The Moving Picture of Elizabethan Art

This famous portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, the “Armada Portrait” of about 1588, memorializes the triumph of the British over an intended invasion by the Spanish Armada. (Slide 1 att. George Gower, Woburn Abbey). That recent history is pictured in the insets behind the queen, much as past events were represented on medieval paintings of the lives of saints. Her appearance is typical of her image as inscribed on her many portraits and in our imagination: a remote, static, rigid figure ramrod straight, a posture partly dictated by her characteristically confining costume, but artistic limitations and conventions also prohibited any more lively representation—even though, as an interesting aside, the most prominent contemporary honorific term for a portrait was that it was “lively.” This static quality is also typical of portraits of Elizabeth’s subjects.

So did the art of the early English Renaissance represent movement, and if so, how? (Slide 2 anon. c. 1596, NPG) One portrait, that of Sir Thomas Unton, again represents movement through time and space by use of a series of insets. These picture the trajectory of Unton’s life from infancy on the lower right through his student years at Oxford, through his travels, his service for Elizabeth as a diplomat, to his death and funeral pictured on the left. Dancers move in a circle at a feast and a long procession of mourners unwinds from the dancers to move across much of the painting through the time of Unton’s funeral, occupying more than half the space of the picture. A virtual Dance of Death in yet another shadow from medieval modes. The significance is not the dancer, or the dance, but its end.

Most often Elizabethan portraits represent the life and achievements of the subject through the incorporation of heraldic identifications and devices which convey the aspirations of the subject, such as the images of pelicans, bay trees, or the rainbow, which appear on portraits, engravings and coins to signify Elizabeth’s virtues: her devotion to her subjects, her steadfastness, her irenic aspirations.

This is not to say that Elizabethan art fails to incorporate movement as a part of aesthetic experience, but it takes a long way around to do so, a route which involved a lively role for the viewer. If a painting seems to lack concern with movement, the conditions of its perception often require motion on the part of the viewer to complete its significance This movement was slow and it only gradually initiated the viewer into the complete experience of the work of art. Our movement through the following examples will also be gradual and cumulative.

Movement toward viewing of Elizabethan works of art began a long way off with the approach toward the great house, the site for display of the work, and itself a work of art. The great houses were intentionally visible from a great distance, location on a hilltop being ideal. In John Norden’s great atlas (Speculi Britanniae Pars Altera . . . : Northamptonshire [1610] 46), he reveals the advantage of a lofty site for the owner in his description of Castle Ashby, “a very fayre House mounted on the browe of a Hill havinge a very goodly perpspect farr over the Countrye.” For example William Dugdale’s 1656 illustration of Kenilworth captures the drama of its distant silhouette (The Antiquities of Warwickshire) (Slide 3). From the topmost height of the roof, from what came to be called the “prospect room” in great houses, the lord of the manor, the cynosure of the surrounding countryside, could in turn survey his prospects. William Burleigh was explicit in his accounting for his enormous investment in renovations to Burghley House; it had to be transformed from its past as the Gothic manor house of a knight into the greater seat “of competency, for the mansion of his Baroncy” (Christopher Hussey, “Burghley House, Country Life 14 (1953): 1962). The arms of his ancestors, emblazoned on the gateway reflected his passionate interest in genealogy and heraldry.

The viewer’s prospect of Hardwick Hall also revealed the upward prospects of Bess of Hardwick (Slide 4). Bess’s initials form the centerpiece of the decorative flourish of the finials which outline against the sky Bess’s coat of arms supported by the Hardwick and Cavendish stags surmounted by the Countess’s coronet and her initials “E S” for “Elizabeth Shrewsbury,” which was the the name of her fourth and now estranged husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury. On this unusually tall building, some of the high windows which are so impressive on the exterior actually are false, and others open into two floors of low-ceilinged rooms (Christopher Hussey, “Hardwick Hall,” Country Life 64 [December 1928] 809). Although born into the family of a squire in financial straits, Elizabeth rose through a series of ever more profitable marriages and dying husbands to the money and position which made the construction of Hardwick Hall possible.

A continuously dramatic approach to a great house involved careful design and great expense. Elizabeth’s favored courtier Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester, re-oriented the approach to Kenilworth, the ancient castle which had become his in 1563. His renovations took ten years in preparation before the queen’s nineteen-day visit, which cost 60,000 pounds (Margaret Williams, Department of Environment exhibition literature on site). Dugdale noted that Leicester “spared for no cost in enlarging, adorning and beautifying [Kenilworth]; witness that magnificent Gatehouse towards the North, where, formerly having been the backside, he made the Front” (I:249). (Slide 5).

Suitably impressed by the long traverse to the castle, visitors passed Leicester’s gatehouse, a structure whose battlements and turrets embodied the medieval structure of the ancient castle. The medievalized details also carried the added value of seemingly historically rooted security for Robert Dudley, scion of two ancestors condemned as traitors, his father and his grandfather. The classical details on the porch were, paradoxically, an avant garde style. Dudley’s initials were embossed on the arch. The architecture bespoke history, solidity, taste, and ambition. Visitors’ impressions thus bonded past historic solidity with Dudley’s forward-looking taste during their present time when they passed through Kenilworth as guests of the ambitiously upwardly noble Robert Dudley.

Those insistent initials of Bess and of Dudley set their interests worlds apart from the implicit symbolism of another contemporary series of gates, those at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge. John Caius there symbolized the student’s progress from the Gate of Humility, which John Summerson calls “a mere doorway in a low wall” (Architecture in Britain 1530 to 1830 5th rev. edn , Baltimore: 1970 [175]) through the Gate of Virtue (John Caius, 1567 Slide 6), and only then does a dedicated student merit passage through the Gate of Honour to the Senate House to receive his degree. (Slide 7). Whether exemplary of personal ambition or virtuous ideal, intentions of builders are embodied in the passage of the viewer.

Once past the gates of a great house, the visitor entered a courtyard which typically presented magnificent facades, perhaps none so grand as that at Kirby Hall (Slide 8). Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor and another of Elizabeth’s favorites, purchased Kirby from its owner Sir Humphrey Stafford in 1576. He installed the large windows which, together with the giant pilasters, would mark later Elizabethan style. Sir Christopher apparently completed such alterations in the interest of making the house more outward-looking by 1584 (John Howard and Robert Taylor, The Country Houses of Northamptonshire [Swindon: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1996] 245).

Nonetheless, and in spite of his huge expense at Kirby, Hatton rarely visited there, at most only every other year, preferring his house at Holdenby, also completed about 1583. He refers to Holdenby as his “other shrine . . . still unseen until that holy saint may sit in it, to whom it is dedicated” (Harris Nicolas, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton [London, 1847] 155). He refers to the queen, for whom we have no evidence of any visit to either costly property, although they were constructed with an eye to her presence.

Lord Burghley describes how the approach to Holdenby did indeed impart its imposing effect, “approaching to the house, being led by a large, long, straight fair way, I found a great magnificence in the front or front pieces of the house, and so every part answerable to the other, to allure liking” (Nicolas 126). We may note here the recurrence of the concept of magnificence in contemporary praise of Elizabethan art. Such magnificent elevations of house, lord, and visitors all came at great price, often paid at the expense of nearby inhabitants, as with the re-orienting of roads, demolition of buildings, and displacement of residents left homeless and jobless at both Kirby and Holdenby, where most likely the queen never visited.

Norden describes how the interior of Holdenby immediately reinforced the towering effect of the height of a great house. He echoes Hatton’s religious nuances, but it is rather the local gentry who are there enshrined: In the hall “are three peramides very high standinge insteade of a Shryne, the midst whearof ascendeth unto the Roofe of the Hawll, the other two equall with the syde Walls of the same Hawll, and on them are depainted the Armes of all the Gentlemen of the same Shire, and of all the Noblemen of this Lande” (49-50).

Inside a great house, the visitor was confronted by the screens passage, the point where a steward would once have separated the unsuitable goats from the admissible sheep, who were then admitted to the hall. (Slide 9) This view from the screen into the great hall at Hardwick Hall shows on the right a fireplace surmounted by the Cavendish arms, those of Bess’s second husband, Sir William Cavendish. Bess’s great hall was the first to depart from the medieval tradition which ran halls across the house. The new plan, running at a right angle from the front of the house, provided a dramatic first sweep through the depth of the house.

At the far end, one now sees two large embroidered hangings, two from a series of five worthy women originally placed in the withdrawing chamber upstairs (Lindsay Boynton and Peter Thornton, eds., “The Hardwick Hall Inventory of 1601,” Furniture History 7 (1971): 26-27). (Slide 10) The hanging on the left represents Penelope at her loom, flanked by Perseverance on her right and Patience on her left. This is one of three images of Penelope listed in the Hardwick inventory of 1601: this hanging, one of the few paintings in the house not a portrait, and the large Ulysses tapestries which Bess bought from Sir Christopher Hatton. (Slide 11) The hanging on our right shows Lucretia as she stabs herself, and, on her right, Chastity with her unicorn, and, on Lucretia’s left, Liberality with her cornucopia. Installed on the back of that screen are hangings which represent virtues and their contraries. All of these hangings are examples of primary female virtues in the contemporary ethic—chastity, patience, silence. Bess’s history as a hard-headed businesswoman and an argumentative wife suggests, though, that the works of art exemplified ideals more alive in her art than in her life.

As at Hardwick, the art works in the hall at Burton Agnes staged exemplary figures from the bible and some vernacular examples of their opposites. (Slide 12). The screens work (Slide 13 is unusual in its top heavy melange of the seven virtues sculpted at the top; in the next lower tier, angels, a crusading knight, and Elizabethan ladies in contemporary dress. In the narrow tier, again the knight in the center of the twelve apostles. In the tall tier at the bottom, the evangelists. In the dark carved tier are crowded representations of the twelve tribes of Israel. The relief translates some Flemish engravings into three dimensions and into some vernacular company (Olive Cook, The English Country House: An Art and a Way of Life [London: Thames and Hudson, 1974] 93 n. 89). On the alabaster carving over the fireplace on the right (Slide 14), the wise virgins on the left side spin and launder while the foolish virgins on the right party. As usual, at the end of the hall, the screen formed an induction into the pilgrimage through the more secluded floors to follow.

Staircases beyond the hall led to the upper floors devoted to bedrooms, withdrawing chambers, and spaces given to entertainment. (Slides 15,16) The great stone staircase at Hardwick Hall shows how dramatic that ascent could be with its interplay of light and shadow and its turnings toward new vistas. The ascent also raised the privileged visitor to the ceremonial spaces of the house, an ascent both kinetic and psychological.
(Slide 17)

The High Great Chamber at Hardwick was built to accommodate the hanging of the eight Brussels series of Ulysses tapestries (Marcel Roethlisberger, “The Ulysses Tapestries at Hardwick Hall,” GBA 79 [Jan-June 1972] 111) which Bess had bought two years before building her house. Again as in many rooms of the great houses, a coat of arms figures prominently over the fireplace, the royal arms, perhaps as a claim or a hope for privilege. (Slide 18)

The room is also busy with a frieze representing the court of Diana amid many animals. The frieze, like so much design in Elizabethan England, is drawn from Flemish design, here, by Martin de Vos (Cook 90). The Hardwick inventory lists 13 paintings originally in this room, including a set of portraits of Tudor monarchs. The huge dimensions of the room were clearly planned as an impressive setting for the installation of these works of art.

The gallery, a long room designed for exercise and leisure, occupied the top floor, and this is where, at last, the favored visitor might tour past a collection of paintings. (Slide 19) The gallery at Hardwick Hall still has its original tapestries and many of its paintings.

It is 26 feet high and 166 feet long, but not the longest one surviving--the gallery at Montecute is 180 feet long. Like the High Great Chamber, this long room also would have impressed visitors with its spacious installations of a frieze above the chimney pieces, tapestries, and paintings. Here, one chimney piece features Justice; the other is Mercy, in the tradition of combining function, moral instruction, and delight. The tapestries compete with the paintings where, now hung under paintings, they are largely hidden and indecipherable, adding to the dizzying kaleidoscope of images in the room.

The panoply of about 40 pictures, or half of Bess’s collection of paintings, so many skied virtually out of sight, overwhelms by their sheer number. Careful viewing of individual image cannot have been the intention, no more than was studied attention to the busy frieze in the Great High Chamber. Rather, the passing viewer is impressed with their great number and a general, gradual perception of the thematic relationship among the separate parts. The separate parts in galleries typically comprised series of portraits, often a set of the kings and queens of England, as at Theobalds, another great house of the Cecils, Elizabeth’s favored counselors, where, according to a contemporary description, the British monarchs hung in the company of emperors, beginning with Caesar. (Harold Spencer Scott, ed., “The Journal of Sir Roger Wilbraham,” Camden Miscellany, 3rd sers. [1902] vol. 4: 23).

Among the subjects of the many portraits in the Hardwick gallery are Bess herself, her third, and her fourth husbands. Others are portraits of family, friends, patrons, and persons favored by royalty such as William Cecil Lord Burghley, which accompany the preeminent portrait (Slide 20), Queen Elizabeth, stiff and static as on the Armada Portrait at the beginning of this talk. An unmoved mover, she stands rigid and immobile before her viewers as they move past, suitably moved and appropriately impressed by her magnificence and the company she keeps. Their pilgrimage, like ours, is complete.