Art, Power, and a Tiny Portrait
The Story is Never Fully Written
If you didn’t catch it in New York and you happen to be anywhere near Cleveland or San Francisco in the coming year, please go see the exhibition “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in the English Renaissance.” I saw it in January at the Met on a short side trip as I made my way to Philadelphia for the conference of the American Historical Association.
The curators have assembled an astounding collection of art and artifacts from across the reigns of the short-lived Tudor dynasty, which spanned the sixteenth century: Henry VII (the original Tudor monarch), Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors. Some of these objects have never been seen outside of the UK; some have never been displayed publicly at all as they belong to private collections whose owners generously donated them for this exhibition.
Almost three months on, I’m still thinking about it and, sucker that I am, I bought the gorgeous exhibition catalogue.
Oh, how “The Tudors” dazzled! This is exactly what the curators intended, if only to reflect the intentions of the Tudor monarchs themselves. As those familiar with the dynasty know well, the Tudors were all deeply insecure on their thrones. Not one of them, from the founding father Henry VII through to his granddaughter Elizabeth, possessed a failsafe claim to the English throne; Henry VII’s claim, to begin with, was extremely tenuous. But the Tudors were savvy media masters. They knew that art could serve as propaganda, propping up the right to power where bloodlines or birth legitimacy proved doubtful. A dynasty could be fabricated, as Henry VII realized. And majesty could be created. A sword offered one way to go about it. The other was with oil and paint, embroidery needle and silk thread.
I saw the exhibition on its penultimate day at the Met. I came early, happy to duck inside on a clear but brisk Manhattan day. It was morning, so the exhibition wasn’t yet busy, although within the hour the rooms started to fill up. Even so, there was a hush. I love the stillness that great art brings, even over a crowd.
It was easy to spend the whole morning in those few rooms. I wandered through, delighting in paintings that I knew from books and websites, but had never seen in person. Like this famous one of Queen Elizabeth I, holding a sieve, a symbol of virginity.
Some items were more familiar to me for other reasons, like this New Year’s roll registering gifts to Queen Elizabeth, which I had had the pleasure and privilege to see up close at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
But there was one picture I kept coming back to, a small one just a touch larger than 11x8 inches, the size of an American sheet of paper. I knew something of its complex history but seeing it in person reminded me just how often the stories we tell about the past can change almost overnight.
Like many a portrait of “an unknown lady,” the identity of this young woman was lost in the hundreds of years separating the sixteenth from the twentieth centuries. Then, in 1915, the German art historian Max J. Friedländer identified the sitter as the young Katherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII. Friedländer based his identification on the necklace the young woman wears. See the ‘K’s? They are set with pearls. There is also a jeweled ‘C’ ornamenting the neckline of her gown, standing perhaps for “Catalina” or “Catherine.” The young woman doesn’t look quite like other representations of Katherine, but the golden hair we see here is not unlike that of Katherine’s mother, Isabella of Castile.
Not everyone agreed with Friedländer’s 1915 identification, but his assessment came to be widely accepted. Then, nearly a century later and about a decade ago, scholars reassessed the portrait. Most now believe the sitter is in fact Henry VIII’s favorite sister, Mary Tudor, when she was a very young woman, before she married the French king Louis XII. When you gaze at the portrait with this latest identification in mind, doesn’t that golden hair seem to possess a reddish cast? It seems faintly reminiscent of the fiery hair associated with Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, even Mary I — something close to a Tudor trademark.
Such is the importance and power of new scholarship: it changes how we look at an image and how we understand a story. This newest scholarship wasn’t necessarily based on new information or a new discovery (unlike the recent decrypting of Mary Stuart’s letters that I wrote about last month). Instead, scholars took what they knew, reassessing the historical context and what was known about the likely artist, and looked at the painting with fresh eyes. A new story emerged.
And, with that new identification, I had to shift the story for myself. For years, whenever I read anything about Katherine of Aragon, I held this image of her in my mind. This portrait is how I imagined the teenaged Katherine when she first married Arthur Tudor (older brother of Henry), or when later, at twenty, she married Henry VIII. This is how I pictured her during the happy years of her marriage before she suffered her miscarriages and before Anne Boleyn appeared on the scene.
But now I see the red-tinged hair and think: of course!
There is something about this portrait that makes my heart go out to the young Mary Tudor. Those are indeed ‘K’s in that necklace, a “C’ at her neckline, and the new identification came in part from a re-interpretation of those letters. Before she was married to Louis XII of France, the young Mary Tudor was betrothed for almost ten years to the Hapsburg Spanish prince Charles who would eventually become Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. The ‘K’ and the ‘C’ stand for ‘Karolus’ or ‘Carolus’, the Latin versions of ‘Charles.’
Scholars date the portrait to around 1514, the year Mary was supposed to marry Charles. It was not uncommon in the sixteenth century for young royal and aristocratic girls, some just very young children, to adopt the clothing of their future husbands once they were betrothed.[1] Sure enough, in addition to the necklace, the young woman here appears to wear a gown and headdress fashionable among the Burgundian nobility of the time, a reference to the Hapsburgs. Mary was about ten years old when she was promised to Charles in 1506; she was eighteen when the wedding fell through. For most of her childhood, Mary believed she would become a Hapsburg and a future Queen of Spain. What life had she imagined for herself? What Burgundian and Spanish customs had she learned, and what costumes had she tried? What ideas had she conjured of her promised husband and his kingdom? How had she imagined her future?
In the Renaissance, betrothals often came and went, shifting according to politics. But this particular engagement lasted a long time, for almost the entirety of Mary’s adolescence, the same years her sense of self must have developed. Her betrothal must have colored that sense of self, and no doubt others treated her as befit the future Queen of Spain. Instead, ten years of practice and anticipation were turned upside down in a flash when the betrothal to Charles dissolved. And later that autumn, perhaps just months after this portrait was painted, Mary was on a boat sailing for France, an instrument in the most recent political play made by her brother, Henry VIII. Her marriage to King Louis XII of France lasted barely more than two months before Louis died, leaving Mary a young widow.
I can’t help but love this portrait even more now — the new identification makes it even more powerful and dynamic. The picture captures Mary as she was supposed to be, not what she in fact became. Unwittingly, the artist caught a “what could have been” moment, an episode in Mary’s life that history has now mostly forgotten.
And the story has changed for Katherine of Aragon, too. With this re-identification, we no longer possess any portrait that appears to depict the young Katherine. But perhaps, one day, a picture will emerge. In fact, maybe we’ve already seen it – we just don’t know what it is.
You can see “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England” at the Cleveland Museum of Art from February 26 until May 14. It will be in San Francisco, at the Legion of Honor, from June 24 through September 24. Some items were shown only in New York; unfortunately, the portrait of Mary above is among them. Other pieces are reserved exclusively for Cleveland and San Francisco. (Boo! Although now I’m tempted to travel to Cleveland and San Francisco just to see the new stuff, like a kind of Tudor exhibition groupie).
[1] See Marjorie E. Wieseman’s essay on this portrait in The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2022), 58-60.
This looks like a wonderful exhibition! And love that you are a groopie 😉