellini and others. Even more significantly, Lord Lumley’s inventory includes a
picture described as ‘Of Raphael de Urbino, the great paynter’.7 The significance
of this reference is often not fully appreciated since it did not record a picture
attributed to Raphael but a portrait of him. It seems remarkable in itself that an
Elizabethan collector would consider the likeness of a mere painter to merit inclusion
in his portrait collection of notable individuals, never mind to describe Raphael as
‘the great paynter’.
The elevation of certain painters from lowly craftsmen to figures of cultural
prestige presupposed the elevation of painting from a mechanical to a liberal art.
This idea is known to have been familiar to a group of humanist scholars in the
circle of the poet John Leland back in the reign of Henry VIII. However, it seems

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to have made very little impact on the wider English culture of the sixteenth century.
It was implied in Italian books which defined the behaviour and accomplishments
of the ideal courtier such as Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano. This text, translated
into English in 1561, included a discriminating knowledge of painting among the
marks of a cultivated gentleman. However, the first book in English to set out
Italian art theory in this matter in a more formal and systematic fashion was Richard
Haydock’s translation of Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte de la pittura, and this was
not published until 1598.
Thus, there is only limited evidence that a small minority of well-travelled or
well-connected members of the elite in Elizabethan England had begun to embrace
this re-evaluation of the significance of painting. This was not quite the appreciation
of paintings as ‘works of art’, which, as discussed earlier, was a term belonging to
a later age and carrying associations derived from subsequent cultural developments.
Yet it marks perhaps a new direction in English culture that ultimately led towards
such notions. The culture of collecting provided a new answer to questions as to
the purpose of images following the Reformation. It privileged chosen paintings
and other objects by conferring upon them a prestige and significance that was
extraneous to religious ideology.
However, these collections forming in the royal palaces and grand residences of
the court elite were part of a remote and largely unknowable world to the majority
of Elizabethans. For them, painting and other visual arts continued to be regarded
in the lowly terms described earlier. Painters and other craftsmen in England did
not see their status rise; in fact, the miniature painter Nicholas Hilliard in his treatise
written in the late 1590s was still bemoaning the fate of painters who were born
in Elizabethan England ‘under a savage government wherin arts be not esteemed’.8
In this respect, perhaps, Hilliard might have shared the disappointed assessment of
Elizabethan culture expressed by Kenneth Clarke with which this chapter began.

FURTHER READING
Aston, Margaret, England’s Iconoclasts: Vol. I, Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988).
Erikson, Peter and Clark Hulse (eds.), Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race
and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, Pa., 2000).
Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580
(New Haven, Conn., 1992).
Foister, Susan, ‘Paintings and Other Works of Art in Sixteenth-Century English Inventories’,
The Burlington Magazine, 123 (1) (1981): 273–82.
Gent, Lucy, Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620: Relations between Literature and the Visual
Arts in the English Renaissance (Leamington Spa, 1981).
–––– (ed.), Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain (New Haven, Conn., 1995).
Gent, Lucy, and Llewellyn, Nigel (eds.), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English
Culture, c. 1540–1660 (London, 1990).
Hamling, Tara, and Williams, Richard (eds.), Art Re-formed? Reassessing the Impact of the
Reformation on the Visual Arts (Newcastle, 2007).
Hearn, Karen (ed.), Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630
(London, 1995).
–––– Marcus Gheeraerts I: Elizabethan Artist (London, 2002).

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Howard, Maurice, The Tudor Image (London, 1995).

Leslie, Michael, ‘The Dialogue between Bodies and Souls: Pictures and Poesy in the English
Renaissance’, Word and Image, 1 (1) (1985): 16–30.
Llewellyn, Nigel, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 2000).
Reynolds, Graham, ‘The Painter Plays the Spider’, Apollo, 79 (1964): 279–84.
Strong, Roy, The English Icon (London and New York, 1969).
–––– Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered (London, 1983).
Thornton, Robert, and Cain, Thomas (eds.), A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning by
Nicholas Hilliard (Manchester, 1981).
Tittler, Robert, The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern
England (Manchester, 2007).
Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991).
Wells-Cole, Anthony, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (New Haven,
Conn., 1997).
Williams, Richard, ‘Collecting and Religion in Late Sixteenth-Century England’, in E. Chaney
(ed.), The Evolution of English Collecting: Receptions of Italian Art in the Tudor and
Stuart Periods (New Haven, Conn., 2003), pp. 159–200.

NOTES
1 Margaret Whinney, Sculpture in Britain, 1530–1830 (London, 1988), p. 27.
2 Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530 to 1790 (London, 1988), p. 33.
3 Kenneth Clarke, Civilisation: A Personal View (London, 1969), p. 163.
4 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 4.
5 Thomas Platter, The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England
(London, 1995), p. 26.
6 From Norden’s 1593 survey of Middlesex; extract in W. B. Rye, England as Seen by
Foreigners (London, 1865), p. 99.
7 Lionel Cust, ‘The Lumley Inventories’, Walpole Society, 6 (1917–18), p. 25.
8 R. Thornton and T. Cain (eds.), A Treatise Concerning the Art of Limning by Nicholas
Hilliard (Manchester, 1981), p. 67.

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