Visions of the Courtly Body: The Patronage of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, and the Triumph of Painting at the Stuart Court 9783050062556, 9783050059082

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Christiane Hille

Visions of the Courtly Body

Christiane Hille

Visions of the Courtly Body The Patronage of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, and the Triumph of Painting at the Stuart Court

Akademie Verlag

This Publication has been made possible by Funding from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Cover: Anthony van Dyck, Venus and Adonis, 1620/21, oil on canvas, 223.5 × 160 cm, Private Collection London, Courtesy of Derek Johns Ltd. Frontispiece: Peter Paul Rubens, George Villers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1625, black, red and white chalk and ink on paper, 38.3 × 26.7 cm, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© Akademie Verlag GmbH, Berlin 2012 A scientific publisher of the Oldenbourg publisher group. www.akademie-verlag.de

All Rights Reserved. Any use outside the limits of copyright and without the permission of the editor is prohibited and punishable. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming and storage or processing in electronic systems. Cover: pro:design, Berlin Layout: Petra Florath Printing and Binding: DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg GmbH, Altenburg This paper is resistant to ageing (DIN/ISO 9706). eISBN 978-3-05-006255-6 ISBN 978-3-05-005908-2

for Armin and my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

IX

Prologue ‘No painting ever bore Greater’: Hans Holbein’s Whitehall Mural and the Tradition of the English Icon Introduction

1 17

Chapter One Spatial Representations of the Royal Body at Court: The Masques of James I

39

A Kingdom for a Stage: The Jacobean Court Masque

41

‘Rul’d by a sunne’: James I as Centre of Masque and Cosmos

55

A Temple for Ancient Britain: Inigo Jones’s Whitehall Banqueting House

70

Chapter Two ‘The Devil take all of you, Dance!’: Bodily Distinction in the Jacobean Court Masque and Portrait Politics of Intimacy: The Role of the Minister Favourite at the Early Stuart Court

99 101

Fashioning the Male Courtly Body: Competitive Displays of Erotic Masculinity in the Court Masque

106

George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, as a Patron of the Masque

114

VII

Performances of the Painted Body: The Portrait Commissions of the Duke of Buckingham

119

Buckingham as a Collector of Painting and Sculpture

126

Image of Devotion: Buckingham’s Commission of Van Dyck’s ‘Venus and Adonis’

145

‘The most earnest lover of painting in the world’: Rubens’ Equestrian Portrait of Buckingham

175

Chapter Three ‘Antwerpian Rubens’ best skill made him soare’: The Duke of Buckingham and the Triumph of Painting at the Court of Charles I From Stage to Ceiling

189 197

Posthumous Portrait: Peter Paul Rubens’ ‘Banqueting House Ceiling’

197

Transcending the Masque: Peter Paul Rubens’ Ceiling for York House

207

The Triumph of Painting

227

Inaugurating the Picture-Plane: Thomas Carew’s ‘Coelum Britannicum’

240

The Royal Body in the Courtly Portrait

251

Appendices

259

List of Illustrations

268

Bibliography

272

Picture Credits

302

VIII

Acknowledgements This book was submitted as a PhD thesis to Humboldt-Universität Berlin in 2008. Many conversations have inspired the development of its argument and perspective. I am particularly grateful to my advisors Susanne von Falkenhausen and Werner Busch for their intellectual encouragement, insightful critique, perceptive questions and deadpan humour. In addition, I am profoundly grateful to John Murdoch, who sparked my interest in English art during my studies at the Courtauld Institute, London. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Horst Bredekamp, Ulrich Pfisterer, Gerhard Wolf, Frank Fehrenbach, Tim Barringer, Marcia Pointon and Kevin Sharpe provided opportunities for discussion and offered crucial feedback, which advanced the argument of this book and stirred inspiration beyond its completion. I owe particular thanks to the DFG-funded International Research Training Group Interart Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, especially its postdoctoral fellows Marcus Rautzenberg and Kristiane Hasselman; participation in the group discussions helped greatly with early draft chapters. A research grant from the Mellon Centre for British Art in London, and a fellowship at the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, provided opportunities for undisturbed research as well as fruitful discussion. I thank the directors Brian Allen and Amy Meyers for this opportunity. Particular gratitude is owed to the librarians and staff members of the Yale Centre of British Art, whose generous support and hospitality made my time there a very happy one. For their help and expertise, I am especially indebted to the librarians and archivists of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes, the British Library, the National Gallery London, the National Portrait Gallery London, the Tate Britain, the National Arts Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Library and the library and archive of Worcester College, Oxford. The publication of this book was made possible by a generous publication grant from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; for their support and patience in putting it to print with Akademie Verlag, I thank Martin Steinbrück, Jan McCann and Petra Florath. Most of all, I thank my parents: their help and understanding during the process of writing this book is just one example for their unconditional support in all my endeavours. Munich, May 2012

IX

PROLOGUE

‘No Painting ever bore Greater’:1 Hans Holbein’s Whitehall Mural and the Tradition of the English Icon

In 1604, a year after James VI, King of Scotland, had succeeded to the throne of Elizabeth I and, as King James I, had united the crowns of England and Scotland, Karel van Mander, the Flemish painter, poet and first biographer of Hans Holbein the Younger, was received at the king’s Privy Chamber at Whitehall Palace. Mander describes seeing the king, who ‘stood there, majestic in his splendour, (…) so lifelike that the spectator felt abashed, annihilated in his presence’.2 The king whose presence so impressed Mander, was, however, not James but Henry VIII, whose fulllength portrait had been painted, as a fresco, by Hans Holbein several decades earlier, in 1537. (Fig. 1) Situated comparatively low down on the wall, Holbein’s life-size portrait confronts its beholder at eye level.3 The Tudor king stands imposingly, legs astride, arms akimbo, against an elaborate background. His legs thrust into the ground, Henry carries the massive bulk of an enormous torso, which Holbein has made to

1 2 3

Quoted from the inscription on the altar depicted in Hans Holbein’s Whitehall Mural of 1537. See note 5. Quoted from: Henri Hymans [1584–1606]: Le Livre des Peintres de Carel van Mander, ND: Hissink, Amsterdam, 1979, p. 218. The mural’s position has long been debated. In 1967 Roy Strong suggested that it was set far above the ground on a gable either side of a window. Strong revised this idea in 1995, after Oliver Millar had convincingly argued that the mural was positioned only slightly above floor level, a hypothesis now generally agreed upon. See: Strong, Roy (1969): Holbein and Henry VIII, London: Routledge; Millar, Oliver (1978): Holbein and the Court of Henry VIII, Exh. Cat., London: The Queen’s Gallery; Strong, Roy (1995): The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy: Pageantry, Painting and Iconography, 3 vols., Woodbridge: Boydell Press; and, Brooke, Xanthe and David Crombie (2003): Henry VIII Revealed. Holbein’s Portrait and its Legacy, London: Holberton.

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Fig. 1: Remigius van Leemput, after Hans Holbein, Whitehall Mural, 1667

look even heavier by extending it over the width of the great niche that frames the composition from behind. Henry’s eyes meet the spectator’s gaze, while his face and body are set at a very slight diagonal, leaving the beholder with a distinct sense of power ready to break free. The tension is reinforced by Henry’s astute, square chin and his small, tight lips, implying a determination to rule. His sovereign power resides in his exaggerated figure and muscularity, which resonates in the ostentatious display of jewels, rings, richly set gemstones and weighty gold chains, for which Holbein probably used real gold leaf.4 As the first life-size portrait of an English monarch, Holbein’s Whitehall Mural marks a moment of dramatic change within the 4

For a detailed account of the techniques Holbein employed for the Whitehall Mural, see: Brooke (2003): op. cit., (above).

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tradition of dynastic portraiture. Having turned from Rome in 1534, when the Act of Supremacy established in law his new title of Supreme Head of the Church of England and abolished papal power in the kingdom, Henry was the first English monarch deliberately to fashion the image of his political body in painting. Holbein had been commissioned to provide a portrait of Henry VIII together with his third wife, Jane Seymour, that displayed the couple together with the king’s parents, Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York, for the king’s principal residence and seat of government, and in so doing the artist designed the definitive icon of English monarchy. In 1698 the fresco was lost in a fire that destroyed almost the entire palace, and it now survives only in its firmly modelled cartoon and in a much smaller copy on canvas by the Flemish artist Remigius van Leemput. Painted in 1667, the copy shows the two kings and queens before a classical, Italianate loggiastyle structure, flanking a great altar in the middle ground that bears a Latin inscription: If you enjoy seeing the illustrious figures of heroes, Look on these; no painting ever bore greater. The great debate, the competition, the great question is whether the Father Or the son is the victor. For both indeed are supreme. The former often overcame his enemies, and the fires of his country, And finally gave peace to its citizens. The son, born indeed for greater tasks, from the altar Removed the unworthy, and put worthy men in their place. To unerring virtue, the presumption of popes has yielded, And so long as Henry the Eighth carries the sceptre in his hand Religion is renewed, and during his reign

The doctrines of God have begun to be held in his honour.5 As historians concerned with the Tudor monarchy have frequently pointed out, this inscription connected Henry’s image with a violently anti-papal reign. Situated in Henry’s Privy Chamber, the principal ceremonial room in Whitehall Palace where 5

Holbein’s mural carries the inscription in Latin: SI IVVAT HEROVM CLARAS VIDISSE FIGURAS, / SPECTA HAS, MAIORES NVLLA TABELLA TVLIT. / CERTAMEN MAGNUM LIS, QVAESTIO MAGNA PATERNE, / FILIVS AN VINCAT VICIT – VTERQVE QVIDEM. / ISTE SVOS HOSTES PATRIAEQVE INCENDIA SAEPE / SVSTVLIT ET PACEM CIVIBVS VSQVE DEDIT. / FILIVS AD MAIORA QVIQEM PROCNATVS AB ARIS / SVBMOVET INDIGNOST SVBSTITVTIQVE PROBOS. / CERTAE VIRTVTI, PAPARUM AVDACIA CESSIT. / HENRICO OCTAVO SCEPTRA GERENTE MANV. / REDDITA RELIGIO EST, ISTO REGNANTE DEIQVE / DOGMATA CEPERVNT ESSE IN HONORE SUO.

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he received ambassadors and held court functions, Holbein’s fresco provided an impressive image of the Tudor King.6 Showing Henry as a commanding and confident ruler, Holbein had created a new image of the English monarch that enhanced his bodily authority and bolstered his claim to the notion that sovereignty was God’s earthly representative. Having already disposed of two wives, Henry’s claim to sovereign rule was based on his assertion of a fecund Tudor monarchy, which Holbein’s picture amply emphasises in the display of a fertile union, both past and future. Through his marriage to Elizabeth of York, Henry VII had reconciled with his enemy after the War of the Roses and had laid the foundation for a fruitful and successful dynasty. With his son, Henry VIII, the situation was different. Still lacking a male heir after two marriages, and with Princess Mary, his daughter with Katherine of Aragon, gaining support from the east Midlands and northern England, Henry was increasingly prone to open attacks, and he therefore needed to demonstrate his own sexual potency in order to maintain the authority of his rule. Creating an image of dynastic fecundity, Holbein’s picture confirms Henry’s right to sovereign rule by emphasising the king’s sexual power. His legs set apart, Henry stands upright with his codpiece prominently displayed in three-quarter profile. Deliberately lengthened in proportion to his torso, Holbein emphasises Henry’s muscular thighs and calves by contrasting them with the long skirts of the two women and the covered legs of Henry VII. The presence of the two women testifies to the legitimacy and permanence of the dynasty and also subtly underlines Henry’s dominant position. Neither woman engages the eye of the spectator. Their subservient position is reinforced by their inward-facing hand gestures. Within this exclusive view, Henry’s legs are rendered iconic, representing his ability to stay erect.7 Exposing the king’s legs as a symbol of his virility, Holbein’s picture provides a vision of absolute masculinity whose phallic dimension is further emphasised by Henry’s wide shoulder pads. Through the visual affirmation of the king’s power to procreate, Holbein promotes the king’s sexual body as constitutive of the power of the English monarchy. It is in this iconic rendering of royal fecundity that Henry’s portrait invites comparison with the famous images of Elizabeth I, which promoted her as the Vir6

7

For the structure of the English royal residence, see: Thurley, Simon (1999): Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments 1240–1698, New Haven: Yale University Press. The significance of the iconic leg in the visual construction of sovereign masculinity has been discussed in the context of the absolutist regime of Louis XIV. See: Zanger, Abby (1998): ‘Lim(b)inal Images. Betwixt and Between Louis XIV’s Martial and Marital Bodies’, in: Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg (eds.), From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 32–63.

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Fig. 2: George Gower, Elizabeth I, c. 1588

gin Queen.8 While Holbein’s representation of Henry’s monarchic role relied on the exaggeration of his masculine power, portraits of his daughter depended on the display of her sexually subdued self-containment. Louis Montrose, who was first to undertake a comparison of the images of the two rulers in English art, has pointed out that in the place corresponding to that of Henry’s prominent codpiece in the Whitehall Mural, George Gower’s famous Armada-Portrait from 1588 displays a 8

On the image of Elizabeth I, see: Strong, Roy (1987): Gloriana. Portraits of Elizabeth I, London: Pimlico; Belsey, Andrew and Catherine (1990): ‘Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I’, in: Lucy Gent (ed.), Renaissance Bodies. The Human Figure in English Culture, c. 1540–1660, London: Reaktion Books, pp. 11–35.

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giant pearl as emblem of Elizabeth’s chastity.9 (Fig. 2) The pearl’s emblematic significance has been re-emphasised by Andrew and Catherine Belsey, who point to its juxtaposition with the vast pearl of the queen’s headdress, which, linked by the nearvertical line of pearls that fasten Elizabeth’s bodice, connects her entitlement to sovereign rule to her chastity.10 Recompense of Elizabeth’s high-risk decision not to take a husband, and thereby to end Tudor succession, was the central concern of those portraits of the queen that at first maintained the possibility of marriage by depicting her as a fecund virgin, and later, when the laws of nature had made marriage futile, promoted Elizabeth’s virginity as the selfless abstention of a queen only devoted to her people. A decade earlier, Nicholas Hilliard, the queen’s personal painter and goldsmith, had presented a design for the iconography of Elizabeth’s selflessness and sacrifice in his Pelican Portrait, painted between 1572 and 1576. (Fig. 3) The canvas derives its name from the prominently displayed Pelican Badge on the front of the queen’s dress – a jewelled imprese that was one of the most valuable pieces of the Royal Jewel House. The bird plucks his breast in order to feed his fledglings with his own blood, serving as an emblem of the body of Christ who was sacrificed to offer spiritual nourishment to mankind, and here portrays the queen as a mother to her people. This iconography relates to the matching composition of Hilliard’s Phoenix Portrait, produced in the same period and showing the queen with the jewelled pendant of a phoenix in its burning nest. This unique and self-sufficient bird, embodying another trope of Elizabeth’s rule, amplifies her motto: semper eadem. Through the carefully orchestrated display of a jewel, the Pelican Portrait is paradigmatic of the portraiture of Elizabeth’s time, in which jewels, clothes, animals, furniture and other objects served as emblems of the sitter’s biography.11 The Elizabethan image promoted the art of the emblem over the art of illusion. Although illusionistic painting in the manner of Flemish realism was still practised at the late sixteenth-century English court, by the 1570s it had clearly fallen out of fashion and had given way to an emphasis on the depiction of dress and family coats of arms as an index of social identity. Still very much influenced by the art of heraldry, Elizabethan painting frequently employed heraldic insignia as symbolic ornament. The queen’s coat of arms replaced

9

10 11

See: Montrose, Louis Adrian (1986): ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, in: Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds.), Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 303–40. See: Belsey and Belsey (1990): op. cit., (note 8). For a detailed reading of the emblematics of Elizabethan painting, see: Ziegler, Georgianna (2005): ‘Devising a Queen: Elizabeth Stuart’s Representation in the Emblematic Tradition’, in: Emblematica, no. 14, pp. 155–79.

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Fig. 3: Nicolas Hilliard, Elizabeth I: The Pelican Portrait, c. 1573

images of Christ, while her portraits aimed to present an icon rather than a human figure, a Virgin Queen who embodies the virtuous focus of her masculine court and inspires her subjects to acts of gallantry and heroism.12 By suppressing her sexuality and rendering her likeness eternally youthful, these images repudiated the course of time. The Tudor queen was placed in a realm that was not bounded by the laws of 12

For the motive of Elizabeth as a warrior maiden, see: Warner, Marina (1987): Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, Berkeley: University of California Press; Berry, Philippa (1989): Of Chastity and Power. Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen, London: Routledge; Schleiner, Winfried (1978): ‘Divina Virago: Queen Elizabeth as Amazon’, in: Studies in Philology, vol. LXXV, pp. 163–80.

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nature, and that transcended those of the human sphere. Rather than depicting Elizabeth as an idealised queen, these paintings translated her likeness into a visual code that symbolically confirmed her claim on sovereign power. Under the reign of her half-brother, Edward VI, who had succeeded to the throne in 1547, the hostility of the iconoclasts had been focused particularly on religious statuary, which often displayed a vivid likeness to the human presence. Carried through the streets in ceremonial procession, it was perceived as the most ‘dangerous’ form of religious imagery. By removing the painted human figure from the churches, early iconoclasm, as in all of Protestant Europe, had effectively reduced painting to the genre of the portrait. Contrary to the iconoclastic purification of Zurich through the followers of Huldrych Zwingly, however, Edwardian Protestantism insisted that pictorial austerity would not reprieve the private displays of pictures in England’s houses.13 Those that were allowed to remain had to obstruct rather than enhance mimetic vision and illusion of presence, thus preventing the possibility that the beholder might be led to believe in some kind of divine or transsubstantiating communication with the image. Contrary to the persistent assumption that the isolation of the Elizabethan regime prevented the Italian tradition of perspective and chiaroscuro from settling in England, and that English artists were consequently engaged in inferior artistic practices, Elizabethan art treatises were concerned with the description of those painterly techniques that actively broke with mimetic illusion and emphasised the two-dimensional nature of the picture plane, as becomes apparent in the theoretical writings of Nicholas Hilliard.14 The painter of Elizabeth’s Pelican Portrait was a committed Protestant who regarded painting as a moral concept, and who based his justification for figurative art on ‘the truth of the line, (…) which is not shamed with the light, nor needs to be obscured’, while assigning shadow to the realm of betrayal, namely the betrayal of Christ by Judas, ‘the traitorous act done by the night’.15 In light of this doctrinaire understanding of line and shadow, the portraits of Elizabeth became progressively more remote from illusionism. Through

13 14

15

See: Aston, Margaret (1988): England’s Iconoclasts. Laws against Images, Oxford: Clarendon, p. 256. David Howarth has demonstrated how the Spanish invasion of the Netherlands resulted in an influx of immigrant Flemish painters to London, who brought with them a tradition of illusionistic painting that, however, did not satisfy their English patrons. Howarth, David (1997): Images of Rule. Art and Politics in the English Renaissance 1485–1649, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Andrew Stott has persuasively shown how Elizabethan images addressed their beholders through the practice of writing. See: Stott, Andrew (1997): ‘Henry Unton’s little Lives: Inscription and Suture in the Elizabethan Portrait’, in: Word and Image, vol. XIII, no. 1, pp. 1–22. Hilliard, Nicholas [1598]: Treatise concerning the Arte of Limning, ed. by R. K. R. Thornton and T. G. S. Cain, Ashington: Mid-Northumberland Arts Group, 1981, p. 85, 89.

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the substitution of pattern for substance, the portrait of the queen promoted an ethically and politically defined visualisation rather than an image of her human figure, rendering her as an ageless icon of perpetual sovereign power. With her body reduced to an array of textile emblems, Elizabeth’s face became the mask of majesty, standing out against the darkness of her dress or the background, like the sun against the darkness of the universe. Mary E. Hazard has remarked upon this iconic representation of the queen under a mask of youth and beauty, and has drawn attention to the legal fiction lying beneath it: if the monarch never dies, he or she also never ages.16 The representation of Elizabeth as unaltered by time was essential to maintain the illusion of her sovereignty. Her portraits began to dismantle her body into a complex composition of circles and semicircles that recall the spheres of the universe. This geometricised, fragmented representation of Elizabeth culminated in Marcus Gheeraerts’ Rainbow Portrait from 1600. (Fig. 4) Elizabeth’s face, with its conspicuously circular forehead and round wig, is surrounded by a number of spherical ruffs and veils, conveying an animated presentation of the queen who appears as the still centre, the unmoved mover of a mysterious, multi-layered cosmos of power. Elizabeth grasps a rainbow with her right hand, which emphasises her proximity to divine power. The rainbow – symbol of God’s reminder of the eternal covenant between Him and mankind – serves as an emblem to further convey the queen as signifier of the presence of God.17 Its line draws attention to another detail of the portrait that has been the subject of intense debate: the peculiar depiction of single eyes and ears on Elizabeth’s cloak, facing the beholder. Long understood to signify fame, this cloak has been compared with that of Henry Peacham’s emblematic figure of the Reason of State from his 1612 Minerva Britanna.18 As Strong points out, Peach16

17

18

See: Hazard, Mary E. (1990): ‘The Case for “Case” in Reading Elizabethan Portraits’, in: Mosaic, vol. XXIII, pp. 61–88. As has been widely acknowledged, the question of whether Elizabeth’s sovereign identity inhered in the queen or only in her Mask of Beauty has formed the subject of Shakespeare’s Richard II, the printing of which the Tudor queen censored during her lifetime. For a discussion of this context, see: Ure, Peter (1955): ‘The LookingGlass of Richard II’, in: Philosophical Quarterly, vol. XXXIV, pp. 219–24; and, Stoichita, Victor (1986): ‘Imago Regis: Kunsttheorie und königliches Porträt in den Meninas von Velázquez, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. XLIX, no. 1, pp. 165–89. The most detailed analysis of the rainbow has been given by: Fischlin, Daniel (1997): ‘Political Allegory, Absolutist Ideology, and the Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I’, in: Renaissance Quarterly, vol. L, no. 1, pp. 175–206. For further discussion of the rainbow in relation to Marian symbolism, see: Diehl, Huston (1986): An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books. 1500– 1700, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. See: Strong (1987): op. cit., (note 8). For an interpretation of the eyes and ears as symbols of fame, see: Yates, Frances Amalia (1975): Astraea. The Imperial Theme of the Sixteenth Century, London: Routledge. Strong equally rebuts the suggestion of René Graziani, who, alluding to Matthew 13:16–17 (‘Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they

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am’s emblem is itself an imitation of the figure of Gelosia in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, of which the epigram reads: ‘Be seru’d with eies, and listening eares of those / Who can from all partes giue intelligence / To gall his foe, or timely to prevent / At home his malice, and intendiment [intent]’.19 Daniel Fischlin has addressed Strong’s reference from within a political context and has convincingly demonstrated that the eyes and ears allude to the watchful gaze of the sovereign, who ‘watches and listens vigilantly, seeing from all perspectives, hearing in all directions’.20 It is this scopic dominance, characteristic for the all-seeing, all-knowing condition of the god-like ruler, that the Rainbow Portrait seeks to convey via the symbolism of Elizabeth’s cloak. Although the queen is the object of the beholder’s gaze, the portrait ultimately embraces its beholder in the political implication of its emblematic symbolism. Through the promotion of this scopic dominance, the Rainbow Portrait stands paradigmatically for the way in which the portraits of Elizabeth effected a consistent dynamic between the sovereign and her subjects, maintaining the divide between the observer and her observed – even in painted representation. Elizabethan imperial ideology, within which the queen is represented in a position of all-embracing dominance, relied on Aristotelian theory and its medieval and Renaissance iconographic tradition. Gower’s Armada Portrait expresses the queen’s supremacy through manifold allusions to the maritime power of her fleet, which had devastated the galleons of the Spanish Armada, and crystallises its imperial theme in the depiction of Elizabeth controlling the globe under her right hand. Her fingers, as Roy Strong has skilfully illustrated, obscure the continent of America, where, by 1588, a colonial outpost had established the foundation of the British Empire in the hear’), suggests that the Queen is wearing the cloak like a blessing that denotes her exemplary status as a Christian. See: Granziani, René (1972): ‘The Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary’, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. XXXV, pp. 247–59. 19 Strong (1987): op. cit., (note 8), p. 159. 20 See: Fischlin (1997): op. cit. (note 17), p. 183. Fischlin here extends a reading of the cloak given before in: Kelley, Francis M. (1944): ‘Queen Elizabeth and her Dresses’, in: Connoisseur, vol. CXIII, no. 2, pp. 71–9. Fischlin has summarised several additional readings of Elizabeth’s cloak that are of no relevance to the discussion above, relating to the construction of the queen’s sexual identity in her portraits. Pointing towards ‘an exceptionally pornographic ear over Queen Elizabeth’s genitals’ and ‘the dildo-like rainbow clasped so imperially by the Virgin Queen’, Joel Fineman has understood the picture to display a ‘fetishistic principle of sovereign power’. See: Fineman, Joel (1991): The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Towards the Release of Shakespeare’s Will, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 228. Arguing along a similar line, Susan Frye puts forward a reading of the eyes and ears as suggestions of ‘vaginal openings combined with a sense of governmental surveillance’. See: Frye, Susan (1993): Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 102–3.

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Fig. 4: Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Elizabeth I The Rainbow Portrait, c. 1600

New World.21 Rather than being indebted to the concrete political reference of the painting alone, the presence of the globe in the Armada Portrait is closely related to a woodcut diagram dating from the same year, in which the queen, imperial crown on her head, is shown presiding over the outer sky, the primum mobile, and embracing the nine concentric spheres illustrating the Ptolemaic system of the universe.22 The image forms the frontispiece of John Case’s Sphaera civitatis and shows the earth 21 22

See: Strong (1987): op. cit., (note 8). This connection was first pointed out by Roy Strong, in his 1987 Gloriana, see note 8.

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at the centre, labelled as Justitia Immobilis, consecutively enclosed by the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, each indicated by its astronomical symbol and its corresponding virtue: Ubertas Rerum, Facundia, Clementia, Religio, Fortitudo, Prudentia and Majestas.23 (Fig. 5) The seven celestial orbs are encompassed by the eighth sphere of the fixed stars, labelled as the Councillor of Elizabeth’s Star Chamber, which itself is enclosed in an outermost sphere inscribed with the official title of the queen: Elizabetha D(eum) G(ratium) Angliae, Franciae et Hiberniae Regina Fidei Defensatrix. This last sphere relates to the outermost moveable sphere, the primum mobile, which, according to the medieval notion of the universe, enclosed the unity of all things, and is moved by a single prime mover, the primus motor.24 As used in medieval scholasticism, the notion of the prime mover, here ascribed to Elizabeth, was understood to cause movement without itself being in motion. The existence of such an entity was asserted in relation to an analogy with the phenomena of nature, and the primus motor was regarded as devoid of potentiality; a motionless prime mover which must either be moved by itself or not move at all, and thus cannot simultaneously be a cause of motion and be in motion. In the fourteenth century, Thomas of Strasbourg abandoned the Aristotelian conviction that only moveable spheres could exist, and declared that this outermost moveable sphere of the unmoved mover was comprised of an immobile orb that existed beyond all the mobile orbs.25 Elizabeth’s position as prime mover of the spheres is quite unusual. A diagram of the celestial spheres by Petrus Apianus, taken from his Cosmographicus liber, which was first published in 1524, inscribes this immobile sphere as the empyrean heaven, Coelum Empirre Um Habitacu Lum Dei e Omnium Electorum – the dwelling place of God and all the elect – which must be immobile because immobility is the only appropriate state for the blessed, who themselves are in a perfect state of rest. Shielding the spheres under her cloak in reference to the iconography of the Madonna della misericordia, Elizabeth is represented as regina universi while simultaneously exerting her beneficial influence and supreme power over state and cosmos.26 Two decades later, under the reign of Elizabeth’s successor 23 24

25 26

John Case, Sphaera civitatis; Hoc est; Reipublicae recte ac pie secundum leges administrandae ratio, Oxford, 1588. The definitive analysis of the medieval and Renaissance understanding of the universe has been given by: Grant, Edward (1994): Planets, Stars, and Orbs. The Medieval Cosmos, 1200– 1687, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See: Edward Grant’s chapter on the ‘Immobile Orb’, in: idem (1994): op. cit., (above), pp. 371–89. The iconography familiar from spiritual paintings of the Madonna della misericordia has been noted before by Louis Montrose, who relates the motive to Elizabeth’s last speech made before Parliament in 1601, wherein the queen described herself as ‘A taper of trewe virgin waxe to waste my self and spend my life that I might give light and comfort to those

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Fig. 5: John Case, Sphaera civitatis: Hoc est; Reipublicae recte ac pie secundum leges administrandae raetio, 1588

King James I, Robert Fludd’s 1617 diagram of the Cosmic Monochord depicts God’s hand, reaching out from the cloud and turning the universe. Through the powerful ideological move of redirecting practices generated from the cult of the Virgin Mary towards her hypostatic self as the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth completed the transformation of the Church of England into a political entity and reflection of monarchy as it had been initiated by her father, and in so doing created a national institution to which all loyal English people, regardless of their religion, owed allegiance. that lived under me’. See: Montrose (1986): op. cit, (note 9), p. 334. For a thorough treatment of this tradition in English art, see: Duffy, Eamon (1992): The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580, New Haven: Yale University Press.

13

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Fig. 6: Anthony van Dyck, Charles I in the Hunting Field, 1635

While Holbein’s fresco of Henry VIII had aspired to convey monarchic power by a particularly credible illusion of his physical presence, this very illusion was considered inappropriate for an effective expression of the queen’s sovereign dignity. Portraits of the Tudor queen promoted her as an unchanged, ageless icon, and were fashioned not as her image but as the medium carrying the imprint of her sovereign power. Significantly, the Hilliardian doctrine of the truth of the line thus allowed 14

PROLOGUE | The Tradition of the English Icon

for an iconic paradigm that promoted the portrait of Elizabeth in association with a theological understanding of the image as a reflection (Abbild) outlined on a neutral substance that holds no existence in itself. Designed to dissolve in the presence of its sitter, the portrait of Elizabeth became the icon of the queen’s supposedly immortal power. Elizabeth had comprehended the power that sprang from the counterfeit presence in Holbein’s image of her father, and exploited the illusion of her painted presence to the point where the image diminished into a sacrament of her sovereignty that rejected any notion of representation. It has repeatedly been claimed for the history of the English royal portrait that Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII surpassed that of any other sovereign after him until Anthony van Dyck painted Charles I in the mid-seventeenth century. Celebrated by art-historical scholarship as the most finely tuned portrait of a seventeenth-century monarch, Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I in the Hunting-Field from 1635 shows the king taking a short rest from the hunt. (Fig. 6) Charles, standing on a subtly orchestrated hillside that opens up into an expansive view over the English countryside, seems to be turning his head at the very moment when our eyes approach the scene and see the king not only in perfect command, but also expressing calm curiosity regarding the reason for this interruption of a moment of private leisure. Showing neither of his two attendants conversing with their master, the scene is as carefully arranged as a stage set that Charles has just entered, in order to enjoy a silent dialogue with nature. Illustrating the unique position of the English sovereign, the horse, itself correctly proportioned, but reduced in size in order not to dominate the figure of the king, paws the ground subserviently, while the trees above Charles’s head seem to form a natural canopy, below which he is raised up on a natural pulpit above the spectator.27 Van Dyck’s portrait of the second Stuart king asserts its representation in the very act of distancing itself from the material of its production, thereby deliberately revealing the polysemic interplay of opacity and transparency that constitutes any painted representation. In its conscious display of royal presence as something that is evoked by the art of illusion, Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I thus exhibits an understanding of representation that stands opposed to 27

My brief account of the painting is indebted to these much more thorough discussions: Brown, Christopher (1982): Van Dyck, Oxford: Phaidon; Hennen, Insa Christiane (1995): Karl zu Pferde. Ikonologische Studien zu Anton van Dycks Reiterporträts Karls I. von England, Frankfurt/Main: Lang; Howarth (1997): op. cit., (note 14); Johns, Christopher (1988): ‘Politics, Nationalism and Friendship in Van Dyck’s Le Roi à la chasse’, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. LI, pp. 243–61; Moffitt, John F. (1983): ‘Le Roi à la chasse? Kings, Christian Knights, and Van Dyck’s Singular “Dismounted Equestrian-Portrait” of Charles I’, in: Artibus et Historiae, vol. IV, pp. 79–99. For a detailed reassessment, see: Hille, Christiane (2012): ‘England’s Apelles and the sprezzatura of Kingship: Anthony Van Dyck’s Charles I in the Hunting-Field Reconsidered’, in: Artibus et Historiae, no. 65, pp. 151–66.

15

PROLOGUE | The Tradition of the English Icon

the Elizabethan notion of the royal image as rejecting any notion of representation. Aware of its ability to re-present the presence of the Stuart king, Van Dyck’s image of Charles I presents the absolute royal portrait, addressing its beholder, as Louis Marin first put it, by saying: Le Roi, c’est moi.28 The portraits of Elizabeth and Charles present two completely different notions of the royal image and, as such, provoke a number of questions regarding the nature and significance of the painted image in English court culture at the turn of the seventeenth century. It is my contention that the processes briefly sketched here came about as a result of an epistemological change in the perception of representation at the early seventeenth-century English court, which is the subject addressed in the following chapters.

28 See: Marin, Louis (1995): Philippe de Champaigne ou la présence cachée, Paris: Hazan. For a detailed discussion see Chapter One.

16

Introduction

State portraits of James I, King of England, Scotland and Wales from 1603 to 1625, seem to lag far behind those of his predecessor, Elizabeth I, and of his son, Charles I. Even the stateliest of his portraits, Paul Van Somer’s James I from 1619, shows the king in a somewhat antiquated manner, standing in full apparel in front of a window that opens onto a perspective view of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House. (Fig. 7) The building, which introduced the Palladian manner to English architecture, is, in fact, the only modern element in the iconography of the king’s portrait. James was well known for his extensive learning and his love of books, but far less so for his patronage of the visual arts – a fact that has led to a general neglect, particularly by art historians, of the study of his court and its culture. Instead, their attention has focused on the paintings and sculptures collected by James’s son, Charles I, who, during the 24 years of his ill-fated reign from 1625 to 1649, assembled the largest and most significant royal art collection of his time. In light of his father’s relative indifference towards the fine arts, Charles’s enthusiasm for painting seems unexpected. It has been argued that this enthusiasm arose from a fashion for princely collecting that emulated the imposing art collections on the Continent; such collections had already sparked the interest of Charles’s elder bother Henry, the late Prince of Wales, whose untimely death in 1612 has sometimes been regarded as marking the end of all encouragement of the arts at the English court in the first decades of the seventeenth century.1 This study, however, takes a different view of the state of the visual arts during the reign of James I. It refers in particular to the collecting and patronage of one of the king’s closest advisers, George Villiers, the First Duke of Buckingham, whose 1

See: Toynbee, Margaret (1949): ‘A Portrait called “Henry, Prince of Wales”’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. LXXVI, no. 550, pp. 21–2; Strong, Roy (1986): Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance, London: Thames and Hudson; Wilks, Timothy (1997): ‘Art Collecting at the English Court from the Death of Henry, Prince of Wales to the Death of Anne of Denmark’, in: Journal of the History of Collections, vol. IX, no. 1, pp. 31–48.

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Fig. 7: Paul van Somer, King James I and VI, 1619

18

Introduction

portraits, commissioned from masters such as Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens between 1620 and 1628, surpassed those of any other Englishman at the time, and, as this study argues, significantly changed the English court’s perception of the painted image. Although Villiers was a central figure in national and international politics under both the Jacobean and the Caroline eras, little has been written on the man who began his courtly career as James’s cupbearer in 1616 and quickly ascended through the ranks and titles of the Jacobean elite until, in 1624, he became principal minister of the English Crown, laying the foundation not only for Charles’s politics after 1625, but also for his taste in the collecting and commissioning of painting. Of the few historians to examine Buckingham’s role as personal and political favourite of two successive English monarchs, none has paused to discuss his career as a collector and patron of the arts, concentrating instead on his role in the increasing separation of both James and Charles from their subjects in questions of domestic and international politics.2 Historians concerned with the history of early modern collecting in England have preferred to study the careers of other, more eminent, collectors of the early Stuart court, considering Buckingham’s role as a patron of painting and sculpture as that adopted by an arriviste to the inner circles of court society.3 These studies have emphasised the fact of Buckingham’s untitled lineage and have confined his role to that of the parvenu who aspires to the style of his social betters, thereby underestimating the significance of a man who assembled

2

3

See: Sharpe, Kevin (1992): The Personal Rule of Charles I, New Haven: Yale University Press; and, idem (1987): Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The account of Philipp Fehl is representative of the unquestioned assumption that Buckingham was principally a mindless art collector: ‘… what for Arundel was an earnest persuasion, for Buckingham, it appears, was more readily a matter of prestige and competition for first place on all counts in the affection of the art-loving king.’ Fehl, Philipp P. (1981): ‘Franciscus Junius and the Defence of Art’, in: Artibus et Historiae, no. 3, pp. 9–55, p. 15. Arguing in the same vein is Robert Hill: ‘… with the Duke of Buckingham, there is no evidence that [he] was a connoisseur himself or played any important part in the formation of his collection.’ See: Hill, Robert (2003a): ‘The Ambassador as Art Agent: Sir Dudley Carleton and Jacobean Collecting’, in: Edward Chaney (ed.), The Evolution of English Collecting: The Reception of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, Studies in British Art XII, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 240–55, p. 243. For similar accounts, see: Parry, Graham (1981): The Golden Age Restor’d. The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–1642, Manchester: Manchester University Press; Brown, Jonathan (1995): Kings and Connoisseurs. Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press; and, Howarth, David (1997): Images of Rule. Arts and Politics in the English Renaissance 1485–1649, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

19

Introduction

one of the principal English art collections of his time, and who greatly influenced the taste and patronage of two monarchs. Early modern English collecting is still largely associated with the name of Thomas Howard, the 21st Earl of Arundel, who is commonly acknowledged to have guided his countrymen in taste and collecting.4 The erudite earl, whose attachment to the art of classical antiquity has been amply discussed in studies of early modern collecting, has emerged as the figurehead of a particular art-historical discourse begun by men like Jonathan Richardson, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, and John Ruskin, which celebrates the history of English connoisseurship and promotes collecting as ‘an education in taste for the nation’.5 Arundel’s

4

5

See: Sutton, Denys (1947): ‘Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, as a Collector of Drawings’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. LXXXIX, no. 526, pp. 3–9, 32–7, 75–7; Howarth, David (1985a): Lord Arundel and His Circle, New Haven: Yale University Press; Howarth, David (1985b): Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel: Patronage and Collecting in the SeventeenthCentury, Exh. Cat., Oxford: Ashmolean Museum; Fletcher, Jennifer (1996): ‘The Arundels in the Veneto’, in: Apollo, vol. CXLIV, no. 414, pp. 63–9; Jaffé, David (1996): ‘The Earl and Countess of Arundel: Renaissance Collectors’, in: Apollo, vol. CXLIV, no. 414, pp. 3–35; Scarisbrick, Diana (1996): ‘The Arundel Gem Cabinet’, in: Apollo, vol. CXLIV, no. 141, pp. 45–8; Howarth, David (2002): ‘The Arundel Collection: Collecting and Patronage in England in the Reigns of Philip III and Philip IV’, in: Jonathan Brown (ed.), The Sale of the Century: Artistic Relations between Spain and Great Britain, 1604 – 1655, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 69–86; Gilman, Ernest B. (2003): Recollecting the Arundel Circle: Discovering the Past, Recovering the Future, New York: Lang; Roberts, Jane (2003): ‘Thomas Howard, the Collector Earl of Arundel and Leonardo’s Drawings’, in: Edward Chaney (ed.), The Evolution of English Collecting: Receptions of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 256–83; Angelicoussis, Elizabeth (2004): ‘The Collection of Classical Sculptures of the Earl of Arundel, “Father of Virtue in England”’, in: Journal of the History of Collections, vol. XVI, no. 2, pp. 143–59. The quote is from: Orgel, Stephen (2000): ‘Idols of the Gallery: Becoming a Connoisseur in Renaissance England’, in: Peter Erickson (ed.), Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 251–83. For the topos of the Connoisseur in English art historical writing, see: Richardson, Jonathan (1972): The Connoisseur: An Essay on the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting, repr. in: The Works of Jonathan Richardson, London: Egerton, pp. 103–71; Sumner, Ann (1989): ‘Sir John Charles Robinson: Victorian Collector and Conoisseur’, in: Apollo, vol. CXXX, no. 341, pp. 226–30; Lloyd, Stephen (1991): ‘Richard Cosway, RA: The Artist as Collector and Connoisseur and Virtuoso’, in: Apollo, vol. CXXXIII, no. 352, pp. 398–405; Exh. Cat. (1995): Soane: Connoisseur and Collector. A Selection of Drawing from Sir John Soane’s Collection, London: Sir John Soane’s Museum; Burn, Lucilla (1997): Sir William Hamilton, Collector and Connoisseur, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Cowan, Brian (1998): ‘Arenas of Connoisseurship. Auctioning Art in Later Stuart England’, in: Michael North and David Ormrod (eds.), Art Markets in Europe. 1400–1800, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 153–66; Wessely, Anna (2000): ‘The Knowledge of an Early

20

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significance in the history of early modern collecting derives from the fact that he remains the earliest-known English connoisseur to have built a separate structure for the display of his antique sculptures and busts at Arundel House on the Strand, next door to Somerset House, the palace of the queen. The two-storey gallery has been recognised from the background of a pair of portraits by Daniel Mytens that display the earl and his wife Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel, in front of the building’s upper and lower storeys.6 (Figs. 8 & 9) The gallery was erected as an additional wing to the medieval structure of Arundel House by Inigo Jones after his return from Italy, where the architect had accompanied his patron on a journey lasting several months that took them as far as Naples and introduced them to the architecture of Palladio.7 The new building was designed to reach into the garden, where

6

7

Eighteenth-Century Connoisseur: Shaftesbury and the Fine Arts’, in: Acta historiae atrium, vol. XLI, pp. 279–309; Plampin, Matthew (2005): ‘“A Stern and Just Respect for Truth”: John Ruskin, Giotto, and the Arundel Society’, in: Visual Culture in Britain, vol. VI, no. 1, pp. 59–78; Mount, Harry (2006): ‘The Monkey with the Magnifying Glass: Constructions of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in: Oxford Art Journal, vol. XXIX, no. 2, pp. 169–84. Mytens’ portrait pair has been studied most thoroughly by: Novikova, Anastassia (2004): ‘Virtuosity and Declensions of Virtue: Thomas Arundel and Alethea Talbot seen by Virtue of a Portrait Pair by Daniel Mytens and a Treatise by Franciscus Junius’, in: Jan de Jong (ed.), Virtus: virtusiteit en kunstliefhebbers in de Nederlanden. 1500–1700, Zwolle: Waanders, pp. 308–33. On Arundel’s significance for the history of the English art museum, see: Impey, Oliver and MacGregor, Arthur (2001): The Origins of the Museum. The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe, Oxford: Clarendon Press; MacGregor, Arthur (1983): ‘Collectors and Collections of Rarities in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in: idem (ed.), Tradescant’s Rarities. Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum 1683, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 70–97; Waterfield, Giles (1993): ‘The Development of the Early Art Museum in Britain’, in: Per Bjurström (ed.), The Genesis of the Art Museum in the Eighteenth Century, Stockholm: Nationalmuseum Stockholm, pp. 81–111; Miller, Edward (1974): That Noble Cabinet. A History of the British Museum, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press; Waterfield, Giles (1991): Palaces of Art. Art Galleries in Britain 1790–1900, London: Dulwich Picture Gallery; Taylor, Brandon (1999): Art for the Nation, London: Manchester University Press; Barlow, Paul and Trodd, Colin (2000): Governing Cultures. Art Institutions in Victorian London, Aldershot: Ashgate; Pointon, Marcia (1994): Art Apart. Art Institutions and Ideology across England and Northern America, Manchester: Manchester University Press; Prior, Nick (2002): Museums and Modernity. Art Galleries and the Making of Modern Culture, Oxford and New York: Berg. It needs to be pointed out here that the first recorded use of the term Grand Tour, which became a typical occupation of privileged young Englishmen in the eighteenth century, is Richard Lassels’ The Voyage of Italy, posthumously published in 1670. For a good introduction, see: Brennan, Michael G. (2004): The Origins of the Grand Tour: The Travels of Robert Montagu, Lord Mandeville (1649–1654), William Hammond (1655–1658), Banaster Maynard (1660–1663), London: The Hakluyt Society; Stoye, John (1989): English travellers

21

Introduction

Fig. 8: Daniel Mytens, Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, 1618

22

Introduction

Fig. 9: Daniel Mytens, Alathea Talbot, Countess of Arundel, 1618

23

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the earl displayed his collection of life-size Greek marbles.8 Opening his gallery to travellers, scholars, connoisseurs and artists, Arundel cultivated a public display of his cultural refinement that has been understood to form the origin of the history of the art museum in England. His hospitality to King Charles and Henrietta-Maria, as well as to foreign dignitaries who documented the splendour of his collection in their reports home, is generally cited as evidence of the collection’s superiority over all others in England at the time, including that of Buckingham. Most of these prominent visits, however, took place in the years after Buckingham’s death in 1628.9 Arundel certainly cultivated his identity as a connoisseur and patron of arts and learning, and established himself as ‘the father of virtue in England’ – a title first proclaimed by Horace Walpole and still highly resonant in art-historical scholarship. As a collector of ancient sculptures, gems and Italian masterpieces of the Renaissance, Arundel emerged as England’s first connoisseur, a figure who certainly pursued the practice of collecting for aesthetic reasons, but who also possessed a profound interest in the recovery and preservation of the past, who aspired to become knowledgeable about history more generally, and who established connoisseurship as the attribute of the gentleman, whose noble status is marked as much by his good taste as by his high lineage. The concept of gentlemanly connoisseurship has thus evolved as one that opposed the kind of collecting undertaken by Buckingham, whose interest in painting and sculpture has been categorised under the much broader notion of ‘Stuart Court Patronage’; this regards the history of the purchase and gift-giving of art as a means of political advancement, as undertaken by men like Robert Carr, the Earl of Somer-

8

9

abroad, 1604 – 1667. Their Influence in English Society and Politics, New Haven: Yale University Press; and, Chaney, Edward (1998): The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural-Relations since the Renaissance, London: Cass. For accounts of travels comparable to Jones’s, i.e. John Donne’s passage through Italy and Spain, and Arundel’s revisitation of the Continent in company of the physician William Harvey in 1636, see: Bald, R. C. (1970): John Donne: A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Keynes, Geoffrey (1966): The Life of William Harvey, Oxford: Clarendon. On the marble collection of the Earl of Arundel, see: Peacock, John (1986): ‘Inigo Jones and the Arundel Marbles’, in: Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol. XVI, pp. 75– 90. And for a short history of their arrival in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Vickers, Michael (2006): The Arundel and Pomfred Marbles in Oxford, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. According to Mary Hervey, Joachim von Sandrart visited Arundel House repeatedly in 1627, while the earl entertained the royal couple twice, once in 1628 and again in 1637. The visits of Abram Booth, delegate of the Dutch East India Company, took place in 1629, and the papal nuncios Panzani and Conn were received in 1634. See: Hervey, Mary (1921): The Life, Correspondence, and Collection of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 255–6, and 398–400.

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set, or Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, in order to enhance their interests at court.10 Both Somerset and Salisbury acquired the paintings and sculptures of their collections from men like William Trumbull and Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassadors to the Spanish Netherlands and the Serene Republic of Venice respectively, who between 1609 and 1625 provided English collectors with works of art as a means of promoting their own political positions while abroad.11 The role of the ambassador as art agent has predominantly been explored in relation to his importance in the evolution of English collecting, and has been examined in those studies that explore the value of paintings, drawings and sculpture in the emerging art market of the early seventeenth century, rather than focusing on the subject matter of the paintings or on the motives of their buyers.12

10

See: Levy Peck, Linda (1990): Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England, Boston: Unwin Hyman; Maccafrey, Wallace (1991): ‘Patronage and Politics and the Tudors’, in: Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 48–76; Bracken, Susan (2002): ‘Robert Cecil as Art Collector’, in: Pauline Croft (ed.), Patronage, Culture and Power: The Early Cecils. 1558–1612, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 121–38; Braunmuller, A. R. (1991): ‘Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, as Collector and Patron’, in: Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 230–50; Seddon, P. R. (1970): ‘Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset’, in: Renaissance and Modern Studies, vol. XIV, pp. 48–68. 11 See: Hill, Robert (2003b): ‘Ambassadors and Art Collecting in Early Stuart Britain: The Parallel Careers of William Trumbull and Sir Dudley Carleton’, in: Journal of the History of Collections, vol. XV, no. 2, pp. 211–28; and, idem (2003a): op. cit., (note 3); Howarth, David (1994): ‘William Trumbull and Art Collecting in Jacobean England’, in: British Library Journal, vol. XX, no. 2, pp. 140–62. 12 Burke, Peter (1988): ‘Art, Market and Collecting in Early Modern Europe’, in: Ján Bakoš (ed.), Artwork through the Market: The Past and the Present, Bratislava: VEDA, pp. 71–8; De Marchi, Neil (1994): ‘Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century’, in: The Art Bulletin, vol. LXXVI, pp. 451–64; Portier, François (1996): ‘Prices Paid for Italian Pictures in the Stuart Age’, in: Journal of the History of Collections, vol. VIII, no. 1, pp. 53–69; Maijer, Bert W. (2000): ‘Italian Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Art Market, Art Works and Art Collections’, in: Max Seidel (ed.), L’Europa e l’arte italiana, Venice: Marsilio, pp. 376–417; Vermeylen, Filip (2003): Painting for the Market: Commercialisation of Art in Antwerp’s Golden Age, Turnhout: Brepols; Goldthwaite, Richard A. (2003): ‘Economic Parameters of the Italian Art Market (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)’, in: Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthew and Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (eds.), The Art Market in Italy: Fifteenth – Seventeenth Centuries, Modena: Panini, pp. 423–44; Cowan, Brian (2006): ‘Art and Connoisseurship in the Auction Market of later Seventeenth-Century London’, in: Neil De Marchi (ed.), Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe, 1450–1750, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 263–84.

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Like Carr and Cecil, George Villiers acquired part of his collection for York House, his London residence on the Strand, with the help of Carleton.13 With regard to Villiers’ role as patron of painting and sculpture, however, the very few studies that have mentioned him at all have dismissed his collecting as a ‘simple strife for status and distinction’.14 Yet what is usually conveyed as a self-explanatory base motive deserves further attention. Criticism of his collecting practice as a nondescript, empty emulation of other, more erudite, collectors of his time advances the notion that the paintings and sculptures collected by Buckingham for York House merely resemble those that others had purchased before him, upon which the duke would have formed his taste. This was not in fact the case. An assessment of the individual paintings assembled by Buckingham shows that his collection differed significantly from those of his contemporaries in one striking aspect. Like the Earls of Arundel, Somerset and Salisbury, Buckingham had purchased paintings and sculptures from the Italian Renaissance, spectacularly outmatching Arundel with the acquisition of Titian’s Ecce Homo in 1621. The most significant pieces of his collection, however, were a number of paintings not acquired from some noble Italian or French household or from the hand of a dealer, but specifically commissioned by Villiers himself from contemporary artists, among them Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens. Significantly, these canvases were portraits of the duke himself, which rendered his collection distinct from those of his contemporaries, not only in number and prominence, but also with regard to its subjects and compositions. This study discounts earlier assertions that Buckingham’s collection represented merely a self-evident, nescient impulse of emulation that affords no further discussion. Instead, it draws attention to practices of distinction as a constitutive aspect of court culture itself that worked as a continuous impulse for the re-negotiation of established values, their maintenance or demise, and the creation of new criteria of discrimination or assimilation. Strategies of distinction were inherent to the specific culture of courtiership as it defined the political ethos of early seventeenth-century England. As Frank Whigham has shown in his reading of late Renaissance and early modern English courtesy literature, the concept of courtiership evolved around a particular vocabulary of rhetorical performances of the courtier

13

14

See: McEvansoneya, Philip (2003): ‘Italian Paintings in the Buckingham Collection’, in: Edward Chaney (ed.), The Evolution of English Collecting. Receptions of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 315–36; McEvansoneya, Philip (1987): ‘Some Documents concerning the Patronage and Collections of the Duke of Buckingham’, in: Tudor Art Review, vol. VIII, pp. 33–4. See: Wilks (1997): op. cit., (note 1), p. 37.

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that defined his social and political status at court.15 Whigham’s study is based on the larger body of historical examination of the so-called ‘century of social mobility’, which Lawrence Stone first defined with reference to the period between 1540 and 1640, in which the English social elite increased greatly in size.16 Individual skill, education and rhetorical self-presentation – qualities that hitherto had merely served to enhance the clarity of a given and unchangeable identity – now became the means by which vertical social mobility could be achieved. In courtly society such upward movement resulted from rhetorical manipulation of established patterns of courtly behaviour, which were subjected to continuous alteration in the dialectic of innovation and tradition. If we consider Buckingham’s portrait commissions to contemporary artists as a deliberate break with the mainstream collecting of his day – that is, as an impulse in the practice of distinction – we can begin to understand how his exploitation of the portrait, as a vehicle for the autonomous, fictitious design of the self, assigned painting an unprecedented significance in the social and political self-promotion of the English courtier. It is significant, in this context, to take note of the manner in which the painted likeness of Buckingham differed from the commissions that the Stuart elite had given to portraitists such as William Larkin (whose paintings will be discussed in chapter two) during the first two decades of the seventeenth century: that is, in the years before the duke began to commission his portraits from Continental master painters. While Larkin’s portraits conform to an established standard of taste, the portraits that Buckingham commissioned from Van Dyck and Rubens challenged conventions by exhibiting a vision of the courtly body hitherto unseen in Stuart visual culture. Certainly, Buckingham collected paintings and sculptures that were 15 16

See: Whigham, Frank (1984): Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Literature, Berkeley: University of California Press. See: Stone, Lawrence (1965): The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, Oxford: Clarendon; Stone, Lawrence and Jeanne C. F. Stone (1986): An Open Elite? England 1540–1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press; and; Cressy, David (1976): ‘Describing Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England’, in: Literature and History, vol. III, pp. 29–44; Anglo, Sidney (1977): ‘The Courtier. The Renaissance and Changing Ideals’, in: A. G. Dickens (ed.), The Courts of Europe, London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 33–54; Archer, Ian W. (1991): The Pursuit of Stability. Social Relations in Elizabethan London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Ingram, Martin (1996): ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in: Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, New York: St. Martins Press, pp. 47–88; Sawday, Jonathan (1997): ‘Self and Selfhood in the Seventeenth Century’, in: Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self. Histories form the Renaissance to the Present, New York: Routledge, pp, 29–48; Hunter, Lynette (1999): ‘Civic Rhetoric. 1560–1640’, in: Francis Ames-Lewis (ed.), Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College. Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 88–105.

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available on the early modern art market, and was involved in the patronage of contemporary artists for philanthropic reasons and for the general advancement of the arts. However, he also sought to explore his courtly identity in a painted language of gesture and appearance that, at the time, was still relatively unfamiliar to the world of the early modern English court. This advanced interest in the qualities of the painted image as a means of political self-display, amid a culture of collecting that tended to value painting as an artefact of past times or foreign cultures, has so far remained unexplored by art-historical scholarship. The limit of discussion is generally reached at the point where further analysis would demand closer inspection of the relationship between Buckingham and James I; this would involve discussion of the the homosexual relationship between the two man, which, with just a few exceptions, scholarship has either ignored or has tried to explain away. Although the study of homosexuality in early modern England has been established as a field in its own right since the 1980s, its discussion in regard to an English monarch still seems to be a topic that makes historians decidedly uneasy.17 Only very recently, owing to the undeterred historical interest of David Bergeron and Michael Young, have the relationships between the first Stuart king and his favourites been studied in any detail, thereby shedding new light on the history of the Jacobean court and inspiring a new generation of scholarship.18 By ignoring the sexual relationship of James and Buckingham, however, previous generations of historians not

17

18

See: Boswell, John (1980): Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Bray, Alan (1982): Homosexuality in Renaissance England, New York: Columbia University Press; Smith, Bruce R. (1991): Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. A Cultural Poetics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Woods, Gregory (1992): ‘Body, Costume and Desire in Christopher Marlowe’, in: Journal of Homosexuality, vol. XXIII, no. 1, pp. 69–84; Franzier, Adrian (1997): ‘Queering the Irish Renaissance. The Masculinities of Moore, Martyn, and Yeats’, in: Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis (eds.), Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 8–38; DiGangi, Mario (1997): The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See: Bergeron, David M. (1999): King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press; Young, Michael B. (2000): James VI and I and the History of Homosexuality, London: Macmillan; Bergeron, David M. (2002): ‘Writing King James’s Sexuality’, in: Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (eds.), Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 344–68; Clarke, Danielle (2002): ‘“The Sovereign’s Vice begets the Subject’s Error”: The Duke of Buckingham, “sodomy” and Narratives of Edward II’, in: Tom Betteridge (ed.), Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 46–64; Knowles, James (2000a): ‘“To scourge the arse / Jove’s marrow so had wasted”: Scurrility and Subversion of Sodomy’, in: Dermot Cavanagh and Tim Kirk (eds.), Subversion and Scurrility: Popular Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 74–92.

28

Introduction

only missed out on a significant aspect in the history of the Stuart reign but have also, it would appear, deliberately overlooked one of the most important figures involved in the collecting of painting and sculpture at the Stuart court. As this study will show, critical attention to early modern notions of queer sexuality reveals new insights into a number of canvases that fostered Buckingham’s ascendancy during the reign of the first two Stuart monarchs and that have so far remained elusive as far as art history is concerned. It should be emphasised, however, that any application of the contemporary notion of ‘homosexuality’ (a notion defined by Michel Foucault as distinct from that of the pre-modern perception of homosexuality) to the study of early Stuart England is problematic.19 As Alan Bray has shown, homosexuality was an integral part of male culture in the societies of Renaissance and early modern Europe.20 In fact, homosexual relations between men served to enhance the civil order of a predominantly homosocial society, casting social relations and networks in politics, commerce and leisure as idealised bonds of erotic friendship. The men of the Renaissance and early modernity inhabited a wider spectrum of sexuality than contemporary society allows for, performing their male identity in various gender roles that changed according to their context. Enacting masculinity in the collective arena of the court of James I, male courtiers like Buckingham negotiated social identity in a framework of homosociality that defined not only sexual relationships, but also any social and emotional bonds between men as transmitters of power, prestige and social dominance. By focusing on the hitherto neglected issue of James’s homosexual desire for Buckingham, we can address the manner in which masculinity was represented at the Jacobean court, and the ways in which this representation of masculinity was connected with social and political ambition, power and display. Through an analysis of the relationship between political constructions of masculinity and the changing strategies of courtly display, this study claims that Buckingham’s interest in painting resulted from the desire to explore the appeal of his body in the medium of the painted image, which he gradually came to employ as the means of his social and political self-fashioning, and, in so doing, fundamentally questioned the established semiotic axioms of the Stuart court. It is important to note that these portraits of Buckingham emerged during a period of transition that allowed for a display of his body, which fundamentally differed from the now canonical notions of the courtly portrait, costume piece or history painting. That which today embodies a commonplace in historical scholarship 19 See: Foucault, Michel (1981): The History of Sexuality, 3 vols., Harmondsworth: Penguin. 20 See: Bray (1982): op. cit., (note 17). For a detailed account of early modern prosecution of homosexuality in Venice, see: Ruggiero, Guido (1985): The Boundaries of Eros. Sex, Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, esp. the table on p. 128.

29

Introduction

– the fact that the Renaissance saw the emergence of a sense of unique and publicly staged selfhood and rendered the long turn from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century as a significant moment of change with regard to attitudes of individuality and a new sense of self – was, however, the result of a long social and political process that, in the English context, culminated in the negotiation of courtly display at the early Stuart court, in which the role of painting has so far received no separate study. Ever since Jacob Burckhardt’s ground-breaking study of the Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) – first published in English as early as 1878 – historians have emphasised the emergence of the individual self during the Italian Quattrocento, which resulted in a claim to social recognition and agency unknown to the men and women of the Middle Ages.21 Almost exactly one century after Burckhardt, Stephen Greenblatt challenged the autonomy ascribed to this Renaissance self, which he perceived less as a freely self-creating individual and more as a self created by the particular culture and relations of power in which that individual lived.22 Introducing the term ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’, Stephen Greenblatt has shown that during the second half of the sixteenth century there evolved in England what he has termed an ‘increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a malleable, artful process’, and which he saw promoted through the literary, visual and material culture of the time.23 Greenblatt refers to what is probably the most prominent example of Renaissance self-fashioning in sixteenth-century England – the particularly artful construction of identity that Elizabeth I undertook in the portrait that presented her as the Virgin Queen and mystical mother to England – thereby emphasising the significance of portraiture among late-Renaissance formations of the self. However, further study of the practices of courtly self-display at the early Stuart court demonstrates that painting, or the painted image, occupied only a minor position among the strategies of self-fashioning at James’s court. Such self-fashioning was, in fact, dominated by the performances of the Jacobean court masque – a ritual staging of mythical narratives to celebrate the glory of the king in an interplay of dance, music, poetry and stage design. Perhaps because it does not feel ‘responsible’ for any study of the masque, art-historical scholarship has hitherto failed to approach 21 22

23

Burckhardt, Jacob (1878): The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by S. Middlemore, with an introduction by Peter Burke, London: Penguin. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980): Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Extending Greenblatt’s emphasis on the multi-dimensionality of the self, more recent studies in the field have begun to speak about fragmented or divided identities. See esp.: Taylor, Charles (1989): Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Jeffries Martin, John (2004): Myths of Renaissance Individualism, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. See: Greenblatt (1980): op. cit., (above), p. 9.

30

Introduction

the genre as a form of visual display, taking the relative absence of painting at the court of James I – commonly explained as a result of the influence of the image-hating Calvinists of Edinburgh – as sufficient reason to dismiss the study of his reign altogether. Instead, studies of English art at the turn of the seventeenth century scrutinise the portraits of Elizabeth and then directly proceede to the study of Anthony van Dyck’s canvases for Charles I. How such a dramatic change of aesthetic preference could occur in less than half a century has, however, remained undiscussed. While Tudor aesthetic sensibility appreciated above all the inextricable linking of the portrait with descriptive text that was understood as the constitutive part of a visual emblem, Van Dyck’s portraits of Charles I exhibited a highly illusionistic rendering of the human body that moved freely through the pictorial space. This study addresses the significance of these two fundamentally opposed aesthetic concepts and hypothesises a significant change in the kinds of media employed in the courtly practice of bodily display that can only be fully understood when the paintings and masques of the Stuart court are taken into simultaneous consideration. Discussions of the body and bodily practices have long come to pervade the entire field of cultural studies, where the body serves as a paradigm for enquiries into the shaping and resistance of power, the formation and representation of identities, and its nature as site and medium of cultural practice. In particular, Michel Foucault’s general promotion of a ‘history of bodies’ that defines the body as a material producer, rather than as a passive receptor of its social meaning, underlies many recent studies in the field of visual culture and has certainly also influenced this one. For instance, Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg’s recent collection of essays titled From the Royal to the Republican Body emphasises the centrality of the body in French social and political life during the ancien régime, where it served both as a means of control and as a site for resistance, while studies of Louis XIV have portrayed the bodily strategies of king and court as a continuous exercise in hegemonic control.24 Jean-Marie Apostolidès and, more recently, Mark Franko, have studied the significance of the body in choreographed movement, and have understood the courtly body as a theatrical projection of royal subjectivity held in a continuous exercise of hegemonic control that defined dance as a sort of physical ‘spelling’ of those texts that were designed to aggrandise the monarch.25 However, this rather limited notion of the body as self-surveying, self-disciplining, and subjected to a pervasive,

24

25

Melzer, Sara E. and Kathryn Norberg (1998): From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, Berkeley: University of California Press. Apostolidès, Jean-Marie (1981): Le Roi-machine. Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV, Paris: Edition de Minuit, and, Franko, Mark (1993): Dance as Text. Ideologies of the Baroque Body, New York: Routledge.

31

Introduction

internalised ‘discipline of power’, does not seem to register the varied and imaginative strategies of bodily self-display that I have sought to assess in this study. By examining the negotiation over displays of the courtly body in the first decades of the Jacobean reign, I suggest that strategies originally shaped for the bodily self-display of the courtier in the dance-performances of the masque shifted into forms and meanings that explored the appeal of the courtly body in the medium of painting. Through an analysis of dance and painting as the two facets of a single process in the visual culture of the Stuart court, I emphasise the fluid shift between performance and painted art that, so I believe, was facilitated by the Jacobean focus on the spectacle of the courtly body. Catalysed by the sixteenth-century translations of Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortegiano, which had promoted the courtier’s appeal to the sense of sight, the Jacobean court masque sought to visualise the particular mark of the courtier’s distinction: his artful body. The masque highlighted the personal grace of the courtier in physical display, and constituted the courtly body as the highest form of spectacle, and itself as the prime medium of social distinction. Like dance, pictorial art offers an expressive paradigm of courtly self-fashioning, which is why this study addresses the emergence of the artful body at the early Stuart court and the varying conditions of its display in performance and painting alike. As will be shown, the masque, and the continuous rehearsal of its dances beforehand, conditioned the courtly body as trained and refined through art. Analysing the masque as a scopic apparatus for the assessment of the artful body, this study shows how social and political advancement of the courtier at the early Stuart court depended on the ability to attract and sustain attention through the subtleties of his bodily performance, staged on several occasions throughout the year. This focus was related to a spatial concept for the representation of sovereign power that registered social authority in physical reference to the body of the monarch, which this study analyses as an object of sight and display. The first chapter examines the representation of the royal body in the architecture of Inigo Jones’s stage for the courtly ritual of the masque in the Great Hall of Whitehall’s Banqueting House. Here the body of King James was promoted as the centre of a strictly structured space designed to provide a well-ordered pattern of social perspective, in which the courtier sought to register his or her body. By approaching the royal body as an object of sight, whose changing displays, so I suggest, interacted with the changing representation of the courtier, this study will repeatedly refer to the juridical concept of royal dignity as derived from the medieval doctrine of rex qui numquam moritur. This doctrine expressed the absolute and immortal nature of English kingship, and defined the royal body as the individual, corporeal presence of a corporate political power in order to justify the permanence of royal power in the face of the undeniable fact of the monarch’s mortality. Ernst Kantorowicz was the first to examine the complex juridical rhetoric that constituted 32

Introduction

this doctrine in his pioneering study of the mystical fiction of ‘the King’s Two Bodies’.26 In fact, Kantorowicz’s study has proved to be among the most fruitful and inspiring works for twentieth-century scholarship in state power, and it has prompted the emergence of a separate discourse on the relation of the king’s physical, mortal body to the divine, sacred persona of his royal dignity.27 The long-standing desire for a history of the royal effigy, which was begun by Ralph Giesey’s examination of The Royal Funeral Ceremony in France, has recently been completed by Jennifer Woodward’s assessment of the royal funerals in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where the practice of publicly displaying an effigy of the royal body ended with the funeral of James I.28 As the physical double of the king’s body natural, the effigy illustrates most clearly the conceptual dependency of royal power on the factual presence of a physical body in the space of the political. What interests me about this, in the context of my own enquiry regarding the function and significance of painting at the early modern English court, is the insight it provides into the historic relationship between the king’s body and his painted image, which is after all an incorporeal, im-

26

See: Kantorowicz, Ernst H. (1957): The King’s Two Bodies: Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 27 See: Hanley, Sarah (1983): The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France. Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual and Discourse, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Valensise, Marina (1986): ‘Le Sacre du roi: Stratégie symbolique et doctirne politique de la monarchie française’, in: Annales E.S.C., vol. XLI, pp. 543–78; Boureau, Alain (1989): Le Simple Corps fu roi. L’impossible Sacraclité des soverains français, Paris: Editions de Paris; Baecque, Antoine de (1993): Le Corps de l’histoire: Métaphores et politique, 1770–1800, Paris: Calmann-Lévy; Moine, Marie-Christine (1984): Les Fêtes à la cour du Roi-soleil. 1653–1715, Paris: Editiones Frenand Lanore; Burke, Peter (1992): The Fabrication of Louis XIV, New Haven: Yale University Press; Ranum, Orest (1992): ‘Islands and the Self in a Ludivican Fête’, in: Rubin, David Lee (ed.), Sun King. The Ascendancy of French Culture During the Reign of Louis XIV, Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, pp. 17–34. 28 See: Giesey, Ralph E. (1960): The Royal Funeral Ceremony in France, Geneva: Droz; Woodward, Jennifer (1997): The Theatre of Death. The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625, Woodbridge: Boydell. For the most recent and stimulating contribution to the discussion of the royal effigy, see: Marek, Kristin (2005): ‘Köperförmiges Rechtesdenken und bildförmige Politik: Repräsentation und Körperbild in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit’, in: Körperrepräsentation in der Frühen Neuzeit. Wolfenbütteler Barock-Nachrichten, vol. XXXII, no. 1/2, pp. 39–56; eadem (2006): ‘Monarchosomatologie: drei Körper des Königs; die Effigies König Edward II. von England’, in: Kristin Marek (ed.), Bild und Körper im Mittelalter, Paderborn: Fink, pp. 185–205; eadem (2009): Die Körper des Königs. Effigies, Bildpolitik und Heiligkeit, Munich: Fink. Indispensable for all these studies, including Kantorowicz, still is: Schlosser, Julius von (1911): ‘Geschichte der Portraitbildnerei in Wachs. Ein Versuch’, in: Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlung des Allerhöchsten Kaisers, vol. XXIX, no. 3, pp. 171–258.

33

Introduction

mobile and lifeless simulation of his likeness in the two-dimensional sphere of the picture-plane. The doctrine of the king’s two bodies was invented in order to locate the source of sovereign power in the king’s body natural after the ideological hegemony of empire and papacy had declined and the hollowness of feudal authority had become increasingly apparent. I argue that this imposed juridical and theological conditions on the representation of the royal body in painting that also affected that of the secular body of the courtier. Through an enquiry into the nature of the royal body as an object of sight, this study shows how the necessity of its factual presence established the spectacle of the English monarchy as an essentially spatialised representation of royal power that located the personal display of the courtier in the space of the masque rather than in that of the picture. The masque produced a performative picture of sovereign power that resulted from the structuring of space and sight around the body of the king, and thus defined both the display of the royal body and that of the courtly body in terms of physical presence. Framed by the perplexing scene designs of Inigo Jones, the masque staged the spectacle of the courtly body, whose path and movement was predetermined by a theory of cosmic motion, which the masque sought to resemble in the unified perspective of a Renaissance stage. During his career as the architect of the Jacobean masque, Jones, as has often been remarked, familiarised the English court with a repertoire of images, forms and devices of the Italian Renaissance still largely unknown in a country that, like other Protestant states, had developed a culture wary of the visual arts.29 Jones’s courtly stage placed the body into a static model of unified perspective that focused on the figure of the king. What has, however, so far remained undiscussed is that this emerged parallel to a culture of manners that promoted the courtly body as the dynamic constituent of a geometry of gesture and manipulation which significantly questioned the symmetrical notion of Renais-

29 See: Orgel, Stephen (1965): The Jonsonian Masque, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Orgel, Stephen and Roy Strong (1973): Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. Including the complete Designs for Productions at Court for the most Part in the Collection of the Duke of Devonshire together with their Texts and Historical Documentation, 2 vols., Sotheby Parke Bernet: University of California Press; Strong, Roy (1973): Splendour at Court. Renaissance Spectacle and the Theatre of Power, Boston: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; Orgel, Stephen (1975): The Illusion of Power, Berkeley: University of California Press; idem (1984): Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals. 1450–1650, Woodbridge: Boydell; Orrell, John (1985): The Theatres of Inigo Jones and John Webb, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Peacock, John (1991): ‘Ben Jonson’s Masque and Italian Culture‘, in: J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds.), Theatre in the English and Italian Renaissance, London: Macmillan, pp. 70–91. The only study to draw particular attention to the significance of dance in the masque so far, is: Ravelhofer, Barbara (2006): The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume and Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

34

Introduction

sance space. Following Mark Franko’s interpretation of Castiglione’s civilité as a dynamic rather than a static concept for the generation of subtly differing forms of bodily expression, I argue that the growing significance of grazia, ingenio and arte for the identity of the courtier who increasingly envisioned his body in an economy of waste, accumulation, and transgression came to disrupt the spatial notion of the masque, and advanced a perception of the painted image as the more artful medium for bodily display.30 This resulted in a novel perception of spatiality, no longer understood as a rational measure but as the sentiment emanating from the bodies within. The growing significance of the refined, artful body in performance resulted in an awareness of and coercion towards form, and in an identity arising from its stylistic dynamics, its visual modification and manipulation of the real. It was in this context that the Duke of Buckingham, commissioning his first portrait from Van Dyck in 1620/21, perceived the fluid shift between performance and visual art, which is the subject of the second chapter. Van Dyck’s Venus and Adonis, which depicted the duke and his wife, Lady Katherine, as the mythological pair, showed Buckingham in a pose of effortless dignity, which, enhanced by colourful drapery, created a splendid, sensuous effect that was able to rival the sight of his body in the masque. The elegant, dynamic style of Van Dyck, this study suggests, accounted for the increased significance of the painted image at the Stuart court, delineating an artful vision of the courtly body that fostered aspirations of social distinction and enhanced its reappraisal as an aesthetic object. With its dance-like display of elegantly turned heads, angled feet, and luminous bodies set off against undulating folds of rich textures, the portraits of Buckingham, first by Van Dyck and later by Rubens, I argue, promoted a pictorial representation of the courtly body that enhanced the established semiotic of choreographed movement as a constituent of courtly distinction and transferred it into an even more artful and permanent display than that achievable by dancing in the masque. This argument is derived from the examination of a series of portrait commissions hitherto hardly noticed by art historians, or if so not analysed in relation to each other. My concern with painting is guided by questions of how the painted image of the courtier operated on a social level and negotiated issues of bodily nature, identity and representation in the specular system of the early Stuart monarchy –

30 See: Franko (1993): op. cit., (note 25). See also: Burke, Peter (1995): The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, Cambridge: Polity Press; Bryson, Anna (1998): From Courtesy to Civility. Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

35

Introduction

questions normally raised within the field of dance and performance studies.31 Arising from an art-historical perspective, however, this study approaches the changing spaces and performances of the courtly body in the Stuart masque with a particular focus on practices of display and representation. Through a reassessment of the qualities of the picture-plane against the dominant practice of representation in theatrical performance, I assert that Buckingham’s portrait commissions disseminated painting as a medium that allowed the courtier to shape the appearance of his body in a particular pose. This shaping of a particular pose by the illusionistic manner of Baroque painting not only accounts for a novel perception of the painted image as a medium for visual distinction, but also reflects an epistemological change in perceptions of representation at the early modern English court. In the third and final chapter I discuss the manner in which portraiture provided the body of the courtier with his own, personal, frame of representation and set his display apart from a spatial relatedness to the body of the king. The increased visibility of Buckingham’s body in the painted image promoted a novel semiotic for the expression of courtly power that challenged not only the representation of his social equals in the masque, but, significantly, also that of the infinite sovereign power of the king’s body itself. Both the renewed significance of the painted image at the court of James’s son, Charles I, and the royal portraits, which the second Stuart king commissioned from Anthony van Dyck, can only be understood from within this context. Unlike Buckingham, whose self-fashioning in contemporary portraiture negotiated the display of the secular courtly body, Charles shifted the display of his body from the space of the court masque to that of the painted image, and in so doing reconstrued the representational paradigms of his twofold, bodily sovereignty. Had he followed the established practice for the representation of the two bodies of English sovereign kingship, Charles, like his father before him, would have remained content to display his body against the mythical narrative of the masque, which represented the corporeal divinity of the king’s body natural through a two-fold signification that generated its signifying power in the oscillation of the viewer’s gaze: the back-and-forth focusing and unfocusing of the eye as it covered the spatial distance between the king and his stage. In Charles’s portrait, however, this spatial distance collapsed, conflating the transparent and the opaque in the representational screen of the painting, as it has been defined by the art historian and critic Louis Marin, whose 1981 study of Le portrait du roi has inspired my analysis of Van Dyck’s Charles I in the Hunting-Field, painted in 1635.

31

See: Franko (1993): op. cit., (note 25); Nevile, Jennifer (2004): The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2004): Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt a. M.: Surkamp.

36

Introduction

With reference to a joint commission of the Duke of Buckingham and Charles I, namely Honthorst’s The Liberal Arts presented to King Charles and Queen HenriettaMaria from 1628, I suggest that Buckingham’s patronage of painting strongly influenced the artistic taste of England’s second Stuart king. Charles ascended to the throne in 1625, and rejected the patronage of the masque in favour of a number of commissions for his portrait from national and international artists. As I demonstrate in a discussion of Thomas Carew’s 1634 Coelum Britannicum, Charles relocated the act of royal representation from the space of the masque to that of the painted image. This study argues that this change of media allowed for the king’s contemplation of his own body, which the masque had kept from his sight. The painted portrait of Charles I promoted an aesthetic valorisation of the king’s body natural over that of his body politic, which eventually resulted in the triumph of painting as the prime medium of courtly representation in seventeenth-century England.

37

ONE

Spatial Representations of the Royal Body at Court: The Masques of James I

‘When the person of a Prince is looked upon (wheron we doe seldome gaze enough) our inward cogitations filled with a reverence of the regall maiestie seated in that flesh (otherwise as infirme and full of imperfections as other is) ought to surmount all sensuall conceits (scant thinking of any humane nature) but making an infinit difference betweene that body, so (as it were) glorified with the presence, representation & in dwelling of that supreme or exalted eminencie, and other ordinarie persons, which yet doeth consist materially of the same substance, and perhaps endued by nature with equall graces. Doe you desire a brighter displaying of the illustrious maiestie shining in soveraigntie? Doe but observe how much it surmounteth the person it selfe thereof possessed, like a brittle glasse all illightened with the glorious blaze of the Sunne.’1

Edward Forsett’s brilliant metaphor for the monarchic body, which appeared in his 1606 Comparative Discourse on the Bodies Natural and Politique, describes its sovereign aura as a brittle glass gloriously illuminated by the blaze of the sun, and draws on a remarkable number of rather weighty terms – gaze, body, presence, representation, display and, finally, sovereignty – all congregated in that mysterious condition which constitutes royal power. The sovereign in power at the time was James I, who on 5 January 1606 attended Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei, the second of the many court masques of the Stuart reign that simultaneously aimed to evoke and to conceal the elaborate mystique dissected in Forsett’s treatise: the fact that, as Clifford Geertz has put it, majesty is made, not born.2 This chapter discusses the conditions of royal representation in early Stuart festival culture and explores its poetics and politics of looking at the king. It asserts that 1 2

Forsett, Edward: A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique, London, 1606, E 4v –F I. See: Geertz, Clifford (1983): Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York: Harper Collins.

39

ONE | Spatial Representations of the Royal Body at Court: The Masques of James I

the gaze that is cast upon the monarch is a political act, and it explores the visual identity of the monarchic body, of its nature as an object of sight. Underlying the festival representation of early Stuart kingship was a genuinely theatrical understanding of sovereignty that anticipated monarchic identity as the fully exposed presence of the king to the subject’s gaze, thereby at once authorising the viewer to confer absolute power onto the royal body while also holding it at one remove from its mythical origins. This chapter discusses the court of James I as a visual regime, and demonstrates that the representation of majesty essentially consisted of a festival orchestration of the king’s body, his gaze, and the court’s view of this body, which demonstrated the age’s most profound assumptions concerning monarchic presence and translated principles of social hierarchy into a scheme of visual laws. Through an investigation of the courtly spectacle of the English masque, this chapter analyses the social and political idioms that governed the early Stuart court of James I, its material culture in relation to the self-presentation of the king and his courtiers, and the visual prerogative of Jacobean monarchy. For the historian who understands court spectacle as a device for political image-making, the ceremonial intensification of the psychological and physical patterns of daily experience posed by the feasts and entertainments of the court offer a tangible picture of the quasi-divine powers of the monarch.3 The English court masque staged a higher vision of reality that was invoked by the presence of the king, and created a fictional universe that centred on the person of the monarch and attributed to him a status of divine power that legitimised his political rule. For the art historian, however, the question remains how this ceremonial picture differed from painted portraits of the king. It is clear that the masque, drawing from all fields of artistic production to present a fixed interaction of speech, song, dance and design, produced a performative version of monarchic magnificence that resulted from the structuring of space and sight around the body of the king. The masque presented a vision of the divine mystery of monarchy, and it was through such a vision that this mystery could be experienced. Arising from this metaphysical notion of vision was a representation of the Jacobean monarch that summoned sovereign power from the juxtaposition of his bodily presence with an image of political allegory that was emblematic of the divine presence that empowered his sovereign rule. The spectacle of early seventeenth-century English monarchy thus anticipated the hierarchical spatial principle of French absolutism, in which the centrality of the monarchic body figured as a political system for personal rule. It also established an essentially spa3

The key studies on the symbolic aspects of power still are: Yates, Frances Amalia (1959): Valois Tapestries, London: Warburg Institute; Strong, Roy (1973): Splendour at Court. Renaissance Spectacle and the Theatre of Power, Boston: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; and Anglo, Sidney (1969): Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

40

A Kingdom for a Stage: The Jacobean Court Masque

tialised representation of the royal body that created a ritual narrative of the monarch as the centre of court and cosmos, which structured all aspects of social space into a circumscription of James’s sovereign power.

A Kingdom for a Stage: The Jacobean Court Masque More than any other art form, the court masque engaged in the glorification of the monarch in Stuart England. Such masques were the most pompous, opulent and profligate events that could be attended at the court of James I, and they orchestrated a social choreography for the courtier that cast his body and its movements into a spatial expression of the king’s sovereign power. Designed as a theatrical and ritual tableau by the collaborative effort of the ‘picture-maker’ Inigo Jones and the Stuart poet laureate Ben Jonson, the masque enhanced the art forms of spoken drama, dance and song through the use of a scenic and dramatic framework that enabled the most sumptuous form of royal panegyric and political comment in the history of the English court. The House of Stuart, newly installed at Whitehall, patronised the masque as proclamation of the dignity, legitimacy and prosperity of its new state. With its abundance of learned allegory and classical lore, and with an exceptional extravagance in costume and stage carpentry, the masque astounded its audience with ever more novel and more elaborate devices to praise the glory of the English Crown. Only the noblest courtiers were allowed to participate in these spectacles. They would, for example, appear, dressed as Olympic gods, from hydraulic clouds onto spectacular stages supported by the golden figures of Atlas or Hercules, before they descended to the dancing space in front of the royal dais. (Figs. 10 & 11) Obscured by a mist of perfumed air radiated by a golden sphere hanging mid-air over the stage and turning on an invisible axle, this space in between the stage and the audience provided the setting for the courtiers’ graceful dances, which formed the highlight of every production.4 The court masque staged spectacles of costly mag4

This description follows the historic account preserved from the staging of Ben Jonson’s 1606 Hymenœi, the first of his masques to appear in print. Jonson, who had created his first masque, The Masque of Blackness, for Twelfth Night in 1605, invented more than twenty masques in the 26 years of his career at the Jacobean court. As it was Jonson under whom the masque developed from a heterogeneous entertainment into a highly sophisticated genre with a unified form, the masques of the Jacobean era are commonly referred to as ‘Jonsonian’. For the historic account of Hymenæi, see: Orgel, Stephen and Roy Strong (1973): Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. Including the complete Designs for Productions at Court for the most Part in the Collection of the Duke of Devonshire together with their Texts and Historical Documentation, Sotheby Parke Bernet: University of California Press, 2 vols., pp.

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nificence and inventive fancy, forming an indispensable component in the celebration of any major event at the Jacobean court of Whitehall. Shaped by classical myth and Renaissance iconography, the genre produced celebratory narratives that evolved around the principal theme of royal creativity and power, and as such provided the king and his courtiers with a heroic mould that gave higher meaning to the realities of their political actions. Offering an elaborate illustration of the political organisation of the Stuart court, the masque, as the most spectacular and most complex genre of English festival culture, has nurtured numerous studies of the English Renaissance.5 The visual elements of its productions – the costumes, stage architecture and scenery – are predominantly derived from models in Italian and French Renaissance festival design,

5

105–6. The most comprehensive study of the role of the poet in the masque to date, is given in: Orgel, Stephen (1965): The Jonsonian Masque, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. The English masque has indeed continuously commanded the interest of historians throughout the twentieth century. Since studies in the first half of the century achieved an understanding of the genre’s genealogy, among which Enid Welsford’s The Masque is still the most authoritative, post-war critics have focused on the analysis of the masque as a form of ritual. The foundation of this approach was laid, above all, by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, whose pioneering mythographic studies understand the genre as political allegory. Studies like Orgel’s The Jonsonian Masque and Illusion of Power, and Strong’s Art and Power have greatly inspired not only this study but modern masque scholarship in general. Furthermore, their joint publication, Inigo Jones: Theatre of the Stuart Court, established studies of the masque in relation to the history of the aesthetics and mechanics of the stage, which has since been pursued in greatest detail by John Peacock. In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, scholars such as Kevin Sharpe, Martin Butler and Erica Veevers have concentrated on studying the precise historical context of specific masques. See: Welsford, Enid (1927): The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and Revels, New York: Russel and Russel; Orgel (1965): op. cit., (above), and idem (1975): The Illusion of Power, Berkeley: University of California Press; Orgel and Strong (1973): op. cit., (above); Strong, Roy (1984): Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals. 1450–1650, Woodbridge: Boydell; Peacock, John (1986b): ‘Inigo Jones and the Florentine Court Theatre’, in: John Donne Journal, vol. V, pp. 201–34; and idem (1991): ‘Ben Jonson’s Masque and Italian Culture‘, in: J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds.), Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance, London: Macmillan, pp. 70–91; Sharpe, Kevin (1987a): Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Veevers, Erica (1989): Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Butler, Martin (1993a): ‘Reform of Reverence: The Politics of the Caroline Masque’, in: J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds.), Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 118–56.

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Fig. 10: Inigo Jones, Design for a Masquer with an Impresa, undated Fig. 11: Inigo Jones, Design for a Masquer: Unidentified Queen, undated

found in architectural treatises and festival books and adapted through the artistic practice of aemulatio and imitatio, the choosing and rearranging after the best models.6 Following the ground-breaking work on the masque’s allegoric concept begun by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong in the 1960s, the genre has been carefully analysed for its use of heroes of ancient myth and its sophistication in stage technique. Equally, its numerous preserved texts have been discussed for their correspondence to the political reality of the period, especially from the perspective of New Historicism, which approaches the masque as a dense palimpsest for the analysis of early

6

The authoritative study of Jones’s reference to Continental designs remains: Peacock, John (1995): The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones. The European Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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modern ideologies and beliefs.7 These excellent studies from the field of literary criticism have certainly contributed most extensively to the body of masque scholarship in recent years. However, they have also diverted attention away from the visual aspects of the masque’s genuinely theatrical nature.8 Furthermore, the heightened interest in the masque’s political significance, promoted by the theoretical and methodological developments of the last decades, has, somewhat paradoxically, reduced the amount of critical attention being paid to the genre’s central concern with ritual and performance as the means of interpreting Jacobean court politics. Although recent studies have begun to address the musical component of masques, thereby adding another interesting perspective to the field, one cannot help but notice that the truly complex nature of the genre – uniting poetry, music,

7

8

While masque scholarship long understood the genre as rather hypocritical to its historic situation – see: Orgel (1975): op. cit., (note 5), esp. pp. 34f – the increasing interest in the social and political embeddedness of literature as promoted by New Historicism has led to an understanding of the actions staged in courtly masques as generally related to a specific, contemporary issue in politics. See for instance: Sharpe (1987a), op. cit., (note 5), esp. pp. 260–4; Lindley, David (1993): The Trials of Frances Howard, London: Routledge; and, Butler, Martin (1994): ‘Ben Jonson and the Limits of Courtly Panegyric’, in: Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, London: Macmillan, pp. 91–115. Most recent studies, however, have come to emphasise that this correspondence to the political context was undertaken not as a simple elevation of the political event into the language of myth, but in the form of a more complex intersection of reality and fiction, in which it would sometimes become difficult to consolidate aesthetic concepts and actual events. See: Marcus, Leah (1978): ‘Present Occasions, and the Shaping of Ben Jonson’s Masques’, in: English Literary History, vol. XLV, pp. 201–25; Peacock, John (1987): ‘Jonson and Jones Collaborate on Prince Henry’s Barriers’, in: Word and Image, vol. III, pp. 172–94; Lindley, David (1986): ‘Embarrassing Ben: The Masque for Frances Howard’, in: English Literary Renaissance, vol. XVI, pp. 343–59; and Butler, Martin (1990): ‘Politics and the Masque: Salmacida Spolia’, in: T. Healy and J. Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English Civil War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 59–74. Most recently, scholars have begun to analyse the masque with regard to questions arising from Gender and Colonial Studies. See: Wynne-Davis, Marion (1992): ‘The Queen’s Masque: Renaissance Women and the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque’, in: eadem and S. Cerasano (eds.), Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private in the English Renaissance, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 79–104; Lewalski, Barbara (1993): Writing Women in Jacobean England, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; MacManus, Claire (1998): ‘Defacing the Carcass. Anne of Denmark and Jonson’s Masque of Blackness’, in: J. Sanders, K. Chedgzoy and S. Wiseman (eds.), Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 93–113; and Smith, James M. (1998): ‘Effacing History: Facing the Colonial Context of Ben Jonson’s Irish Masque at Court’, in: English Literary History, vol. LXV, pp. 297–321.

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dance and design into one single artistic endeavour – has been overlooked.9 If the masque is approached as no more than a literary text or a piece of music, then such an approach limits our understanding of the performative qualities of the masque, which, after all, made the genre such a popular, and complex, mode of visual representation. Through an understanding of the masque as a ceremonial practice for the enunciation of royal presence at court, I would like to emphasise the performative nature of the genre with reference to its origins in medieval ritual. The masque was rooted in various traditional court entertainments and folk customs that were popular in the early Middle Ages, and it followed on from a form of ritual mumming and disguising that was already familiar to the court of Edward III; indeed, the ten-yearold Prince Richard is reported to have taken part in an event of this kind in 1377.10 That night, London’s most powerful citizens – variously disguised as a pope with a retinue of cardinals, an emperor followed by a train of knights and squires, and a legation of devils – lay in wait for the prince, in order to gamble with him over some jewels. The use of loaded dice ensured that the prince would win.11 The entertainment was acted out in pantomime, and ended with a dance, performed simultaneously by the disguised visitors and by the unmasked members of Edward’s court, who were, however, kept at opposite ends of the hall, thus maintaining a strict division between the two groups. Ritual traditions such as courtly mumming, knightly tournaments and folk carnivals further added to the courtly entertainments of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, until, under the reign of Henry VIII, the court masque was recognised as a distinct genre and began to acquire a fixed structure.12 9

Musicological enquiry into the genre was inspired by Andrew Ashbee’s 1991 publication of musical records from the Jacobean and Carolinean era. See: Ashbee, Andrew (1991): Records of English Court Music, 9 vols., Ashgate: Aldershot; Holman, P. (1993): Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court. 1540–1690, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Toft, Robert (1993): Tune thy Musicke to thy Hart, Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Walls, Peter (1990): ‘Comus: The Court Masque Questioned’, in: John Caldwell, Edward Olleson and Susan Wollenberg (eds.), The Well Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance, Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 107–13; and Walls, Peter (1996): Music in the English Courtly Masque. 1604 – 1640, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 10 See: Westfall, Suzanne R. (1990): Patrons and Performance. Early Tudor Household Revels, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 11 See: Welsford (1927): op. cit., (note 5). A more general discussion of the entertainment in honour of Prince Richard is given in: Chambers, Edmund K. (1923): The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press. 12 The first evidence of a courtly entertainment referred to as a masque is given by Edward Hall: ‘On the daie of Epiphanie at night, the kying with a XI other wer disguised, after the maner of Italie, called a maske, a thing not seen afore in Englande, thei were apparelled in

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The masque sought stability through a traditional set of gestures, promoting an aura of solemn ritual that permitted a fictional union of its allegorical vision with the literal world of the court. Through the transformation of actual political events at court into individual allegoric accounts, the masque was able to perpetuate a fixed narrative of the wisdom and virtue of Jacobean rule that lay beneath the various allegories of its different productions. It is this aspect of continuous repetition that marks the masque as a reiterative and citational act of sovereign power, performative in the sense that the nature of selfhood claimed therein does not present a manifestation of essence, but is produced and sustained through discourse.13 The royal body here manifests itself as the outcome of an intersection of visual spectacle and discursive process, emerging through interwoven systems of representation. Analyses of the productive force arising from the staging of the royal body have so far predominantly focused on French Absolutism.14 Jean-Marie Apostolidès was the first explicitly to discuss the theatrical nature of the French court, and demonstrated how lavish spectacle and regular displays of music, dance and social ritual safeguarded the symbolic integrity of Louis XIV, who figured as Apollo, the sun

13

14

garments long and brode, with visers and cappes of gold, and after the banket doen, these Maskers’ came in, with sixe gentlemen disguised in silke bearynge staffe torches, and desired the ladies to daunce, and commoned together, as the fashion of the Maske is, they toke their leaue and departed, and so did the Quene, and all the ladies.’, quoted from: Brotanek, Rudolf (1902): Die Englischen Maskenspiele, Vienna: Wilhelm Braunmüller, p. 66. Regarding a detailed analysis of the masque’s medieval predecessors, an aspect in masque scholarship that is still controversial, see: Wickham, Glynne (1959): Early English Stages. 1300–1600, 3 vols., London: Routledge, esp. pp. 191–228. For the connection between the court masque and mumming traditions within English popular culture, see: Hulton, R. (1994): The Rise and Fall of Merry England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, and most recently, Forrest, John (1999): The History of Morris Dancing. 1458–1750, Cambridge: James Clarke, esp. his chapters ‘Theories of Origin’ and ‘Royal Court’. See: Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2004): Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp; and, Mersch, Dieter (2002): Ereignis und Aura. Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. For an introduction to the discourse of performativity, see: Hanley, Sarah (1983): The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France. Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual and Discourse, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Valensise, Marina (1986): ‘Le Sacre du roi: Stratégie symbolique et doctrine politique de la monarchie française’, in: Annales E.S.C., vol. XLI, pp. 543–78; Boureau, Alain (1989): Le Simple Corps fu roi. L’impossible Sacraclité des soverains français, Paris: Editions de Paris; Baecque, Antoine de (1993): Le Corps de l’histoire: Métaphores et politique, 1770–1800, Paris: Calmann-Lévy; Roach, Joseph (1998): ‘Body of Law. The Sun King and the Code Noir’, and Kaiser, Thomas E. (1998): ‘Louis le Bien-Aimé and the Rhetoric of the Royal Body’, both in: Sarah E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg (eds.), From the Royal to the Republican Body. Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and EighteenthCentury France, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 113–30 and 131–61, respectively.

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king.15 Inspired by the work of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault, however, subsequent studies have inevitably regarded the performances of the French king as a means of disciplining the bodies of his subjects.16 By delineating festival culture within the sphere of omnipotent and invincible state power, these studies approach courtly spectacle from a somewhat limited perspective. However, they nevertheless contribute to a growing awareness of monarchic performance as a means of negotiation in the discourse of power. More significantly, the argument advanced by Apostolidès established a general understanding of the performativity of kingship as arising from the royal body in performance, in this case the popular image of Louis XIV as premier danseur of the French court ballet at Versailles.17 Scholars of late Val-

15

16

17

See: Apostolidès, Jean-Marie (1981): Le Roi-machine. Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV, Paris: Edition de Minuit. Apostolidès’ work has been further substantiated by: Moine, Marie-Christine (1984): Les Fêtes à la cour du Roi-soleil. 1653–1715, Paris: Editiones Frenand Lanore; Burke, Peter (1992): The Fabrication of Louis XIV, New Haven: Yale University Press; Ranum, Orest (1992): ‘Islands and the Self in a Ludivican Fête’, in: David Lee Rubin (ed.), Sun King. The Ascendancy of French Culture During the Reign of Louis XIV, Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, pp. 17–34; Greenberg, Mitchell (2001): Baroque Bodies. Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism, Ithaca: Cronell University Press. For the figure of the courtier as represented within the narratives of the comédies-ballets of Molière and his collaborators between August 1661 and October 1670, i.e. the satiric depiction of the courtier as a type, see: Christout, Marie-Françoise (1967): Le Ballet de Cour de Louis XIV, 1643– 1672, Paris: Édition A. et J. Picard; Shaw, David (1991): ‘Theatrical Self-Consciousness in Molière’, in: Nottingham French Studies, vol. XXX, no. 1, pp. 1–12; Stanton, Domna C. (1980): The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century France, New York: Columbia University Press; Smith, Gretchen Elizabeth (2005): The Performance of Male Nobility in Molière’s comédies-ballets, Aldershot: Ashgate. While Foucault understood the performing arts – which he saw as embodying one of the prime technologies of power – as directly inscribing state power onto the body, Norbert Elias, studying the history of manners, demonstrated how the rules of etiquette resulted in an intellectual self-subjection under courtly power. See: Foucault, Michel (1977): Discipline and Punish, London: Allen Lane; idem (1982): ‘The Subject and Power’, in: Critical Inquiry, vol. VIII, pp. 777–96; and Elias, Norbert (1969): Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 2 vols., Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Studies written within this tradition include: Hunt, Lynn (1984): Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press; Outram, Dorinda (1989): The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press; and Maza, Sarah (1998): ‘The Theatre of Punishment. Melodrama and Judicial Reform in Pre-revolutionary France’, in: Melzer and Norberg (1998), op. cit., (note 14), pp. 182–97. See: Astier, Régine (1992): ‘Louis XIV, ‘Premier Danseur’’, in: Rubin (1992): op. cit., (note 15), pp. 73–103; Leigh Foster, Susan (1998): ‘Dancing the Body Politic. Manner and Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Ballet’, in: Melzer and Norberg (1998): op. cit., (note 14), pp. 162– 81.

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ois and early Bourbon court ballet, most notably Mark Franko, appreciate ‘dance as text’, and have begun to focus perceptions of sovereign performativity on the act of dancing, thereby defining royal performances within court festivities as the moment in which the corporeal and the incorporeal body of the king become united in spectacle.18 However, James I never performed in any of his royal spectacles, either on stage or on the dance floor, and consequently I perceive the notion of the dancing king as an exemplification of sovereign performativity as a potentially misleading one, since it invites the assertion that this performativity arises via the king’s bodily performance: in other words, through his physical participation in the action displayed on stage. This unspoken supposition has led to the frequent objection that James’s passivity, as a non-performing spectator of the masque who was often impatient with the performances of his court, failed to comply with the theatrical economy of the genre, leading, as masque critics have argued, to difficult challenges for the devisers of Jacobean entertainments, and diverting attention from the figure of the king to the performer on stage. Measured against the great affability with which Elizabeth I had enhanced public spectacle as a means to visually affirm the relations with her people, James’s preference for the written word in his practice of government has caused reasonable doubt as to whether the Jacobean masque really represented ‘the expression of the monarch’s will, the mirror of his mind’.19 In his seminal 1975 essay on English political festival, Stephen Orgel describes the masque as the mirror of royal will, emphasising the differing poetics of space that distinguished the entertainments of Elizabeth from the spectacles staged for the first Stuart king. Quoting from an account of the preparations for a production of Plautus’s Aulularia (1564) at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, Orgel points to the habit of placing Elizabeth’s seat directly on stage, which made her the ‘essential part of the spectacle’.20 Although she did not disguise herself as her father had done, Elizabeth took 18

See: Franko, Mark (1993): Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, New York: Routledge. 19 Orgel (1975): op. cit., (note 5), p. 45. Orgel’s powerful depiction of the masque’s role at court has meanwhile repeatedly been critically assessed. For the most recent and substantial discussion, see: Butler, Martin (2008): The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 20 Orgel (1975): op. cit., (note 5), p. 9. Orgel’s full quotation describes how, ‘for the hearing and playing whereof, was made by her Highnes surveyor and at her own cost, in the body of the church from one side to the other, that the chapels might serve for houses. … Upon the south-wall was hanged a cloth of sate, with the appurtenances and half-pace [dais] for her Majesty. In the rood-loft, another stage for ladies and gentlewomen to stand on. And the two lower tables under the said rood-loft, were greatly enlarged and rayled for the choice officers of the Court. … When all things were ready for her plays, the Lord Chamberlayn with Mr Secretary came in; bringing a multitude of the guards with them of the play. … From the quire doore unto the stage was made as ‘twere a bridge rayled on both sides; for

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part in the spectacle by joining in the action of the narrative.21 Positioned amid the action on stage, the queen received objects such as the golden apple from Paris’s hand, which symbolised public consent to her acknowledgement of herself as the figure of truth, or as the arbitrator of conflicting argument, thereby engaging in a physical relationship with maskers and audience that, following Orgel’s account, differed fundamentally from that of her successor. In 1605 a new scenographic design was introduced, which highlighted the centrality of the king’s position in relation to the stage. As Orgel points out, King James was seated opposite the stage rather than on it, in the privileged position of the single-perspective viewer. The centrality of the king’s position as the principle spectator, at once all-observing and observed by all, effected a paradigmatic shift: ‘The centre of the spectacle,’ Orgel concluded, ‘was not the entertainment but the entertained, the monarch’.22 Masques were therefore fables devised for the single-point perspective of a passively contemplating king, whose dominance as a viewer provided a metaphor for his centrality to the court. This reading of the privileged visibility of James I in the early Stuart masque resulted in the central assumption of the monarch’s all-embracing gaze, and gave expression to the inescapability of royal command, which would become one of the most influential conjectures of masque scholarship. The theory of a scopic regime of the masque, which has been further developed in much subsequent scholarship, has lately become the object of revision, and a younger generation of scholars has repeatedly pointed out that a unified perspective that employed foreshortening was employed by Inigo Jones only after 1615. This has provided a more nuanced view of the inherent instability of the masque as a perspective depiction of the court’s power structure. And yet comprehension of the role of the king in the masque has become even more elusive than before. James’s written proclamation that ‘one of the maynes for which God hath advanced me upon the lofty stage of the supreme throne is that my words uttered from so eminent a place (…) might with greater facility be conceived’ seems to resonate with the frequently cited words of his predecessor Elizabeth Tudor, who declared

21

22

the Queen’s Grace to go to the stage. … At last her Highness came, with certain Lords, Ladies, and Gentlewomen: all the Pensioners going on both sides, with torch staves … and so took her seat, and heard the play fully’, p. 9–10. For a detailed assessment of the entertainments and masks staged for Elizabeth, see: Astington, John H. (1999): English Court Theatre 1558–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Astington emphasises the distinction of the Tudor masks, in Elizabethan spelling, from the masques of the Stuart court, pointing to the fact that especially for those no scaffolding was provided. See: pp. 98ff. Orgel, Stephen (1985): ‘The spectacles of state’, in: Richard C. Trexler (ed.), Persons in Groups: Social Behaviour and Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Binghampton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. XXXVI, pp. 101–20, p. 114.

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that ‘we Princes I tell you, are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world duly observed’.23 Yet while Elizabeth had paid particular attention to her role as England’s Virgin Queen, with displays of great religious humility and devotion, James’s speech in the Parliament of 1610 testified to a very different understanding of monarchy, one in which ‘Kings are not only God’s lieutenant upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself are called Gods’.24 James’s declaration of divine kingship encapsulates Stuart attempts to establish an absolutist form of government and redefine earlier Renaissance theories of kingship, as exemplified in speculum principes texts, into a vision of monarchy that increasingly denied the possibility of a division between the king’s person and office.25 Provoked by James’s accession to the English throne, this transition from the political theology of a twobodied kingship to a more individual perception of the person of the monarch united in the corpus mysticum of his divina praesentia resulted in renegotiations of this body’s performable surface that would reach its conclusion in the imago regis of his son, Charles I.26 Long before that, however, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the status of the king’s staged body was dramatically explored in the public stage-plays of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, which depicted kingship as

23

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26

Quotations from: McIlwain, C. H. (ed.), The Political Works of James I, Cambridge, Mass., 1918, p. 169; and: Neale, John E. (1957): Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, London: Cape, p. 119. Quoted from: Kenyon, John P. (1966): The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 12. On King James’s political ideology as expressed in his writings, see: Wormald, Jenny (1991): ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation’, in: Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 36–54; and, Somerville, J. P. (1991): ‘James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics and Continental Theory’, in: ibid., pp. 55–70. On the emergence of monarchic absolutism in early modern Europe, see: Henshall, Nicholas (1992): The Myth of Absolutism. Continuity and Change in Early Modern European Monarchy, London: Longman; Wilson, Peter (2000): Absolutism in Central Europe, London: Routledge; Alan, James (2006): The Origins of French Absolutism, 1598–1661, London: Longman. For Charles, see Chapter Three. For seventeenth-century theories of the imago regis, see: Stochita, Victor (1986): ‘Imago Regis. Kunsttheorie und königliches Portrait in den Meninas von Velázquez’, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. XLVIII, pp. 165–81; Brown, Jonathan and John H. Elliot (1980): A Palace for the King. The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 114ff; Pfisterer, Ulrich (2002): ‘Malerei als Herrschaftsmetapher. Velázquez und das Bildprogramm des Salón de Reinos’, in: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, vol. XXIX, pp. 199–251.

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the empty pose of exterior authority.27 In this context, the increasingly elaborate mythologies of the Stuart court masque maintained the mystery of kingship. The masque presented the most powerful expression of the cultural and political construction of James I’s mythical persona, and contributed to this shift by translating the performative economy of the king’s divided self into the spatial experience of a staged act, generating sovereign power from the interplay between the body natural of the king-as-spectator on the royal dais and the mythological cosmos of the king’s divine body politic, displayed in visual opposition on the Jonsonian stage. The performativity of sovereign power can therefore be seen to arise from the divided nature of the king’s body rather than from its performance, and I would like to draw attention to a particular question relating to the study of ‘the king’s two bodies’ that has, hitherto, not been discussed by Kantorowicz or his followers. English jurisdiction conceptualised the corporate continuity of the collective, and the continuous succession of the individual incumbent of royal dignity in the dualist doctrine of the king’s two bodies, and in so doing established a highly abstract image of sovereign kingship that conformed to the prevailing philosophical and theological theories of the time, but which remained indiscernible in terms of a concrete visual imagination. As the most basic axiom of English kingship, however, this doctrine must have influenced the rendering of the king’s body not only in terms of its intellectual perception, but also with regard to the question of its representation in the royal portrait. I suggest that the doctrine of the king’s two bodies imposed juridical difficulties on the painted image of the English monarch by requiring the representation of a twofold nature by means of a flat medium. Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII overcame this challenge through its depiction of the Tudor king’s fecund dynastic past and future, while Elizabeth regarded her portraits as the iconic sacraments of her twofold sovereign presence, for which the theatrical representation of her successor – via the staged image of the masque – provided an allegorical expression of the Stuart king’s divine self against which his body natural could be displayed. Ernst Kantorowicz’s the King’s two Bodies offers no explicit résumé of the juridical parameters of the royal image, yet his enquiry into the theory of monarchy in medieval Europe is essentially concerned with the king’s image in the royal funeral effigy. Clothed in the royal regalia, the English royal effigy, as Kantorowicz has shown, came to eclipse the dead body of the king, who was buried either naked or in a winding sheet, while the wooden figure was presented during the funeral ritual as the true bearer of monarchy. The royal effigy was a life-size figure, carved from a 27

Kernan, Alvin B. (1995): Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright. Theatre in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613, New Haven: Yale University Press; Rolls, Albert (2000): The Theory of the King’s Two Bodies in the Age of Shakespeare, Lewiston: Mellen.

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single piece of timber, which would wear the royal apparel during the ritual of the funeral.28 The earliest funeral effigy of an English monarch that has been preserved to the present day is that of King Edward III, whose reign ended in 1377 after fifty successful years.29 Phillip Lindley asserts that the face of King Edward III’s royal effigy is of particular interest. Referring to a recently discovered plaster mask that was attached to the figure’s wooden face, Lindley argues convincingly that Edward’s funeral effigy was intended to achieve a direct likeness of the dead king through the use of a death mask.30 Lindley quotes from a letter documenting the commission of the effigy of Edward’s father, Edward II, in 1327, which, contrary to that of his son, has not been preserved. A payment of £22 4s.11d. was made ‘pro factura unius ymaginis ad similitudiem Regis’ (for making of an image in the likeness of the king) and for ‘uno Sceptro una pila una cruce sum crucifixo argentea deaurata et aliis diversis custubus (…) circa preparacionem corporis ejusdem domini Regis ante diem sepulture’ (a sceptre, an orb, a cross with silver-gilt crucifix and other diverse expenses (…) about the preparation of the corpse of the lord king before the day of burial).31 In an argument that has been further pursued by Kristin Marek, Lindley asserts that the royal effigy was therefore not supposed to embody a general representation of Edward II, but, rather, his exact resemblance, and this effectively became ‘the first surviving portrait of an English monarch’, in the sense of ‘a self-contained image, deliberately intended to convey the likeness of an individual’.32 Kantorowicz refers to the wooden likeness of the dead monarch as persona ficta, and he argues that the royal effigy embodies the king’s other, differing persona, termed dignitas, which, in the context of the medieval doctrine of rex qui numquam moritur, signified the immortality of sovereign power.33 The effigy conveyed royal power as a concept of endless supremacy, and symbolised the immortal body of 28 The first study on the English funeral effigy is: Hope, William H. (1907): ‘On the Funeral Effigies of the Kings and Queens of England with Special Reference to those in the Abby Church of Westminster’, in: Archaeologia. Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiquity, vol. LX, pp. 517–65. 29 Edward’s advanced reign and many political achievements have been much acknowledged in English historiography. For a detailed reading, see: Ormrod, William Mark (1987): ‘Edward III and the Recovery of Royal Authority in England. 1340–1360’, in: History, vol. LXXII, pp. 4–19; Mortimer, Ian (2006): The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation, London: Cape. 30 Lindley, Phillip (1995): ‘Ritual, Regicide and Representation: The Murder of Edward II and the Origin of the Royal Funeral Effigy in England’, in: idem, Gothic to Renaissance. Essays on Sculpture in England, Stamford: Paul Watkins, pp. 97–112. 31 Quoted from: Lindley (1995): op. cit., (above), p. 108, (translation by Phillip Lindley). 32 Ibid., p. 109. 33 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. (1957): The King’s Two Bodies: Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 386.

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monarchy during the funeral ceremony – the moment at which this concept was clearly contested by the dead and evidently mortal body of the deceased king.34 Through the concept of the royal dignitas, English medieval lawyers answered the long-standing philosophical problem of the opposition between the finite world of man and God’s infinite immensity, neither of which could be appropriated to support the notion of an infinite sovereign power reigning on earth. Both spheres had been rendered distinct in Augustine’s theological doctrine of time, which denoted the finite realm of time that God had created on earth as tempus, and the infinite time of God himself, existing without past or future, as aeternitas.35 The idea of a changing and yet infinite – i.e. sovereign – kingship in the realm of earthly time thus posed a fundamental threat to sovereignty, for such an idea questioned its survival beyond the lifetime of the figure of the monarch. It is here that the medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies – the king’s body natural and the king’s body politic – allows for the perpetual nature of sovereignty to survive the physical body of its bearer in the form of the royal dignitas, which posits sovereign power as absolute and perpetual. As Kantorowicz has shown, the king’s body politic could thus be imagined as incorporated within the king’s body natural and yet still be ontologically separate from its existence. Transcending the life of the king, the dignitas of the body politic was discerned from the corporation of the Crown (corpus mysticum), and, as ‘sovereignty assigned to the king by his people’, designated the singularity of royal power.36 The understanding of the Crown as corpus mysticum alludes to the one mystical body of Christianity, and developed out of the doctrine of the sovereignty of spiritual power, which was promoted in those theological writings that were concerned with the political struggle between the pope and secular rulers from the thirteenth century onwards. Christianity defined mankind as one mystical whole that was founded and governed by God, and historically imposed the supreme government of a universal ecclesiastical society – the Church. Pope Boniface VIII introduced the corpus mysticum as an additional juridical concept to that of the corpus Christi, and, in 1302, 34 In a study on the royal effigy of Edward II, Kristin Marek has questioned the much acknowledged theory that for the time of the royal funeral the effigy contained the danger of the interregnum during which the power of monarchy was temporarily untied from any living royal body. See: Marek, Kristin (2006): ‘Monarchosomatologie: Drei Körper des Königs. Die Effigies König Eduards II. Von England’, in: Kristin Marek et. al. (eds.), Bild und Körper im Mittelalter, München: Fink, pp. 185–205. 35 Aurelius Augustine’s De Trinitate, in 15 volumes, presents one of the most significant theological treatises on time written between the fourth and fifth centuries. See: Grant, Edward (1994): Planets, Stars, and Orbs. The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 36 Kantorowicz (1957): op. cit., (note 33), p. 402.

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declared: ‘Urged by faith we are bound to believe in one holy Church, Catholic and also Apostolic (…) which represents one mystical body, the head of which is Christ, and the head of Christ is God’.37 The political argument contained in this analogy was a clear reminder to secular rulers that kingship was an ecclesiastical office receiving its power from the head of the Church – that is, the pope – in the form of a temporal right to rule in subjugation to his authority. Boniface’s declaration of Christianity as a mystical body, however, conceptualised the Church as a body politic that in juridical terms acted on the same level as other, secular, political bodies. As the corpus mysticum of the Church thus gradually came to establish its body politic (corpus iuridicum), the notion of the corpus mysticum was ultimately applied to any body politic of medieval society, both religious and secular. When Henry VIII ended juridical connections with Rome in 1533 by the Act in Restraint of Appeals, the head–body metaphor provided the qualifying clause for his claim to sovereign rule, since it was declared that ‘England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king, (…), unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people (…) ought to bear (…) humble obedience’.38 One year later, in the Act of Supremacy, Henry proclaimed himself ‘the supreme head of the Church of England’, and, though not laying claim to the right to minister the sacraments and other priestly powers of the ordained clergy (potestas ordinis), thus began to control the enactment of ecclesiastical laws (potestas jurisdictionis), and declared himself and ‘his heirs and successors, kings of this realm’, who ‘shall be taken, accepted and reputed the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England’.39 In proclaiming the shared identity of predecessor and successor, father and son, Henry thus safeguarded the continuity of royal power by a juridical fiction that personified the immaterial and invisible Crown as linked to a hereditary monarchy that, despite a change of the mortal body natural, was defined as perpetual and without change in the body politic. Here the fiction of law contains the threatening political reality that the pope, who as vicarius Christi claimed for himself the right of the interrex embodied by Christ, would assume the 37 38 39

Quoted from: Documents of the Christian Church, ed. by Henry Bettenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 115. Quoted from: Ryrie, Alec (2002): ‘Divine Kingship and Royal Theology in Henry VIII’s Reformation’, in: Reformation, vol. VII, pp. 49–78, p. 56. Ibid. For detailed reading, see: Bernard, George W. (2005): The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church, New Haven: Yale University Press; Graves, Michael A. (2003): Henry VIII: A Study in Kingship, London: Longman; and, Loades, David (1992): Revolution in Religion: The English Reformation 1530 – 1570, Cardiff: University of Wales Press; King, John N. (1996): ‘Davidic Kingship and Reformation Politics. The Iconography of Henry VIII, James I, and Charles I and II’, in: György Szönyi (ed.), European Iconography East and West, Leiden: Brill, pp. 146–58.

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government over secular dominions in the event of an interregnum. In this context, dynasty was defined as a ‘corporation by succession’, allowing the doctrine of rex qui numquam moritur to encompass the succeeding line of English kings as the one body politic that carried the absolute nature of English sovereign power in the concept of royal dignity.40 While the Crown thus signified the sovereignty of the collective body of the whole realm, the concept of royal dignity referred solely to the king’s sovereignty as vested in his office by the people and present in his body natural alone.41 This context explains why the visual representation of the English monarch after Henry’s Act in Restraint of Appeals would question the medium of the painted image, which, in its natural quality of material flatness, did not conform to the material conception of a twofold royal body, whose union of a natural and political identity asserted their complementarity. The masque, in contrast, presented James’s body natural in front of, and his body politic within, the framed image of Inigo Jones’s stage and proscenium arch, and, as I will demonstrate, provided a visual device that proved capable of conveying this twofold identity of sovereign power by transferring the mental image of the king’s two bodies to a spatial representation wherein James’s body natural could be complemented by the theatrical image of his body politic.

‘Rul’d by a sunne’: James I as Centre of Masque and Cosmos During the earliest Jacobean stagings, the most explicitly theatrical nature of the masque is demonstrated in the productions of Thomas Campion, who, in his service to King James, combined the roles of poet and composer. His metric treatises defined music and poetry as an undifferentiated unit of sound, causing him to employ a very plain and immediate style in order to emphasise his concern with the production of theatrical space and performance.42 As one of the very few of his contemporaries to compose musical settings for his own poems, Campion understood the ear

40 See: Kantorowicz (1957): op. cit. (note 33), p. 338. 41 For a detailed analysis of the relation between Crown and royal dignity see the third part of Kantorowicz’s seventh chapter, ‘The King never dies’, pp. 383–450. 42 For the notion of immediacy, a term central to the theoretical writings of Thomas Campion, see: Ing, Catherine (1951): ‘The Lyrics of Thomas Campion’, in: eadem, Elizabethan Lyrics. A Study in the Development of English Meters and their Relation to Poetic Effect, London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 151–77; and Short, R. W. (1944): ‘The Metrical Theory and Practice of Thomas Campion’, in: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. LIX, pp. 1003–18.

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as ‘a rational sense and a chiefe judge of proportion’.43 Throughout his career at the Jacobean court, Campion, whose work is otherwise rather extensive, especially in the field of music, composed only three masques. All three have been preserved within an account of unique detail that was edited and published by Campion himself, and which documents not only the entertainment’s text but also meticulously describes the action on the stage and the dancing floor. The first of these, entitled Description of a Maske, Presented before the Kinges Majestie at White-Hall, on Twelfth Night last, in honour of Lord Hay, and his bride, (…), and dating from 1607, presents what may well be an authorial account of the performance, although the question remains as to whether it formed an accurate record of the event or rather an idealised depiction of his work.44 As far as this chapter is concerned, however, it is precisely the author’s editing of his invention that provides an insight into our understanding of the genre of the masque. While preparing the scripts of his three masques for publication, Campion acknowledged the fact of the masque’s transient

43

Campion, Thomas (1607): Campion’s Works, ed. by Percival Vivian, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909, p. 36. 44 See: Thomas Campion (1607): ‘The Description of a Maske, Presented before the Kinges Majestie at White-Hall, on Twelfth Night last, in honour of the Lord Hayes, and his bride, Daughter and Heire to the Honourable the Lord Dennye, their Marriage having been the same day at Court solemnized’, in: Percival Vivian (ed.), Campion’s Works, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909, pp. 57–76. Masque scholarship has long been aware of the problem of authorial evidence. See: Butler, Martin (1984): Theatre and Crisis. 1632–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yet with a recent publication by Lynn Sermin Meskill, this aspect has gained new significance. See: Meskill, Lynn Sermin (2005): ‘Exorcising the Gorgon of Terror: Jonson’s Masque of Queenes‘, in: English Literary History, vol. LXXII, pp. 181–207. Reading Ben Jonson’s holograph of his 1609 The Masque of Queenes, prepared for Prince Henry after the performance, as an enquiry into the ‘poetic fantasy constructed around fame and envy’ (p. 182), Meskill emphasises authorial accounts to be ‘at least a different and perhaps in part even consciously differing and deferred work from the original script used for the performance.’ (ibid., emph. Meskill). As Meskill, in consequence, thinks, ‘it is surprising, that scholars attempting to understand the present occasions of the masque borrow and quote from a post-performance text later published by the poet as his own work’ (ibid.), it might be appropriate to briefly discuss the validity of Campion’s account as material for this chapter. Jonson’s published editions of his masque productions are famous for their wealth in footnotes and marginalia. Though some of them hold detailed descriptions of the performance, they are in the majority meticulous explanations of the masques’ symbols and allegories and references to their sources. In Campion’s masque accounts, in contrast, such association with the work of classical antiquity is missing. Peter Walls, who enquires into Campion’s account of Lord Hay’s Masque as a source of musical history, further points out: ‘his [Campion’s] account … seems all the more reliable for his willingness to acknowledge imperfections, even if only in marginal gloss. There were, he tells us, problems with the machinery …’, see: Walls (1996): op. cit., (note 9), p. 18.

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nature and attempted to supply what the eye could no longer see. His masque inventions changed in a way that is mirrored in the changing method of his published accounts. Campion’s description of the 1607 Lord Hay’s Masque (as his first production is commonly described) concentrates on meticulous descriptions of the spectacle’s scenery. In contrast, his account of The Lords’ Masque, staged in February 1613, in which allegory and emblem give way to a more melodic pattern in verse, focuses far more on movement and gesture.45 In the report of his final production, The Masque of Squires from December 1613, a performance consisting predominantly of dancing, Campion’s annotation far outnumbers the lines of its actual poetic text. Campion’s account thus mirrors the increasing significance of movement and rhythm in the early Jacobean masque, and draws attention to contemporary reflections on its theatrical nature. Central to this theatrical nature was a dramatic structure of strong binary opposition, which allowed for what Campion referred to as the exchange of chaos for order. This view of the genre became further accentuated with the emergence of the anti-masque, a dramatic device that was enacted before the main masque by Ben Jonson in 1609.46 Jonson’s addition of the antimasque would become the standard form of the genre: a tuneful prologue that set the scene and introduced the theme of the evening’s production. Professional actors would then enter the hall in order to 45

Campion’s Lords’ Masque formed the highlight of the entertainments given for the wedding of James’s daughter Elizabeth to Prince Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine. The most detailed account of the events surrounding the Palatine wedding has survived in: Nichols, John (1828): The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, his Royal Consort, Family and Court, 4 vols., London: J. B. Nichols. For a discussion of the surviving accounts themselves, see: Norbrook, David (1986): ‘The Masque of Truth. Court Entertainment and International Protestant Politics in the Early Stuart Period’, in: Seventeenth Century, vol. I, pp. 81–110. The panegyric concept underlying Campion’s The Lords’ Masque has most recently been analysed by Kevin Curran. See: Curran, Kevin (2006): ‘James I and fictional authority at the Palatine wedding celebrations’, in: Renaissance Studies, vol. XX, no. 1, pp. 51–67. On the political significance of the Anglo-German match see: Yates, Frances Amalia (1972): The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Routledge, esp. pp. 1–23; and Werner, Hans (1996): ‘The Hector of Germany or the Palsgrave Prime Elector and Anglo-German Relations in Early Stuart England’, in: Malcolm R. Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe. Essays in Politics and Political Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 113–32. 46 For a detailed reading of the emergence of the antimasque see: Orgel, Stephen (1968): ‘Antimasque’, in: Essays in Criticism, vol. XVIII, pp. 310–21. The introduction of the antimasque provided Jonson, and fellow artists occupied with the invention of its separate staging, with a whole new range of possibilities. In his introduction to The Jonsonian Masque, Stephen Orgel analyses in concise form how this new device was explored in the various masque productions throughout the first decades of the seventeenth century. See: Orgel (1965): op. cit., (note 4), pp. 11–4.

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perform the speeches and dances of the antimasque. Expressed both in words and through distorted dancing, the anti-masque presented a world full of grotesque, ridiculous, evil or otherwise impure characters that preceded the display of virtuous court life displayed in the main masque as an antithetical depiction of misrule. Transition from the anti-masque to the main masque was marked by a spectacular scene change that provided the new setting for the dances of the noble masquers, cast from among the highest members of the court and performing as mythical personae within the fiction on stage.47 The masque presented the microcosm of the Jacobean court in a simple metaphor for moral threat and its defeat, and was established upon the basic structure of a strong antagonism that was resolved through the logic of ritual action. Each time the masque was performed, it staged the establishment of monarchic order in a setting of natural confusion, thereby conveying an idealised image of the Jacobean kingdom as a triumphant community of heroic aristocrats with a virtuous and bountiful king as their leader. By displaying evil forces that would be overpowered by ancient gods, who were enacted by members of James’s court, the masque controlled a fictional but tangible territory wherein the king’s dominance could be exemplified as rightful and wise. Occasioned by the marriage of Lord Hay, James’s Scottish favourite at the time, to Honora Denny, the daughter of an English country gentleman, Campion’s 1607 masque praised the king as the architect of the British union of England and Scotland, which was mirrored in the nuptial union of bride and groom. James hoped that his personal union of the two crowns would assure peace to the kingdoms of the British Isles – which he insisted on being known as Great Britain – and he had exhorted Parliament to approve the political union of England and Scotland since his first day on the throne. The two kingdoms should become ‘one body of both Kingdomes under mee your King’.48 Throughout the sessions of 1605 and 1606, however, James had not succeeded in achieving a legal and religious unification of both coun-

47

The word persona derives from the Latin personare, which refers to the actor’s voice resounding through the mask worn on stage. See: Scherer, Georg (1989): ‘Person’, in: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. VII, pp. 300–19, p. 301. 48 Quoted from: Somerville, J. P. (ed.): King James VI and I, Political Writings, Cambridge, 1994, p. 161. For a detailed account on the union of Scotland and England, see: Galloway, Bruce (1986): The Union of Scotland and England. 1602–1608, Edinburgh: Donald. Gregory Martin has emphasised that the common title of this work – the union of the crowns – is incorrect and refers only to the pragmatic effort of James to unify his two kingdoms in legislative and judicial matters, as far as the two crowns of Scotland and England were not united or combined by James or his son, who was crowned King of Scotland in Edinburgh in 1633, seven years after his English coronation in London. Discussing this aspect in detail, Bruce Galloway has therefore termed the union Regal Union. See: Galloway, Bruce (1985): The Jacobean Union, Six Tracts of 1604, Edinburgh: Constable.

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tries. Campion’s masque took the opportunity provided by the courtly wedding to celebrate the virtues of marriage as metaphor for the social and metaphysical benefit of James’s proposed political union, paralleling the motive in the union of Diana and Apollo as symbols of the opposite principles of nature, which can only be joined by love.49 Campion evolved his entertainment along a highly illusionistic mythological narrative characteristic of the early masque of the Jacobean court, opening with Flora and Zephyrus, allegories of spring and fertility, who prepare a night chamber for the bridal couple. The story begins when Night enters to report that Diana is in a rage over one of her nymphs, who defected from her entourage in order to marry one of Phoebus’s knights, all of whom the goddess, in her scorn, transformed into trees. The drama is resolved when Apollo reconciles Diana, who finally consents to the match and turns the nine knights back into men. For this final transformation the front part of the stage began to sink – ‘effected by an Ingin plac’t vnder the stage’ – lowering three trees at a time to the dance floor, where their golden bark fell apart and revealed the courtly masquers.50 The process of this new configuration was emphasised by a ‘song of transformation’ that expounded the mythical process and emphasised that the transformation of the nine golden trees back into men was effected by ‘gratious Phoebus’, King James, whose gaze breaks the spell upon Apollo’s knights: ‘Night and Diana charge, And all t’Earth obayes, Opening large, Her secret waies, While Apollos charmed men Their forms receiue againe. Giue gratious Phoebus honour then, And so fall downe, and rest behind the train, Giue gratious Phoebus honour then, And so fall downe, and rest behind the train.’51

The image of solar eminence as a metaphor in praise of the monarch is a consistent device in the Stuart masque. Familiar from the philosophical and literary under-

49 Ben Jonson had done the same in Hymenaei, the Twelfth Night masque of the year before, which had been staged in celebration of the marriage of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and Frances Howard. See: Parry, Graham (1993): ‘The Politics of the Jacobean Masque’, in: J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds.), Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 87–117. 50 Campion (1607): op. cit., (note 43), p. 70. 51 Ibid., pp. 70–71.

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standing of light as a symbol of beauty, truth, life and divinity, metaphorical light was often employed to allude to the virtue and glory of kings. In the poetic strategy of the masque, the symbolic properties of light thus maintained the mythical quality of monarchic eulogy. Entheus, the fictional poet guiding the narrative of Campion’s Lords’ Masque from 1613, celebrates James as a source of this divine light – ‘the fires / Are reddy in my braine / which Jove [James] enspires’ – thereby attributing the inspiration of his poetry, representative of all artistic invention in the kingdom, to the genius of the monarch. As John Meager has pointed out, the frequent characterisation of James as sun or sun-god in the masque was reinforced by the astounding display of light engineered by Inigo Jones through the use of massed candles and coloured liquids, symbolically linking the brightness of the hall to ‘the Maiesty of this light, the King whose eyes doe dart Promethean fire / throughout this all’.52 Symbolising the conflicting world of the main masque and the anti-masque in terms of light and darkness, the masque underpinned Thomas Dekker’s notion of the British kingdom as ‘Rul’d by a Sunne’.53 James was seated in the middle of the room, where he mirrored the cosmic centre of the sun, and ‘proiecteth so powerfull beames of light’, thus confirming the centripetal system of English monarchy that circled around the person of the monarch as its gravitational centre.54 The masque thus allegorised him as source of light and harmony, positioning him between the corporeal realm of men and the incorporeal realm of the heavenly spirits, and conveying his divine power on earth by a device prefigured in Marcus Gheeraerts’ Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I. Although the gods and goddesses of the masque performed as fictional personae within a stage-set narrative, they testify to a very concrete political concept of Stuart monarchy. The masque’s action was directed by its prime spectator, Jove – i.e. James – and the heavenly deities of Mercury, Diana and Apollo not only carried allegorical meaning but, as personifications of the celestial bodies that circled around the globe, alluded to the very tangible concept of a divine social order as it was based on the geocentric world picture. The classical gods could be interpreted as both incarnate virtues and cosmic figures, and they proved particularly capable of epitomising the political self-conception of the Jacobean monarch. The order established in these 52

See: Ben Jonson’s Masque of Beauty from 1608, quoted from: Orgel and Strong (1973): op. cit., (note 4), p. 93. Detailed reading on the tradition and training of torchbearers in the Stuart masque is given in: Daye, Anne (1998): ‘Torchbearers in the English Masque’, in: Early Music, vol. XXVI, no. 2, pp. 246–62. For a general analysis of lighting practices in late Renaissance English court festivities, see: Graves, R. (1984): ‘Stage Lighting at the Elizabethan and Early Stuart Courts’, in: Theatre Notebook, vol. XXXVIII, no. 1, pp. 27–36. 53 See: Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness, quoted from: Orgel and Strong (1973): op. cit., (note 4), p. 91. 54 See: Ben Jonson’s Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly from 1611, quoted from: ibid., p. 232.

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narratives, visually enhanced by the movement and choreography of the dancers, celebrated the power and virtues of the monarch, who provided its ratio, modus and disciplina, in the sense of Cicero’s dictum that where there is order to be seen, there must be someone who established and maintains it. In a treatise composed in 1612 for the edification of his eldest son and heir to the throne, his Basilikon Doron, James I delineated the rights and duties of a sacred king, which, as Roy Strong was first to point out, is best summarised in a speech made by James to Parliament on 21 March 1609: ‘The state of Monarchy is the supremest thing vpon earth. For Kings are not only GODS Lieutenants vpon earth, and sit vpon Gods throne, but even by GOD himselfe they are called Gods. There bee three pinicipall similtudes that illustrates the state of MONARCHIE: One taken out of the word of GOD; and the two other out of the grovnds of Policie and Philosophie. In the scriptures Kings are called Gods, and so their power after a certaine relation compared to the Diuine power. Kings are also compared to fathers of families: for a King is trewly Parens Patriae, the politique father of his people. And lastly, Kings are compared to the head of this Microcosme of the body of Man.’55

James’s political theory on the divine right of kings was conveyed in the masque through the action of the classical gods, which conferred an aura of divine power on the Jacobean monarch. As Gordon Teskey has shown in regard to the literature and art of late Renaissance Italy, the revival of the classical gods in allegory was related to the emergence of the idea of the sovereign state that centred in the body of the prince as a cosmos unto itself, wherein the gods mediated the power of the sacred to the realm of the political.56 Defining the monarch not merely as its ethical and emblematic reference, but as its spatially defined, tangible and corporeal centre, the English masque constituted the king’s body as the material bearer of the allegoric abstractions performing in its spectacle of state. The masque bound the illusion of sacred power to ritual practice, and thus maintained the political doctrine of the king’s superhuman judgement and limitless power that lay at the heart of James’s claim to divine rule by providing an exemplary but tangible concretisation of this abstract belief, which could be realised and embodied in action. Of particular interest in this context is the spatial rhetoric that the masque developed to express this sense of the king as the central figure in the cosmic hierarchy to which his own, well-ordered, realm invisibly corresponded. Through its representation of the microcosm of the Stuart kingdom, the masque aligned its performers 55 56

See: McIlwain, C. H. (1918): The Political Works of James I, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Quoted from: Strong (1984): op. cit., (note 5), p. 159. See: Teskey, Gordon (1996): Allegory and Violence, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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to the larger context of cosmic hierarchy by way of dance. Dance and music contain a metaphorical significance that has been observed but not taken into account by traditional studies of the genre. The masque served as the prime form of courtly self-fashioning, articulating the hierarchic structures and negotiating the power relations of the Jacobean court by reproducing social complexities in choreographed movement. By dancing in the masque, Jacobean courtiers aspired to participate in the perfect state of celestial harmony that the entertainment was understood to reflect. The courtly dance of the masque inherited from the late Renaissance a notion of dance, which was commonly understood to have arisen as an imitation of the orderly dance of the cosmos, and believed to impart moral improvement to its performers, who thereby confirmed their position within the divine hierarchy of the court. As an amalgamation of Pythagorean and Platonic treatises on the harmony of the spheres, the concept of celestial dance embodied the notion that every star and planet moved at its own particular speed and path according to its fixed rank in cosmic hierarchy and thereby joined in a harmoniously choreographed motion that controlled the course of time, years, seasons and ages.57 Inaudible to the human ear, the movement of the spheres produced the musica mundana, which was perceived as an analogy to the musica humana, linking the practice of dance to the doctrine of correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm.58 This enquiry into the principles of order in nature was already extremely influential during the Elizabethan Renaissance, and during the Stuart era it was further explored by John Dee and Robert Fludd, whose History of the Two Worlds, the Great World of the Macrocosm and the Little World of Man, the Microcosm was published in 1617.59 In the reiterated victory over the chaos of its anti-masque, the Stuart masque thus re-created the birth of the universe that God had built from celestial disorder on the command of James, who,

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According to the theories of celestial hierarchy developed by Neoplatonists, the universe was divided into three layers consisting of the elemental human world, the celestial world of the planets and fixed stars, and the super-celestial angelic world of God. The angelic or heavenly world was naturally equated with the realm of Platonic Ideas, reflected as light to the lower worlds. Hence the celestial was seen as a mediator between the elemental-terrestrial realm inhabited by mankind, and the super-celestial, with the movement of the planets reflecting divine influence which in turn controlled human affairs. See: Berghaus, Gunter (1992): ‘Neoplatonic and Pythagorean Notions of World Harmony and Unity and their Influence on Renaissance Dance Theory’, in: Dance Research. The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, vol. X, no. 2, pp. 43–70. See: Hollander, John (1961): The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500– 1700, Princeton: Princeton University Press. For a reprint of Robert Fludd’s History of the Macrocosm and Microcosm and Declaratio Brevis dedicated to James I, see: Huffman, William (2001): Robert Fludd, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

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in the role of Jove, oversaw the orderly motion of his courtly dancers as the new king of the universe. It was thus the body of the Jacobean courtier that offered the prime medium for the fashioning and maintenance of social and political status at court. Complex and hard to master, dancing in the masque ranged among the prime rhetoric of the gentle body in Stuart England, where the conduct of politics was first and foremost a matter of personal contact and physical encounter. Although dance in the masque has long been acknowledged as an integral part of the genre, critical studies on this subject are still only slowly arising from a wider body of recent research on the significance of dance within late Renaissance festival culture all over Europe. 60 Far from being a mere entertainment, dancing covered about two-thirds of a masque performance, and was painstakingly taught and rehearsed during the weeks beforehand. Performed by the highest members of court, these carefully choreographed dances formed the highlight of every masque and were most anxiously followed by the evening’s audience.61 Dancing in the masque was a means of demonstrating high status, as only the best performers at court were selected to participate and had demonstrated superiority in both lineage and stage presence before being taught the high standard of the masque’s choreographies in long, daily rehearsals.62 Dignified processional dances like the pavane had been imported to Elizabethan England from Burgundian courts. These were created to parade rich clothes and jewellery, through which social status among the English peerage could be displayed.63 Courtly dancing thus formalised social hierarchy through codified movement, and was perceived to transform the body from a grotesque mass into a virtuous instrument that safeguarded its carrier’s status. Elite dance sought to suppress gestures that had become characteristic of traditional English country dances, in

60 The first separate study on dance in the English masque has recently been published by: Ravelhofer, Barbara (2006): The Early Stuart Court Masque. Dance, Costume and Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 61 Graham Perry has pointed out that contemporary eyewitness accounts of Stuart masques were primarily concerned with the dances, the success or failure of mechanical effects and comments on other members of the audience, while references to the spectacle’s political message were rather poor. See: Parry (1993): op. cit., (note 49). 62 Tom Bishop makes a similar argument in his analysis of Prince Henry’s dancing in Oberon, 1611, demonstrating how the Prince’s performative participation asserted his political agenda. See: Bishop, Tom (1998): ‘The Gingerbread Host. Tradition and Novelty in the Jacobean Masque’, in: David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (eds.), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 88–120. 63 On the origins of English courtly dancing in French festival culture of the sixteenth century, see: Kipling, Gordon (1977): The Triumph of Honour. Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance, Leiden: Leiden University Press.

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which dancers often mimed the actions of their trades in movement and gesture.64 Such physical self-mastery demonstrated the prime virtues of the Elizabethan courtier and was considered a practical exercise in moral improvement, capable of counteracting dangerous passions. Unlike dance at the court of Elizabeth, during the Jacobean era dance was embedded in the specific emblematic of royal politics. 65 Courtly dancers had to enact the mythical identity of their masqued persona through virtuosity in motion and vigour of bodily control. In Campion’s 1613 Lords’ Masque the conspicuous virtuosity of the courtly dancers was displayed via individually composed instrumental pieces encompassed within a song that pronounced the dancers as celebrating a collective rather than an individual courtly identity, joining the single voice of the instrumental solos to the multi-voiced lines of a chorus that united the efforts of the individual dancers in a visualisation of social harmony. The dances of the Stuart masque thus reconciled strategies of political self-assertion to the values of fellowship and royal service, rendering social identity into a rhythmical and spatial work of art. The climax of this aspect of the masque was provided by the revels, a series of popular dances that followed the final transformation-scene of the main masque and provided the social part of the evening’s spectacle, in which the courtly masquers joined with members of the audience.66 These dances usually followed an established sequence, drawing on traditional Elizabethan social dances, known as the eight measures, as well as on dances imported from continental courts, such as galliards, brawls and corantos.67 Using familiar music and standard step sequences, the revels were not restricted with regard to the number of participants from the audience, 64 See for example the dance of the ‘hard-handed-people’ which Mark Franko refers to in his pioneering study on the semiotics of the Renaissance body: Franko, Mark (1986): The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography, c. 1416–1589, Birmingham, Ala.: Summa Publications. For a detailed analysis of Tudor elite dances embraced or resisted by a wider audience see: Howard, Skiles (1996): ‘Rival Discourses of Dancing in Early Modern England’, in: Studies in English Literature, vol. XXXVI, no. 1, pp. 31–56. 65 For the political deployment of dance at the Elizabethan court see: Brooks, Eric St John (1946): Sir Christopher Hatton, London: Cape. 66 A comprehensive analysis of the revels in the Stuart masque is given in: Daye, Anne (1996): ‘“Youthful Revels, Masks, and Courtly Sights”: An Introductory Study of the Revels within the Stuart Masque’, in: Historical Dance, vol. III, no. 4, pp. 5–22. 67 For a detailed discussion of these dances, as for reconstructions of their choreographies and music, see: Ward, John (1986): ‘The English Measure’, in: Early Music, vol. XIV, no. 1, pp. 15–21, and, idem (1993): ‘Apropos “The Old Measures”’, in: Records of Early English Drama, vol. XVIII, no. 1, pp. 2–21; Stokes, James and Ingrid Brainard (1992): ‘”The Olde Measures” in the West Country: John Willoughby’s Manuscript’, in: Records of Early English Drama, vol. XVII, no. 2, pp. 1–10; and, Payne, Ian (2003): The Almain in Britain, c. 1549– c. 1675: A Dance Manual from Manuscript Sources, Aldershot: Ashgate.

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whose selection to participate in the dancing space was, however, undertaken according to rank. Joining audience and performers in bodily concord, the revels thus produced a moment of incorporation in performance, thereby expanding the celestial harmony of the masque’s fiction onto the material reality of the Stuart court. The masque incorporated ritual elements inherited from festive practices such as courtly mumming, and was thus rooted in a theatrical tradition dating from the Middle Ages that was characterised by an ad hoc creation of performative space. ‘Room, room, Ladies and Gentlemen’ – the traditional entrance call by which performers of early Tudor mumming proclaimed the clearing of tables and seats from the hall in order to commence the entertainment – might illustrate most emblematically how theatrical space was constructed by the means of performance only. 68 Lacking any kind of formal performance space, medieval actors created the place for their spectacle amid the spectators, creating the performance space out of the space provided by the audience by means of words and gestures. This ephemeral theatrical space existed only for as long as the performance, and it survived in the Jacobean court masque, emphasising the difference between the masque and those plays that were staged in public playhouses.69 In contrast, contemporary Jacobean City-Comedies, as well as earlier Shakespearean drama, required that their spectators imagine an alternative, story-based reality for the contestation of moral, social and political scenarios on stage. Within this world, a fictional narrative was developed by professional actors, who represented fictional characters that had no continuity once the performance was over. Establishing a clear divide between the world of its audience and that of the stage, early Stuart drama thus proposed a perspective of aesthetic distance that marked its theatricality as an act of representation. While the early modern spectators of London’s playhouses had thus long been acquainted with redirecting their gaze from the bodily identity of the professional actor to the fictional persona conveyed by his acting for the duration of the play, the theatrical principle of the masque still required its courtly spectators to perceive social identity via the performance of bodily presence. In opposition to the body of the Jacobean actor, the body of the Jacobean masquer was thus cast as retaining the 68 See: Astington (1999): op. cit., (note 21). 69 The opposites of masque and drama have been much played upon already by the genre’s contemporaries. Thus the lines of Thomas Middleton’s A Courtly Masque from 1620: ‘This our device we do not call a play / Because we break the stage’s laws today’, quoted from: Bullen, A. H. (1985): The Works of Thomas Middleton, 8 vols., London: John C. Nimmo, vol. VII, p. 149. The only thorough analysis of the relation between masque and drama so far has been given in an essay by Helen Cooper, in which she demonstrates that the masque derives from the dramatic form of the morality play. See: Cooper, Helen (1984): ‘Location and Meaning in the Masque, Morality and Royal Entertainment’, in: David Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 135–48.

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already remote notion of the union between bodily and spiritual presence, an antagonism that was conditioned by the doctrinaire conception of the king’s material body as the corporeal presence of the corporate body of English sovereignty. The masque was opposed to a theatricality of representation as it was promoted on the public stages of contemporary London; instead, it deliberately undermined the aesthetic distance between the world of its courtly audience and that of its allegorical narrative. Rather than feigning a dramatic illusion, the masque aspired to enact a higher vision of the social, political and material reality of its courtly performers, in an understanding similar to the portraits of Elizabeth that had claimed the true image of the queen by their rejection as a form of representation. Recalling medieval ritual, the courtly masquer was seen to reveal the virtues of his allegoric identity as the inner truth of his bodily self in the moment he appeared on stage. Acting meant the adoption of an identity not one’s own, the embodiment of a lie, a harmful practice carried out in masque productions by professional players who were hired when speech was entailed.70 In contrast to the professional actor whose acting, in a puritanical link to popish liturgy, was seen as the denial of his true self, the Jacobean masquer was understood to carry the mythical idealisation of his cast beyond the time of his performance, thereby uniting the realms of political allegory and political reality within his courtly body.71 In the eyes of the antitheatrical Puritans, acting was perceived as hypocrisy, counterfeited dissembling, demonic metamorphosis. Actors substituted a self of their own contriving for the one given them by God and were therefore guilty of blasphemy. Indeed, permanent public playhouses were considered highly suspect in Elizabethan and Jacobean London and were cast to the margins of the city, while players were regarded as vagabonds and scoundrels. Since the enactment of the Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds of 1572, which aimed to outlaw players, and, at the same time, to officially endorse a limited number of theatre companies within the patronage structure of a hierarchical society, the acting profession was regulated by the Privy Council through the

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Analysing masque dance as a realm of potential female assertion at the early Jacobean court, Clare McManus has shown how the prohibition of aristocratic speech performance stood in the context of the period’s perceived links between speech and the sexualised female body. See: McManus, Clare (2002): Women on the Renaissance Stage. Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thomas Becon, in his treatise The Displaying of the Popish Mass, first published in London 1564, with a reprint in 1605, condemned the priests as ‘game-players, coming on stage in hickscorner’s apparel’. See: Thomas Becon (1564): ‘The Displaying of the Popish Mass’, in: John Ayre (ed.), Prayers and Other Pieces of Thomas Becon, Cambridge: 1964, pp. 259.

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censorship and licensing of the plays that were allowed to be staged.72 For the antitheatrical polemicists of Elizabethan London, actors and audience were effectively committing the same sin, since both were involved in a sustained imaginative collusion with the feigned characters and events on stage. The argument goes back to Salvianus, a disciple of St. Augustin, who wrote on the sin of playgoing: ‘Al other evils pollute the doers onlie, not the beholders, or the hearers. For a man may heare a blasphemer, and not be partaker of his sacriledge, inasmuch as in minde he dissenteth. And if one come while a roberie is a doing, he is cleere, because he abhors the fact. Onlie the filthines of plaies, and spectacles is such, as maketh both the actors & beholders giltie alike. For while they saie nought, but gladilie looke on, they al by sight and assent be actors.’73

Puritan assaults on the stage found their most violent expression in pamphlets such as William Rankins’ A Mirrour of Monsters (1587) and John Rainolds’ Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes (1599), provoking written apologies for the stage. In defence of his profession, Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors, written in around 1607–08 and first published in 1612, argued that the actor, through his performance, had the ability to encourage moral behaviour in the audience, ‘as if the Personator were the man Personated, so bewitching a thing is liuely and well spirited action, that it has power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt’.74 Heywood’s distinction between the ‘personator’ and the ‘personated’ addresses the inherent duality of theatrical play – the actor and the character represented by the act of playing – which early modern England held in differing esteem.75 Seeing the agency arising from the twofold relation of the actor to his imaginary role as a treacherous form of self-expression, the Privy Council, which granted the Master of the Revels a patent for the licensing and censorship of playbooks, strongly regulated every new production.76 The playwrights of the Eliza-

72 For the history of public playhouses in England, see: Gurr, Andrew (1992): The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Mullaney, Stephen (1988): The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 73 Quoted from: A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters, in: William Carew Hazlitt (ed.), The English Drama and Stage under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543– 1664, London, 1869, p. 104. 74 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, London, 1612, p. 21. 75 The same scholars also comment upon the selectiveness and partisanship that characterises Heywood’s Apology. See: Burns, Edward (1990): Character: Acting and Being on the PreModern Stage, New York: St. Martin’s Press; Alter, Jean (1990): A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 76 See: Gurr, Andrew (1996): The Shakespearan Playing Companies, Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 55–6.

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bethan and Jacobean stage were aware of this discourse, and they explored the ethical implications of theatrical feigning by staging plays-within-plays, in which the actor plays a character who plays with the disclosure of the actor behind the dramatic persona, and, in its most extreme version, in the double-gendered representations of Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines, played by boy-actors counterfeiting young women, who, in the play, presented themselves as servant or page.77 Interfering with the economy of representation, the exposure of role-playing exhibited the friction between the imaginary figure and its impersonating agency, producing what Meredith Anne Skura has termed the ‘onstage tension’ of Elizabethan theatre.78 Apart from denoting the imagination of the playwright as the productive force underlying the stage play, this disclosing of role-play, as the material act of counterfeiting by giving body and voice to the representation of a fictional figure demanded from the actor, gave recognition to the actor’s skill, his talent in the art of representation. William Worthen was first to draw attention to the centrality of imagination in the socio-political discourse on theatricality and representation in Elizabethan England. Puritan attacks on theatrical artifice as an act of blasphemy and idolatry were met by a defence of poetry as manifestation of man’s godlike potential of creation by the humanist elite that identified feigning as the very criterion of poetry.79 A backlash against the widespread disrepute of imagination as a falsifying and misguiding faculty took shape in the late sixteenth-century literary debate concerning the moral primacy of poetic fiction over both the writing of philosophy and history, invoked by Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie of 1595: ‘in making things either better then Nature bringeth forth, or, quite a newe, [the poet] forms such as neuer were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as hee goeth hand in hand with Nature, not inclosed within the narrow

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For studies on Renaissance cross-dressing, see: Orgel, Stephen (1989): ‘Nobody’s Perfect; Or, Why did the English Stage take Boys for Women?’, in: South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. LXXXVIII, pp. 7–29; idem (1996): Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Adelman, Janet (1991): ‘Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model’, in: Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russel (eds.), Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 23–52; Stallybrass, Peter (1992): ‘Transvestism and the “Body Beneath”: Speculating on the Boy Actor’, in: Susan Zimmerman (ed.), Erotic politics. Desire on the Renaissance Stage, New York: Routledge, pp. 64–83: Howard, Jane E. (1998): ‘Cross-Dressing, the Theatre and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England’, in: Lizbeth Goddman (ed.), The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, London: Routledge, pp. 47–53. See: Skura, Meredith Anne (1993): Shakespeare, the Actor and the Purpose of Playing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. See: Worthen, William B. (1984): The Idea of the Actor. Drama and the Ethics of Performance, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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warrant of her guifts, but freely ranging onely within the Zodiack of his owne wit’. 80 While English Puritans condemned theatrical representation as an act of betrayal, Neo-Platonists like Sidney acknowledged feigning as a means to higher truth, revealed in a refined vision of nature. The poet, as Michael Drayton put it, casts ‘life in a more purer mold’.81 As William Rossky has shown, poetic feigning was seen as distinct from haphazard distortion: produced by way of deliberate and purposeful imagination, guided and controlled by the poet and as such directed to moral benefit.82 Feigning results in a higher beauty, and the poet creates a truth even more exact than the literal truth, a world that is better and hence a world of higher truth. In the words of Philip Sidney, the poet becomes the ‘right Popular Philosopher’, conveying higher truths which ‘lye darke before the imaginatiue and iudging powre, if they bee not illuminated or figured foorth by the speaking picture of Poesie’.83 Within the rhetoric of poetic imagination, counterfeiting became a mark of God-endowed skill, and not only in the poet. Celebrating Elizabeth I in his first, dedicatory chapter of The Art of English Poesie from 1589 as ‘the most excellent poet of our time’, George Puttenham conferred the ‘diuine instinct’ of imitation to his queen: ‘my most Honored and Gracious: …your person as a most cunning counterfaitor liuely representing Venus in countenance, in life Diana, Pallas for gouernement, and Iuno in all honour and regall magnificence’. 84 Depicted as resembling the manifold virtue of her one persona, Elizabeth counterfeits no other, fake, identity, but artfully displays the various sides of her God-given mutability in the disguise of Venus, Diana, Pallas and Juno. With the patronage of Ben Jonson since 1605, Britain’s new monarch, while seeking to establish a dynastic mythology of his own, institutionalised an art form that addressed his politic persona as Jove, the king of Gods in ancient Roman mythology, enabling him to claim prerogatives that blurred the distinction between secular and sacred forms of authority and to inform a metaphorical discourse that conferred on that kind of sanctity that had been at the disposal of religious authorities regarding the political matters of his reign. The first Stuart king realised the enormous role of theatricality in the theoretical manifestation of monarchic power, and his imagination of kingship was projected into the staged cosmos of the masque. Seated opposite the stage, neither part of the audience 80 Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, in: Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959, vol. I, pp. 148–207, p. 156. 81 Michael Drayton, The Tragicall Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy, in: The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. by J. William Hebel, Oxford, 1931–1941, vol. I, p. 285. 82 Rossky, William (1958): ‘Imagination in the English Renaissance’, in: Studies in the Renaissance, vol. V, pp. 49–73. 83 Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, op. cit., (note 80), p. 165. 84 George Puttenham (1589), The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007, p. 2.

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nor of the masquers, James was presented with gifts by deities and symbolic figures embodied by members of the court that included him in the entertainment’s dramatic framework. Traditional elements of staging some kind of disguise before the monarch were combined with an increasingly complex idea of drama, arguably inspired by the productions of the Shakespeare company, to whom James had granted royal patronage at the beginning of his reign, enabling them to change their name from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to the King’s Men.85 Yet even though the masque became ever more elaborate throughout his reign, masquers remained largely mute, only rarely having a speaking part, and expressing themselves through symbolic and scenic effects, the choreography of their dances, and emblematic signs. Descending from the stage to the dancing area, the masked courtiers carried myth and allegory down into the midst of the auditorium, where their dances in front of the royal dais prepared a theatrical space for the final union of fiction with fact that was accomplished when performers and audience joined in the dances of the revels. The theatrical space constructed throughout the masque was designed to obliterate the divide between performers and audience, and thus provided a place of ritual familiarisation with the allegoric and mythical abstractions promoted by the masque’s fiction, hence pronouncing the spiritual and the material world as physically coexistent.

A Temple for Ancient Britain: Inigo Jones’s Whitehall Banqueting House A rare description of the space of performance, which the Jacobean court designed for its cosmos of British mythology, can be found in an account by Thomas Campion. Commissioned in 1606 from David Cunningham, Master of the King’s Works in Scotland, the Banqueting House was built along the West end of Whitehall’s principal court, and adopted the plan of a Vitruvian basilica with painted columns, which were made to look like marble – an Iconic order supporting the roof over Doric columns that carried the gallery.86 Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque of 1607 inau85 See: Kernan (1995): op. cit., (note 27). 86 The most detailed account is preserved in a description by Orazi Busino, a member of the entourage of the Venetian ambassador, on the occasion of the staging of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, staged in 1618. See: Public Record Office, London, E 351/3321. On the detailed history of the banqueting houses of Whitehall, see: Palme, Per (1957): Triumph of Peace. A Study of the Whitehall Banqueting House, London: Thames and Hudson; Thurley, Simon (1997): ‘Whitehall Palace and Westminster 1400–1600. A Royal Seat in Transition’, in: David Gaimster and Paul Stamper (eds.), The Age of Transition. The Archaeology of English Culture 1400–1600. Proceedings of a Conference hosted by the Society for Medieval Archaeology and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology at the British Museum London. 14–15 November

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gurated the newly built banqueting house, preserving in its published account a detailed description of the spatial division that the hall received for every performance: ‘As in battiles, so in all other actions that are to bee reported, the first, and most necessary part is the description of the place, with his opportunities, and properties, whether they be naturall or artificiall. The greate hall (wherein the Maske was presented) receiued this diuision and order: The vpper part where the cloth and chaire of State were plac’t, had scaffolds and seates on eyther side continued to the screene; right before it was made a partition for the dancing place; on the right hand whereof were consorted ten Musitions, with Basse and Meane lutes, a Bandora, a double Sack-bott, and Harpiscord, with two treble Violins; on the other side somewhat nearer the skreene were plac’t nine Violins and three Lutes, and to answere both the Consorts (as it were in a triangle) six Cornets, and sixe Chappell voices seated almost right against them, in a place raised higher by a yearde then that which was prepared for dancing: This higher Stage was all enclosed with a double vale, so artificially painted, that it seemed as if darke cloudes had hung before it: within that shrowde was concealed a greene valley, with greene trees round about it, and in the midst of them nine golden trees of fiteene foote high, with armes and braunches very glorious to behold from the which groue toward the State was made a broade descent to the dauncing place, iust in the midst of it; (…)’87

The placing of both the king’s seat and that of the spectators in Cunningham’s banqueting hall reflected the traditional arrangement of the Tudor Hall, in which the Lord’s table and seat were placed at the upper end of the room, affording him a clear view of his guests and servants, who approached between the other tables placed at right angles to his own, so that his company could be seated in descending order from the upper end of the hall. The distinction between the upper and lower ends of the banqueting house, described by Campion, refers to this traditional division, in which higher significance was given to the end of the room that led to the private apartments of the manor house.88 In accordance with this traditional differentiation, the lower end of the banqueting house at Whitehall was to the north, where the stairs led down to the Terrace, which led straight onto the Guard Chamber and

1996, Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 93–104; and idem (1999): Whitehall Palace. An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments. 1240–1690, New Haven: Yale University Press. 87 See: Campion (1607): op. cit., (note 43), pp. 62–3. 88 Anne Daye has noted that this hierarchic notion of space is consistently found in accounts of the Banqueting House at Whitehall by English-speaking commentators, whereas commentators from abroad referred to the one and other end of the room. See: Daye, Anne (2004): ‘The Banqueting House, Whitehall: A Site specific to Dance’, in: Historical Dance, vol. IV, no. 1, pp. 3–22.

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from there into the Hall. Ultimately connected through the Privy Gallery with the king’s Privy Chamber, the upper end of the banqueting house was to the south. Cunningham’s banqueting house was progressive in its design and had replaced a wooden banqueting house, inherited by James from Elizabeth on his accession to the throne in 1603. This first Whitehall banqueting house had been ordered by Elizabeth for the entertainment of the embassy of the Duc d’Alençon in 1581, and had served James for the presentation of the first masques of his reign. Some 330 feet long, the rectangular structure stood on a framework of wooden poles covered externally with canvas, a construction that resembled traditional methods for the fabrication of festive theatres as they had been employed at the Field of the Cloth of Gold and at Calais under Henry VIII. Though erected for one particular occasion, this first banqueting house was a solid structure with canvas walls backed by wooden boards and fitted with several hundred small windows, and it hosted many Elizabethan entertainments.89 The festivities within probably resembled the one given by the queen during her summer tournament of 1560 at Greenwich Park, when she held a supper followed by a mask and a sumptuous banquet.90 The upper canvas walls and the ceiling of the wooden banqueting house at Whitehall were decorated with various strapwork of painted flowers and fruits, richly highlighted with brushes of gold that testified to the building’s reference to the concept of the Tudor banquet.91 A final course of sweets was served after the dishes had been cleared away, and in this respect the Tudor banquet emulated the English tradition, practised in medieval times, of ending a grand meal with hippocras and wafers, together with the French fashion for the voidée, which refers to the

89 ‘A banketting house was begun at Westminster, on the south west side of his maiesties place of Whitehall, made in maner and forme of a long square, three hundred thirthie foot in length a peece, standing upright; between everie one of these masts ten foot asunder and more. The walles of this house were closed with canvas, and painted all the outsides of the same most artificiallie with a worke called rustike, much like to stone. This house a two hundred ninetie and two lights of glasse.’ Quoted from: Raphael Holinshead (1587): The peacable and prosperous Regiment of blessed Queen Elizabeth: A facsimile from Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. by Cyndia Susan Clegg and Randall McLead, San Marino: Huntington Gallery, 2005, p. 523. 90 See: Aikin, Lucy (1819): Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, 2 vols., London: [s.n.]. 91 ‘In the top of this house was wrought most cunninglie upon canvas, works of ivie and hollie, with pendents made of whicher rods, and garnished with baie, rue, and all maner of strange flowers garnished with spangles of gold, as also beautified with hanging toseans made of hollie and cucumbers, grapes, carrets, with such other like, spangled with gold, and most richlie hanged.’ Quoted from: Holinshead (1587): op. cit., (note 89).

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clearing out of the Great Hall or Chamber before serving a similar course.92 With the growing opportunity of the English aristocracy to enjoy sugar-sweetened dishes in the early sixteenth century, banqueting courses became conspicuous displays of wealth for which separate buildings began to be erected.93 Although the Whitehall banqueting house had thus been associated with display and entertainment since the late sixteenth century, it was not until 1619, when Cunningham’s stone structure of 1606 was destroyed by fire and James resolved to create a grander replacement, that this concept was translated into architectural form. Jones improved Cunningham’s design for the new Banqueting House by combining the basilica floor plan, in which he planned seven windows on each side of the façade, with a domestic Palladian design for a Venetian palace of three storeys, each pilastered externally, and a great room on the first storey that rises to the height of the roof. Following the model of the piano nobile, Jones thus chose to raise the principal space of his Banqueting House on a basement, rusticated throughout, thereby establishing it as a hall set above an equally wide but lower space beneath. Although at one point during the planning he had considered a central entrance for the basement, Jones designed his Banqueting House without a formal entry, thereby emphasising the long façade’s function as a side wall.94 (Fig. 12) Instead, a frequently rebuilt external staircase, covered by a temporary lean-to structure between the north end of the Banqueting House and the old Tudor Court Gate, provided access

92 For the voidée, see: Wilson, Anne (1986): ‘The Evolution of the Banquet Course. Some Medicinal, Culinary and Social Aspects’, in: eadem (ed.), Banquetting Stuffe. The Fare and Social Background of the Tudor and Stuart Banquet, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 9–35. Hippocras was a very popular beverage among the English peerage, composed generally of red, and sometimes white, wine with sugar – which at the time was considered medicinal and digestive – and spices. Wafer-cakes occur in Shakespeare where they are described as paste-cakes with honey. See: Brears, Peter (1986): ‘Rare Conceites and Strange Delights. The Practical Aspects of Culinary Sculpture’, in the same volume, pp. 60–114. 93 Built in the gardens or on the roofs of great mansions, these banqueting houses were often fanciful structures wherein sugar-cast models of flowers and animals, but also shoes, slippers, keys, knives and gloves, all finished in colour or with gold leaf, were presented next to marzipan shaped into fruits, together with biscuits, comfits, jam-balls, jellies, quince, snow cream, fresh cheese, pies, tarts and custards. Specialised recipe handbooks for the preparation of banquets began to be published in the latter part of the sixteenth century. See: Hunter, Lynette (1986): ‘Sweet Secrets from Occasional Receipts to Specialised Books. The Growth of a Genre’, in: Wilson (1986): op. cit., (above), pp. 36–59. For a detailed account of the architectural prototypes of Elizabeth’s banqueting house at Whitehall, see: Girouard, Mark (1978): ‘The Elizabethan and Jacobean House’, in: idem (ed.), Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 81–118. 94 See: Palme (1957): op. cit., (note 86).

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to all levels of the building. The rusticated ground floor of Jones’s Banqueting House accommodated the King’s Privy Cellar, decorated with a shell grotto designed by the garden-architect Isaac de Caus, which provided the setting for the king’s private banqueting.95 Plain pillars and half-columns of the Ionic style, carrying a Composite order, divide the front of the Banqueting House into seven bays, with the sections of the upper order forming a richly carved frieze running the full length of the façade. These showed female masks draped between swags of fruit, mirroring the frieze in the upper zone of the building’s interior, and familiar from the tradition of decorating Tudor banqueting houses with fresh flowers and greenery.96 James appointed a committee to oversee the planning of the new project. Its members were selected from among his principal noble officers at court: the Duke of Lennox (Lord Steward of the Household), the Earl of Pembroke (Lord Chamberlain), Lord Digby (Vice Chamberlain) and Sir Fulke Greville (Chancellor of the Exchequer), all of whom had been frequent masquers in past productions and as such were familiar with the protocol of the masque. James’s commission testified to the magnificence of the masque as the highest of all courtly arts.97 Inigo Jones was commissioned to design the new building in acknowledgement of his skill in building the scene settings of Ben Jonson’s masque productions since 1605. He had been appointed Surveyor to Henry, Prince of Wales, in 1610, after whose premature death he had remained in royal service. Jones’s much invoked transformation from a ‘picture maker’ into an architect – a juxtaposition of artistic interest which scholars have increasingly come to emphasise in recent years – is generally accredited to what was probably his second journey to Italy, in the company of the Earl and Countess of Arundel, together with the newly married Princess Elizabeth and her husband, the

95

The grotto was added in 1623 and probably resembled the one designed by De Caus for Wilton House, whose interior walls were lined with rock and shell work in the manner of French garden pavilions of the period. See: Plame (1957): op. cit., (note 86), p. 66. 96 Jones’s building was resurfaced entirely in Portland stone in 1829, but the original version emphasised the façade’s structure by the use of honey-brown Oxfordshire stone for the basement, darker brown Northamptonshire stone for the upper walls and white Portland stone for the columns and balustrades. See: Summerson, John (2000): Inigo Jones, New Haven: Yale University Press. For a discussion of Jones’s reading of ornamentation in the context of Aristotle’s concept of ‘megaloprepia/magnificantia’, see: Hart, Vaughan and Richard Tucker (2001): ‘“Immaginacy Set Free”: Aristotelian Ethics and Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House at Whitehall’, in: RES Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 39, pp. 151–67. 97 For a more detailed discussion see: Norbrook, David (1984b): ‘The Reformation of the Masque’, in: David Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 94–110.

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Fig. 12: Inigo Jones, Design for Whitehall Banqueting House, elevation of the penultimate façade design, undated

Elector Palatine Frederick V. The party left London on 18 April 1613.98 A decade before, Jones had studied Andrea Palladio’s I Quattro libri dell’architettura, published in Venice in 1570. Where and when Jones had bought this copy of Palladio’s Quattro libri has been a topic of much debate, centring around an inscription on the flyleaf: ‘1601 doi docato Ven’, which suggests that Jones obtained ‘his Palladio’ from a pre-

98 Arundel resumed a trip to Italy from which he had been called back to London on news of the death of Henry, Prince of Wales, the previous November, having come no further than Padua. See: Hervey, Mary F. S. (1921): The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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vious journey to Italy.99 That first trip to Venice – during which Jones quite probably learned to speak Italian well enough for Dudley Carleton to remark upon it in a letter of 1613 to the Earl of Arundel – was probably undertaken in the entourage of Francis Manners, the 5th Earl of Rutland, whose account book holds the first known reference to ‘Henygo Jones, a picture maker’.100 Jones travelled well equipped: besides Palladio’s Quattro libri, he carried a heavily annotated copy of Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte in the 1598 English translation, together with the first volume of Vasari’s third part of the Vite.101As John Newman has shown from studies of Jones’s handwritten notes, his reading in the years prior to 1613 included Sebastiano Serlio’s Architettura (1560–62), as well as his Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva di Sebastiano Serlio Bolognese (1601), and Daniele Barbaro’s I dieci libri dell’architettura di M. Vitruvio (1567).102 By way of Basel and across the Alps, the group arrived in Milan on 11 July 1613, from where most of the party went back to England and only the Arundels and Jones proceeded to Parma and Padua – most probably, though evidence remains circumstantial, via Mantua and Verona. J. A. Gotch, whose itinerary of ‘Inigo Jones’s principal visit to Italy’ remains the most detailed account of the journey, has reconstructed the traveller’s path from the dated entries in the Quattro libri and

99 Most recently, Giles Worsley has re-emphasised the fact that some of Jones’s annotations in his copy of Palladio’s Quattro libri dell’architettura dated from before 1613, an argument first made by John Newman contrary to an earlier conviction held by John Harris. See: Harris, John et. al. (1973a): The King’s Arcadia: Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court, A quarter-centenary Exhibition held at the Banqueting House, Whitehall from July 12th to September 2nd, 1973, Exh. Cat., London: Arts Council of Great Britain; Newman, John (1992): ‘Inigo Jones’s Architectural Education, in: Architectural History, vol. XXXV, pp. 18–50; Worsley, Giles (2007): Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 100 Historic Manuscripts Commission, Rutland (London, 1905), vol. IV, p. 446. For Dudley Carleton’s letter to Arundel, from 9 July 1613, wherein Carleton writes: ‘I hear my Lord [Arundel] had taken Inigo Jones into his train, who will be of best use to him (by reason of his language and experience) in these parts’, see: Dudley Carleton, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624, ed. with an introduction by M. Lee, New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, p. 145. 101 More than forty of the books formerly in Jones’s library are today at Worcester College, Oxford: among them Leon Battista Alberti’s L’architettura (1565), Pietro Cataneo’s L’architettura (1567), Philibert de l’Orme’s Le premier tome de l’architeture (1569), Giovanni Antonio Rusconi’s Della architettura (1590), Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s Regole delli cinque ordini d’architettura (1607), Vincenzo Scamozzi’s L’idea della architettura universale (1615), Gioseffe Viola Zanini’s Delle architettura (1629). For the books and manuscripts of Inigo Jones’s library see: Anderson, Christy (1993): Inigo Jones’s Library and the Language of Architectural Classicism in England, 1580–1640, Diss. MIT; Newman (1992): op. cit., (note 98); Harris (1973a): op. cit., (note 98). 102 Newman (1992), op. cit., (note 98).

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sketchbook, which the artist carried with him.103 Contrary either to what one might expect or to what most references to Jones’s journey tend to imply, after Milan Jones seems to have travelled alone, visiting many buildings and places, and re-joining the Arundels from time to time. The next stop on the tour was Venice, where the group stayed for two weeks before leaving for Vicenza, Bologna and Florence, where they arrived two weeks later, on 3 October.104 In January 1614 Arundel and Jones are known to have arrived in Rome, where the classical tradition, represented by Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni and Giovanni Battista Agucchi, still flourished under the papacy of Gregory XV, while the Rome of Pietro da Cortona, Gionalorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini had yet to be built. On 2 January Jones made a note of 26 temples in or close to the city at Tivoli, Trevi, Assisi, Naples, Pola and Nimes, all of which are described by Palladio, and all of which he apparently planned to visit. His entries, however, only make explicit mention of a few: the Temple of Fortuna Virili, the Temple of Vesta, the Temple of ‘Nerva Traiano’ (Rome, 5 January), the Temple of Castor and Pollax (Naples, 8 March), the Pantheon and the Temple of Mars (back in Rome, 31 May), and, on 13 June, the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli.105 By the end of July, Jones was back in Venice, where he met Vincenzo Scamozzi, of whom, on 1 August, he writes that the architect ‘hath resolved me in this in the manner of voltes’.106 From Venice Jones than travelled to Vicenza, where, according to Gotch, he visited a dozen buildings illustrated in Palladio’s Quattro libri, even though only two entries, dating 13 and 14 August, confirm his presence there. Upon seeing the Teatro Olympico, which Scamozzi had been commissioned to finish after Palladio’s death, he noted in his copy of the Quattro libri: ‘The Theatre of Palladio’s ordering the front of the scene of brick covered with stucco full of ornament and statues as in the design I have’.107 Jones probably remained in Italy until the end 103

See: Gotch, J. A. (1938): ‘Inigo Jones’s Principal Visit to Italy in 1614. The Itinerary of his Journey’, in: Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, vol. XXI, November, pp. 85–6. My account of Jones’s route through Italy relies predominantly on Gotch’s itinerary. 104 An annotation in the Life of Fra Giacondo suggests that Jones had a copy of the first volume of the third part Vasari’s Lives, the 1568 edition, with him in Venice. Jones’s copy is today at Worcester College Library. See: Giorgio Vasari: Delli vite de’piv exxellenti pittori scvltori et architettori scritte da M. Giorgio Vasari pittore et architetto Aretino, Primo volume della terza parte, Florence, 1568, Worcester College Library, Oxford, LR.A.3.13. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., p. 86. On Jones’s reception of Scamozzi’s architectural designs and writing, see: Burns, Howard (2003): ‘Note sull’inflesso di Scamozzi in Inghilterra: Inigo Jones, John Wegg, Lord Burlington’, in: Franco Barbieri and Guido Beltramini (eds.), Vincenzo Scamozzi, 1548–1616, Exh. Cat., Verona/Vicenza: Cassa di Risparmio, pp. 129–31; Ottenheym, Konrad (2010): Schoonheit op maat: Vincenzo Scamozzi en de architectuur van de gouden eeuw, Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura Pers; which has a separate chapter on England. 107 Quoted from: Worsley (2007): op. cit., (note 98), p. 17.

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of August 1614 and then returned to England via France, bringing with him newly acquired knowledge about the construction of a perspective stage, which he promptly introduced into his designs for the court masque. John Summerson’s ground-breaking Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, published in 1953, led to a particularly strong interest in Palladianism among English scholars by the mid-twentieth century, and studies of Jones’s work began to focus on Palladian influences on his designs.108 Giles Worsley has recently presented a more nuanced account of Jones’s architectural work, in which he points to the significant influence of Vitruvius, Serlio and Scamozzi, and to the fact that Jones’s Banqueting House was in fact his only building to derive from Palladio in its overall design.109 Worsley emphasises Jones’s strong interest in Roman architecture, drawing attention to the numerous occasions upon which Jones preferred antiquity to Palladio, for example in the references to the Bath of Diocletian in his design for the portico and cladding of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. This interest accords with the frequent and indeed central references to Roman history that can be found in the rhetoric of Stuart rule.110 The accession of a Scottish monarch to the English throne and his proclamation as king of a British empire had resulted in a reassessment of national identity and of the heritage of this identity from the ancient realm of Great Britain. James’s policy of Anglo-Scottish union constituted the equality of the two kingdoms and evoked the creation of a single British nationality. This in turn produced a language of propaganda that mirrored the ancient conflict with the legions of Julius Caesar and that was perceived as the defining moment of the historical formation of a unique British identity.111 The significance of Rome as a model of cultural attain108

109 110

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Summerson, John (1953): Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830, Harmondsworth: Penguin. In 1974, four years after Jones’s annotated copy of Palladio’s Quattro libri had been published, Rudolf Wittkover published a collection of essays on Jones and Palladianism from the 1940s and 50s. See: Wittkover, Rudolf (1974): Palladio and English Palladianism, London: Thames and Hudson. For Jones’s artistic legacy in English architecture, see: Worsley, Giles (1995): Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age, London: Yale University Press. See: Worsley (2007): op. cit., (note 98). For Jones’s borrowings from Scamozzi in the hierarchy of the orders of the Banqueting House, see pp. 107f. See: Peacock, John (1987): ‘Jonson and Jones collaborate on Prince Henry’s Barriers’, in: Word & Image, vol. III, pp. 172–94; Theodore, David Michael (2001): ‘Aproued on my self’: Inbetween the Sheets of Inigo Jones’s Palladio, Master Thesis, McGill University. See: Galloway, Bruce (1986): The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1703, Edinburgh: John Donald; Smuts, Malcolm R. (1993): ‘Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c. 1590–1630’, in: Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 21–44; Curran, John E. (2002): Roman Invasions. The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660, Newark: University of Delaware Press. For James’s proclamation ‘both Realms to be the Subjects of one Kingdome’, see: ‘Proclamation for the

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ment in this process is illustrated by the Roman iconography of James’s accession medal, which presented the first Stuart king in the apparel of an ancient emperor. In a similar impulse, Elizabeth I, in reference to the preamble to the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals decreed by her father, and in emulation of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Charles IX of France, was associated with Astraea, heralding the return of the ‘Golden Age’ and commanding her chosen people through imperial rule.112 In the last decades of her reign, this topical conceit of a ‘British Empire’ was enhanced by another form of imperialism, resulting in English expansion into overseas colonies.113 Raising general questions of ownership, Britain became increasingly fascinated with Roman history, ultimately challenging Mediterranean primacy in the inheritance not only of the intellectual but also of the literary and visual culture of the ancient Roman Empire in an attempt to relocate classical narratives of origin to England. The years following 1590 witnessed an unprecedented wave of translations of ancient texts into English: Henry Savile’s translation of Tacitus in 1591, arguably the most influential contemporary translation of a Roman historian, and also the translation of Livy in 1600, Plutarch in 1603, Suetonius in 1606, and, in 1608, Thomas Heywood’s translation of Sallust.114 At the same time, stage plays set in ancient Rome fed the growing appetite of London’s reading and viewing public: Fulke Greville’s Antony and Cleopatra (lost), William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1593–94) and Julius Cesar (1599), Samuel Brandon’s Virtuous Octavia (1598), Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601) and Sejanus (1603), most of which appeared in print more or less immediately. The complete translation of Virgil’s Aeneid by Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne, first published in 1573, was reprinted in revised editions in 1584, 1596 and 1600. Paulina Kewes has recently drawn attention to the manner in which

112 113

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Unity of England and Scotland’, in: James F. Latham and Paul L. Hughes (eds.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, Volume I: The Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625, Oxford: Clarendon, 1973, p. 18. Yates, Frances Amalia (1975): Astraea. The Imperial Theme of the Sixteenth Century, London: Routledge. On the use of the two distinct but equally topical meanings of the term ‘empire’ in early modern England, see: Wormald, Jenny (1992): ‘The Creation of Britain: Multiple Kingdoms or Core and Colonies?’, in: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. II, pp. 175– 94. For a list of translations of classic texts into English, see: Cummings, Robert and Stuart Gillespie (2009): ‘Translations from Greek and Latin Classics 1550–1700: A Revised Bibliography’, in: Translations and Literature, vol. XVIII, pp. 1–42. For the vogue for Tacitus generally associated with the Earl of Essex and his circle in the context of a growing factionalism at the court of Elizabeth I, see: Lake, Peter (2004): ‘“The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I” Revisited (by its Victims) as a Conspiracy’, in: Barry Coward and Julian Swann (eds.), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 87–111.

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this interest in Roman history and its literary treatments was mediated through its highly politicised reception elsewhere in Europe at the time, expressed especially in the writing and editing of Nicolò Machiavelli (Il Principe, 1532), Louis le Roy (Les Politiques d’Aristote, 1568), Giovanni Botero (Ragione d’estato, 1589) and Jacques Amyot (Les Vies des hommes illustres Grecs et Romains, 1559).115 This development of a pseudo-republican sentiment for the fashioning of English identity inspired the increasing documentation of Roman conquest and the colonisation of Britain in chronicles and poetry, such as Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (1577, 1587) and John Stow’s Chronicles (1580) and Annales (1592), and in work of antiquarian scholarship such as William Camden’s Britannia (1586).116 Self-declared heir to the Roman Empire, Great Britain’s first monarch sought to restore ancient magnificence, not only through the munificence of his reign, but through its buildings. While Henry VII had reunited the warring families of Lancaster and York by drawing on Arthurian mythology in his claim to Tudor continuity with the most ancient traditions of the British monarchy, James surpassed Tudor dynasty by uniting two kingdoms rather than two families, consequently fashioning himself as heir to a line reaching back even further than that of King Arthur: Ben Jonson’s 1610 masque The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers, a prelude to Henry’s investiture as Prince of Wales in the summer of that year, presented a star-like Arthur on stage, who, proclaiming King James as his rightful and superior successor, declared from heaven that ‘it is nobler to restore than make’.117 Although attention has been drawn to this metaphor in the language of early Stuart propaganda, its significance as an ethical concept for the very concrete structuring of space in Jacobean London has not yet been fully realised. By satisfying the convention to legit115 See: Kewes, Paulina (2011): ‘Henry Savile’s Tacitus and the Politics of Roman History in Late Elizabethan England’, in: Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. LXXIV, no. 4, pp. 515–51. 116 On the foundation of the first chairs for history at Oxford and Cambridge in the first decades of the seventeenth century, which, rather than studying recent national or European history, dedicated their scholarship to ancient Rome, see: Sharpe, Kevin (1989): ‘The Foundation of the Chairs of History at Oxford and Cambridge: An Episode in Jacobean Politics’, in: idem (ed.), Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies, London: Pinter, pp. 207–29. 117 Ben Jonson’s The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers, reprinted in: Orgel and Strong (1973): op. cit., (note 4), pp. 159–63, p. 160, l. 82. Gordon Kipling was first to point out that this figuration of King Arthur as a star was used in the pageant for Katherine of Aragon’s entry into London in 1501, where she was greeted with the news that her future husband Prince Arthur was waiting for her in the constellation Arcturus. See: Kipling (1977): op. cit., (note 63), p. 80. On Jonson’s own criticism of the myth, see: Patterson, Annabel (1982): ‘“Romancast Similitude”: Ben Jonson and the English Use of Roman History’, in: Paul A. Ramsey (ed.), Rome in the Renaissance. The City and the Myth, Binghamton: Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, pp. 381–94.

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imise the modern political settlement of Britannia by reference to a mythical past, James’s capital seat, the city of Westminster, and its mercantile counterpart, the City of London, saw their true historic genesis reframed in a trans-historical identity. In appeal to an epic depiction of London that had gained prominence during the second half of the sixteenth century following Henry VIII’s claim to equal status with the Holy Roman Emperor, Thomas Dekker had figured the City of London in his entry pageant for King James as Troynovant, the capital seat of Britain, urban heiress to the Trojan and Roman empires. Similarly, Tudor propagandists had traced the origins of their empire back to the legends told in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 1136 Historia Regum Britanniae, which cast Brutus in the role of the founder of British monarchy. This narrative of the descent of England’s rulers, through those of ancient Britain, from ancient Troy, became the underlying theme of Tudor mythology in the writing of Edmund Spenser.118 Brutus, Aeneas’s descendant and exiled son of Silvius, prophesied an island where he would be father of kings over a new Troy, and carried forth the creation of the Trojan empire by landing on an island called Albion that was inhabited by giants. After driving the giants away, Brutus renamed the island Britain and built its chief city on a site by the River Thames, calling it New Troy. The city’s figuration as Troynovant had gained particular significance under Elizabeth, when the Crown had sought to invent a narrative by which it could link the evolving civic consciousness to the chivalric culture of the court.119 Public street ceremonies of the English Crown symbolically depicted the relationship of City and Crown as a community of honour, and had began to employ pageantry in the fourteenth century, when, under the troubled reigns of Edward II and Richard II, the City began to be established as rival jurisdiction to the Crown through the incorporation of London’s major guilds and the consolidation of the merchant oli-

118 For an excellent introduction of the Trojan myth as ‘para-scripture’ in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, see: Carscallan, James (2004): ‘How Troy came to Spenser’, in: Alan Shepard and Stephen D. Powell (eds.), Fantasies of Troy. Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, pp. 15–38. 119 For a detailed analysis, see: James, Mervyn (1986): ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour. 1485–1642’, in: idem (ed.), Society, Politics, and Culture. Studies in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For the imperial theme in English monarchy, see: Yates (1975): op. cit., (note 112). On the values and conventions of aristocratic honour as a concept for self-definition of London’s craftsmen and merchants, who arguably developed a consciousness of the particular values of their own class rather late, see: Ferguson, Arthur (1986): The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England, Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library.

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garchy.120 By raising subsidies to provide the Crown with loans to back its foreign credits, the City’s wealth was a source of finance upon which the English monarchy depended heavily.121 Only a stable bond with the potentially divergent system of government and society of the City secured the Crown’s authority and enabled it to carry out ambitious programmes and policies. In exchange for this support, the Crown not only protected the City’s traditional privileges and liberties, which permitted Londoners to elect a mayor from among themselves, but also granted further concessions and contracts that enabled the City to secure its control over England’s overseas trade and to prosper economically.122 Within this context, the Royal Entry ceremony, traditionally staged as an opulent spectacle to celebrate a new monarch’s formal entry into the City of London, provided an occasion for the two jurisdictions to celebrate the prosperity of their alliance while documenting once more the mutual conditions of their interdependency. Accordingly, the climax of the king’s procession along the orderly ranks of City officials and companies, who lined his route towards the western end of Cheapside in full livery, was reached at the moment when the royal entrant passed the sword or sceptre to the Lord Mayor, after the City’s chief officials had offered him their gifts and speeches. Malcolm Smuts has argued that this central device served as a reminder of London’s special status of mayoralty, affirming the City’s privilege to offer popular acclamation to the making of the king.123 120 See: Withington, Robert (1963): English Pageantry. An Historical Outline, 2 vols., New York: Benjamin Blom. Formerly confined by the London Wall that had been erected by the Romans, the City of London denotes the mercantile community of the English capital, which by the beginning of the seventeenth century was confined to a square mile between the Tower and the Strand, and which was subsequently referred to in initial capitals, as distinct to ‘city’ as a concept of urban space. 121 In the last decade of his reign, Edward raised £40,000 from London’s merchant community, which was more than his predecessor had raised over a considerably longer period. See: Barron, M. C. (1981): ‘London and the Crown. 1451–1461’, in: J. R. L. Highfield and Robin Jeffs (eds.), The Crown and Local Communities in England and France in the Fifteenth Century, Gloucester: Sutton, pp. 88–109. 122 The Crown’s support also became essential in protecting the City’s interests against lobbies of the entrepreneurial gentry in Parliament, who became increasingly critical of the exclusionary trading practices of the London merchants. See: Brenner, Robert (1993): Merchants and Revolution. Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 123 Smuts demonstrates how the symbolic gift-giving, which supplemented the panegyric coronation and mythical unification staged along the route, was not only the ceremonial figuration of a relationship that was based on mutual exchange, but a powerful reminder that the City’s oligarchic power was the essentially feudal result of a royal grant. See: Smuts, Malcolm R. (1989): ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma. The English Royal Entry in London, 1485–1642’, in: A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim

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Through assessments of public ritual in relation to Stuart monarchy, historians have concentrated on the kind of political argument outlined above, stressing negotiations of governmental interests between Crown and City. This predominant focus on the Royal Entry as a ceremonial form in which Court and City, as both partners and competitors in the network of power, expressed their negotiation over differences and mutual dependencies, has resulted in a neglect of the ceremony’s effect as an act of assigning semiotic structure and liturgical meaning to urban space.124 The speeches delivered during the parade read as a poetic synopsis of the interpretation of urban space that had been encoded in the socio-political understanding of English society since the Middle Ages and that served to reinforce the courtly image of the Jacobean monarch as divine and absolute king. The unchanging course of the new monarch’s procession from the Tower of London – symbol of royal authority in the City – to the palace of Whitehall distilled the experience of space and time into an enunciation of royal presence.125 The ritual, it is argued here, structured London’s physical identity in reference to the royal body, thereby causing persistent rupture in both pre-existing space and chronological time. Martha Kalnin Diede has described how, in sixteenth-century England, the concept of the king’s two bodies had developed into a popular metaphor for the state in political discourse: far from being considered as an orthodox doctrine, it referred not only to the monarch as possessor of two bodies – one natural and one politic – but to a stately body, composed of many members with the monarch as its head, or to the corporate entity, which the body politic of the monarch would espouse.126

(eds.), The First Modern Society. Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 65–93; and Bradbrook, Muriel (1981): ‘The Politics of Pageantry. Social Implications in Jacobean London’, in: Anthony Coleman and Anthony Hammond (eds.), Poetry and Drama. 1570–1700. Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks, London: Methuen. 124 See: Smuts (1989): op. cit., (above). On the frequent controversies of City and Crown during the Stuart period, caused by the Crown’s prerogative power to grant charters of incorporation that threatened the protected market of the London companies, see: Ashton, Robert (1979): The City and the Court. 1603–1643, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 125 For the ritual of the Royal Entry in continental Europe during the seventeenth century, see: Fruth, Mary Ann (1971): The Royal Entry. A Study of Tradition and Change in the French Festival of the Sixteenth Century, Columbus: Ohio State University Press; Bryant, Lawrence M. (1986): The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony. Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance, Genève: Droz; Varey, J. E. and A. M. Salazar (1966): ‘Calderón and the Royal Entry of 1649’, in: Hispanic Review, vol. XXXIV, no. 1, pp. 1–26. 126 See: Diede, Martha Kalnin (2008): Shakespeare’s Knowledgeable Body, New York: Peter Lang. Diede assesses the notion of the king’s two bodies as a metaphor in the plays of Shakespeare.

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As it unfolded in panegyric text and performance, the Royal Entry employed the urban environment as a material for the production of sovereign authority, creating a mental map composed of reference points for the signification of the monarchic wherein urban space was enacted and experienced, rather than contemplated and conceptualised.127 The ceremonial surface thus applied to the City embodied an imprint for the signification of royal presence that was conducted in eminently spatial terms. By the time of Elizabeth’s reign, the entry ceremonies of the English Crown had established the major stations and ceremonial syntax of a fixed liminal route through the City of London. The monarch, who had spent the night in the Tower, entered the City from the East and passed the City oligarchy that lined Cheapside, before he was greeted by the clergy in St Paul’s Churchyard and escorted to Westminster where the coronation ceremony would take place the following day.128 Symbolically anticipating the coronation rite itself, in which the monarch was presented for popular acclaim in the nave of Westminster Abbey before then proceeding to the high altar where he was anointed by the clergy, the entry ceremony culminated in a pageant of allegorical coronation of the king to the witness of London’s chief officials who gathered at the western end of Cheapside. The entry ceremony passed the same landmarks – the Conduit in Cornhill, the Great Conduit at the head of Cheapside, the Little Conduit at St. Paul’s Gate and the Cross in Cheapside, all sites of mercantile activity – and transformed the main East–West thoroughfare through the civic centre into the most sacred space of royal ceremony outside Whitehall Palace. Forming the central, unchanging zone of all royal processions, which could, however, vary with regard to length and place of departure, this section functioned as the climactic segment towards which all ceremonial activity of the entry converged, thereby segregating urban space from the context of civic habitation. The typological symbolism of the Royal Entry thus gradually dissolved the identity of the urban body as a city and refigured its open, civic places in an interior

127 Michel de Certeau has described the process by which the notion of the pre-modern ‘urban fact’ was transformed into the modern ‘concept of the city’. See: Certeau, Michel de (1984): The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. 128 The exact route began in Tower Street, and then led along Mark Lane and Fenchurch Street to Gracechurch Street, from where the procession turned to Cornhill, where the central section of the ceremonial route began. In contrast, entries of English monarchs previously crowned abroad or returning from the battlefield commenced at the gate of London Bridge from where the procession led up to Cornhill through Gracechurch Street. See: Bergeron, David M. (1968): ‘Harrison, Jonson and Dekker: The Magnificent Entertainment for King James (1604)’, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. XXXI, pp. 445–8; idem (1971): English Civic Pageantry. 1558–1642, London: Edward Arnold.

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of monarchic space. Through the establishment of an alternative reading of time and space, the Royal Entry worked as a ceremonial corrective of the urban environment. The ritual broke with the civic calendar, and substantiated a parallel timeline upon which only historic instances were recorded and which thus subsumed civic time as the ‘hollow’ periods in-between. Thomas Dekker’s account of the coronation progress of James I into the City in 1604 clearly illustrates this effect of public royal ritual: ‘By the sound of the trumpets that proclaimed King James,’ it had been forty-five years since Elisabeth had made her entry into London; with the entrance of her successor ‘this forty-five years wonder’ was ‘now brought forth by Time’.129 In this poetic description, the event had the power to invalidate both the everyday rhythm of work and play and the natural divide between night and day; ‘the night’, so the pageant reads, ‘was thought unworthy to be crowned with sleep and the day not fit to be looked upon by the sun’.130 However, the empty sphere of standstill that was constructed by the poetic dismantling of astronomic time was not left vacant. In Dekker’s account of the days before the event, time was no longer measured in hours passed, but by the miles covered on ‘His Majesty’s more near and nearer approach’.131 The body of the king here becomes a substitute for the sun, and just as the position of the sun in the course of its movement is observed for the measure of astronomic time, so the position of the king’s body indicates the measure of time and space. In his description of James’s journey from Edinburgh towards London, Dekker’s account reads: ‘by the sound of the trumpets that proclaimed King James: / all men’s eyes were presently turned to the north, / standing even stone-still in their circles, / like the points of so many geometric needles’132. By describing the universality of James’s significance in relation to the manner in which the North Pole attracts the needle of a compass, Dekker illustrates once more that the body of the monarch embodied the point zero, the zodiac from which the grid that structured the realm of time and space originated. The power of the entry ritual in asserting the City’s identity in spatial relation to its sovereign’s body did, however, not remain restricted to allegorical devices. During preparations for the event ‘the streets [were] surveyed; heights, breadths, and distances taken, as it were to make fortifications, for the solemnities.’133 Adjust-

129 Thomas Dekker (1603): The Magnificent Entertainment: Given to King James, Queen Anne his wife, and Henry Frederick the Prince, upon the day of his Majesties Tryumphant Passage, ( from the Tower) through his Honourable Citie (and Chamber) of London, being the 15th of March 1603, London, l. 8–11. 130 Ibid., ll. 17–9. 131 Ibid., ll. 20–1. 132 Ibid., ll. 8–11. 133 Ibid., ll. 200–2, 204.

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ing urban space to the dimensions of royal representation, ‘seven pieces of ground [were] plotted forth’, providing seven fragments for the incorporation of civic space in the king’s body politic when he passed below the seven triumphal arches, each of which marked the entrance to one of them. 134 The first of these seven arches, Stephen Harrison’s Londinium Arch at Fenchurch Street, figured the City as Camera Regia, the King’s Chamber.135 For the time of the entry ceremony the City refrained from arguing its primacy as the chief city of the nation in reference to its mercantile power; it ‘makes no account (…) of her ancient title to be called a Cittie, because during these tryumphes, shee puts off her formall habite of Trade and Commerce’.136 Instead, as Ben Jonson’s pageant for the entry recounts, London asserted its identity as ‘the proper seat of the empire: (…) totius Britanniae Epitome, Britanniciq. Imperij Sedes, Regumque Angliae Camera’.137 As Martin Butler has shown, the annual stagings of the masque contributed in designing the images of a specifically British kingship for James I.138 The standard argument for the use of Britain in such masques, as rehearsed by a dutiful Ben Jonson in the Masque of Blackness, was that it marked a return to a common national origin: ‘With that great name BRITANIA, the blest Isle / Hath wonne her ancient dignitie and stile’. Yet, in the midst of his orthodox celebration of historical continuity, Jonson slyly highlights the effective novelty of the term: ‘BRITANIA (whose new name makes all tongues sing)’.139 As John Peacock has shown in his assessment of the collaboration of Jonson and Jones, the architect saw classical antiquity not as a timeless ideal but as Britain’s historical past.140 His Palladian Banqueting House, in this light, must be considered as part of the greater effort to refurbish the English royal seat with the greatness of Roman antiquity, recovered through its Palladian reconstructions.141 Visiting the ruins and remains of ancient Rome, Jones and Arundel would have perceived themselves not as studying another, foreign culture, but as if they were looking at the very beginnings of British history and their own national culture. John Peacock has assessed Jones’s developing prowess as an artist in the

134 135 136 137 138

139 140 141

Ibid., ll. 205. Ibid., ll. 325. Ibid., ll. 1035–8. Ben Jonson (1604): His Part of King James his Royall and Magnificent Entertainment in Passing to his Coronation, London: [s.n.], ll. 101–2. Butler, Martin (1996): ‘The Invention of Britain and the Early Stuart Masque’, in: Malcolm R. Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 65–85. Quoted from: Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness, in: C. H. Hereford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds.), Ben Jonson, Oxford, 1947–52, vol. VII, lines 246–7 and 251. See: Peacock (1995): op.cit., (note 6). On English antiquarian study of ancient architecture see: Patterson (1982): op. cit., (note 117).

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Fig. 13: Marc’Antonio Palladio, after Andrea Palladio, Teatro Olimpico, c. 1585

years of his appointment to Prince Henry, and has emphasised how his interest hovered between scenography and architecture.142 In the years preceding his journey to Northern Italy in 1613–1614, the Quattro libri had served Jones as a way to educate himself about the principles of architectural ornament; a knowledge he sought to confirm by personal inspection of the buildings studied abroad, where he recorded his observations and comments regarding discrepancies between the built structures and their printed designs, acquiring a feeling for the use of ornament in the practicalities of building. As well as exerting a strong influence upon Jones’s compositions of architectural ornament, Palladio’s Quattro libri served as Jones’s main source for the recovery of architectural designs from antiquity. As Gordon Higgott was first to show, however, Jones’s attitudes towards theoretical aspects, such as the principles of proportion and commensurability, did not derive from Palladio but from his reading of Vitruvius.143 Before travelling to Italy, Jones had studied Palladio’s design for the Teatro Olimpico from a flyleaf most probably in the collection of Henry Wotton, the English ambassador to Venice, who was in England shortly before Jones and Arundel left for the Continent.144 (Fig. 13) The design displays a frontal view of the scenic façade, providing no indication of the hallways which were designed by Scamozzi to simu142 See: Peacock (1995): op. cit., (note 6). 143 See: Higgott, Gordon (1992): ‘Varying with Reason: Inigo Jones’s Theory of Design’, in: Architectural History, vol. XXXV, pp. 51–77. 144 The drawing is one of six today in the Burlington-Devonshire collection at the Royal Institute of British Architecture: RIBA, London, Burlington/Devonshire Collection XIII / 5.

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late perspective street scenes exiting between the wooden columns, which Jones would find when he came to see the finished structure for himself. It is of considerable interest that, on his return to England in 1614, Jones had introduced perspective wing scenery of the Italian Renaissance theatre, but used neither the circular layout described by Vitruvius nor the rectangular ground plan he had studied in Serlio’s Secondo libra di perspettiva – a fact that has repeatedly caused scholars to remark upon the somewhat curious application of Jones’s knowledge.145 In fact, Serlio’s ground plan had been copied in the building of a theatre in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, where James attended a scenic play in 1605.146 For this project, Inigo Jones was assigned as supervisor by the Office of the King’s Works, and he erected a consciously Serlian design, preserved in a plan at the British Library, which placed the royal seat at the very front of a curved, high-rising rank for the auditorium opposite the stage. (Fig. 14) This setting, however, would remain exceptional, for both the frequent stagings of plays at court and those of the masque. The plays of the King’s Men and other professional London acting companies were typically presented in relatively small rooms, where a small stage platform would be set up opposite the courtly audience, as with Shakespeare’s Richard III in the Presence Chamber at St James’s Palace.147 Certainly one reason for this was the need to adapt the acoustics of the space to the abilities of the actors’ voice, as speech held an incomparably more important status in plays than it did in masques, where dialogue was scarce. Palladio’s ground plan for the Teatro Olimpico, with its fixed scenic façade, became the model for Jones’s construction of the Cockpit-in-Court, which the architect refurbished as a permanent stage for the plays presented at Whitehall in 1629. In the Whitehall Cockpit, as on the stage of public playhouses like the Globe, actors stood in front of a fixed representation of a preferably neutral façade, as semiotic emphasis lay on the spoken word. With its five entrances in a semicircular façade in classical style and an octagonal ground plan that imitated Scamozzi’s perspective street scenes in Vicenza, Jones’s Cockpit-in-Court is the first and only theatrical space the English architect designed according to the tradition of Roman an-

145 This perception is first noted by Frances Yates in 1969, see: Yates, Frances Amalia (1969): Theatre of the World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 146 See: Orrell, John (1985): The Theatre of Inigo Jones and John Webb, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Before Orrell, Frances Yates had discussed the Serlian adaptation: Yates (1969): op. cit., (above). 147 See: Astington, John H. (1986): ‘Staging at St James’s Palace in the Seventeenth Century’, in: Theatre Research International, vol.II, pp. 199–213.

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Fig. 14: Plan for a Theatre at Christ Church, Oxford, 1605

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tiquity, which he had so carefully studied in Italy.148 (Fig. 15) The only surviving pictorial evidence of the general segmentation Jones chose for the masque, preserved from the 1635 production of Florimène, does not show any resemblance to the designs of either Palladio or Serlio. (Fig. 16) The plan is generally considered to represent the layout of stage and seating for the performances of the masque both in Cunningham’s Banqueting House and in the Great Hall of Jones’s very own Banqueting House at Whitehall. Clearly discernible from this drawing is the central position of the seat in the midst of the auditorium, constructed as a large dais surmounted by a canopy that raised the king’s seat to stage level. In front of the State a free space covered in cotton cloth was nailed into place, and this served for the performance of the dances and revels. Both this dancing space and the State were surrounded by a number of boxes for the most important members of the court. Behind these, built up in several tiers of scaffolding, further rows rose halfway up the walls on all three sides of the building. Erected at the other end of the hall was a stage forty feet square that rose four feet above the main floor and was divided into three different parts: at the front, a shallow forestage with two flanking descents to the orchestra; behind it a deeper, perspective stage – here showing four pairs of wings before a backshutter device; and the upper stage, raised up about six or seven feet on trestles that were installed for the appearance of the masquers from above. If anything, this matched the design of Giovanni Battista Aleotti’s Teatro Farnese in Parma, built between 1618 and 1619 for the planned state visit of Cosimo II de’Medici, which, however, never took place.149 As John Peacock and Giles Worsley have pointed out, Jones’s stage designs had much in common with those of the man who served Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara and Modena as an architect, mathematician, hydraulic engineer and stage designer since 1575. In his scenic inventions for the earliest productions of the Jacobean masque, Jones had concentrated primarily on stage machinery such as pageant cars used for the floating of islands and movement of mountains, or wave and cloud machines that were combined with complex lighting effects.150 For the increasingly complex masques of the later years, however, Jones introduced a raked stage with foreshortened wings and a back-scene; this produced a unified perspective in which the position of the monarch was precisely 148 Howard Burnes argues that Scamozzi’s style was less influential for Jones than for John Webb and Richard Boyle, Third Earl of Burlington, since the reception of his L’Idea della architettura universale began in England only after 1615. See: Burns (2003): op. cit., (note 106). 149 Still authoritative: Ciancarelli, Roberto (1987): Il progetto di una festa barocca: Alle origini del teatro Farnese di Parma, Rome: Bulzoni. 150 For a general discussion of Jones’s stage, see: Campbell, Lily B. (1923): Scenes and Machines on the English Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The definitive study on Jones’s models and influences remains: Peacock (1995): op. cit., (note 6).

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Fig. 15: John Webb, The Cockpit Theatre at Whitehall, plan and section, undated

Fig. 16: Inigo Jones, Florimene, floorplan, 1635

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calculated as the point at which all the orthogonal lines of the scene would converge, so that only the king could sit at the one point from where the illusion of the stage worked to perfection.151 Jones designed the Great Hall in the form of a double cube, measuring 110 × 55 feet, the proportion and symmetry of which has been amply discussed before. Judging from the annotations in his copy of Palladio, Jones seemed to have used a modular system of measurement, based on number and probably drawn from the concept of Eurythmia. The well-balanced proportion of a double cube for the Great Hall of Whitehall Banqueting House seems designed to complement the harmonious reign of James I.152 Furthermore, the equilibrium of the double cube became the structuring rationale of the theatrical space of the masque. The most important innovation of Jones’s stage, however, was the introduction of the proscenium arch, which came to frame his masque productions from 1615 onwards and which allowed him to compose a unified perspective setting that evoked a realistic illusion of space. The unfamiliar verisimilitude of the scenic action of main- and anti-masque provided by a proscenium arch at first demanded too much of his English audience, whose eyes were not yet educated to appreciate the effect and so denounced these first performances as tedious and unspectacular.153 Conditioned by the non-realistic aesthetic of Elizabethan painting, wherein the representation of space was diminished in a bold, emblematic design, Jones’s English audience was used to beholding an image without the benefit of perspective. In his study of Vitruvius and Palladio, Jones had grasped the rules of evoking a linear perspective that would transform space into a uniform system that resembled the vision experienced in the environment of the natural world. Evoking the perception of a normative visual accessibility, the site contained by the proscenium arch allowed Jones to achieve a coherent space-image that seemingly equated the representation on stage with that in front. The space of James’s courtly audience, which staged the

151 John Orrell has pointed out that the new relation between the space for the seating and that of stage and dancing space was now in the proportion of 8:5, the Renaissance approximation of the Golden Section. See: Orrell (1985): op. cit., (note 146). 152 See: Wittkower, Rudolf (1974): Palladio and Palladianism, London: Thames and Hudson; Harris (1973a): op. cit., (note 99); Higgott, G. (1992): ‘Varying with Reason: Inigo Jones’ Theory of Design’, in: Architectural History, vol. XXXV, pp. 51–77; Newman, John (1994): ‘Inigo Jones and the Politics of Architecture’, in: Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, Stanford: Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 229–55. Worsley (2007): op. cit., (note 99) has shown how square and double-square proportions referring to Vitruvius and Palladio formed Jones’s standard approach to the beginning of a design. See esp. pp. 94–5. 153 Stephen Orgel has pointed out that, in contrast, continental guests at a masque, for example the Venetian ambassador, particularly admired Jones’s new stage design. See: Orgel and Strong (1973): op. cit., (note 4).

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king’s presence in its centre and included the stage itself, now seemed to share a common metaphysical field. Presenting James’s body natural at the front, and his body politic behind the proscenium arch and within the framed image of Inigo Jones’s new stage, the masque had developed into a visual device capable of conveying the twofold identity of sovereign power by transferring the mental concept of the king’s two bodies to a spatial one in which the Stuart king’s body natural and his body politic could be represented together. Jones’s stage with proscenium reinforced the central position of the king, in theatrical and natural space alike. Acting simultaneously as the masque’s prime spectator and its prime mover, the king summoned the power of his sovereign rule in the ambiguity of the audience/author relation to the medium of his representation. Exposed to the gaze of his court, James’s body natural, displayed against the representation of the masque, assumed the miracle of sovereignty in his body politic – ‘like a brittle glasse all illightened with the glorious blaze of the Sunne’.154 At the very moment that the masque achieved perfection in the representation of the twofold nature of the English monarch, whose divine reign over Church and country had been established by the Reformation and through acts of iconoclasm, the English court thus saw the revival of pictorial naturalism as a principle of royal representation. Jones’s stage images employed painterly effects familiar from the technique of the trompe-l’œil, thereby connecting the living figures of his allegoric personae with false shapes painted on the scenic backdrop, or figures in relievo, cut out and set up in layers against the back-cloth, thereby aspiring to accomplish the condition of vivacità, which Vasari’s account of the development of Italian painting registered in the successful composition that appeared ‘three-dimensional, living and truthful’.155 In Jones’s own words, the notion of the stage as image is recorded in his description of the opening scene for one of his later masques, Tempe Restored (1632), where he emphasises ‘I should not be too long in the description of the frame, I will go to the picture itself; and indeed these shows are nothing else but pictures with light and motion’.156 This comment has led to discussions of the ‘masque as picture’; first by Frances Yates as early as 1969, and subsequently, in a more thorough

154 Forsett (1606): op. cit., (note 1). 155 See: Giorgio Vasari (1878–85): Le opera di Giorgio Vasari, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols., Florence: G. C. Sansoni S. p. A., vol. IV, pp. 9–12. For a discussion of Jones’s stage designs as a logical consequence of his study of Alberti, Vasari and Lomazzo, all of which were in his library, see: Peacock (1995): op. cit., (note 6). For a discussion of Jones’s moulded relief figures, see: Southern, Richard (1952): Changeable Scenery: Its Origin and Development in the British Theatre, London: Faber and Faber. 156 Quoted from: Orgel and Strong (1973): op. cit., (note 4), vol. II, p. 480.

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approach, by John Peacock in 1995.157 Both, however, develop their perception of Jones’s stage designs as ‘pictures’ from discussions of the artistic rivalry between the architect and his collaborator in the productions of the masque, the poet Ben Jonson.158 Quoting from the poet’s well-known book Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter, and some Poems, published in 1641, six years after his death, Peacock assesses Jonson’s definition of poetry as ‘a speaking Picture, and Picture a mute Poesy’ along the doctrine of ut pictura poesis.159 Peacock argues that Jonson’s adaptation of the Italian model of the artists’ paragone must be read from its perception from within a Calvinist tradition that is suspicious of the image, and he emphasises that this implies recognition of the picture as inferior to the written word. A full quotation of Jonson’s passage in the Discoveries shows, however, that this is not the only distinction to be made. The poet’s rather commonplace remark begins with the heading: ‘Poesis, et pictura – Plutarch. Poetry and picture are arts of a like nature, and both are busy about imitation. It was excellently said of Plutarch, poetry was a speaking picture, and picture a mute poesy. For they both invent, feign, and devise many things, and accommodate all they invent to the use and service of Nature. Yet of the two, the pen is more noble than the pencil; for that can speak to the understanding, the other but to the sense. They both behold pleasure and profit as their common object; but should abstain from all base pleasures, lest they should err from their end, and, while they seek to better men’s minds, destroy their manners. They both are born artificers, not made. Nature is more powerful in them than study’.160

157 Yates (1969): op. cit., (note 145); Peacock (1995): op. cit., (note 6), has a separate chapter on ‘The Masques as pictures’, pp. 35–54. Yates’s study has received much attention for its reconstruction of the Elizabethan theatre stage based on Robert Fludd’s illustration of the memory-theatre, which has been doubted for its accuracy in depicting an actual stage. For the development of the controversy and the wider discussion of the Globe as a ‘Theatre of the World’, see: Bernheimer, Richard (1958): ‘Another Globe Theatre’, in: Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. IX, pp. 19–29; Shapiro, A. (1966): ‘Robert Fludd’s Stage-Illustration’, in: Shakespeare Studies, vol. II, pp. 192–209; Yates, Frances Amalia (1967): ‘The Stage in Robert Fludd’s Memory System’, in: Shakespeare Studies, vol. III, pp. 138–68; Berry, Herbert (1967): ‘Dr. Fludd’s Engravings and their Beholders’, in: ibid., pp. 11–21. 158 The groundwork for critical assessment of this dispute was: Gordon, Donald James (1949): ‘Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. XII, pp. 152–72. 159 Ibid., pp. 39f. 160 Hereford (1926–52): op. cit., (note 139), pp. 609–10.

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It is clear that Jonson’s notion of the contribution of his rival and collaborator Jones is referenced to the concept of pittura in Italian art theory, as it was known in England through the writings and translations of Lomazzo und Dolce. Keeping with his emphasis that ‘the pen is the more noble than the pencil’, Jonson, proceeded that: ‘Picture took her feigning from poetry; from geometry her rules, compass, lines, proportion, and the whole symmetry. Parrhasius was the first won reputation by adding symmetry to picture; he added subtlety to the countenance, elegance to the hair, love-lines to the face, and by the public voice of all artificers, deserved honour in the outer lines. Eupompus gave it splendour by numbers and other elegancies. From the optics it drew reasons, by which it considered how things placed at distance and afar off should appear less; how above or beneath the head should deceive the eye &c. So from thence it took shadows, recessor, light, and heightenings’.161

‘Picture as mute poesy’, in this context, compares to painting according to the Vasarian definition of arte del’disegno, which linked the figure of the artist to the power of divine creation and defined the imitation of nature as the purpose of all arts.162 Peacock’s conclusion that the muteness of Jones’s ‘pictures’ must indeed have set his art ‘at a disadvantage’ with the Stuart court, is developed out of an understanding that reduces his stage scenes to the emulation of the art of disegno, which accords with Peacock’s general argument of Jones’s artistic advancement from picture-maker to architect.163 This reading, however, does not sustain the general perception of muteness as the privileged attribute of courtly identity, as it was discussed in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century discourses on dramatic speech as hypocrisy and denial of the true self. As has been discussed above, perceptions of counterfeiting were in a state of flux in early Stuart London, and, as I show in the next chapter, taking a speaking part in a courtly entertainment could provide the courtier with an opportunity to question established semiotics of identity. A hitherto unconsidered notion implied in Jones’s very own perception of his designs as ‘nothing but pictures with light and motion’, however, draws attention to ‘picture’ as a concept of spatial composition. (Fig. 17) My argument here is that the assertion of linear perspective and a naturalist mode of perception in the visual culture of the English court did not emerge from the study of the visual properties of nature that had driven the painters of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, but from the political impulse of the court artists to enhance the theatrical faculties of the body by the 161 Hereford (1926–52): op. cit., (note 139), vol. VIII, p. 611. 162 See: Giorgio Vasari (1511–74): The Lives of the most excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. A. B. Hinds, 4 vols., London, 1927. 163 See: Peacock (1995): op. cit., (note 6), p. 40.

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Fig. 17: Inigo Jones, Scene Design for unknown Masque, undated

provision of a spatial environment of greater visual verisimilitude. Contrary to the professional theatres outside court, the masque did not stage plays, but, rather, emblems of royal magnificence. Plays, such as those of Shakespeare’s company of the King’s Men, were performed on a stage with a fixed architectural background, while the masque relied on the evocation of wonder by the effects of stage machinery, enhancing the pleasure of the beholder through variety and motion. Whereas the unchanging background of the stage-play focused attention on the text recited by the actor, the masque, in its preference for the mute courtly body and choreographed movement, privileged the ephemerality of frequent scene changes. Moving in front of painted perspective scenery, but framed behind the proscenium arch, which the masquers traversed only for their crucial move off the stage onto the dancing floor, Jones’s masque stage had developed into a picture composed by the action unfolding inwards and backwards from the proscenium arch.164 The result was a theatrical 164 Not to be confused with the tableau-vivant, which is comprehensively discussed in: Helas, Philine (1999): Lebende Bilder in der Italienischen Festkultur des 15. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. The role of the frame in the construction of agency will be more fully discussed in the next chapter.

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simulation of the attributes of painting, a re-enactment of the picture-plane in the space of the stage. The epistemological and phenomenological implications of this proposition will be discussed in the following chapters. With regard to its effect on the masque, however, the proscenium arch, together with perspective vision, enabled the representation of the Stuart king to summon his sovereign power from the signifying difference of an allegorical stage picture that resolved the visual tradition of the emblem into a theatrical juxtaposition. The unified vision needs to be considered as an ideology of totality that depicted the body of the Stuart courtier during his performances in the masque as an identity sustained in the geometric precision of a Renaissance world picture, twice enclosed by the image of monarchic omnipotence. The masque, I argue, combined the principle of synchrony with that of competition and thereby compelled the courtier to a practice of imitation that conditioned the individual claim of social status as an expression of collective identity. The specular regime of the masque, advanced by its organisation in linear perspective, would cause the courtier to convey his image along a codified choreography of bodily synchrony, thereby registering his body to a uniform structure that found its reference in the body of the king. Enquiring into the semantic anxiety of courtly identity springing from this paradigm of representation, the following chapter assesses the performances of one particular courtier George Villiers, the favourite of James I, who later became the Duke of Buckingham. As an avid patron of the arts, Buckingham extended his courtly self-fashioning from the dancing ground of the masque to the pictorial space of the picture-plane, challenging the Jacobean eye with yet another, radically new, sense of vision.

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‘The Devil take all of you, Dance!’:1 Bodily Distinction in the Jacobean Court Masque and Portrait

Two months after the death of James I, George Villiers, the first Duke of Bucking­ ham, represented England’s new king, Charles I, at his marriage by proxy to Prin­ cess Henrietta­Maria in Paris on 11 May 1625. Buckingham, who had been entrusted with the honourable task of escorting the bride back to England, had brought with him 27 suits of clothes, including a white velvet suit trimmed with diamonds that was rumoured to be worth 800,000 Dutch guilders.2 During his first audience with the bride’s mother, Marie de’ Medici, the legendary favourite of Britain’s late king staged an extravagant spectacle. Appearing in a grey velvet suit embroidered with pearls, the Duke entered the audience chamber. The pearls, however, had – one as­ sumes by commission – not been sewn on securely, and with every step he took past the assembled court of France a few dropped off and rolled across the floor. The Duke took no notice of this, and made an elegant bow in front of the queen mother before cheerfully exiting, scattering pearls as he went.3 The French hosts were cour­ teous enough to return the pearls to Buckingham later that day; within hours, how­ ever, talk of the English visitor’s magnificence nouvelle was all over Paris, adding to his reputation as the most glamorous courtier of early seventeenth­century Europe. This anecdote testifies to the rhetorical imperative of performance that governed public life at the European courts of the early seventeenth century. Nicholas Faret’s The Honest Man: or, The Art to Please in Court, published in London in 1632, advised the courtier that ‘whenever our honest man shall make his first entry into a great 1

2

3

James I in the 1618 staging of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, see discussion below. The notion of ‘distincion’ is here used in relation to Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term, see: Bourdieu, Pierre (1979): La distinction. Critique social du jugement, Paris: Edition Minuit. A list of Buckingham’s wardrobe for the eight­day journey has been published in: Howarth, David (1997): Images of Rule. Art and Politics in the English Renaissance 1485–1649, Basing­ stoke: Macmillan, pp. 295–6. See: Anon. (1734): Recueil de Pièces qui regardent le Gouvernement du Royaume d’Angleterre, et qui ont rapport aux Affaires présentes de l’Europe, 12 vols, Haye, vol. I, p. 7–8.

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mans house […] it is not sufficient to have merit, he must know to expose it to view’4. The elite status and individual distinction of the courtier were demonstrated in strategies of self­display that relied upon the ostentatious practice of symbolic be­ haviour, of which Buckingham’s pearl­dripping entry presents a particularly ex­ travagant example. Buckingham had begun his career at the English court as a dancer in the Court Masque, establishing his privileged position in the favour of James I by outshining his ambitious peers in the display of effortlessness, or sprezzatura, which, since the 1528 publication of Baldassare Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) in Venice, had become the required symbol of courtly identity.5 Castiglione’s book was first translated into English by Thomas Hoby in 1561, under the title The Courtyer of Counte Baldessar Castilio divided into Foure Bookes. Very necessary and profitable for young Gentlemen and Gentlewomen abiding in Court, Palace, or Place.6 Subsequent editions appeared in 1577, 1588 and 1603. Just three years after publication of the first edition of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, the English court had its very own courtesy manual at its disposal – Thomas Elyot’s The Book named the Governor, printed in London in 1531. Like The Book of the Courtier, Elyot’s treatise instructed its reader on the fashioning of the ideal courtier, char­ acterised by recklessness, and an eagerness to be of service to his king.7 Such eagerness was shown by Buckingham, who, during the staging of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue in 1618, when King James had begun to tire of the unsatisfactory performance of the masquers and had shouted ‘Why don’t they dance? What did they make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance!’, ‘immediately sprang forward, cutting a score of lofty and very minute capers, with so much grace and agility that he not only ap­ peased his angry lord, but rendered himself the admiration and delight of every­ body’.8 This incident shows that self­performance was not only an imperative of courtly semiotics, but was also a strategy to divert moments of general crisis into demonstrations of individual favour and distinction. Consistent with the Renais­ sance notion that the jewel that is beautifully set is also more precious, the chance to distinguish himself in the presence of his king provided the courtier with an oppor­ 4 5 6

7

8

Nicholas Faret, The Honest Man: or, The Art to Please in Court, London: 1632, Sig. K8–K9. See: Baldassare Castiglione: Il Libro del Cortegiano, Venice, 1528. See: Thomas Hoby, The Courtyer of Counte Baldessar Castilio divided into Foure Bookes. Very necessary and profitable for young Gentlemen and Gentlewomen abiding in Court, Palace, or Place, London, 1561. The most astute comparative reading of both books can be found in: Bermingham, Ann (2000): Learning to Draw. Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art, New Haven: Yale University Press. The incident had been witnessed by Orazio Busoni, chaplain to the Venetian ambassador, whose report has been preserved in: Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, vol. XV, (1617–19), pp. 113–4.

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tunity to acknowledge his distinctiveness.9 Buckingham’s repertoire in staging his personal distinction by way of spectacular self­display became increasingly nuanced in the course of his career, as the account of his audience with Marie de’ Medici il­ lustrates. Pointing to the centrality of display and the production of the courtly body as self­consciously artful, this chapter explores the emerging significance of the illusionistic portrait as a form of courtly self­fashioning at the early seventeenth­ century English court, and the negotiations of style entailed by this kind of person­ alised aesthetic production.

Politics of Intimacy: The Role of the Minister­Favourite at the Early Stuart Court Although the figure of the royal favourite had already been familiar to the court of Elizabeth I, the career of George Villiers at the court of James I epitomises the sudden and generally rather short period of unparalleled political dominance achiev­ ed by men such as Cardinal Richelieu and the Count­Duke of Olivares, as well as the Duke of Buckingham himself later on, at the courts of early seventeenth­century Europe.10 Resulting from structural changes in several areas of early seventeenth­ century monarchy, the rise of the royal favourite within European court politics depended above all on the imperative to centralise crown patronage at court as a means of securing the support of the landed elites responsible for local politics throughout the kingdom, as well as on the increasing importance of royal bounty as a central attribute of monarchy, which has been stressed within the literature of the time.11 Authorised as a broker of titles and offices, the minister­favourite arose as the one figure at court who was able to maintain a monopoly on favour while at the same time remaining dependent solely on his sovereign.12 In an attempt to put an

9 10

See: Hoby, op. cit., (note 6), pp. 95–6. For the favourites of Queen Elizabeth I, see: Adams, Simon (1991): ‘Favourites and Fac­ tions at the Court of Elizabeth’, in: Ronald Asch and A. Birke (eds.), Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450–1650, Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, pp. 265–87. 11 For the Renaissance notion of monarchic bounty, see: Levy Peck, Linda (1986): ‘For a King not to be Bountiful Were a Foult’, in: Journal of British Studies, vol. 25, pp. 31–61. 12 The political control wielded by men like Richelieu, Olivares and Buckingham has caused considerable interest among historians in recent years, see: Lloyd Moote, A. (1992): ‘Riche­ lieu as Chief Minister: A comparative Study of the Favourite in Early Seventeenth­Century Politics’, in: Joseph Bergin and Laurence Brockliss (eds.), Richelieu and his Age, Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 23–35; Feros, Antonio (1995): ‘Twin Souls: Monarchs and Favourites in Early

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end to the inner­courtly conflicts caused by the combined force of ministry and Privy Council after the death of Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury, the powerful councillor James had inherited from Elizabeth, the first Stuart monarch granted this position first to Robert Carr, First Earl of Somerset, who served as his principal secretary from 1612, and then to George Villiers, who succeeded Carr in James’s favour in 1615.13 Both men’s positions at court were characterised by the excessive power bestowed upon them, including permission to sell titles and offices. Disturb­ ingly, this placed the mediation of royal bounty through favouritism outside the sphere of national economy and invited criticisms of misgovernment and sodomy.14 The figure of the royal favourite at the court of James was thus situated in a culture of exchange wherein the boundaries between reciprocal services and corruption became as easily blurred as those of the discursive and material practice of homoeroticism. The free disposal of royal bounty characteristic of the figure of the minister­ favourite was emphasised by a degree of intimacy that clearly marked the relation­ ship between king and favourite as distinct from any other at court. The bonds be­ tween royal favourites and their monarchs were variable but always close; for example, the Duke of Lerma was a father figure to Philip III of Spain, while the li­ aison of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, with her greatest favourite the Earl of Leicester was portrayed as Petrarchan love, and James’s relation to George Villiers was characterised by homoerotic affection. In each case, the unique power of the favourite sprang from his proximity to the monarchic body. His power was contin­ gent upon the concept of sovereign monarchy as it stressed the ideology of personal rule and negotiated political power through the regulation of physical proximity to

13

14

Seventeenth­Century Spain’, in: Richard L. Kagan and G. Parker (eds.), Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27–47; Thompson, I. A. A. (1999): ‘The Institutional Background of the Rise of the Minister­Favourite’, and Levy Peck, Linda (1999): ‘Monopolizing Favour: Structures of Power in the Early Seventeenth­Century Court’, both in: John H. Elliott and L. W. B. Brockliss (eds.), The World of the Favourite, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 13–25 and 54–70. See also: Lockyer, Roger (1986): ‘An English Valido? Buckingham and James I’, in: Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor­Craig (eds.), For Veronica Wedgwood These. Studies in Seventeenth-Century History, London: Collins, pp. 45–58. With his appointment as Lord Chamberlain in 1614, Carr united the office of both the head of the inner and outer chamber in one person, which is significant in that the two in­ stitutions had hitherto been kept strictly separated at the English court. For a detailed insight into the political significance of this structural change, see: Cuddy, Neil (1993): ‘The Conflicting Loyalties of a ‘vulger counselor’: The Third Earl of Southampton, 1597– 1624’, in: John Morrill et. al. (eds.), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 121–50. See: Levy Peck, Linda (1990): Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Modern England, Boston: Unwin Hyman.

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the body of the monarch. Displays of bodily intimacy thus served as essential ex­ pressions of patronage bonds that circulated power between the members of a pre­ dominantly homosocial court. With the exception of the Elizabethan court, where privileged closeness to the monarch was cast in the staging of hetero­erotic desire for the body of the queen, court favouritism was thus underpinned by expressions of homoerotic desire staged in the bid for political power.15 Within this context of political homoeroticism, King James’s prominent promotion of first Cecil, then Carr, and finally Villiers constituted a sustained cultural discourse concerning the intertwining of male power and homoerotic desire within the relationship of the monarch and his favourite that mediated questions of sovereign power and its li­ mits.16 James had first noticed Villiers at table in 1614, where the handsome man, by now in his early twenties, served as the Royal Cupbearer, a post that had been se­ cured for him by William Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke, who sought to ad­ vance his anti­Spanish policy in defence of English Protestantism.17 It was intended that Villiers would displace James’s current favourite, Robert Carr, whom the King 15

16

17

Pam Wright has demonstrated how the publicly displayed erotic desire of the male favourites of Elizabeth I for her body was mediated through the trope of the sexual un­ availability of the virgin Queen who cast herself as Diana or Cynthia. See: Wright, Pam (1987): ‘A Change in Direction: The Ramifications of a Female Household. 1558–1603’, in: David Starkey (ed.), The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, London: Longman, pp. 147–72. The stereotype of the Machiavellian favourite, who monitors what his monarch sees and knows, however, had been prominently applied to Elizabeth’s reign by Catholic pamphleteers in The Treatise of Treasons from 1572, Leicester’s Commonwealth from 1584, and Cecil’s Commonwealth, a series of pamphlets from the 1590s. See: Lake, Peter (2005): ‘From Leicester His Commonwealth to Sejanus His Fall: Ben Jonson and the Politics of Roman (Catholic) Virtue’, in: Ethan H. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 128–61; and, idem (2004): ‘“The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I” Revisited (by its Victims) as a Conspiracy’, in: Barry Coward and Julian Swann (eds.), Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe. From the Waldensians to the French Revolution, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 87–111. Though James’s highly visible affection for his favourites, both before and after his marriage to Anne, was much noted and discussed by his contemporaries, even the best scholars have – as Michael Young has put it – stumbled when dealing with the sexuality of the first Stuart king and only most recently has contemporary scholarship acknowledged his homosexuality. See: Young, Michael B. (2000): James VI and I and the History of Homosexuality, London: Macmillan; Bergeron, David M. (1999): King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press; Jordan, Mark (1997): The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and Bray, Alan (1982): Homosexuality in Renaissance England, New York: Columbia University Press. See: Lockyer, Roger (1982): The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, London: Longman.

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had brought from Scotland in his entourage and whom he had recently pronounced Earl of Somerset.18 The growing power of the Scotsman, who openly promoted a match between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta Maria­Anna – a match that had been considered by the king for some time – was a threat to the Pembroke fac­ tion. Seizing plans for Somerset’s alienation from James, Herbert’s choice alighted on Villiers, whose exceptional grace and good looks were known to have caught the king’s attention during his visit of Apethorpe in course of his summer progress ear­ lier in 1614. The plan succeeded, and the young man rose first in the favour of the British monarch and then to a degree of power that an English favourite had never enjoyed before or since. The good looks and forceful personality of George Villiers drew the attention not only of James, but also of his whole court. Contemporaries were fascinated by his legendary handsomeness: ‘From the nails of his fingers, nay, from the sole of his foot, to the crown of his head, there was no blemish in him’, wrote John Hacket after seeing Villiers in Spain, ‘and yet his carriage and every stoop of his deportment, more than his excellent form, were the beauty of his beauty … the setting of his looks, every motion, every bending of his body was admirable.’19 Equally captivated by Villiers’ ‘lovely complexion’, Bishop Godfrey Goodman described him as the ‘handsomest bodied man of England; his limbs so well compacted, and his conver­ sation so pleasing, and of so sweet a disposition’.20 Villiers’ childlike face and his long, slender legs made him ‘one of the handsomest men in the whole world’, as Sir John Oglander put it.21 Villiers had been educated for a career at court, and he suc­ cessfully added to his physical charms by his graceful manner and delightful con­ duct, exhibiting exceptional skill in conversation, riding, fencing, and all the other ornaments of youth attained in three years of instruction in France. In particular, Villiers’ talent and adroitness in dancing surpassed that of his peers, fashioning the young man as the prototype of elite masculinity as it was negotiated within the dis­ ciplines of competitive male display at the early Stuart court. Predicated on athletic contestation, courtly dancing in the masque ranked first and foremost among these disciplines of competitive display, and the Jacobean masque thus provided the 18

James’s strong favour for Carr was first noticed at court in 1610. By 1613 the Scot had be­ come Viscount Rochester and by 1614 first Earl of Somerset. For a detailed account of his role at the Stuart court, see: Seddon, Peter (1970): ‘Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset’, in: Renaissance and Modern Studies, vol. IV, pp. 46–68. 19 John Hacket (1693): Scrinia Reserata. A Memorial Offer’d to the Great Deserving of John Williams, London, p. 120. 20 Godfrey Goodman (1839): The Court of King James the First, reprint, 2 vols., London, p. 226. 21 Oglander, John (1971): A Royalist’s Notebook. The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander, ed. by Francis Bamford, New York, p. 41.

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beautiful but penniless young man with a stage upon which to start his meteoritic rise at court. Scholars of late­Renaissance and early modern court culture have studied the history of courtiership as a subject in its own right. Evolving around a vocabulary of rhetorical performance, the figure of the courtier generated status in terms of per­ sonal alliances and association, as Frank Whigham has shown in his pioneering analysis of Elizabethan court culture.22 Although this vocabulary changed with the rise and fall of new fashions at court, as has best been demonstrated by Anne Bryson, its rhetorical manipulation remained the essential strategy to advance oneself into and prevent one’s rivals from entering the prestigious circles at court.23 The prin­ ciple of courtly distinction has been studied as a constant interchange of differing groups that shaped court culture in continuous negotiation over social authority at the level of both politics and aesthetics. Change in the rhetoric of courtly distinc­ tion implied the emergence of something new, the manifestation of a novel fashion, taste, or aesthetic strategy that is detectable only in collective expression. This chapter follows the political career of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, at the Jacobean and Caroline courts, under the reign of Britain’s first two Stuart mon­ archs, and shows how the new taste for painting, which came to infect the English court throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, became established as a novel instrument for courtly distinction. By examining the semiological structure of this novel rhetoric in distinction, Buckingham’s social ascendancy was of such par­ ticular success, not because he subjected himself to the collective fashion of collect­ ing paintings, as it generally emerged at the Stuart court, but because he developed this novel fashion into a politic practice in a way that was distinct from that of his peers. As the king’s favourite, George Villiers was a person of unique status. He was elevated above his fellow courtiers by the king’s benevolence, and as such negotiated his status at court aside from the differing factions, depending on the single vote of his monarch. As the shaping of political status and personal image was conveyed through displays of the self, courtly distinction was a very corporeal affair, focusing attention on the courtier’s body, not merely as the surface from which to decode knowledge about questions such as rank and gender, but as the medium available for their negotiation. Villiers’ much­commented­upon beauty, his acquaintance with continental fashion, and his exceptional coordination in dance and comportment easily contented the Jacobean taste for the refined courtly body, heralded by the king’s 22 23

See: Whigham, Frank (1984): Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Literature, Berkeley: University of California Press. See: Bryson, Anna (1998): From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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abolishment of the Tudor sumptuary laws in his second year on the throne. Arguing that Buckingham promoted his rise at court by aiming for a heightened visibility of his body, this study assesses the particular faculties of the various media he utilised in this process. Throughout the course of this chapter I argue that representations of the courtly body, at the beginning of Villiers’ career, were intrinsically bound to the perform­ ances of the masque, which not only promoted the power of the king, but also the ideal image of the courtly body. This ideal image, as displayed in the performances of the masque, was challenged by the portraits that Villiers began to commission from contemporary master painters like Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. While the courtly elite around him endeavoured to assemble eminent works from the Italian Renaissance, Villiers collected portraits of himself, and in so doing delib­ erately shaped the image of his courtly body in a new medium, which, as an instru­ ment of social distinction, would eventually come to replace the performances of the masque.

Fashioning the Male Courtly Body: Competitive Displays of Erotic Masculinity in the Court Masque Villiers’ masque debut was in January 1615, in the staging of Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court, shortly after an attempt to advance him as a member of the Gentlemen of the Royal Bedchamber had been blocked by Somerset.24 Due to the prevailing lack of money in the king’s purse, there had not been a Twelfth Night masque the previous year, and so, not surprisingly, rumours began to spread when it became known that preparations were under way for ‘a masque this Christmas to­ wards which the King geves 1500li the principal motive wherof is thought to be the gracing of young Villers, and to bring him on stage’.25 James’s court was anxious to witness the young man’s debut, especially as he was to perform together or rather in competition with the Scotsman Robert Carr, the very courtier whom Somerset, in his capacity as Lord Chamberlain, had placed into the Royal Bedchamber to block Villiers’ membership. A letter by John Donne, first cited by Martin Butler, illustra­ tes how the court expected to see one of the two men settle the matter by his per­

24

25

Letter of John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, English ambassador at The Hague, December 1614. See: The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. by Norman McLure, 2. vols., Philadelphia, 1939, I, p. 561. Ibid., I.559. Court entertainments for Christmas traditionally held the presentation of a court masque on Twelfth Night, the evening of 5 January, preceding Twelfth Day, the day of Epiphany.

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formance in the entertainment: ‘I have something to say of Mr Villiers’ he wrote in view of the approaching event, ‘but (…) new additions to the truth or rumours which concern him are likely to be made by occasion of this masque’.26 Somerset, as con­ temporary accounts attest, did his best to interfere with the successful presentation of Villiers, inviting not only the Venetian and the Dutch ambassador, but also the ambassador of Spain, which nearly caused the diplomatic éclat that he intended.27 In the end, neither of the two dancers succeeded in outdoing the other; both presented ‘excellent dancing, the choice being made of the best of English and Scots’.28 In the months following Mercury Vindicated, however, rumours emerged con­ cerning Somerset’s faction and the death of the poet and essayist Sir Thomas Over­ bury, leading to what without doubt became the major court scandal of James’s reign.29 In 1613 Overbury had opposed Carr’s plans to marry Frances Howard, wife of Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, whom she had married at the age of thir­ teen. Supported by James, the couple had obtained a decree for the annulment of Frances Howard’s marriage to Robert Devereux. On 16 January 1613, ten days before Carr and Howard’s wedding, Overbury, who had been imprisoned by the king after rejecting, on Carr’s advice, the office of the Russian ambassador, was found poi­ soned in the Tower of London. No charges were raised against Frances Howard and Robert Carr at the time, yet neither had the crime been disclosed, and when, in October 1615, Richard Weston and James Franklin, two disreputable apothecaries, together with Anne Turner, the confidante of Lady Frances, were found guilty of murdering Overbury, suspicions regarding the couple’s mastery of the murder plot began to be raised.30 Somerset’s fall necessitated a transfer of offices that took place between 23 December 1615 and 4 January 1616, the same time that Villiers made his second appearance in a masque, Ben Jonson’s The Golden Age Restor’d, on 1 January 1616. This time, Villiers’ performance was exceptional, and ‘though neither in devise nor shew was there any thing extraordinarie but only excellent dauncing’, the enter­ tainment was ‘so well liked and applauded that the King had yt represented again the Sonday night after’.31 Ironically, the masque that figured in Villiers’ debut at 26

Letter of John Donne from 20 December 1614, quoted from: Butler, Martin (2008): The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 221. 27 Letters of John Chamberlain, op. cit., (note 24), I, p. 570. 28 Ibid. 29 See: Bellany, Alastair (2002): The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair. 1603–1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and, idem (1993): ‘Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart Eng­ land’, in: Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 285–310. 30 See: Lindley, David (1993): The Trials of Frances Howard, London: Routledge. 31 Ibid., I.559.

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court had been designed as the panegyric celebration of the downfall of the er­ stwhile favourite Robert Carr, attesting to the entertainment’s ritual function as a rite of passage, leaving behind the events of the last year and inaugurating the new year to come. Ben Jonson’s epigraph to the first printed edition of The Masque of Blackness (1605), ‘Salve festa dies, meliorque revertere semper’, quoted from Ovid’s Fasti, supports this idea.32 The Golden Age Restor’d began with the entry of Pallas announcing the restora­ tion of Astraea, the goddess of justice, to the earthly throne at the command of Jove, and reflected upon these judicial events by casting them into the more abstract mys­ tery of Evil’s attacks on Jacobean peace, represented by a group of anti­masquers who appeared as the vices of the Iron Age.33 After the vices’ defeat by Pallas, whose shield had turned them to stone, Astraea descended in attendance of the Golden Age, represented by a group of noble masquers, among them George Villiers, whose dance warranted the goddess’s sustenance in the Stuart realm. Villiers’ performance in the entertainment had been carefully planned by the anti­Howard, anti­Spanish Pembroke faction of James’s court, which had promoted Carr’s gradual displacement in the affection of the king through the handsome young Villiers and which now saw the chance for their return to power. While Villiers was dancing, evidence against Carr was still being collected, and although James had proclaimed his deter­ mination for the ‘discovery of the truth whereof so much concerneth the glory of God’, this still meant proceedings were continuing against his favourite.34 Martin Butler and David Lindley have shown how the ambiguity residing in this state of affairs was powerfully invoked with the opening lines of Jonson’s text, which simul­ taneously celebrates James’s resolution for a renewal of justice and, at the same time, reminds him that the task has not yet been completed.35 By translating its political context into a struggle between the Iron Age and the Golden Age, Jonson’s masque stages a moment of comparison wherein two conflicting visions of princely rule are assessed for their different aesthetics. Figuring within the group of courtly masquers whose dance warrants Astraea’s descent to earth, Villiers thus became part of Jon­ son’s vision of a Jacobean reign recovered to the glory of justice.36 By submitting 32 33

Reprinted in: The Works of Ben Jonson, Boston: Philips, Sampson and Co., 1853, p. 660. Martin Butler and David Lindley have assessed the entertainment’s iconology and possible audience response in the context of the ongoing judicial hearings in a joint publication. See: Butler, Martin and David Lindley (1994): ‘Restoring Astraea: Jonson’s Masque for the Fall of Somerset’, in: English Literary History, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 807–21. 34 Public Record Office, State Papers, 14/82/81. 35 See: Butler and Lindley (1994): op. cit., (note 33). 36 David Lindley has demonstrated how, in celebrating the fall of Somerset, Jonson was com­ pelled to rewrite his earlier panegyric of the Howard faction that had unmistakably praised the match of Robert Carr and Frances Howard just two years before. See: Lindley, David

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himself to the choreography of Jonson’s masque, Villiers fashioned his body as the living emblem of James’s returning Golden Age, transmitting political interest through the display of bodily grace and strength. Villiers’ performance in Astraea’s entourage proclaimed his arrival as the favourite to the renewed Stuart throne and attached the aesthetics of his male eroticism to the political vision of Jonson’s pan­ egyric. Presented in a moment of political contestation, Villiers partook in the sym­ bolic defeat of corrupt forces at court by reaffirming courtly splendour in the su­ premacy of his performance and by establishing himself as part of a royal court re­ emerging from crisis. As a theatrical act, the court masque fashioned the noble masquer’s body in the centre of the courtly gaze. George Villiers demonstrated his physical vigour and athletic grace in The Golden Age Restor’d, and in so doing presented himself as the object of performative attention, employing the aesthetics of his bodily movement as a means of coming into court as others had done before him.37 Aristocratic perform­ ance in the masque required both physical strength and skill, and linked the dy­ namics of sexual potency to those of political power, thereby asserting the legibility of the dancing male body as an object of erotic display. The eroticism of male dance alluded to the chivalric tradition of tilts and barriers with its competitive display of masculine athleticism, and spoke to, and of, the homosocial structures of courtly power that negotiated political status through demonstrations of male friendship and sexuality. By equating sexual prowess with social dominance and the attainment of political power, the performative idiom of male self­fashioning in courtly dance thus mediated social hierarchy in terms of sexual availability. A dance performance within the confines of the masquing floor offered the Jacobean courtier the oppor­ tunity to display his body in proximity to the monarch and demonstrated his social position within the courtly elite. As a means of gaining more than this, those dancers who were particularly talented and ambitious would emphasise the eroticism within this performance, presenting themselves in a self­demeaning display of sexual avail­ ability. Thus in 1604, during the performance of the very first New Year’s masque of James’s reign, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses at Hampton Court, Philip Herbert,

37

(1986): ‘Embarrassing Ben: The Masques for Frances Howard’, in: Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins (eds.), Renaissance Historicism: Selections form Early Literary Renaissance, Am­ herst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 248–64. Jonson’s unease with the margina­ lisation of personal doubts on political matters, which he was required to celebrate within the panegyric for his patrons, has been substantially discussed in: Norbrook, David (1984a): Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, London: Routledge. Exquisite dancing skill had granted entry into the court to other favourites before Bucking­ ham; Paul Johnson has pointed to the beginning of Sir Christopher Hatton’s rise in the favour of Elizabeth I when dancing in a court masque. See: Johnson, Paul (1974): Elizabeth I. A Study in Power and Intellect, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

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the handsome younger brother of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, succeeded in obtaining the king’s attention by addressing him with a cheekily sexual invitation during his dance. Herbert performed with a group of noble masquers, who each presented the king with an impresa on a shield that was supplemented with a set of written verses to explain it. As Dudley Carlton, who was present on the occasion, reported, the masquers ‘in theyr order delivered theyr scutchins with letters and there was no great stay at any of them save only at one who was putt to the interpre­ tacion of his devise’.38 The performers had obviously passed the throne without aris­ ing the king’s particular interest. Upon seeing the shield of the 16­year­old Herbert, however, the king ordered the performance to pause and demanded that the masquer explain his device. ‘It was a faire horse colt in a faire greene field which he meant to be a colt of Busephalus race and had this virtu of his sire that none could mount him but one as great at lest as Alexander’.39 Playing on the sexual connotation of ‘mount’ as it was prominent in Tudor and Stuart literature, and alluding to the homosexual affection of Alexander the Great for Hephaestion, Philip Herbert staged an ex­ pression of homoerotic desire for the monarchic body as a means of securing the king’s favour.40 The king, in turn, ‘made himself merry with threatening to send this colt to the stable and he could not breake loos till he promised to dance as well as Bankes his horse’.41 James’s acceptance of the invitation reveals how displays of homoerotic desire for the king’s body invested the power of his body politic. By staging the request for sexual domination by the figure of the monarch, performances like Herbert’s con­ stituted private interventions for social status within a sustained socio­political dis­ course on the intertwining of political power and sexual desire that shaped early Stuart court culture in general. The sovereign power of the king’s body politic was rendered manifest in the display of the sexual dominance of his natural body. The masque was predicated on this fashioning of the king’s body politic, exhibiting the performing body of the noble masquer for erotic appropriation by the monarchic spectator to such an extent that contemporary ballads circulating in alehouses and taverns regarded the genre as the prime locus of homoerotic excess. For example, a song called Listen jolly gentleman framed James’s rule as a pastime spent between the exercise of hunting and the ingestion of ‘merry boys’, and condemned the pleasures of the masque as the source of the king’s bodily degeneration:

38

Sir Dudley Carlton in a letter to John quoted from: Chambers, E. K. (1923): The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols, III, p. 279. 39 Ibid. 40 See: Williams, George (1994): A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols., London: Athlone Press, II, p. 348. 41 Chambers (1923): op. cit., (note 38), p. 279.

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‘King James hath meat, king James hath men King James loves to be merry King James too is angrie nowe and then But it makes him quickely wearie hee dwells at Court where he hath good sport Att Christmes he hath dancing In the summer tyde abrode will hee ryde With a guard about him pranceing (…) Att Royston and newmarkett hele hunt till he be leane But hee hath merry boys that with masks, and toyes Can make him fatt againe’42

Supposedly fattening his lean body with the masques and toys offered to him by merry boys, the king is depicted as losing his physical capacity to rule; enjoying young men like meat, he exhausts his bodily fitness and form by a profligate inges­ tion of homoerotic pleasures that leaves his body politic plump and frail. The ballad promotes a vision of James’s gluttony for swallowing male courtiers, through which it portrays his abused mouth as a metaphor for the dangerous openness of both his body natural and his body politic that is stuffed and fattened by his favourites’ access to it. By securing bodily access to the king through his erotic and political status, the favourite was affecting the king’s body politic; by weakening his body, he was weakening the whole realm. As Mario DiGangi has shown in his analysis of homo­ erotic narratives in early modern drama, it was not the king’s love for a favourite that provoked such censure, but rather the excessive amount of power that his sexual desire bestowed on the political position of the favourite.43 By enhancing the king’s erotic desire for his body as a means to advance his personal political power, the fa­ vourite conveyed an image of the king’s body natural as sexually infatuated with the body of a political minor, thereby shifting the rhetoric symmetry of sovereign will and sovereign duty precariously towards the monarch’s private desires, causing an increasing anxiety about his body politic as irresolute and corruptible. The power invested in the favoured bodies of men like Philip Herbert and George Villiers thus constituted the figure of the favourite as a disorderly boundary 42

43

References to the performances of Nedd Zouch, Harrie Riche, Tom Badger and George Goring, who, apart from Riche, the later Earl of Holland, were all minor courtiers of Ja­ mes’s reign, suggest the anonymous poem to date from between 1617 and 1620, although its exact date has not yet been identified. The lines above are quoted from: Bodleian Library, Malone MS 23, pp. 19–22. See: DiGangi, Mario (1997): The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press.

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between the monarch and his court. James’s favourites were advanced to the office of Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, where they enjoyed the privilege of exclusive ac­ cess to their king’s body, thereby disrupting the connection to his subjects and in­ terfering with his public duties. The elite circle of the Royal Bedchamber that form­ ed Villiers’ first power­base at the Stuart court enjoyed a form of intimacy with the monarch characterised by an ease and informality that struck the English court as shockingly unfamiliar. As a result of James’s delight in his performance in The Golden Age Restor’d, Villiers had been appointed as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in April 1615, thereby attaining an office that promoted him into the king’s private life as well as into the centre of public affairs. The English court James had inherited in 1603 depended much more strongly than his Scottish household had done on a strict restriction of intimacy between the monarch and his subjects as it was regulated in the protocol of the entrée. The door to the Privy Chamber marked the threshold be­ tween the public and private spheres of protocol. In front of this door lay the semi­ public outer chambers that opened towards the Privy Chamber itself and then to the Private Lodgings, which centred on the King’s Bedchamber.44 James’s choice of a rule more personal than that of Elizabeth I, England’s half­deified Gloriana, was marked by his decree to translate these hitherto vaguely different spheres of the Privy Chamber and the Bedchamber into two socially and politically distinct insti­ tutions. This change in court etiquette restricted opportunities of intimate contact with the king to the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, who enjoyed the privilege of lodging closest to the royal bed and oversaw such tasks as keeping the king’s linen and attending him with his under­skirt and formal dressing, moments opportune for taking political advantage.45 Though not normally directly translated into public office, such close and intimate contact with the monarch resulted in the power to influence affairs of royal administration and patronage. Entrée was no longer granted freely to the chief minister and council of the Privy Chamber, and the Bedchamber evolved as a powerful and independent institution, firmly grounded in court proto­ col. By preserving a court culture resembling that of his former Scottish household, James satisfied his inclination to spend his reign retired from court business in Lon­ don in the intimacy of a small, all­male company that took to the pleasures of hunt­ 44 For a detailed account of the modification of the Henrican Privy Chamber, i.e. the adaptation of the Withdrawing Chamber, interposed between the Privy Chamber and the Privy Lodgings, resulting from the accession of a female monarch to the English throne in 1558, see: Wright (1987): op. cit., (note 15). 45 For a more detailed account of the servants to the royal bedchamber and their respective tasks, see: Cuddy, Neil (1988): ‘The Revival of the Entourage: The Bedchamber of James I, 1603–1625’, in: David Starkey (ed.), The English Court, from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, London: Longman, pp. 173–225.

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ing, drinking and improvised entertainment. Being an excellent dancer in constant attendance to his king, Villiers took advantage of this, performing in almost any masque that came to be staged at court and in the country from 1615 onwards. Vil­ liers outshone his fellow dancers in his ‘neater limbes and freer delivery’, and ‘in the daintinesse of his leg and foote’, and rose equally in James’s favour and through the ranks of the courtly elite.46 In the ‘certain grace’ that the court observed in his danc­ ing and comportment, Villiers displayed a readiness to excel, to go beyond the limits set by the achievements of others, by which Baldassare Castiglione had defined the nature of the true courtier.47 In 1616, the year in which Villiers performed in The Golden Age Restor’d and was created both Knight of the Garter and Master of the Horses, Viscount Fenton notes: ‘His Majestie loves the young man beyond measure’.48 On the day before the Twelfth Night Masque of 1617, Jonson’s The Vision of Delight, Villiers, who just a few months earlier had been made Baron Whaddon and then Viscount Villiers, advanced into the ranks of higher nobility as Earl of Buckingham, so that during the masque’s staging he was able, for the first time, to invite Queen Anne into the dancing of the revels. The following year, Prince Charles gave his masque debut in Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue on 6 January 1618, and Buck­ ingham, who had by now been created Marquess, danced at his side. Buckingham mentored the Prince’s education in the practice of courtly dance, and in so doing had begun to establish himself as a patron of dance. By continual practice, Buckingham had groomed his body into the perfect image of aristocratic grace and courtly refinement. He became the model upon which the Prince aspired to shape his skills, and his position as an authority in these matter was affirmed. Command over his body had provided him with the privilege of commanding the moves of a future king. Great courtiers like Buckingham mastered multiple dancing styles, showing themselves conversant with the different protocols of the continen­ tal courts. Deportment had been perceived as an indicator of character and social status since the beginning of the Renaissance; by the end of the sixteenth century, however, it was consciously cultivated, and the movements of the body became scrutinised as expressions of the social self. Standard repertoire was conceived in dancing schools such as that of John Bosseley in Oxford, while choreographies for new masque productions were rehearsed at court. In early Stuart England, the 46 Sir Henry Wotton (1641): A Parallel betweene Robert late Earle of Essex, and George late Duke of Buckingham, London, p. 6. 47 According to Castiglione, the courtier will ‘wade in everye thyng a litle farther then other menne, so that he maye bee knowen among all menne for one that is excellente’. Quoted from: Castiglione, Baldassare [1528]: The Book of the Courtier, trans. by George Bull, Har­ mondsworth: 1971, p. 54. 48 Quoted from: Paton, Henry (1904): Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Mar and Kellie preserved at Alloa House, London: His Majesties State Office, p. 72.

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teaching of dance was no longer the monopoly that it had been under Elizabeth, and dancing masters arrived from the Continent to seek patronage at court or to settle in the country as freelance professionals. By 1620, half of the dancing masters living in London were French.49 Professionals such as Simon de la Gard, Jacques Gaultier and Sebastian La Pierre added international dancing fashions to their repertoires and recorded past choreographies in their manuscripts. However, rather than suggesting predefined choreographies, such as dance manuals, they promoted separate figures and elements from which dancers would compose individual performances, so that questions of authorship remained secondary. By acquiring the technical skills necessary for the execution of complex step sequences, a graceful révérence, or a spectacular capriole, performers transferred authority onto their bodies through the practice of dance. Courtiers like Buckingham, who used visits to foreign countries as opportunities to learn new techniques and to take lessons with continental dance masters, and who employed professionals from abroad in their own households, thus fashioned themselves as patrons of courtly dance.

George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, as a Patron of the Masque Buckingham’s patronage of dance extended participation in courtly masque per­ formances. From 1619 he embarked on a conspicuous promotion of revelry and ama­ teur theatricals outside the court that corresponds with his early years of social and political dominance. He figured prominently in the performances of the 1619/20 Christmas season, which has been noted for its unprecedented abundance in the number of plays and revels that were performed during the fortnight around the turn of the year.50 Stuart aristocracy traditionally passed the time between Christ­ mas Eve and Twelfth Night by mutual invitation to informal entertainments in the richly furbished halls of their London residences, of which many provided ample space for sumptuous stage settings and scenery, and some even rivalled David Cun­ ningham’s banqueting house at Whitehall.51 Although the king might sometimes be present, these more familiar masques were not commonly designed to entertain the monarch, but rather the host’s family, his household, friends and associates, drawing 49 See: Ravelhofer, Barbara (2006): The Early Stuart Court Masque. Dance, Costume, and Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 50 See: Butler, Martin (1993b): ‘Jonson’s News from the New World, the “Running Masque”, and the Season of 1619–20’, in: Leeds Barroll (ed.), Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, New York: Ams Press, pp. 153–78. 51 See: Butler, Martin (1986): ‘A Provincial Masque of Comus, 1636’, in: Renaissance Drama, vol. XVII, pp. 149–73.

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on the Elizabethan tradition of summoning the space of performance from that of the audience, without the need for formal scaffolding. Within the atmosphere of seclusion and intimacy created by such events, political affairs were regarded as matters of personal relations that would be negotiated through expressions of fa­ vour, courtesy and hospitality. In the season of 1619/20 such matters of political con­ troversy were primarily concerned with the recent acceptance of the Bohemian crown by Frederick Elector Palatine, head of the Protestant Union and James’s son­ in­law. This had caused an outburst of diplomatic fury, which the official court masque on Twelfth Night, Ben Jonson’s News from the New World, sought to repre­ sent. The first few years of the new decade were of special significance not only on account of the Thirty Years’ War but also with regard to Buckingham’s national and international career. Early in 1619 he had been granted the post of Lord Admiral of the Fleet, and, on the death of Queen Anne in March, he was bequeathed a con­ siderable quantity of her possessions. This bequest increased not only his wealth but his political significance at court. Yet the favourite had been advancing his own con­ cerns rather too forcefully, and in so doing had provoked coalitions of enemies who were waiting to strike against him. At the same time, James Hamilton, second Marquess of Hamilton, whom Buckingham had promoted to office within the Privy Council while seeking support in counterattacking the pro­Spanish Howard faction back in 1617, had just been created first Earl of Cambridge and was rising in the fa­ vour of King James, thereby increasingly threatening Buckingham’s position at court. Realising his need for greater influence in the older factions of the courtly elite, Buckingham endeavoured to affirm the various friendships and courtesies he had established as a member of the Bedchamber into alliances for his new political office by commissioning his own masque. Performed not at court but rather at sev­ eral London houses that were politically aligned to Whitehall during the season of 1619/20, this entertainment has become known as the Running Masque, and shall be discussed here as an example of the characteristic manner in which Buckingham enlisted and amplified a practice reserved for the representation of the king in se­ curing his own political interests and shaping his social image.52 The spectacle, which proved very popular with the courtly elite, not only staged a moment of absolute self­promotion for Buckingham, but, significantly, tran­ 52

The masque’s script that evolves around a dialogue between a Master of the Revels and a magician, whose necromantic demonstrations cause the performances of several dances, has only been known since its recent discovery among the manuscripts of the British Library by James Knowles in 1990. Knowles has since published the document in an ex­ cellent analysis of its literary significance, in: Knowles: James (2000b): ‘The “Running Masque” Recovered: A Masque for the Marques of Buckingham (c. 1619–20)’, in: Peter Beal (ed.), Seventeenth-Century Poetry, Music and Drama, London: British Library, pp. 79–135.

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scended the traditional performance practices of the masque by presenting an aris­ tocrat – himself – in a speaking part. In so doing, Buckingham reduced the distinc­ tion that had secured him the rank of nobility at court, since speech was regarded as the marker of the socially marginalised actor, and courtly masque performances il­ luminated the contrast between the courtly and the non­courtly through the dif­ ferences between dance and speech. Like the actor, the courtier exploited the oppor­ tunity to mould himself into a different self, taking the liberty to transcend and subvert the hierarchic order of society. As the performative idiom of courtly iden­ tity, dance served as a status­inflicted practice by which the noble masquer obtained recognition as a member of the social elite. It was dance, not speech, that was the attribute of aristocratic status, and that formed the courtier’s innate means of ex­ pression.53 Through its focus on bodily presence, the court masque thus confined noble identity to the physical, obliging the aristocratic body to create meaning by way of bodily movement rather than the spoken word. Buckingham’s performance in the Running Masque marks a clear transgression of this performative idiom, pre­ senting the Marquess in a moment of radical self­fashioning that exceeds traditional strategies of social distinction and attempts a renegotiation of courtly masculinity. By presenting himself through speech, Buckingham disengaged from the principles of the masque’s form and its traditional notion of the male noble masquer in an at­ tempt to enlist the genre’s political discourse on the theatricality of the courtly body under his authority. In seeking a new expression to convey his status at court, Buckingham deli­ berately resigned the status of the noble dancer, exploring aesthetic alternatives in fashioning his personal image, which lay beyond that traditionally employed in the process of courtly myth­making. This striving for the exceptional and progressive, which, as we shall see, became paradigmatic of his later portrait commissions, is further documented by his patronage of the French dancing master Barthélemy de Montagut, and his commission of a masque from Ben Jonson, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, which he publicly performed for the king in August 1621 at his new estate, Burley­on­the­Hill.54 The entertainment celebrated the king’s first visit to Bucking­ 53 54

For a detailed discussion, see Chapter One. Barthélemy de Montagut dedicated a treatise on the history of the art of dancing to Bucking­ ham. See: Barthélemy de Montagut (1620): Lounge de la danse In Praise of the Dance, ed. by Barbara Ravelhofer, Renaissance Texts from Manuscript, no. 3, 2000, p. 89f. For Ben Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed, see: Randall, Dale B. J. (1975): Jonson’s Gypsies Unmasked: Background and Theme of ‘The Gypsies Metamorphos’d’, Durham: Duke University Press; Butler, Martin (1991): ‘“We are one man’s all”: Jonson’s Gypsies Metamorphosed’, in: Andrew Gurr and Philipa Hardman (eds.), Politics, Patronage and Literature in England, 1558–1658, London: The Modern Humanist Research Association, pp. 253–73; Knowles, James (2006): ‘“Songs of baser alloy”: Jonson’s Gypsies Metamorphosed and the Circulation of Manuscript Libels’, in:

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ham’s newly refurbished house during the summer recess of the 1621 Parliament, and it was so well received that it was repeated first at Belvoir, in the house of Buck­ ingham’s father­in­law, and again before the court at Windsor. Jonson’s masque presented Buckingham and his fellow masquers as a band of gypsies, who tell the fortunes first of King James and Prince Charles, and then of other court dignitaries, before fleecing a group of yokels of a trifling sum of money. The entertainment’s feature of telling the king’s fortune – staging the pretence of an unknowing Buck­ ingham­gypsy who only recognises James’s royal nature when he reads his hand – provided the favourite with an opportunity to phrase a eulogy that affirmed his own virtue through the capacity to discern and celebrate the full extent of the king’s royal virtue.55 As Buckingham the gypsy discerned the virtues of the king, the audi­ ence of Jonson’s entertainment was lead to recognise the true nature of Buckingham and his gypsies, when in the following scene they trick the yokels, only to return the stolen goods, metamorphose into their real selves as courtiers and become revealed as ‘gypsies of no common kind’.56 Martin Butler has recently rejected previous read­ ings of the entertainment as covertly satirising their patron, asserting that Bucking­ ham’s self­presentation as a pickpocketing, carefree charlatan traded on his charisma and empowered rather than undermined his relationship to the king.57 The Marquess’ performance, however, is subversive beyond this winking impersonation of a petty thief. By presenting himself as the captain of a band of gypsies who attempt to pick the pockets of the assembled spectators, Buckingham exchanged his courtly status for an unstable position at the margins of civil society. The feeling of a cultural dis­ parity thus evoked between the prime courtier and his courtly audience seems pur­ poseful, candidly addressing the underlying questions concerning the legitimacy of Buckingham’s position at court. The disparity was accentuated by Buckingham’s ap­ pearance with a painted face, alluding to the contemporary belief that gypsies were not born with a darker skin colour but voluntarily painted their faces to become ‘counterfeit Egyptians’.58 Following the poetics of the masque, Jonson’s entertain­

55

56 57 58

Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 153–76; and emphasising the shortfall of Butler’s perspective: Netzloff, Mark (2001): ‘“Counterfeit Egyptians” and Imagined Border: Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed’, in: English Literary History, vol. 68, pp. 763–93. For the general logic underlying this eulogy, see: Levy Peck, Linda (1986): ‘“For a King not to be bountiful were a fault”: Perspectives on Court Patronage in Early Stuart Eng­ land’, in: Journal of British Studies, vol. 25, pp. 31–61. ‘A Masque of the Metamorphosed Gypsies’, in: Stephen Orgel (ed.), Ben Jonson: Complete Masques, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969, pp. 316–73, p. 372, l. 1380. See: Butler, Martin (2008): op. cit., (note 26), p. 229f. See: Netzloff (2001): op. cit., (note 53); and Orgel, Stephen (1998): ‘Marginal Jonson’, in: David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (eds.), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 144–75.

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ment would have had to end with a transformation scene wherein Buckingham, the gypsies’ captain, was revealed as Buckingham, the courtly masquer. However, The Gypsies Metamorphosed breaks with the established form of the court masque, sub­ stituting the transformation scene with a spoken epilogue, describing how the meta­ morphosis hidden from view was performed by ‘a mere barber’, and the blackface carried by Buckingham to forge the identity of a gypsy captain was ‘fetched off with water, (…), and no magic else’.59 By requesting an anticlimactic conclusion that contradicts the normal scheme of the courtly masque, Buckingham thus refused to present himself according to the stereotype of courtly idealisation and thereby trans­ gressed the established norms of social distinction. The performance emphasised the manner in which the figure of the courtier shared the ability to mould a perfect version of himself in the Castiglionian sense, with the actor’s perfection in what was perceived as hypocrisis. By assuming the role of Jonson’s gypsy captain, which was associated with a void, malleable identity of the ‘counterfeit Egyptian’, Buckingham portrayed his own identity in opposition to the performative idiom of the dancing courtier whose allegoric virtue is revealed by the masque as a higher truth inherent to his bodily self. Buckingham’s performance in The Gypsies Metamorphosed did more than just trade on the erotic appeal of his body, for it testified to the purposeful assessment of the malleability of his bodily self as a medium for the production of courtly mythol­ ogy. Reflecting on his much contested body as fashioned by court protocol and in contemporary diatribe Buckingham’s patronage of the masque illustrated the fa­ vourite’s increasing desire to develop an image of himself that registered his body as separate from the established tropes of social distinction as they were promoted in the genre of the masque. Although his patronage of the masque thus allowed Buck­ ingham to present himself in contradiction with the norms of erotic manliness that had framed his body as the period’s iconic representation of political demise, this presentation remained caught within the semiotics it ventured to contradict, main­ taining a notion of social identity that derived the image of his body from a per­ formative examination of its uniformity to a fixed set of social norms. As an image described in performance, the social identity of James’s favourite constructed in the masque demanded continuous reiteration, thereby promoting a notion of Bucking­ ham’s bodily image as incessantly open to contestation. Even though the Marquess excelled at dancing in the masque, the genre still amplified the social instability of his already much contested identity at court. As his performance in the Gypsies Metamorphosed showed, this was an effect Buckingham increasingly tried to escape, by extending the conscious shaping of his image from the genre of the masque to that of portraiture. 59

Orgel (1970): op. cit., (note 56), l. 1390.

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Performances of the Painted Body: The Portrait Commissions of the Duke of Buckingham The history of Buckingham’s collection of paintings and sculptures has been touched on in scholarly investigations of the collections of the Earl of Arundel and Charles I. In these investigations, however, Villiers has been portrayed as a mere emulator of his social superiors – men like Edward Somerset, the Earl of Worcester, or Philip Herbert, fourth Earl of Pembroke, who had been listed as great patrons of the arts in Henry Peacham’s The Gentleman’s Exercise, published in 1612. Indeed, in 1983 Mon­ ique Riccardi­Cubitt summarised what has essentially remained common opinion ever since: ‘he had neither the culture, taste, sophistication, nor scholarship of Arundel. He bought in haste with recklessness, yet he achieved remarkable results in a short time’.60 Buckingham’s prime concern has been seen as a desire to model him­ self upon great favourites like Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, and Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the Duke of Lerma, who both assembled major early modern collections, and his collection at York House, on the Strand, has been seen merely as a decorative assemblage which was designed to reflect his splendour and status, thereby denying any aesthetic or historical understanding of his appreciation of art.61 Indeed, the only author with a deeper interest in the assessment of the col­ lection of James’s favourite is Philip McEvansoneya, who has remarked upon the general tendency to dismiss Buckingham’s practice in the acquisition of art as a half­ hearted attempt motivated by rivalry and the desire to possess rather than to study and to observe.62 However, McEvansoneya’s systematic analysis of the inventories of Buckingham’s collection results merely in an interpretation of numbers and in hasty conclusions. This is also a particular problem for McEvansoneya’s assertion that portraits seem to have been of less importance to Buckingham than to other collec­ 60 Riccardi­Cubitt, Monique (2000): ‘The Duke of Buckingham’s cabinet d’amateur. An Aes­ thetic, Religious and Political Statement’, in: British Art Journal, vol. I, no. 2, pp. 77–86. 61 See: Fehl, Philipp P. (1981): ‘Franciscus Junius and the Defence of Art’, in: Artibus et Historiae, vol. II, no. 3, pp. 9–55; Parry, Graham (1981): The Golden Age Restor’d. The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–1642, Manchester: Manchester University Press; Brown, Jonathan (1995): Kings and Connoisseurs. Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe, New Haven: Yale University Press; Howarth, David (1997): Images of Rule. Arts and Politics in the English Renaissance 1485–1649, Basingstoke: Macmillan; Hill, Robert (2003): ‘The Ambassador as Art Agent: Sir Dudley Carleton and Jacobean Collecting’, in: Edward Chaney (ed.), The Evolution of English Collecting: The Reception of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, Studies in British Art 12, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 240–55. 62 See: McEvansoneya, Philip (2003): ‘Italian Paintings in the Buckingham Collection’, in: Edward Chaney (ed.), The Evolution of English Collecting. Receptions of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 315–36.

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tors.63 Buckingham started his collection in 1618, and built it up fairly quickly, at first obtaining paintings in great numbers through intermediaries who would pur­ chase items on his behalf, or receiving paintings as gifts solicited from foreign diplo­ mats and petitioners. In 1619, however, he enlisted Balthazar Gerbier into his house­ hold and entrusted him with the task of keeping and extending his collection. 64 Gerbier was the son of French Protestant refugees who had settled in Middel­ burg, Zeeland, and had started his career as a calligrapher in the service of Prince Maurits of Orange, on whose command he accompanied a diplomatic mission to London in 1616. In France, Gerbier had been educated in the arts and sciences, where he showed significant skills in writing, limning and drawing, as well as in geometry, architecture, and the design of fortifications and war machines. 65 Within the household of Buckingham, Gerbier first served as a writer and translator of letters, and as a painter of miniatures of his master’s family and friends. Although his talents as a miniaturist were somewhat limited, he showed good judgement in matters of artistic and political expertise, leading Buckingham to entrust him first with the keeping of his collection and later with the transmission of political news to his associates abroad. Until the death of his patron in 1628, Gerbier was instrumen­ tal in the rapid expansion of Buckingham’s York House treasures: these included about 325 paintings, of which 22 canvases were by Titian, 21 by Jacopo Bassano and Francesco Bassano the Younger, 17 by Tintoretto, 16 by Veronese, ten by Palma the

63

Ibid, p. 329; for the inventory referred to by McEvansoneya, see: Davies, Randall (1907): ‘An Inventory of the Duke of Buckingham’s Pictures, etc. at York House in 1625’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. 10, no. 48, pp. 367, 379–82. 64 Philip McEvansoneya has discovered the date in an unpublished document formerly in the collection of Lord Fairfax of Cameron. See: McEvansoneya, Philip (1987): ‘Some Docu­ ments concerning the Patronage and Collections of the Duke of Buckingham’, in: Tudor Art Review, vol. 8, p. 33. 65 The most substantial account for the life and career of Balthazar Gerbier, both in the ser­ vice to the English Crown before 1642 and to Parliament during the Civil War, has recently been given by: Kelblusek, Marika (2003): ‘Cultural and Political Brokerage in Seventeenth­Century England: The Case of Balthazar Gerbier’, in: Juliette Roding et. al. (eds.), Dutch and Flemish Artists in Britain. 1550–1800. Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 13, Leiden: Primavera Pers, pp. 73–84; and, Chaney, Edward (1998): ‘Notes towards a Bi­ ography of Sir Balthazar Gerbier’, in: idem, The Evolution of the Grand Tour. Anglo-Italian Relations since the Renaissance, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 215–25. For Gerbier’s time as English agent to the archducal court at Brussels from 1631 to 1642, see: Howarth, David (2001): ‘The Entry Books of Sir Balthazar Gerbier’, in: Hans Vlieghe (ed.), Van Dyck. 1599–1999. Conjectures and Refutations, Turnhout: Brespols, pp. 77–87.

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Younger, two by Correggio and one by Giorgione.66 Travelling abroad to visit the workshops of living masters and to inspect canvases from the High Renaissance in the houses of the continental elite, Gerbier was able constantly to refine his taste in the arts, eventually becoming one of the greatest connoisseurs of his time. Gerbier regularly reported back to Buckingham from Italy, France or Spain, re­ questing decisions on the commissioning or purchasing of paintings, medals, books and other rarities, but his precise dealings abroad can only be guessed at.67 His first mission on Buckingham’s behalf was probably a visit to Antwerp, in July 1619, to at­ tend the sale of the Aarschot collection; this comprised works of the Italian Renais­ sance assembled by Charles II de Croy, Duc d’Aarschot and Prince to Chimay, until his death in 1612. Having obtaining a famous biblical series by Veronese that com­ prised ten canvases, Gerbier spectacularly launched his patron onto the international art trade, creating Buckingham’s identity as that of a powerful collector on a par with notable English patrons like Arundel and Somerset, who had tried to obtain works from the Aarschot collection before, but without success.68 Although Gerbier had augmented Buckingham’s collection with works by notable Florentine and Roman artists, he acquired a strong taste for sixteenth­century works from the Venetian School and subsequently purchased mythological and religious scenes by Titian, Tintoretto and Jacopo Palma for his patron. The only evidence to have sur­ vived concerning this is an expense account that lists the transactions undertaken by

66 As has been emphasised, the number of paintings encompassed by Buckingham’s collection is impossible to calculate. The most significant documentation preserved is a copy, datable after 1673, of an inventory drawn in 1635 that lists the paintings, sculptures and other items at York House and at Chelsea House, held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which has partly been published by Ron Davies in 1906. Some of the works in his collection seem to have been kept at Wallingford House at Whitehall, his residence as Admiral of the Fleet. See: Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS A 341, fols. 30r–41v; Davies (1907): op. cit., (note 62). The complete list has been transcribed by: Jervis, S. (1997): ‘Furniture for the first Duke of Buckingham’, in: Furniture History, vol. 33, pp. 57–74. The most detailed as­ sessment of the quality and quantity of Buckingham’s collection has been given by Philip McEvansoneya. See: McEvansoneya, Philip (1996a): ‘Vertue, Walpole and the Docu­ mentation of the Buckingham Collection’, in: Journal of the History of Collections, vol. VIII, no. 1, pp. 1–14; idem (1996b): ‘The Sequestration and Dispersal of the Buckingham Collection’, in: Journal of the History of Collections, vol. VIII, no. 2, p. 140. 67 A rough account has been given in: Betcherman, Lisa­Rose (1961): ‘Balthazar Gerbier in Seventeenth­Century Italy’, in: History Today, vol. XI, no. 5, pp. 325–31. 68 Gerbier’s first continental trip for the purchase of artworks has long been thought to have been his 1621 journey to Italy. Evidence of his 1619 journey to Antwerp, however, has recently been given by: Klauner, F. (1991): ‘Zu Veroneses Buckingham­Serie’, in: Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, vo. XLIV, pp. 107–19. For Arundel’s and Somerset’s interest in the Aarschot collection, see: McEvansoneya (2003): op. cit., (note 62).

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Gerbier for the purchase of paintings during his 1621 trip from Rome to Venice. Among the pictures acquired were a David and another biblical scene by Bartolomeo Manfredi, The Four Seasons by Guido Reni, a copy of Raphael’s fresco The Banquet of the Gods, Tintoretto’s The Women Taken in Adultery, Jacopo Bossano’s The Shepherds in the Night and Noah’s Ark, and Francesco Bossano’s History of Vulcan.69 Buckingham was also one of the early patrons of Inigo Jones, having employed him from 1619 to 1621 to make alterations to Wallingford House, his and his mother’s lodgings at Whitehall. Buckingham subsequently called on Jones’s architectural skills for alterations to Burley­on­the­Hill, which he bought in 1621. The full extent of this commission is unknown, since the house was destroyed by a fire during the Civil War. Only the large stable survives, built by Jones to fulfil Buckingham’s wish to house forty horses at his estate, and described in Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England (1662) as a particularly advanced construction, ‘where the horses were the best accommodated in England’.70 Jones received another commission from Buckingham in 1622, the only surviving evidence of which is a letter from John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton. For the chapel closet of Katherine Manners at New Hall, the Marquess and Marchioness house in Essex, he designed a ceiling modelled after Palladio’s illustration of the ‘Temple of Neptune’. (Figs. 18 & 19) It has been suggested that Jones had been superseded by Balthazar Gerbier, who was employed at New Hall from 1624 to 1625. During this time, Gerbier was also in­ volved in the alterations of Buckingham’s London residence, York House; indeed, there has been some debate about whether Jones or Gerbier was the architect of its Italianate Waterfront Gate.71 Gerbier’s most notable acquisition for Buckingham, however, was Titian’s Ecce Homo, which he obtained for the enormous sum of £275, and which caused a sen­ sation upon its arrival in England, enhanced by the rumour that the Earl of Arundel had offered the staggering amount of £7,000 to obtain it from Buckingham, while Inigo Jones got down on his knees to kiss the canvas when he first saw it.72 True or not, this anecdote fits with recent assessments of early Stuart collecting as an activ­ ity characterised by competitive consumption, and pursued by courtiers rivalling for

69 See: Bodleian Library, Tanner MS. 73, ff, 122–3; reprinted in: Philip, I. G. (1957): ‘Bal­ thazar Gerbier and the Duke of Buckingham’s Pictures’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. IC, no. 650, pp. 155–6. 70 Thomas Fuller (1662): The History of the Worthies of England, London, p. 346. 71 See: Colvin, Howard (1995): A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 554–61. 72 See: B. Fairfax (1678): A Catalogue of the Curious Collections of Pictures of George Villiers, London. For the rumour, see: Goodman (1839): op. cit., (note 20), vol. II, p. 360.

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Fig. 18: Andrea Palladio, Ceiling Detail from the ‘Temple of Neptune’ from I Quattro libri dell’architettura, 1580 Fig. 19: Inigo Jones, Design for the Ceiling of the Marchioness of Buckingham’s Chapel Closet at New Hall, Essex, c. 1622­23

political status and influence.73 Both episodes have been prominently quoted in the few accounts describing Buckingham’s activity as a collector, contributing to a gen­ eral tendency to reduce his interest in the acquisition of paintings and sculpture to ‘a concretisation of his collection of abstract possessions such as titles and power’.74 Such descriptions of Balthazar Gerbier’s service in Buckingham’s household have come to endorse the image of Buckingham as the ignorant cretin who collected paintings and sculptures in the pursuit of fashion, aspiring to nothing more than the desire to outshine his social superiors.75 With his great skill and acquisitiveness, it 73 See: Münsterberger, W. (1994): Collecting, an Unruly Passion, Cambridge, Mass.: Princeton University Press. 74 See: McEvansoneya (2003): op. cit., (note 62), p. 317. 75 See: Philip (1957): op. cit., (note 69); Howarth (2001): op. cit., (note 65); Betcherman (1970): ‘The York House Ceiling and its Keeper’, in: Apollo, vol. 92, no. 104, pp. 251–9; Marika Kelblusek has recently transcended this perspective by assessing Gerbier’s duties in trans­ mitting political news, negotiating political, cultural and intellectual contacts for Buckingham and other patrons. See: Kelblusek (2003): op. cit., (note 63).

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was Gerbier who secured the rapid growth of Buckingham’s collection at York House and at his other properties – Chelsea House up the River Thames, his White­ hall residence Wallingford House, and his two country houses Burley­on­the­Hill in Rutland and New Hall near Boreham in Essex – assembling more paintings and sculptures within the first five years of his service to Buckingham than any of Eng­ land’s early modern collectors so far. A quote from a letter to Buckingham, in which Gerbier ponders his achievements, supports this: ‘Our pictures’ Gerbier writes in 1625, ‘if they were to be sold a century after our death, would sell … for three times more than they cost. … If Your Excellency will only give me time to mine quietly, I will fill Newhall with paintings so that foreigners will come there in procession’.76 Certainly, this quote underscores the mercantile interest in Gerbier’s collecting for Buckingham, but passages from other letters, cited less frequently, offer a rather dif­ ferent reading of both Gerbier’s and Buckingham’s interest in painting. By mistaking Buckingham’s interest in painting and sculpture as an attempt merely to emulate the cultural practices of his social betters, historians of the early modern English art world have disregarded the evolution of a specific notion of collecting within English society at the beginning of the seventeenth century that significantly differed from the collecting of erudite connoisseurs like Thomas Ho­ ward or artist­collectors like Inigo Jones. As is documented by the first contact Peter Paul Rubens had with Sir Dudley Carleton, Jacobean art collectors generally priori­ tised the originality of a painting, i. e. its production by the hand of the master, rather than his workshop, above its subject matter. Thus in September 1616 the English ambassador to The Hague had commissioned the English art agents Toby Matthew and George Gage to visit the Flemish master and obtain one of his re­ nowned hunting scenes. At first, Rubens refused the deal, offering a hunting scene produced by his studio. The written negotiation, in which Carleton stresses the im­ portance of the artist’s own touch to the canvas, proceeded until the end of 1617, when the ambassador received Rubens’ Wolf and Fox Hunt.77 This example is only one of many documented art deals that illustrate how English collecting in the first decades of the seventeenth century was primarily concerned with the fame of the artist. Though such interest in the quality of workmanship, or for a particular sub­ ject matter, clearly differs from the English attitude toward art held by previous generations, when paintings were bought for their representation of a family relative or important historical personality, there nevertheless remained an interest in the collecting of famous, rare, or otherwise worthy pieces. Buckingham’s collecting of painting exhibits an enduring interest in purchasing particular subjects that related to his political career, while his continuous commissioning of his portrait from liv­ 76 77

The quote was given by Betcherman (1970): op. cit., (note 67), p. 250. See: Donovan, Fiona (2004): Rubens in England, New Haven: Yale University Press.

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ing artists documents his understanding of painting as a means of exploring the ef­ fect of his bodily appearance in the painted image. The ten years of Buckingham’s patronage – between c. 1618 and his assassination in 1628 – witnessed the most pioneering commissions of painting in early seven­ teenth­century England. Through his interest in portraiture as a medium for the cultivation of his personal image, Buckingham approached the art of painting in a manner different from that of his English peers, who collected painting and sculp­ ture in order to strengthen their associations with the courtly elite rather than to render themselves as distinct from the elite’s norms and established practices. Al­ though York House certainly held a considerable number of paintings selected for this reason, the history of Buckingham’s collection is dominated by a much smaller number of exceptional portraits commissioned from contemporary masters like Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. With these works, Buckingham suc­ ceeded in obtaining what could best be described as the most remarkable series of contemporary masterpieces assembled by an early seventeenth­century English col­ lector. After his death in 1628, the canvases were dispersed into different collections; two of them were destroyed in a fire in 1949, another has only recently been recover­ ed. As a result, a series of five commissions by Buckingham, dating from between 1621 and 1628, has never been examined in relation to each other, leaving one of the most decisive moments in early seventeenth­century English art patronage almost entirely overlooked. This study brings together these five portraits – two by Van Dyck, another two by Rubens, and the last one by Gerrit van Honthorst – which depict Villiers in five different allegorical settings and which have puzzled art historians for a long time.78 However, if we examine the portraits in relation to each other, it is clear that each setting forms part of an overarching allegorical programme by which Buckingham aimed to convey a particular image of himself to the early Stuart court. By commis­ sioning his portraits, Buckingham was able to pursue a much more deliberate fashioning of his public image than could be provided by the masque, allowing for an allegorical investiture of his body within a stable depiction, as distinct from the ephemeral visions of his body that were crafted in the stagings of the masque. Such commissions demonstrated that Buckingham not only collected art but that he also aimed to obtain representations of his social identity from the hand of contemporary masters, whose artistic prowess highlighted the shortcomings of the traditional, 78

Three of these canvases, Van Dyck’s Continence of Scipio (1620/21) and Venus and Adonis (1620/21), and Peter Paul Rubens’ Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Buckingham (1625), are discussed in this chapter. Rubens’s ceiling The Duke of Buckingham conducted to the Temple of Virtue (1625) and Gerrit van Honthorst’s The Liberal Arts Presented to King Charles and Henrietta-Maria (1628) are discussed in the next chapter.

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iconic style of English portraiture and established a notion of art patronage radically new to English collectors of the period in question.

Buckingham as a Collector of Painting and Sculpture The earliest known portrait of Buckingham is a full­length one by William Larkin, dated 1616 and showing him at the age of 24, wearing the Order of the Garter, which he had received in April that year (Fig. 20). The painting renders Buckingham in the typical English style prevalent until the second decade of the seventeenth century, employing the essentially medieval aesthetic of a line filled with colour, and con­ cerned with a two­dimensional pattern. More than any other painter of the iconic tradition within late Elizabethan and early Stuart portraiture, Larkin excelled at presenting his sitters in an ostentatious display of meticulous detail, recording a period obsessed with decadence in dress caused by the abolition of the sumptuary laws by the new reign of James I.79 (Fig. 21) Larkin’s portrait depicts an elegantly formalised outline of Buckingham’s figure, thereby reducing it to a bizarrely exag­ gerated silhouette that presents his body as awkwardly detached from his personal self, recognisable only within the barely individualised features of his small, pale face. The image emphasises the two­dimensional, reducing its sitter to a physical shape, whose individual features are assessed for their correspondence to a universal idea of the elite masculine body. Registering his conformity to this model, Larkin’s emphasis of the young favourite’s long, slender legs thus reasserts Buckingham’s body as an object of erotic display, just as his performances in the masque had done and would continue to do. The first of Buckingham’s commissions radically to break with this aesthetic tradition was Van Dyck’s 1621 The Continence of Scipio (Fig. 22), illustrating a well­ known Roman story from the Second Punic War. After capturing New Carthage in Spain, the young Publius Cornelius Scipio was presented with a captive maiden of great beauty. Discovering that the girl was betrothed to Allucius, the Prince of the besieged Celtiberians, Scipio publicly reunited the couple and bestowed upon them the gold that the bride’s parents had offered as a ransom.80 Jeremy Wood has sug­ gested that Van Dyck’s picture portrays Buckingham and his wife­to­be, Lady Ka­

79

The extent of research on Larking is surprisingly small. A substantial examination of the painter’s style has indeed been pursued exclusively in the work of Roy Strong: See: Strong, Roy (1995b): William Larkin. Icons of Splendour, Milano: Franco Maria Ricci, and; idem (1969): The English Icon. Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture, New York: Pantheon Books. 80 Valerius Maximus, Dicta et facta, IV, III, I. / Livy Roman History, vol. XXVI, 50.

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Fig. 20: William Larkin, George Villiers, later First Duke of Buckingham, 1616

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therine Manners.81 The canvas has since become one of the artist’s most controver­ sial works, for there has been little consensus over whether it had been commis­ sioned as a wedding gift to Buckingham either by King James or the Earl of Arundel, or, as has most frequently been suggested, by the groom himself. Attribution of the commission to the Earl of Arundel has been raised on account of the marble frieze with two gorgon heads, prominently displayed in the lower left­hand corner of the canvas where it supports both the historical and the mythological themes of the composition. As John Harris discovered in 1973, the frieze eventually became part of Arundel’s collection of antique sculpture.82 Various authors have since referred to the painting as a commission from Arundel, but in 1993 Ron Harvie asserted that the marble may have been part of Buckingham’s own collection at the time when The Continence of Scipio was executed.83 Harvie’s suggestion that the canvas was a wed­ ding present from King James to Buckingham resulted in renewed debate, which has most recently been supplemented by John Peacock, who delivers what is to date the most detailed analysis of the painting’s emblematic and mythological elements, identifying it as Buckingham’s own commission.84 Peacock addresses Van Dyck’s Scipio in the context of the painter’s iconographic approach to narrating the drama of a scene through the inclusion of animated ob­ jects: a technique the painter had acquired from his master, Peter Paul Rubens, when executing the Decius Mus Cycle in 1618.85 Pointing to the confrontation between the gorgon heads on the frieze and the gold gorgon masks adorning the heavy vase which is carefully being lowered by the servant to the right, Peacock identifies a ‘second pattern of looks’ that replicates the drama connecting the figures above. 86 Although both gorgon heads on the original frieze, now in the Museum of London, are in fact identical, the frieze’s right­hand gorgon in Van Dyck’s depiction glances towards Scipio. Similarly, the gold gorgon on the massive vase looks out of the can­ vas, confronting the beholder with a candid look that is repeated in the face of the 81 82

83 84 85 86

See: Wood, Jeremy (1992): ‘Van Dyck’s Pictures for the Duke of Buckingham. The Eleph­ ant in the Carpet and the Dead Tree with Ivy’, in: Apollo, vol. CXXXVI, July, pp. 37–47. See: Harris, John (1973b): ‘The Link between a Roman Second­Century Sculpture, Van Dyck, Inigo Jones and Queen Henrietta­Maria’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CXV, no. 845, pp. 526–30. Harris recognised the painted marble in a drawing by John Webb dated to 1639 that forms part of his Larger Talman Album (now at the Ashmolean Museum), where­ in Webb collected drawings of marble fragments from Arundel House. See: Harvie, Ron (1993): ‘A Present from Dear Dad? Van Dyck’s The Continence of Scipio’, in: Apollo, vol. 138, October, pp. 224–6. See: Peacock, John (2000): ‘Looking at Van Dyck’s Scipio in its Context’, in: Art History, vol. XXIII, no. 2, pp. 262–89. Ibid. For the Decius Mus Cycle see: Baumstark, Reinhold (1985): Peter Paul Rubens. The Decius Mus Cycle, Köln: DuMont. Peackock (2000): op. cit. (note 84), p. 265.

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Fig. 21: William Larkin, Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, later Fourth Earl of Pembroke, 1615

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Fig. 22: Anthony van Dyck, The Continence of Scipio, 1621

second servant above. With an expression of both gratitude and dismay, Allucius joins his right hand with that of his bride, who has cast her eyes shamefacedly down, looking towards an elephant’s head woven into the carpet. Emblem of temperance and chastity, the fierce animal, as Wood was first to point out, alludes to the bride’s propriety, which shortly before the wedding had been called into question by her father, the Earl of Rutland.87 Historians have frequently referred to the scandal that compromised the wed­ ding of Buckingham to Lady Katherine Manners on 16 May 1620. In a coup de théâtre, Lady Katherine, heiress of the extensive Manners estates in Northamptonshire and Yorkshire, had been called to supper at the house of Buckingham’s mother, the Countess of Buckingham, who made sure that her son was also present. Forced to stay overnight, next morning the young woman was taken back to her father’s house. Her father refused to receive her, since she had compromised herself by spending 87 See: Wood (1992): op. cit., (note 81).

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the night under the same roof as her suitor. Lady Katherine had to take refuge with her uncle, and Rutland declared that he would not allow her back until Buckingham had committed himself to marry her. The scandalous incident caused extreme ten­ sion in the relationship between Rutland and Buckingham, who professed that Ka­ therine ‘never received any blemish in her honour but that which came by your [Rutland’s] own tongue’, but eventually it put an end to an extended period of wed­ ding negotiations that had almost foundered twice already: first on account of Ka­ therine’s Roman Catholic religion, and secondly because of Buckingham’s demand for a dowry of £20,000 and land worth £4,000 a year.88 As John Peacock has convincingly shown, Van Dyck’s painting alludes to this assault through the presence of the gorgon heads. Invested with the power of the petrifying look after Medusa’s rape by Neptune in the temple of Minerva, the gor­ gons symbolise an accusation of sexual debauchery. Pointing to the gorgon that looks at Scipio, Peacock sees this accusation addressed to the image of the Roman general, who feels the appeal of his captive’s beauty. By restoring her to Allucius, so Peacock argues, Scipio declares that his beneficence stems from his sympathy with the feelings of the Spanish Prince, whose love he must tender, as the interests of the greater good hold him back from loving a spouse of his own.89 Scipio’s demonstra­ tion of empathy with Allucius, illustrated by Van Dyck in the mutual inclination of the two figures, leads Peacock to argue that the picture shows ‘the idea of Scipio as alter ego to Allucius, [so that] both the leading male figures can make reference to Buckingham’.90 Peacock elaborates on this by pointing to Machiavelli’s interpre­ tation of the Scipio narrative, which emphasises the general’s calculation on the ef­ fect of not merely avoiding but publicly overcoming temptation as a way to amplify the power of his leadership; an aspect in which he sees reflected the image­conscious Marquess of Buckingham to whom he subsequently ascribes the commission of Van Dyck’s canvas.91 88 See: Lockyer (1982), op. cit., (note 17). 89 Quoted from Peacock (2000): op. cit. (note 84), p. 266–7: ‘So soon as the yong gentleman was come, Scipio entred into more familiar speech with him. (…) I am a young man as well as your self [sic]. Come on therefore, let us yong men both (…) not be too nice, coy, and bashfull one to the other. After that your espoused wife taken captive by our souldiours, was brought onto me, and that I heard of the exceeding fansie and affection that you cast onto her, I believed it full wel: for her singular beautie deserveth no lesse. Now, for as much as my selfe, if I might be allowed to use the pastimes of youth and were not called away by the common­weal (…) I would think to be pardoned and held excused, if I had an extraordinary liking to a spouse of mine owne, and loved her extremely. I must therefore need favour and tender your love, which is the thing I can, considering that I may not the other in any wise’. 90 Ibid., p. 267. 91 Ibid.

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John Peacock’s well­informed exegesis of the various texts narrating the story of Scipio has, however, shifted the emphasis of his analysis onto the poetic and pictori­ al traditions relating to Van Dyck’s composition, thereby somewhat neglecting its more immediate context. After all, the man who married Katherine Manners in May 1620 was the favourite of the king, a position that would necessarily have made his wedding an occasion of major celebration, had it not been for its unfortunate circumstances. The festivities for the marriage of Robert Carr, James’s favourite be­ fore Buckingham, to Frances Howard in 1613 had lasted for seven days. Attended by the king and queen, together with the leading nobles of the court, the pair was married the day after Christmas Day in the Royal Chapel, with James bearing most of the expense. The diplomat William Trumbull commented on the event in a letter to his friend Sir John Throckmorton on 11 January 1614: ‘There was never the like bravery and vanity seen as hath been the most part of all these unholy days’.92 And John Chamberlain reported to Alice Carleton in The Hague: ‘The presents indeed were more in number and value, then ever I thincke were geven to any subject in this land’.93 The king’s present to the couple was the sumptuous Squire’s Masque (also known as Somerset Masque), commissioned from Thomas Campion, which brought the day’s festivities to a close. In contrast, Buckingham’s marriage service was a very private affair at Lumley House, with the king and the Earl of Rutland as the only guests. Such a minimum of ostentation, unsuitable for a man of the rank and fortune Buckingham had already acquired, must surely have perplexed the munificent tem­ perament of King James. Considering James’s otherwise pointed and frequent public displays of affection for his favourite, this complete lack of stately wedding festivities is remarkable. The small ceremony testifies to the insecurity of the Marquess’s posi­ tion, which in 1620 was still entirely dependent on his monarch’s favour. Notorious for his benefit from royal bounty, Buckingham’s rise to rank and fortune had in­ creasingly become the subject of open criticism, which was ultimately motivated to discredit the king himself. James had been attacked in the Parliament of 1607 for paying off the personal debts of his Bedchamber gentlemen with money received from Parliament, and he submitted to similar accusations by a Member of Parliament in 1614, who libelled James’s favourites as ‘their masters’ spaniels but their country’s

92 Historical Manuscript Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire: Volume Four, Papers of William Trumbull the Elder, January 1613–August 1614, ed. by A. B. Hinds, London: H.M.S.O., 1940, pp. 285f. Quoted from: Knowles, James (2003): ‘Crack Kisses Not Staves: Sexual Politics and Court Masques in 1613 – 1614’, in: Stephen Clucas and Rosalind Davies (eds.), The Crisis of 1614 and The Addled Parliament. Literary and Historical Perspectives, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 143–60, p. 143. 93 The Letters of John Chamberlain, op. cit., (note 24), I, p. 249.

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wolves’.94 The match of George Villiers and Katherine Manners was celebrated just seven months before Parliament was summoned anew in January 1621, and the new Parliament was expected to bring the first serious test of Buckingham’s political power since his arrival in royal favour. The first session was expected to be raised on the precarious matter of monopolies that touched constitutional issues and that formed part of the prerogative powers of the Crown. Monopolies constituted an in­ direct attack on the favourite, as patents for alehouses, gold and silver­thread had been obtained by Buckingham’s brothers, raising questions about his integrity in office. At the same time, James’s foreign policy had been taken over by the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618, and the king who had envisioned a reunited Chris­ tendom at the beginning of his reign was now under increasing pressure to join in the battles on the side of Frederick and Elizabeth who had been driven from the Palatinate by Catholic Habsburg forces.95 Fraught by this, James seems intentionally to have restrained from any public celebration of Buckingham’s wedding, and, given his favourite’s keen interest in painting, might well have decided that the commis­ sion of a painting from Van Dyck was a good way to compensate the groom for this. Although information on Van Dyck’s brief stay in London in the winter of 1620/21 is scarce, the circumstances of his arrival have been passed to us in a letter sent to William Trumbull by Thomas Locke, dated 20 October 1620.96 Bringing with him letters from his master, Van Dyck arrived in London on the invitation of John Villiers, first Viscount of Purbeck and Buckingham’s eldest brother, who had spent the summer at Spa in Flanders where he lodged opposite the apartments of Lady Arundel, Alatheia Talbot. A letter from her Italian secretary Francesco Vercel­ lini to her husband, Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, documents her arrival from Antwerp, where she sat for her portrait by Rubens and where she met Van Dyck in July, whom she then invited to work at Arundel House in London. The in­ vitation, however, was turned down, and Vercellini reported to his English master

94 See: Moir, Thomas L. (1958): The Addled Parliament of 1614, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 143. 95 For a detailed account of the ensuing political events that culminated in England’s ill­fated entry into the Thirty Years’ War, see: Russel, Conrad (1990): Parliament and English Politics 1621–1629, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Cogswell, Thomas (1989): The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War 1621–1624, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and Adams, Simon (1978): ‘Foreign Policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624’, in: Kevin Sharpe (ed.), Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 57–72. 96 Locke’s letter has first been published in: Howarth, David (1990): ‘The Arrival of Van Dyck in England’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXXII, no. 1051, pp. 709–10. The original is held by the British Library, Trumbull MSS., Miscellaneous correspondence, vol. XI, fols. 144ff.

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that ‘van Dyck is still with Signor Rubens where he lived rather comfortably, so that it will be rather difficult to get him to leave all these parts’.97 On his return to Eng­ land in September 1620, Purbeck must clearly have informed his brother of Lady Arundel’s vain attempt to persuade the young painter into her patronage, and Buck­ ingham then might very well have passed his own thoughts about wanting a painting by Van Dyck to James.98 What is certain is that Van Dyck changed his mind about travelling to England and arrived in London just one month after Purbeck’s return from Spa; most likely he was persuaded by the prospect of a prestigious commission from within the closest circle of the British monarch. The next documented detail concerning Van Dyck’s first stay in London states that in February 1621, shortly be­ fore the end of his first brief residence in England, the Flemish master received a payment of £100 as a reward for a ‘special service’ performed by him for the king.99 Oliver Millar has suggested that this payment is an additional one to a sum of £100 granted to Van Dyck by King James as a yearly pension, which is referred to in a postscript to a letter from Toby Matthew to Sir Dudley Carleton, sent from Ant­ werp and dated 25 November 1620.100 It has also been proposed that these payments are in fact one and the same, although, as David Howarth has pointed out, this would mean that the painter was given a full yearly pension for only four months in the king’s service.101 Significantly, however, there is no known commission that Van Dyck painted for the king during his first stay in England. A small sketch in black and red chalk, inscribed ‘Jacobus De Eerste / Koning van Groot / Brittanje / dor A van Dyck’, which was probably drawn as a study for the king’s portrait, may date from that period, but it is however extremely unlikely to have earned Van Dyck a sum as large as his yearly pension.102 It is thus rather likely that the ‘special service’ 97 See: Hervey, M.F.S. (1921): The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel ‘father of vertu in England’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.176. 98 For the collecting of Alatheia Talbot as a patron in her own right and her collection at Tart Hall, a suburban villa acquired by Arundel in 1633, see: Chew, Elizabeth V. (2003): ‘The Countess of Arundel and Tart Hall’, in: Edward Chaney (ed.), The Evolution of English Collecting, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 285–314. For her role in the sale of the Gon­ zaga collections to Charles I in 1627–28, see: Howarth, David (1981): ‘Mantua Peeces. Charles I and the Gonzaga Collections’, in: David Chambers and Jane Martineau (eds.), Splendours of the Gonzaga, London, pp. 51–64. 99 See: Millar, Oliver (1982): Van Dyck in England, Exh. Cat., London: National Portrait Gal­ lery, p. 14. Millar quotes from W. Hookham Carpenter’s 1844 Pictorial Notices, which con­ tains a number of the most important contemporary documents relating to Van Dyck. 100 For the letter see: Sainsbury, Noel W. (1859): Original unpublished papers illustrative of the life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens, as an artist and a diplomatist, preserved in H. M. State Paper Office, London, p. 54. 101 See: Howarth (1990): op. cit., (note 96). 102 For the drawing see: Millar (1982): op. cit., (note 99), Cat. No. 66.

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Fig. 23: Felix Gem, AD 1­4, AN 1966. 1808

carried out by the Flemish master for the British king was the commission of The Continence of Scipio. Van Dyck’s composition clearly corresponds to James’s taste for Roman cos­ tume and the history of Antiquity. The Scottish king, who had previously been por­ trayed as a Roman emperor on his own marriage medal, had written an epic poem on the Battle of Lepanto, displaying an interest in the Roman Republic as a model of political philosophy that would cause him to identify with King Solomon, and set­ ting a precedent for the cultural inspiration that his son Charles would draw from the figure of Augustus in later years.103 The painting shows a bridal couple in front of a Roman general, who holds out his hand over the chastity of their lawful union. His purple cloak flamboyantly disposed, Scipio receives the pair beneath two Solo­ monic columns – a recurring theme in the personal iconography of James I – in front of which Scipio leans in a relaxed and confident manner. The posture of his legs – one bent in casual informality, the other restfully stretched out and supporting the sword raised in battle only hours ago – strikingly contradicts the posture of his upper body. The unusual pose, hitherto ignored, seems inspired by a cameo known to form part of the gem cabinet of the Earl of Arundel, commonly referred to as the Felix Gem and today in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. (Fig. 23) Dated to the early first century AD by the signature of the gem­cutter Felix below the sitting figure, 103

See: Smuts, Malcolm (1993): ‘Court­centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, 1590–1630’, in: Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 21–43.

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the intaglio shows Diomedes stealing the Palladium from its Trojan altar, upon which he is seated. With his arm outstretched, he displays his plunder to Odysseus, who is standing before him and pointing to what has been identified as the body of a defeated guard at his feet. The gem is first mentioned in the 1457 inventory of the collection of Pietro Barbò, Pope Paul II (1464–71), from where it found its way into the collection of antiquities in the possession of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, as is known from an inventory made in 1483.104 The first surviving record of the intaglio in England is found in the inventory of a gem cabinet that comprised 132 intaglios and 136 cameos dating from 1690, which was written on commission from the Earl of Peterborough, who had obtained the cabinet from the estate of Thomas Howard, fifth Duke of Norfolk, who was the grandson of the Earl and Countess of Arun­ del.105 According to a letter by John Evelyn to Samuel Pepys, dated 12 August 1689, Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, had obtained this cabinet in 1637 from the French art dealer Daniel Nys.106 However, in her study of the provenance of this cabinet, Diana Scarisbrick has pointed out that before Arundel’s acquisition, the major collectors of gems in England were King James’s son Henry, Prince of Wales, and his favourite, the Marquess of Buckingham, whose gem cabinet consisted of 196 engraved gems by the time of his death in 1628.107 Given the strong reference of Van Dyck’s juxtaposition of the figures of Katherine Manners and Scipio to the gem’s two nude figures of Diomedes and Odysseus, it could thus be debated if it was the collection of Buckingham rather than that of Arundel, in which the Flemish painter studied the antique design. Its prominence as a model for a painting commission 104 The cameo is listed on folio 12 of the 40­page inventory as: ‘a carnelican with two figures who look at one another and one is sitting, and the other is in a large house and the one who is sitting has Greek letters above and below, … with a background of candanella and pearl in a little box with the Annunciation’. [corniola cum due figure che se guardano in faza e una sede, e l’altra è in un casamento, e quella che sede ha litere grece di sopra e de sotto, …, col fondo candenella e perla in una casetina d’ariento dorato cum l’Annunciata’.] See: Inventario de arzenti, zoye, panni di razi, tapeti, panni, leni, vesti, libri, cavalli masarini et de ogni altri robe restante de la heredità de la bona memoria de Reverendissimo Cardinale de Mantua, quoted from: Vickers, Michael (1983): ‘The Felix Gem in Oxford and Mantegna’s Triumphal Program­ me’, in: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. CI, pp. 97–104, Appendix, p. 102. For a lost antique chalzedony of Diomedes with the Palladium formerly in the collection of Niccolò Niccoli and surviving only in Renaissance bronze casts, such as the relief medallion from the work­ shop of Donatello in the courtyard of Palazzo Medici Riccardo in Florence, see: Dacos, Nicole (1980): Il tesoro di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Repertorio delle gemme e dei vasi, Florence: San­ soni, 2 vols., vol. 1, Le gemme, Cat. 26, p. 57f. 105 Northamptonshire Record Office, SS 4033. 106 See: Scarisbrick, Diana (1996): ‘The Arundel Gem Cabinet’, in: Apollo, vol. CXLIV, no. 141, pp. 45–8. 107 Scarisbrick (1996): op. cit., (above). For the inventory of the gem cabinet: Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson A341, 39ff.

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suggest the possibility of a diplomatic gift from Mantua presented to the English court before Van Dyck’s first visit to London in the winter of 1620. Van Dyck’s painting depicts the moment when the dramatic tension contained in the Scipio narrative is resolved in a speech made by the Roman general. His head adorned with the victor’s laurel, Scipio leans energetically forward, putting his full weight onto his muscular arm while he bends to the left and meets the imploring eyes of Allucius, whom Van Dyck has figured as Buckingham. The Marquess’s left hand touches the gold chain that he wears – a gesture, which, as Peacock has pointed out, is attributed to the virtue of Humanity, whose golden chain ‘nobly links the souls of those who have mutual feelings of friendly courtesy’.108 Restoring the beautiful prisoner, virtue untouched, to her betrothed, Scipio proves his sexual in­ tegrity, thereby demonstrating his personal wisdom, which confirms the legitimacy of his rule. By defending the dignity of his leadership against the destructive power of sexual desire, Scipio subjects his personal actions to the higher principles of hon­ ourable rule and thus publicly overcomes temptation in the act of pronouncing the law of marriage over the right acquired by the victor of war. The canvas celebrates the wise rule of a sovereign leader, whose vigour in subjecting his personal desire to higher moral principles safeguards the prosperity of his reign. The painting’s emphasis on the celebration of Scipio’s sexual continence is re­ inforced by the presence of the gorgon frieze cast to the feet of its protagonist. As a symbol of sexual incontinence, the function of the gorgon head in Van Dyck’s com­ position has hitherto been understood to provide a counterweight to the historical theme of the Scipio narrative in mythological form.109 More importantly, however, the gorgon’s head, coupled with the petrifying effect of its gaze, was a particularly topical emblem at the Jacobean court, since it had particular relevance for the politics of the period. It was familiar to English contemporaries from the shield of Pallas that had defeated the advent of the Iron Age in Ben Jonson’s 1616 The Golden Age Restor’d, which was designed both as Buckingham’s masque debut at court and as the panegyric celebration of the downfall of James’s erstwhile favourite Robert Carr.110 Like Robert Carr’s match with Frances Howard, around which had evolved 108

109 110

See: Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1611, reprint Hildesheim 2000, p. 216: ‘Humanità: Una bella donna che proti in seno variii fiori, & con la sinistra mano tanhi und catena d’oro (…) con la catena d’oro allacia noblemente gli animi dele persone, che in se stesse sentono l’alrui amichevole cortesia’. Referring to Charles Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Peacock further notes that the figure of Humanity had appeared as part of the decoration to the proscenium arch of a masque performed for the French ambassador in 1617. See: Ben Jonson, ed. by Charles H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols., Oxford, 1925–52, vol. VII, p. 453. See: Peacock (2000): op. cit., (note 84). See the detailed discussion in Chapter One.

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the greatest scandal at the court of the Stuart king, the marriage of Buckingham was an affair of national significance. The king’s part in securing the agreement of the Earl of Rutland to a match between Buckingham and Rutland’s daughter was alarm­ ingly reminiscent of the interventions James had undertaken to obtain a decree of annulment for Frances Howard’s marriage to the Earl of Essex. In Jonson’s The Golden Age Restor’d, Pallas, having banished the anti­masque and called Astraea and the Golden Age back to earth, wakes the poets and instructs them to aid her in re­ calling to earth the heroes of virtue who will be able to sustain the new Golden Age: the virtuous men, who are, of course, the masquers, are revealed when Pallas ‘throwes a lightning from her shield’.111 The reappearance of the gorgon heads in Van Dyck’s composition thus testifies to a moment of personal and political risk contained within James’s consent to the marriage of his favourite. The gorgon’s head here becomes an emblem assigned to the personal iconography of Buckingham, and this notion is supported by another work in Buckingham’s art collection – namely, an undated canvas by Rubens, referred to in Buckingham’s inventory as Head of Medusa from 1617–18, today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, in which the emblem is a subject in its own right.112 Within the context of this iconographic analogue, the presence of the gorgon heads in Van Dyck’s Continence of Scipio is revealed as an emblematic re­appropri­ ation of the panegyric narrative for the incorruptible wisdom of Stuart rule as it had been established in Jonson’s The Golden Age Restor’d. Contrary to their function in the masque’s fiction, the gorgons of Van Dyck’s composition attest to the continence of the match under question. While in Jonson’s entertainment the gorgons’ gaze had banned the vices already present on the political stage of the Stuart court, the power of their petrifying looks now remains ineffective as they assess Buckingham’s future union. As prominent onlookers of the scene, the gorgons send a powerful message to the contemporary beholder. Silently they watch the scene, unnoticed by anyone but the captured bride, who shows herself surprised but not frightened by them. Their sly presence seems to be tied up with the undisclosed condemnation of Bucking­ ham’s position in James’s favour that circulated within court at the time of Van Dyck’s first stay in England. One of the gorgons steals a glance at Scipio and blushes as if caught in the act of thinking unwarranted accusations. Embodying the scene’s silent witness, this gorgon mirrors the position of the beholder, who might recog­ 111 112

Ben Jonson, ‘The Golden Age Restor’d’, in: Orgel, Stephen (1969): Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 224–32, p. 229, l. 134. The painting is included in a list of pictures sold from the Buckingham Collection in May 1648 together with ten other works, at least another four of which were by Rubens. See: Duverger, Erik (1992): Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, 13 vols., vol. VI, Brussel: Koniklijke Acad. voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, p. 70.

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nise in her depicted embarrassment his own, undue, prejudgement of the scene’s protagonists – an effect further enhanced by the scornful gaze of the black servant who addresses his derision upon this misjudgement straight out of the canvas to­ wards the beholder. In the context of Van Dyck’s composition, the trope of the gor­ gon’s gaze, familiar from the staging of Jonson’s The Golden Age Restor’d, thus begins to lose its metaphorical status and dissolves within the political reality of the day. Buckingham’s portrait in Scipio evolves around a political emblem from the masque which is predominantly employed with the intention of re­signification, thereby imitating the established rhetoric of courtly identity of the time. Although the commission thus demonstrates the Marquess’s pursuit of an artistic expression that provided a more exclusive and personal narrative of his image than his dance in the masque, it still asserts his status in the accustomed semiotic of the panegyric de­ vice centred on the figure of the king. Just as Buckingham’s association with classical myth in the performances of the masque required James’s presence, so Van Dyck’s Scipio includes the figure of a ruler, whose actions bestow virtue upon the figure of the Marquess. The composition, which would not be the last to depict Buckingham with an allegorical portrait of his monarch, displayed the princely figure to the left, flanking the depiction of Buckingham in the centre, as does the group of servants behind him. The arrangement of the figures in Van Dyck’s composition presented a quite literal transfer of the aesthetic and social dynamic derived in the masque – and could, in fact, pass for the depiction of an actual staging of the moment the group of masquers presented themselves to the monarch, with the costumes of Buckingham and his wife resembling the designs of Inigo Jones. Yet it surpassed its model through the permanence of the art of painting, which was capable of preserving the moment indefinitely. Unlike the act of the courtier’s self­display in the masque – where ideal presentation depended on the fortunate combination of different effects, stage and costume design, as well as the light and atmosphere in the hall – the space of the canvas allowed for a careful orchestration of the ideal setting and point of view cre­ ated from the single hand of the artist, and as such was controllable by its patron. By delivering a graceful image of the courtly body in paint, Van Dyck’s painterly skill offered his sitter a semiotic concept that acknowledged the centrality of bodily dis­ play and enhanced its artificial fashioning as a visible surface for social eminence by an illusionist aesthetic. This dramatic style of painting was new to the Stuart court of the early 1620s, and at the time it had only been attained by Buckingham’s rival collectors, the Arundels, in the form of two individual portraits: the first by Rubens, obtained during Lady Arundel’s sojourn in Flanders; and the other a portrait of the Earl painted by Van Dyck at some point during the winter of 1620/1621, during which period he also painted Buckingham. (Fig. 24) In both works – Van Dyck’s portrait of Thomas Howard, today in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Rubens’ Alatheia 139

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Talbot, Countess of Arundel and her train, now in the Rubens­Saal of the Alte Pinako­ thek in Munich – the impression of the sitter’s importance is derived from references to the paraphernalia of rank and status such as the furniture, rugs and curtains whose Renaissance origins had already become well known through the portraits painted by William Larkin. However, Buckingham’s commission makes full use of the ability of painting to go beyond nature and to form his figure according to the idea rather than the physical reality of his body. In fact, there could hardly be more of a contrast between the visual economy underlying Van Dyck’s portrait of Buck­ ingham and his portrait of Arundel. Arundel is dressed in the customary black that denoted his Catholic descent, and is sitting stiffly, with his left hand holding the badge of the Lesser George, which is suspended from his neck and which denotes his membership of the most noble Order of the Garter, and with a folded sheet of paper in his right hand, seeking to reaffirm his learning and elite status. The effortless elegance of the Flemish manner alluded to the virtuosity of ar­ tificiality promoted in Castiglione’s notion of the ideal courtier that had lingered throughout the Stuart court for some time. As Anna Bryson has shown, Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortegiano of 1528, its first translation by Thomas Hoby in 1561, and its many subsequent translations and imitations, established the notion of the courtly body as an expression of social and political status detectable from the subtleties of its visual and material surface.113 Probably because no written evidence exists, scholarly attention to early Stuart discourse on the influence of Castiglione on the English masque has hitherto been inadequate.114 Yet the notion of the courtier’s out­ ward performance as indicative of inner qualities, as described in the Cortegiano, must have resonated with the English court in the practice of adapting an allegorical identity as a means of displaying the higher truth of the self in the performance of 113

114

See: Bryson, Anna (1990): ‘The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth­ and Seventeenth­Century England’, in: Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (eds.), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture. c. 1540–1660, Lon­ don: Reaction Books, pp. 136–53; and, idem (1998): op. cit., (note 22). For a detailed account of the reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano in early modern England, see: Burke: Peter (1995): The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘Cortegiano’, Cam­ bridge: Polity Press; Schoenfeldt, Michael C. (1999): Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England. Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press. Considering the substantial amount of, and long tradition in, the history of masque scholar­ ship, this is somewhat surprising. Ann Bermingham’s astute study of Castiglione’s relevance for the English artist amateur is the most explicit treatment of Castiglione’s effect on Eng­ lish art. See: Bermingham (2000), op. cit., (note 7). Furthering the discussion in Frank Whigham’s Ambition and Privilege, Anna Bryson has focused on Castiglione’s reception in England in the context of increasing social mobility. See: Whigham (1984): op. cit., (note 22); Bryson (1998): op. cit., (note 23).

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Fig. 24: Anthony van Dyck, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, 1620/21

the masque. The imaginative world of the masque provided a space for the acting out of the protean nature of the courtier that allowed for the pleasing display of self­ fashioned identity. According to Castiglione, this provided the dominant mode for the projection of the best conceivable image in the courtier’s search for political agency. For Castiglione, the ideal courtier had ‘to imbue with grace his movements, his gestures, his way of doing things and in short, his every action …’115 Signifying the supremacy of courtly identity, this grace in every action was emphasised as a ‘natu­ ral, God­given gift’ that, if it was ‘not quite perfect’, could be ‘enhanced by appli­ 115

See: Castiglione [1528]: op. cit., (note 47), p. 67.

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cation and effort’.116 Sprezzatura, the term Castiglione had coined for this, required the seemingly effortless achievement of the difficult, coupled with nonchalant and apparently careless mastery of comportment, action, and skill. Recklessness was the word Thomas Hoby chose in 1561 to translate the term into English – a recklessness that was very different to the notion Monique Riccardi­Cubitt had in mind when she described Buckingham with the same word in 1983. Throughout the course of four centuries the meaning of a word naturally undergoes changes; yet the discrep­ ancy that is apparent here might point to the fact that judgement of Buckingham’s collecting and patronage of painting still remains partial and incomplete, casting recklessness as a fictional strategy for the demonstration of instinctive, rather than learned, art appreciation outside the picture. Having internalised Castiglione’s dictum to frame every action with indiffer­ ence and seeming spontaneity, Buckingham had trained this natural expression of grace in the endless practising and rehearsing of courtly dancing, perfecting a style of expression in which nature was artificial to the point that the material facts of flesh, muscles, and bones were perceived as the result of courtly artifice. The staged slip­up of the pearls scattering from his suit during his audience with Marie de’ Medici is just one example of the mastery Buckingham developed in the practice of sprezzatura. Impelled by a confident sense of his own grace and virtuosity, Bucking­ ham was paradigmatic of the Castiglionian courtier, who made himself protagonist of the courtly stage and sought to engineer his favourable reception through illu­ sion, design and style. The kind of deception that was required in such performance has been discussed as a skill constitutive of courtliness, not only by Castiglione, but in the vernacular discourse on the ideal courtier in Elizabethan England.117 Thus George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie, printed in London in 1589, advises that he who ‘being now lately become a Courtier he shew not himself a crafts­man, and merit to be disregarded, […] but may worthily retaine the credit of his place, and profession of a very Courtier, which is in plaine terms, cunningly to be able to dis­ semble’.118 In a similar invocation of illusion as a form of noble, that is, artistic, de­ ceit, Castiglione’s kinsman Ludovico Dolce had privileged the artistic ingenuity of 116 117

118

Ibid. Delineating the cultural differences between Renaissance Italy and Tudor England, Ann Bermingham’s comparative reading of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528) and Thomas Elyot Book named the Govenor (1531) emphasised the scepticism with which the iconoclast mind­ set of the Elizabethans reacted to the Italian discourse of courtly artifice – an argument unsustainable for the general mind­set of the Stuart court. See in particular Bermingham’s perceptive emphasis on the aristocratic court system of Urbino and the centralised Tudor government: Bermingham (2000): op. cit., (note 7), esp. p. 16. George Puttenham [1589]: The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007, p. 299.

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drawing and painting above the physical labour entailed by the art of the sculptor, aligning the former with the courtly ideal of sprezzatura. At its most explicit, Cas­ tiglione compared the courtier’s fashioning of the ideal self, with the painter’s skill in composition: ‘as good painters who, by their use of shadow, manage to throw the light of objects into relief, and, likewise, by their use of light, to deepen the shadows of planes and bring different colours together so that all are made more apparent through the contrast of one another’.119

Castiglione had linked the artful self­fashioning of the courtier to the skill of the painter, whose vigorously confident ambition and advancement in style had elevated him above the position of a mere craftsman, and whose claim for prestige perceived the importance of art as an instrument of political propaganda. Like the Renais­ sance artist’s insistence on painting as a gentle art, derived from ingenuity rather than from labour, it was the courtier’s ultimate ambition to conceal any impression of labour entailed in the effortlessness of his self­display. The measure of deceit in­ volved in the laudable practice of the courtier’s hedonistic self­display was legitimis­ ed by painting’s capacity to produce mimetic illusion by the use of perspective, fore­ shortening and shadow – features that had still been strongly rejected by Elizabethan art, and that now presented themselves to Buckingham in the artistic skill of An­ thony van Dyck. In 1615, the topos of the painter’s divine ability to refine nature had been applied by John Webster to the figure of the actor, who ‘by his actions fortifies morall percepts with example; for what we see him personate, we thinke truly done before us; … and tis a question whether that make him an excellent Plaier, or his playing an exquisite painter.’120 The bold and cunning manner in which the courtier knew to employ this skill is illustrated by Van Dyck’s second portrait of the Marquess: a double portrait of Buckingham and his wife as Venus and Adonis from the same year as the Scipio. (Fig. 25) Other than the history scene, this second canvas Van Dyck painted for Buckingham granted full prominence to the sight of the courtier’s body, comparable to the composition William Larkin had executed for the portrait of the Marquess four years earlier. Yet the virtuosity with which Van Dyck rendered Buck­ ingham’s pose and figure into an expression of effortless grace presented a depiction 119

120

Quoted from Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano, see: Hoby (1561): op. cit., (note 6), II, p. 199. The original paragraph in Castiglione reads: ‘come i boni pittori, i quali con l’ombra fanno apparere e monstrano i lumi de’ rilevi, e cosi col lume profundano l’ombre dei piani e compagnano i colori diversi insieme di modo, che per quella diversità l’uno e l’altro meglio si dimostra, e l’ posar delle figure contrario l’una all’alltra le aiuta a far quell’officio che è intenzione del pittore’. Quoted from: John Webster, An Excellent Actor, c. 1615, in: Alois Maria Nagler (ed.), A Source Book in Theatrical History, New York: Dover Publications, pp. 126–7, p. 126.

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so incomparable to the still current taste of Larkin’s patterned style that the sitter must have perceived his painted likeness as a different self, as imparting an image of his body and person that provided visual testimony to the much­vaunted beauty and grace of his demeanour. With this composition Buckingham acquired a libertine, full­length display, wearing nothing more than a dazzling blue cloth, dauntlessly fixed by a small golden clip on his right shoulder and otherwise revealing his body as the main asset of his wealth. The iconophile vision expressed by painter and patron in this composition, its veneration of both the body and its depiction, would have been terrifying to Tudor iconoclasts, and would probably also have irritated most of its Jacobean beholders, yet the composition seems to find its model in Castiglione’s very own advice: ‘Indeed there in no better way of displaying oneself (…) which greatly enhances the charm: as for a youth to array himself like an old man, yet in easy dress so as to be able to show his vigour; a cavalier in the guise of a rustic shepherd or some other like costume, but with a perfect horse and gracefully bedecked in character; – because the mind of the spectators is quick to fill out the image of that which is presented to the eyes at first glance; and then seeing the thing turn out much better than the costume promised they are amused and delighted’. 121 The established perception of early seventeenth­century art collecting as a treasure hunt of old masters’ paintings, resulting from erudite learning and the precursors of the Grand Tour, has been registered as only one concept shaped in Stuart England before the outbreak of the Civil War. Another, as I hope to show in the detailed as­ sessment of Van Dyck’s Venus and Adonis, was motivated by an equally venerable understanding of painting as the supreme art of deception.

121

Hoby (1561): op. cit., (note 6), II, p. 87. The passage in Castiglione reads: ‘Ma in pubblico non così, furoché travestito. E benché fosse di mondo che ciascuno lo conoscesse, non dà noia. Anzi, per mostrarsi in tali cose negli spettacoli pubblici (…) Il che accresce molto la grazia. Come saria vestirsi un giovane da vecchio, ben però con abito disciolto, per potersi mostrare nella gagliardia; un cavaliere in forma di pastore selvatico, o altre tale abito, ma con perfetto cavallo e leggiadramente acconcio secondo quella intenzione. Perché subito l’animo dei circostanti corre a immaginare quello che agli occhi al primo aspetto si appre­ senta; e metteva quell’abito, si diletta e piglia piacere.’

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Image of Devotion: Buckingham’s Commission of Van Dyck’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ Discovered in a private collection in 1990, the canvas has been discussed principally with regard to its subject, finally identified as that of Venus and Adonis, which was a prominent theme in the visual and literal culture of late sixteenth­century Europe.122 Rather than following Titian’s Venus attempting to restrain Adonis from the Hunt, which created the pictorial model for Ovid’s myth in 1553 (Fig. 26), Van Dyck’s painting corresponds closely to an earlier depiction of the mythological couple that he had painted shortly before travelling to England, as has been pointed out by Mi­ chael Jaffé, whose article in the Burlington Magazine announced the discovery of the painting.123 Like the Scipio, the canvas has been dated, on stylistic grounds, to Van Dyck’s first visit to London in 1620/21, although this has been questioned by Jeremy Wood, who proposed that the picture was a posthumous commission for the com­ memoration of Buckingham after his assassination in 1628.124 However, the uncon­ ventionally bold composition, which seems to have no precedent in either Flemish or English painting, appears as a somewhat inappropriate memorial for the Duch­ ess’s mourning. Following the initial dating of the canvas as contemporary to that of 122

123

124

The canvas was discovered by Derek Johns. The 2004 Complete Catalogue of Van Dyck’s paintings still lists the title with a question mark. See: Barnes, Susan J. et. al. (2004): Van Dyck. A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven: Yale University Press, Cat. No. I. 158. See: Jaffé, Michael (1990): ‘Van Dyck’s Venus and Adonis’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXXII, no. 1051, pp. 696–703. Jaffé’s article gives a detailed analysis of Van Dyck’s preparatory sketch of the c. 1618 Venus attempting to restrain Adonis from going hunting, indi­ cating the composition’s affinity with two contemporary paintings in the artist’s work: Van Dyck’s Martyrdom of St Sebastian in the Louvre, and his Jupiter and Antiope in the Wallraf­ Richartz Museum. See also: Larsen, Erik (2004): ‘Anthony Van Dyck’s Second Conception of the Theme Jupiter and Antiope’, in: Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, vol. LXXIII, pp. 81–90. For a detailed discussion of Titian’s interpretation in contradiction to Ovid and the conventions of the Venus and Adonis theme, see: Panofsky, Erwin (1969): Problems in Titian. Mostly Iconographic, London: Phaidon. Jeremy Wood points to the dead tree entwined with ivy, prominently displayed in the left foreground, which he reads as an emblem for eternal love outliving even death as it was de­ fined in Alciati’s Emblematum libellus, first published in 1546. The motif, Wood argues, had been employed before by Rubens, as an emblem for loyalty after death, in his Four Philosophers from c. 1615–18, and as such was probably familiar to Van Dyck. See: Wood (1992): op. cit., (note 80). Considering the stylistic evidence dating the composition to the beginning of the 1620s, Wood’s argument seems misleading. For a more detailed discussion of the use of emblems in the art of Van Dyck, see: Brown, Christopher (1984): ‘Allegory and Symbol in the Work of Anthony Van Dyck’, in: Herman Vekeman and Justus Müller Hofstede (eds.), Wort und Bild in der niederländischen Kunst und Literatur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Erfts­ tadt: Lukassen, pp. 123–35.

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the Scipio, I will here propose a different reading of the double­portrait, taking into account sixteenth­century literary interpretations of the myth that have been over­ looked in previous assessments of the work. Van Dyck’s Venus and Adonis is best understood by first recollecting the myth’s narrative as it was originally given in Ovid, who relates the love of the goddess Venus for a mortal, the young shepherd and hunter Adonis. Venus’s passion for Adonis was roused by Cupid, who accidentally scratched his mother’s bosom with one of the arrows protruding from his quiver. Struck by its spell, Venus’s eyes fall on the beautiful Adonis, with whom she immediately falls in love. Yet the youth favours the hunt rather than Venus’s passion, so that the goddess, dressed like Diana, henceforth has to pursue her beloved through the woods as he himself pursues his prey. Hoping to obtain his affection by emphasising the protective force of her love for him, the goddess warns Adonis about the wild boar, but the hunter does not listen, and one day he is gored by the animal and dies. Van Dyck’s depiction of this story shows Venus and Adonis standing lightly clad in an open landscape, their nakedness cover­ ed by a blue cloak and a red wrap broken with golden yellow. The illustrious couple stands close to each other, their calm and intimate embrace echoed by the entwined tree trunks in the right background, and contrasted with the joyous leap of the hound in the left foreground, eager to lead his master to the hunt. Buckingham, his head tenderly inclined, attentively watches the Marchioness, his left arm wrapped softly around her back, his right hand resting gently on his chest. The heroic body of Adonis dominates Van Dyck’s composition. Displayed in full­length and slightly bigger than life­size, Buckingham’s ideal beauty confronts the beholder while the figure of Katherine Manners is standing in profile, her head shown in the three­ quarter position. As Venus, she carries the traditional attributes of her divine beauty: the pearls and, copied from the Veneres of antiquity, the gold armlet.125 Her broad forehead, with the wide arching of the brows and the aristocratic line of her nose, testifies to her delicacy, and yet the painting’s prime concern is not the goddess’s splendour but the mesmerising looks of her Adonis. The tension arising from the conflicting desires of Venus and Adonis has been a popular motif with painters before Van Dyck, who mostly chose to depict the mo­ ment of the youth’s departure for the hunt despite the pleas of the impassioned god­ dess, as it was first displayed in Titian’s Departure of Adonis (1553). For this most 125

Van Dyck’s adornment of Katherine Manners seems to have served as a model for a half­ length portrait of the Marquesse one year later by Daniel Mytens, signed and dated 1622. The full­frontal composition, with her face in half­profile, repeats the large pearl earrings, the bead chain in her hair, and the tight pearl necklace, both of which are doubled, with the addition of two pearl bracelets on each wrist, and a large pearl hanging from a pendant cross. The canvas was sold in an auction at Bonham’s on 18 January 1973 and is today in a private collection.

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Fig. 25: Anthony van Dyck, Venus and Adonis, 1620/21

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Fig. 26: Titian, Venus and Adonis, 1553

celebrated depiction of the myth, Titan had transformed the scene of the lovers’ parting: while, in Ovid, it is Venus who takes leave of Adonis, drawn heavenwards by her swans after cautioning the hunter against the boar, Titian rendered the moment as Adonis’s flight from too possessive a lover.126 Shortly afterwards, in 1584, this break with the previously established tradition earned Titian the disapproval of Raf­ faello Borghini, and again, rather later, that of Erwin Panofsky in 1969.127 Obviously awaking from a night of love, Venus clings to Adonis, whose determination to leave draws the goddess off­balance, while his face remains unmoved when he meets her imploring eyes. Titian’s rendering of this moment, of the glance exchanged between Venus and her beloved, speaks of the complex dynamism of engagement and dis­ engagement around which Ovid’s tale evolves and which inspired subsequent treat­ ments of the myth. Reworking the theme in three major paintings executed between 1610 and 1635, Rubens further exploited the dramatic and psychological ambiva­ 126

127

For a discussion of ancient precedents that probably inspired Titian’s composition, see: Ro­ sand, David (2004): ‘Inventing Mythologies: The Painter’s Poetry’, in: Patricia Mailman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Titian, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 35– 57. Panofsky (1969): op. cit., (note 123),150ff.

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lence caught in Titian’s composition. His two versions of Adonis departing from Venus demonstrate the emotional complexity of the pivotal moment in Adonis’s conflict­ ing silhouette. Only Venus’s beseeching gaze remains the same as she clings to her beloved in an absorbing embrace. Indifferent, the youthful hunter inclines his head towards her and his body pulls away from her in different degrees and positions, shifting his weight onto the spear, symbol of the hunt. While Rubens’ compositions vary but remain close to the model of Titian, ex­ pressing a greater empathy for Venus’s desire in his last version from 1635, Van Dyck’s 1621 rendering of Buckingham and his wife as Venus and Adonis seems alienated from the great master’s mould. The canvas presents Venus in a remarkably calm and restrained manner. It is the body of the Marquess that represents the paint­ ing’s true rationale. His elegant posture forms the central contour of the canvas, his eyes, lips and legs drawing a line with the fingertips on his bare chest that indicate the place of his heart. Particular prominence is given to the display of Buckingham’s long and distinctly sculpted legs. Not only are they exposed from the blue cloak up to his hips, but they are gracefully angled to exhibit multiple views of his muscular calves and are conspicuously attired with ochre boots and a little red ribbon – all alluding to his fame as the most elegant dancer in the Stuart masque.128 His subtle movement, reflected in the flamboyant fluttering of the cloak and the ornate leap of the hound, contrasts with the serene pose of his bride, whose right foot stands firmly on the forest path. The guileless expression of Katherine Manners is enhanced by a knowing smile on her lips as she looks out at the beholder, conveying the synthesis that arises from a succession of looks progressing through the scene. Both the fig­ ures of Katherine Manners and that of Buckingham are being looked at while en­ gaged in looking themselves. Lady Katherine, whose eyes rest on the painting’s be­ holder, is affectionately watched by her beautiful lover, who is himself impatiently observed by the stare of his hound, which in turn represents the beginning of the composition’s inherent discourse on the theme of love and devotion. Van Dyck’s depiction of the mythical theme astonishes in several respects. Ex­ citing the eye by its dense composition and flamboyant texture rather than by the drama of its scene, the painting displays the ill­fated couple of Ovid united. Alluding to the fatal moment of their seemingly inevitable parting through the figure of the leaping hound, the painter demonstrates a deliberate rejection of the myth’s tradi­ tional narrative. His depiction portrays the beautiful hunter and the goddess of love no longer as incompatible in their conflicting desire, but conjoined in a mutual con­ 128

For an account of the well­defined, active leg as a standard feature of male aristocratic imagery in European culture, see: Dressler, Rachel (2000): ‘Cross­Legged Knights and Si­ gnification in English Medieval Tomb Sculpture’, in: Studies in Iconography, vol. XXI, pp. 91–121.

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quest of their allegoric opposition. Adonis lacks his traditional attribute, the spear, while the pose of Venus has lost all anxiety. Unmoved, she stands besides him, while it is he who reaches out to embrace her. Covering the very nakedness that previous depictions had exposed to indicate her attempt to persuade Adonis away from the hunt and to enhance the erotic appeal of the scene, Venus’s beauty is now rather quieted by the boisterous bloom of Adonis’s prominently exposed body – displaying a nakedness hitherto reserved for the depiction of the gods of Antiquity. The meta­ phor seems reversed, dislodged from its model both in Ovid and Titian. England had seen a heightened interest in Ovid during the last decades of the sixteenth century that attested to the ideological role of bodily and gender meta­ morphosis as a trope introduced by Elizabeth and her courtly publicists, who de­ fined the queen’s gender identity through the refashioned medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies. As Goran Stanivukovic has shown, of all the competing dis­ courses on the constitution of the self, the body, libido and agency at the time, the Ovidian was not only the most widely available, but the closet to the Renaissance notion that the gender of the body does not determine the erotic nature of that body’s desire.129 The period’s apprehension of pagan aesthetics, and of Ovid in par­ ticular, was inextricably linked to the religious transformation ignited by Henry Tudor’s turning from Rome, and yet, as Dympna Callaghan has demonstrated, this does not address the survival of an earlier popular piety, pagan or Catholic, but rather its rearrangement and transmutation into a new and ultimately secular form.130 The first translation of the Metamorphoses into English, Arthur Golding’s The XV Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosisk from 1567, was published when the country was in a state of general crisis regarding the nature of the human subject’s relation to God. In this religious context of sixteenth­century England, translation operated in a radical environment, where translators would rewrite source texts ac­ cording to the general project of taking the new English Protestant culture out of

129

130

Stanivukovic, Goran (2001): ‘Introduction’, in: idem (ed.) Ovid and the Renaissance Body, To­ ronto: University of Toronto. In particular, those of Shakespeare’s tales where figures ac­ tually assume the bodily characteristics of the other sex and biological differentiation is, in effect, insistently eroded, have been linked to the Galenic one­sex model, in which male and female anatomy are homologous. See: Paster, Gail Kern (1993): The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press; Adelman, Janet (1999): ‘Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One­Sex Model’, in: Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (eds.), Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 23–52. Callaghan, Dympna (2005): ‘The Book of Changes in a Time of Change: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Post­Reformation England and Venus and Adonis’, in: Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, London: Blackwell, pp. 27–45.

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alignment with Catholic Rome. Vernacular translations promoted issues of English identity and performed a major role in the reformation of Christian frames of sig­ nification, among which the works of Ovid, as they had been incorporated in the allegorical reading of the medieval church and moralised as a pagan predecessor to Christian typological truth, were just one example. Although moralising to some degree, Golding’s translation overcame the medieval tradition of the Ovide moralisé, which would still influence Thomas Howell’s 1560 publication of The Fable of Ovid tretyng of Narcissus, in Englysh Mytre.131 Associated with contemporary Continental reformers even before his translation of the Metamorphoses, Arthur Golding trans­ lated the Latin text by frequent use of dialect and words of particular resonance in the context of contemporary religious debate, defining Ovid as part of England’s own canon of literary tradition. Unlike the respectable epic poetry of Virgil (who had famously been translated into English by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey), Ovid, at least from a radical Protes­ tant perspective, was perceived as dangerous. Carrying the connotation of the magi­ cal, mysterious and divine, the Metamorphoses had to be unmoored from previous religious iconography into a distinctly secular aesthetic. In its most resolute form, this was achieved through the frivolous genre of the epyllion, a diminutive form of epic verse that confronted the orthodox tradition of interpretation by a sustained em­ phasis on irony, verbal wit, grotesqueness and erotic pathos.132 Flourishing for no more than a single decade, c. 1592– c. 1602, the genre originated from among a col­ lection of poems based on Ovidian narrative that were written by a group of riv­ alling writers connected to the cultural milieu of the Inns of Court, the so­called training ground for young men with political aspirations in Elizabethan England: Thomas Lodge (Scillaes Metamorphoses), John Marston (The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image), Thomas Heywood (Oenone and Paris) and John Weever (Faunis and Melliflorak). However, with Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander from 1593, which arguably provoked William Shakespeare to write his own version of Ovid’s Venus and Adonis, the two most prominent and widely read examples were written by two men – Marlowe and Shakespeare – not associated with the Inns as their primary audience. Indeed, shortly before Van Dyck’s arrival in London, Sha­ kespeare’s poem had been published in its sixteenth edition. At the heart of the genre’s narrative was the maturation of the young man, often provoked by an aggressive female wooer taken from the Ovidian universe. In a typi­ 131

132

For a recent discussion of Golding’s translation and the extent of its moralisation of the original, see: Lyne, Raphael (2001): Ovid’s changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses 1567– 1632, Oxford: Oxford University Press. The authoritative treatment of the epyllion remains: Keach, William (1977): Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

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cal scenario, the female figure embodies a threat to the male youth, who by this is either explicitly or implicitly linked to the figure of the Petrarchan mistress, while adult males are noticeably absent from the genre. In accord with this pattern, Sha­ kespeare’s Venus and Adonis, which has to be discussed in relation to its significance for Van Dyck’s iconographic conception of his Venus and Adonis for Buckingham, presents an ardent goddess as the frustrated lover of a reluctant youth, whose prig­ gishly idealistic opposition to love and lust the English poet draws with clear refer­ ence to Petrarch’s Laura. Ovid’s text had depicted an image of Venus and Adonis in ironic inversion of their identity, intertwining the categories of lover and beloved and that of hunter and prey by deliberately blurring their effectiveness as paired opposites.133 In pursuing Adonis through the woods, Venus becomes an involuntary impersonation of her chaste opposite Diana, while the hunter Adonis finds himself in the position of the game he would normally pursue. In Shakespeare’s version, which explores the narrative in the frivolous language of the epyllion, this reversal of stereotyped gender identity is expanded to an erotic pathos of female power that reduces the beautiful Adonis to mere object of desire. ‘Fondling,’ [Venus] saith, ‘since I have hemmed thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer: Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale; Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.’134

Shakespeare’s continuous emphasis on the absence of a satisfying heterosexual male presence throughout his poem, conveying a picture of Adonis as complete unto him­ self, has been understood to promote homosexuality as a form of de­sexualised love that elevates itself over the physical lust displayed by Venus’s heterosexual desire.135 However, considering Shakespeare’s and the genre’s particular interest in the flexi­

133

134

135

A detailed discussion of the myth’s ambiguous interpretation in Elizabethan literature has been given by: Tromly, Fred B. (1998): Playing with the Desire. Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalisation, Toronto: University of Toronto Press; see also: Kuchar, Gary (1999): ‘Narrative and the Forms of Desire in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis’, in: Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. V, no. 2, pp. 1–24. William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, reprinted in: The Riverside Shakespeare. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by Gwynne Blakemore Evans, Boston: Houghton Miff­ lin, 1997, pp. 1797–813, p. 1802, ll. 229–34. See: Roe, John (2000): ‘Ovid renascent in Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander’, and, Mas­ len, R. W. (2000): ‘Myths exploited: The Metamorphoses of Ovid in early Elizabethan Eng­ land’, both in: A. B. Taylor (ed.), Shakespeare’s Ovid. The Metamorphoses of the Plays and Poems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 31–46 and 15–30.

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bility characteristic of the Ovidian metamorphic body as an entity always in flux and mysteriously instable, which becomes employed as an instrument for the production of an even more multifaceted relationship of sexuality and power and the construc­ tion of new discourses of sexuality, such a reading seems difficult to maintain. Rather, Shakespeare promotes an Ovidian narrator, who positions himself in a dis­ tanced, ironic and experienced relation to his narrative. In the figure of the ardently wooed youth who is more interested in the hunt than in love­making, Shakespeare rejects the Petrarchan code of love as immature and a form of desire that challenges the autonomy and integrity of the male subject. An ‘adult’ male love inevitably leads to sex, not to poetry of praise. Jim Ellis convincingly argues that Shakespeare’s use of Petrarchism in Venus and Adonis is employed to bring into focus the narcissism, rather than morality, that lies behind Adonis’s resistance to Venus, and which, in the rationale of the epyllion, works as the chief example of failure in obtaining an adult masculine identity. Point­ ing to ‘the similarities between the Petrarchan code and Platonic pederasty’, Ellis even goes so far as to read the gender of the goddess as male and the category of the youth, or boy, as that of the ‘not­man’, a category which in early modern Italy, and arguably England, ‘denoted a proper or at least possible object of desire’.136 Until the age of between eighteen and twenty, a boy or adolescent in early modern Europe was not yet considered a man, and he faced another turning point in male sexual life around thirty, when he was expected to have married and become procreative. Be­ fore the age of twenty, however, the male youth was frequently engaged in male homosexual interactions as the ‘passive’ or ‘submissive’ partner of an ‘active’ adult. This asymmetrical organisation around age difference and rigid distinction of sex­ ual roles helped to distinguish boyhood from manhood, whose respective sexual roles were perceived according to conventionally defined gender dichotomies as manly (active) or womanly (passive). Physically immature and not yet fully a man, the adolescent was perceived to possess a sexually ambiguous state that had more in common with women, and which would be overcome with the event of marriage.137 Shakespeare’s poem narrates such a transformation, or at least attempted trans­ formation, from a youth to a man in the figure of Adonis. While the young hunter clearly recognises the dangers of being a mere object of desire – replying to Venus’s approaches: ‘measure my strangeness with my unripe years; / before I know myself, 136 137

Ellis, Jim (2003): Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse, Toron­ to: University of Toronto Press, p. 80. See: Rocke, Michael (1996): Forbidden Friendship: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, New York: Oxford University Press; Hammond, Paul (2002): Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester, Oxford: Clarendon Press; Smith, Bruce (1991): Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics, Chicago: University of Chica­ go Press.

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seek not to know me, / … / being early pluck’d, is sour to taste.’ – he nevertheless does not manage to become an adult lover of women, leaves Venus for the hunt, and dies.138 More importantly than this failure to satisfy Venus’s desire, however, Ado­ nis’s death by the boar can be read as a punishment, not for rejecting heterosexuality in general, but heterosexual intercourse as an inauguration to adult masculinity. At first glance, Van Dyck’s canvas seems to oppose this narrative of incom­ mensurable love between a man and a woman, and it is only on closer inspection that the Shakespearean interpretation can be discovered at work in the painter’s inventione of the composition. Unfortunately, we do not know if the choice of Venus and Adonis as mythical roles for a depiction of Buckingham and his wife was Van Dyck’s. Considering the prominence of the theme in Rubens’ workshop, however, the Flem­ ish painter was well acquainted with the myth as a pictorial device. Although evi­ dence remains circumstantial, the portrait, like Van Dyck’s Continence of Scipio, was probably commissioned in the context of Villiers’ wedding in May 1620; and this second commission, I suggest, was intended as a gift from the Marquess to the king. After all, the hunt, represented in the composition by the figure of Adonis, was King James’s favourite pastime, which he loved to pursue in the company of his favour­ ite.139 The figure of the hunter, whose beauty was so great as to enchant the goddess of love and beauty herself, seems predestined for a depiction of Buckingham, whom the king called ‘Steenie’ in reference to the angelic­faced Saint Stephen. Carrying a sexual undertone, the hunting trope appeared prominently in the written cor­ respondence between the monarch and his favourite, who signed his letters to James as ‘your humble servant & dog’.140 Writing to Buckingham from Theobald’s Park, his hunting lodge, James employed the hunting metaphor for a planned encounter with his favourite, writing that ‘it will be a great comfort unto me that thou and thy cunts may see me hunt the buck in the park upon Friday next’.141 Cast within the 138 139

140

141

Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, op. cit., (note 134), p. 1805, ll. 524–5, 528. The figure of hunting deer as a metaphor for sexual intercourse is ancient, appearing as the hunter spreading nets for the stag, not only in Ovid’s tale of Venus and Adonis but in his Ars Amatoria. See: Williams (1994): op. cit., (note 40), vol. II, p. 161. The sexual connotation of this trope is documented most clearly in an undated letter, in which Buckingham recalled an instance from the summer of 1615, writing to James: ‘… whether you loved me now … better, then, att ye time, wch I shall never forgett at Farneham where ye Beds hed could not be found between yee Master & his Dog’. See: Akkrig, G. P. V. (1984): Letters of King James VI and I, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 172. Quoted from: Bergeron (1999): op. cit., (note 16), p. 175. Quoting this undated letter to Buckingham, historians have been at odds with James’s use of the word ‘cunt’, which refer­ ring to its regular meaning of ‘vagina’ was used in early modern English as a bawdy term for women. Thus George Akkrig, in his 1962 edition of King James’s letters, has put the word in quotation marks and written it ‘cuntis’, thereby indicating earlier editors’ re­spelling of James’s handwriting to ‘countesses’. As David Bergeron’s edition of James’s letters shows,

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semantic domain of hunting, the ‘buck’ denotes the sexually capable male, thereby offering a way not only for the king to trope his desire, but for contemporary dia­ tribe to conceptualise the relationship between James and his principal minister.142 A poem entitled To the Duke of Buckingham further employs the metaphor, referring to the joined pleasure of monarch and favourite by suggesting – but holding back on – an alternative rhyme for ‘Buck’ than ‘looke’: ‘The King loves you, you him; both love the same, You love the King, he you, both Buck­in­game; Of sport the King loves game, of game the Buck, Of all men you; and you, solely, for your looke.’ 143

The myth of the beautiful young hunter who falls prey to the love of Venus fits per­ fectly with the metaphorical language employed here. The depiction of Buckingham and his newly wed wife as the mythological pair of Venus and Adonis in a picture intended for the king introduces a prominent trope – in both the personal exchange between the two men and the contemporary libelling of the Marquess – to what might best be described as the ‘nobilitating’ realm of court portraiture. Adonis is no longer identifiable by the spear, which is absent from Van Dyck’s depiction of the story. Instead, the painter has rendered the hunter’s dog in a more elaborate manner than Rubens and Titian before him. No longer employed merely as one of Adonis’s attributes, the dog at Buckingham’s side has become an autonomous figurative term: a forceful leap that introduces the painting’s compositional line. Its ears point back­ wards in complete devotion, as the dog seeks a pat from his master, fixing its eyes, in a strenuous move, upon his face. While the dog thus raises his head in expectation of his master’s response, Buckingham lowers his eyes onto the face of his bride. The movement of both is more restrained than that of the dog, but no less elaborate. Bride and groom seem to have overcome the fate of the unloved goddess and the young hunter, who is doomed to find his death by the fatal wound from the boar. For the first time in the long history of the myth’s treatment, we see Venus relieved from the anxious desire that animated her body before. Adonis, too, shows no attempt to

142 143

the re­spelling is incorrect and the word ‘cunt’ was a familiar phrase in the correspondence between James and his favourite to describe the women in Buckingham’s family. Though James’s reference to Buckingham’s wife in the context of such an openly suggestive letter to his friend and lover might appear shocking to the modern reader, it would not have done so to his contemporaries. All the wives of James’s lovers would have been openly aware of their husbands’ sexual relations with the king, who would sometimes join his favourites in their marital bed. See the entry in Williams (1994): op. cit., (note 40), vol. I, p. 698. Fairholt, F. W. (1850): Poems and Songs relating to George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, and his Assassination by John Felton, August 23, 1628, London: Percy Society, p. 148.

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escape his goddess but lays his arm around her shoulders, turning his face – image of her unattainable desire in Ovid – towards hers, upon which his gaze rests with lov­ ing affection. She, in turn, has detached her eyes from him, contemplating the paint­ ing’s beholder instead. Pointing above his heart, Buckingham’s right hand seizes the painting’s compositional line introduced in the movement of the hound that guides the beholder’s eye from the dog’s hind legs along the twist of his waist up to his nose. This circular line is concluded in the posture of Katherine’s left arm, and this leads the eye back to its beginning, where it now comes to rest on the dog’s exposed pu­ denda, which hint at the painting’s hidden subject of erotic devotion. With all this sexual energy present, Van Dyck’s composition still transforms the defamation of Buckingham as the king’s sexual prey into a gracious depiction of the Marquess as the virtuous hunter whose beauty destines him to become the desire of love itself. By displaying what previous depictions of the myth have overlooked – the complete reconciliation of the seemingly incommensurate pair – Van Dyck redirects the antagonistic momentum arising from the opposing desires of Venus and Adonis into a dialectic movement that creates a powerful vision of virtuous love. The initial choice of this particular myth as the theme of the double­portrait might have arisen from the fact that its prototype, Titian’s Venus and Adonis (today in the Prado, Mad­ rid), had originally been painted for ‘the King of England’, before it was lost to the Spaniards shortly afterwards. As Titian himself stated in a letter to Philipp II of Spain dated 10 September 1554, the canvas was ready to be dispatched to London, where it was to be presented to Philip, who by his marriage to Mary Tudor on 25 July of that year had come to enjoy the title of his wife as monarch of England and Ireland.144 With Mary’s death in 1558, however, the Spanish king lost royal auth­ ority over the island, and declared Titian’s canvas part of the Spanish royal collec­ tion.145 The fact that such a famous work by an artist zealously sought­after by Eng­ land’s aristocratic collectors at the time had once been in London and then been lost 144

145

For Titian’s letter, see: Gandini, C. (1997): Tiziano. Le lettere, Pieve di Cadore, p. 165, no. 129. For a discussion of Titian’s Venus and Adonis being sent to England, see: Hope, Charles (1990): ‘Titian, Philip II and Mary Tudor’, in: Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (eds.), England and the Continental Renaissance. Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp, Woodbridge: Boydell, pp. 53–65. Only two years after Buckingham’s commission of Van Dyck’s double portrait, Titian’s ori­ ginal was in fact briefly restored to the English royal collection, when the Marquess accom­ panied the then Prince of Wales, later King Charles I, to Madrid, where the picture was presented as a gift to the English visitors from the eighteen­ year­old Philip IV – the grand­ son of Philip II, who since 1621 reigned as King of Spain, sovereign of the Spanish Nether­ lands, and King of Portugal (as Philip III). With the dispersal of Charles’s collection in 1649, however, the canvas, with the help of Cardinal Mazarin, found its way into the collec­ tion of Louis XIV. See: Panofsky’s ‘Excursus 7 – The Prado Venus in the Louvre’, Panofsky (1969): op. cit., (note 123), p. 190f.

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to the Spanish royal collection might have initiated the idea of restoring it to the English Crown through the commission of a new version. By drawing on the tradition of the Elizabethan miniature as a pledge of love, given by the Petrarchan suitor to his chaste beloved, the portrait, I suggest, was de­ signed as a gift of the favourite to his king, at a moment when the relationship of both men would be redefined by the event of the favourite’s marriage. In the early sixteenth century Petrarch’s Trionfi famously provided the theme for a series of tap­ estries in the palaces of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey, which had firmly estab­ lished the vogue for the literary model in England in the 1530s. Thomas More’s Nyne Pageants, written in 1502 and devised to accompany a set of nine tapestries of his own design, show clear knowledge of the text. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Trionfi and its illustrations were familiar not only throughout Europe but also at the English court, where three copies were held in the collection of Henry VIII’s library at the Palace of Westminster, and another was in the possession of his wife, Queen Catherine Parr.146 In 1530, the Trionfi, together with Machiavelli’s Principe and Castiglione’s Cortegiano, was one of the books that Edmund Bonner, future Bishop of London, would hope to borrow from Thomas Cromwell.147 As Ro­ bert Coogan has argued, this association with the Cortegiano marks the beginning of English interest in Petrarch and more particularly with his Canzoniere as the Italian ideal of the lover – who sings in complaint, lies awake in sleep, and freezes near the fire.148 Towards mid­century, which was the high point of interest in Italian litera­ ture in England, Petrarch was no longer studied only as a moralist, but as a love poet: a figure not hitherto known in the English Renaissance.149 Besides its popu­ larity as a source of spectacle and pageantry, the Trionfi became of primary import­ ance for Edmund Spenser, who, in its most suggestive use in English literature, re­ lated it to the cult of Elizabeth as the Virgin Queen. Echoes of the Petrarchan 146

147

148 149

Of the two copies in Westminster Palace, one was Italian and the other Castilian, while the copy owned by Catherine Parr was a particularly elaborately bound edition produced in Venice in 1544. See: Carley, James P. (2000): The Libraries of King Henry VIII, London: Brit­ ish Library, p. 110, and, idem (2004), The Books of King Henry VIII and his Wives, London: British Library, p. 142. For Bonner’s letter to Cromwell: J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie (eds.): Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 23 vols., (1862–1932), repr. (1965), IV, Part III, 2850. For a detailed account on the role of Petrarch in sixteenth­century Eng­ land, see: Coogan, Robert (1970): ‘Petrarch’s “Trionfi” and the English Renaissance’, in: Studies in Philology, vol. LXVII, no. 3, pp. 306–27; and Mumford, Ivy (1964): ‘Petrarchism in Early Tudor England’, in: Italian Studies, vol. XIX, pp. 53–63. Ibid. Publications attesting to the heightened reception of Italian literature at the time are: Tho­ mas Wilson’s The History of Italy from 1549, and his Principal Rules of the Italian Grammer, with a Dictionarie for the better understanding of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante from 1550.

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triumph embodied part of Elizabeth’s personal iconography from the very begin­ ning of her reign. Thus in the most strongly Petrarchan of her Coronation pageants, the new queen actively joins the dialogue and action at the Little Conduit by St Peter’s Church, drawing herself into playing the role of Truth.150 Linking an anti­ papal reading of Petrarchan chastity with the apocalyptic historical schema of Prot­ estant apologists, the cult of the virgin Elizabeth became the key political mythol­ ogy at court from the late 1570s, finding expression in a number of portraits.151 Thus two portraits, one by George Gower (1579) and the other by Quentin Metsys the Younger (1583), feature a sieve held by the queen in her left hand, alluding to the Vestal virgin Tuccia, one of the historical types of chastity who supports Petrarch’s Pudicizia in her triumph. (Fig. 27) The first of the two pictures shows the queen with a quotation from Petrarch’s Triumph of Love below the arms: ‘Stancho riposo e riposato affano’ (IV.145).152 Dominic Baker­Smith was first to show that a similarly Petrarchan devise, also alluding to the iconography of Pudicizia, was applied in ad­ dition to the series of ‘Sieve’ portraits, in a rendering of the queen with an ermine, painted by William Segar in 1585. The ermine, which, according to the proverb, would rather surrender to its pursuers than soil its fur, links the queen to Laura, thereby celebrating her as the monarch who placed her marriage to the kingdom over her private desire and realised a Protestant triumph in her personal chastity.153 Such worshipping of Elizabeth as England’s Laura provided her courtiers with a

150

151

152

153

For a detailed discussion of Petrarchism in Elizabeth processions, see: Warkentin, Ger­ maine (2004): The Queen Majesty’s Passage & Related Documents, Toronto: Center for Refor­ mation and Renaissance Studies. Still the most authoritative account of Puritan associations with the Petrarchan image of Elizabeth is: Yates, Frances Amalia (1975): Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. “Weary I rest, and having rested I am troubled” (my translation). It could be argued, in fact, that the portrait of Elizabeth when Princess, today in the Royal Collection and attributed to William Scrots, already depicts the future queen in a Petrarchan fashion, with her hair held back in a jewelled hairnet after the Italian fashion, and with the wide forehead and arched eyebrows. Elizabeth holds a small book, hitherto read only as a reference to text­centred Protestantism, which might be inspired by Italian depictions of sitters holding the Petrar­ cino. This traditional reading of the ermine as an emblem of chastity is enhanced by the golden crown­shaped collar, which links the animal directly to Petrarch’s opening of the Triumph of Death, wherein an ermine, wearing a chain of topaz and gold, is displayed on the banner of victory: ‘Era la lor vittoriosa insegna. / in campo verde un candido ermellino, / ch’oro fino e topazi al collo tengna’ [The banner of their victory displayed. / An ermine white upon a field of green, / Wearing a chain of topaz and of gold.] (ll. 19–22) See: Yates (1975), op. cit., (note 151), pp. 112–20: see also: Baker­Smith, Dominic (1988): ‘Spencer’s “Triumph of Mar­ riage”’, in: Word & Image, vol. IV, no. 1, pp. 310–16.

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prime topos for the crafting of multi­layered compliments.154 Most explicitly, this reference was drawn by Walter Raleigh in the first of the commendatory sonnets published together with the first edition of the first three books of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which, like the Trionfi, is set in a dream vision and reinforces Eliza­ beth’s identification with Laura by a supposed confusion of the dreamer, who ‘thought I saw the grave where Laura lay’, only to find out that her real identity was Elizabeth, when ‘all suddenly [he] saw the Fairy [sic] Queene’.155 Raleigh, in fact, en­ visions his Faerie Queene at Laura’s tomb, where he did not come to praise but to bury Petrarch’s beloved, claiming in his dedicatory poem that Spenser is to surpass Petrarch, as Elizabeth surpasses Laura. Chastity in the Faerie Queene, however, is explored by Spenser via two Venerian figures, who are not simplistically distinct, but remain interrelated: Appearing in the middle books of Spenser’s epic, these two Venerian figures are Belphoebe, representing Petrarchan love, and Britomart, rep­ resenting a deeper, more profound, chastity that finds expression only in marriage. A central theme in Spenser, this vision of marriage as the ideal form of chastity and friendship testifies to an increasingly Protestant and culturally nationalist identity in late Elizabethan England, wherein the Italianate conception of an unconsum­ mated love came to be understood as false chastity. Spenser’s conception of Britom­ art, who marries the knight Artegall, critiques the Catholic condition on the unity of chastity and virginity in the poetic convention of Petrarchism, and accords with the general Protestant redefinition of marriage as the spiritually higher state in the last decades of the sixteenth century.156 Another image that has repeatedly been discussed with reference to the Petrar­ chan cult of Elizabeth as Laura, even though the identity of its sitter has often been cause for debate, is Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature of a Young Man among Roses, most probably painted between 1585 and 1595. (Fig. 27) The elegant courtier, leaning against a trunk, which is traditionally considered an emblem of stability, is generally considered to be Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. The crossing of his right leg over his left has been understood to symbol thwarted love, and the roses within which he is entwined are the single, five­petalled roses, known in Elizabethan Eng­ 154

155 156

For the political Petrarchism Elizabeth employed to constantly play the role of Laura with her court, see: Yates (1975), op. cit., (note 151); and, Forster, Leonard (1969): The Icy Fire. Five Studies in European Petrarchism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quoted from: Sir Walter Ralegh [1590], ‘A Vision vpon this conceipt of the Faery Qveene’, in Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. by A. C. Hamilton, London, 1977, p. 476. On the Protestant mythologising of marriage in Spenser, see: Hume, Anthea (1984): Edmund Spenser. Protestant Poet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For a more general reading of the reception of Italian culture under Elizabeth, see: Wyatt, Michael (2005): The Italian Encounter with Tudor England. A Cultural Politics of Translation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Fig. 27: Nicholas Hilliard, Young Man among Roses, c. 1587

land as eglantine, and celebrated as the personal flower of the queen. The uncom­ monly large miniature (13.7 × 7 cm), one of the first of Hilliard’s miniatures to show a full figure, is believed to represent a pledge of love, given by the Earl to his queen.157 Tellingly, Buckingham’s depiction in the double­portrait mirrors the elements of the symbolic trunk, and the sitter’s pose, in every significant detail: head, hand and legs. The Flemish painter has refined Hilliard’s figure to a proper contrapposto, Buckingham’s head is inclined in a similarly striking manner, suggesting that the sitter’s melancholic thoughts rest with his beloved, whose image he holds – so his hand tells us – in his heart. Van Dyck’s depiction of Buckingham as Adonis seems modelled on the depiction of the Earl in Hilliard’s miniature, and, similarly, it was arguably the portrait’s purpose to offer the English sovereign an image of his be­ loved to be beheld by his gaze. The erotic charge connected with the act of behold­ ing a painted face in one’s hand, the craving and longing invited by the small object,

157

See: Strong, Roy (1983): The English Renaissance Miniature, London: Thames and Hudson; Strong, Roy (1983): Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered. 1520–1620, Exh. Cat., London: Victoria and Albert Museum; Murdoch, John et. al. (1981): The English Miniature, New Haven: Yale University Press. For a critical reading of the identification of the Young Man among Roses, see: Edmond, Mary (1983): Hilliard and Oliver. The Lives and Works of two great Miniaturists, London: Robert Hale.

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its suggestion of a scopic and imaginary possession, and its incitement of secret de­ sire – all resonate in Van Dyck’s composition. Given the different, and, in some respects, contradictory, references of Van Dyck’s double­portrait of the Marquess and his bride, the canvas advances a rather sophisticated argument concerning the poetics of love in early Stuart England and the relation between the first Stuart king and his favourite in particular. At a poten­ tially dangerous point in Buckingham’s career at court, when his position as the king’s favourite became redefined as that of a married man, Van Dyck’s double­por­ trait constructed a pictorial vision of the Marquess’s erotic body that accommodated its identity as an object of the king’s desire with the respectability of a self­deter­ mined adult masculinity. Combining the tradition of the Petrarchan vision of ideal love with its revisionist reading in vernacular literary history, the Flemish painter pictures the moral dignity of chastity while at the same time offering a dashing vi­ sion of carnal pleasure. In contrast to the undiscerning youth of Shakespeare’s poem, Buckingham is presented as the Adonis who successfully masters the passage from adolescence to manhood, actively embracing the love of his beautiful but chaste Venus, to whom he is now united in the Protestant ideal of married love. Unlike the traditional depictions of Venus, Van Dyck has rendered Lady Katherine as Venus pudica, pulling the ample drapes of her clothing high up over her nude body.158 In turn, the goddess’s Ovidian passion and sexual appetite have been reassigned to the figure of the dog that is assailing the Marquess in an attitude of unrestrained, ani­ mal lust. Contrary to the dogs in the myth’s previous depictions, which stood wait­ ing patiently, Buckingham’s dog is calling his master to the hunt, metaphor of both unrepressed desire and its fatal consequence in the myth. The impulse for the myth’s classical fate of Adonis’s parting from the goddess is here shifted from the body of the hunter to that of his dog, leaving the couple’s unity unimpaired by conflicting desire. This vision of chaste, virtuous love between an adult man and his lawfully betrothed is wittily complemented by the erotic energy of Buckingham’s tantalising, half­naked and full­frontal body and by the leap of his dog. Van Dyck’s brilliant depiction of Buckingham’s figure in sublime silhouette provided the Marquess with a perfected vision of the physical charms of his body, preserving a lasting portrayal of the youthful beauty that had prompted the desire of England’s quasi­divine ruler. By having his portrait make reference to the miniature as the traditional device for the expression and declaration of love in Renaissance England, but transferring it to life­size dimensions by Van Dyck’s painting, Buck­ 158

For the revealing modesty of the famous pudica gesture, see: Salomon, Nanette (1996): ‘The Venus Pudica: Uncovering Art History’s “Hidden Agendas” and Pernicious Pedi­ grees’, in: Griselda Pollock (ed.), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, London: Routledge, pp. 69–87.

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ingham could visually reaffirm the intimate power­base of his relationship to King James and his position at court. The close alignment of miniatures to the bedroom, or its attached closet or cabinet room, where this kind of imagery was kept to be viewed in conspicuous secrecy – a secrecy directed to rather public ends – suggests that the double­portrait could have been intended for the bedchamber of the Stuart king.159 A much later portrait of Buckingham with his wife and his two children, Mary and George, painted by Gerrit van Honthorst in 1628, hung above the chim­ ney of King Charles’s bedchamber by the end of the 1630s, possibly replacing or supplementing Van Dyck’s portrait of the Duke and Katharine Manners in the same room. In the end, the hanging of the mythological double­portrait has to remain a matter of speculation, yet Buckingham’s depiction as the superbly beautiful shep­ herd, whom Shakespeare’s poem invokes as a ‘painted idol’ and ‘lifeless picture’, resonates with both the viewing practice of the Elizabethan miniature as treasured sight, and the common topos of Dolce’s discussion of painting as the only form in which ideal beauty of the beloved can be possessed.160 This comparison of Van Dyck’s canvas to Dolce’s description of Apelles’s Venus Anadyomene is enhanced by Buckingham’s acquisition of an Apelles painting Campaspe by the Flemish artist Joos van Winghe from around 1600, which is listed in the 1635 inventory of the York House collection and today is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.161 In any case, Van Dyck could safely have assumed that the story of Alexander’s gift of his mistress to Apelles would have been familiar to King James. The scene had been the subject of a widely celebrated composition by the German Mannerist Hans von Aachen, whom it had secured the patronage of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. 162 Even more prominently it was discussed in Castiglione’s Cortegiano and Dolce’s re­ telling of Pliny, where further emphasis is placed on the ruler’s liberality in giving away an object of affection in exchange for its picture.163 Castiglione’s text, in fact, 159

160 161 162

163

On the practice of ‘secret’ miniature displays in the bedchamber has been discussed at length in: Fumerton, Patricia (1986): ‘“Secret” Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets’, in: Representations, no. 15, pp. 57–97. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, op. cit., (note 134), p. 1802, ll. 211–14. The inventory wrongly identifies Van Winghe’s composition as Apelles painting Venus naked. See: Davies (1907), op. cit., (note 62), p. 375. For Hans von Aachen at the court of Prague, see: Konecný, ˇ Lubomir (1988): ‘Zeuxis in Prague: Some thoughts on Hans von Aachen’, in: Prag um 1600. Beiträge zu Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolf II, Exh. Cat., Freren: Luca, pp. 147–55; Fusenig, Thomas (2010): Hans von Aachen. Hofkünstler in Europa, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, esp. pp. 184ff. See: Roskill, Mark W. (1968): Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, New York: New York University Press, pp. 104–5; and, Rosand (2004): op. cit., (note 126), p. 47. For England the mannerist doctrine of the skilled painter as experiencing an even greater appreciation of the beauty he is requested to paint than its commissioner had been promi­ nently transferred by Nicholas Hilliard to the art of limning the portrait miniature, for

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seems to resonate deeply with Van Dyck’s enhancement of the Ovidian myth. The tripartite composition of Venus, Adonis and his dog brings to mind the tripartite paradigm of courtly love addressed by Pietro Bembo in the fourth book of Il Cortegiano: the sensual love which we share with the animals, the rational or human love, and the intellectual love that links us to the angels.164 Itself derived from Plato’s Symposium, Bembo’s tripartite conception of love is, significantly, discussed in re­ sponse to the question of whether or not it is permissible for old men to love: ‘To showe that olde menne maye love not onlie without slaunder, but otherwhile more happilye then yonge men’, Bembo explains how, while young, sensually loving men ‘love most unluckely’, older men’s desire for beauty is no longer guided by sensual appetite but by reason.165 Freed from the ‘bodyly burdein’ of sensual desire, Bembo argues, rational love, ‘the which olde men can much sooner do then yong […] is most good and holy’.166 Through contemplation of the beloved’s beauty purified and cleansed of all sensual bodily longing, ‘reasonable love’ will gradually orient the lover’s soul towards its true, celestial object. Having outgrown the sensual desire represented in Van Dyck’s portrait by the figure of the dog, Buckingham’s love for his Venus seems to spring from the kind of rational desire that, in Bembo’s neo­Platonic defi­ nition, attests to the virtue of a man’s love. As Bembo explains, this virtuous and holy kind of love is stimulated by the sight of beauty, which the courtier, ‘assone as he is a ware that his eyes snatch that image and carie it to the hart’, his ‘soule be­ ginneth to beehoulde it with pleasure’.167 Finally, divine love, according to Bembo, allows the soul to break free from its earthly prison and leads it to taste the sublime nature of heavenly beauty that arises from the act of beholding the image of ideal beauty. A few lines further on, ‘the vertue of seeinge’ described by Bembo is equated with the virtue of love that disclosed to Saint Paul the sight of ‘those secrets which is not lawfull for man to speak of’.168 Offering James an image of his favourite courtier

164 165 166 167 168

which the painter, in his position as the purveyor of a love token, must be capable of sensing the longing which his portrait was designed to satisfy. See: Nicholas Hilliard: ‘Nicholas Hilliard’s Treatise Concerning “The Arte of Limning”, with introduction and notes by Philip Norman’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, vol. I, 1912, pp. 1–50. Hoby (1561): op cit., (note 6), IV, p. 342ff. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. The passage in Castiglione reads: ‘Stavano tutti attentissimi al ragionamento del Bembo; ed esso, avendo fatto un poco di pausa e vedendo che altri non parlava, disse: ­ Poiché m’avete fatto cominciare a mostrar l’amore felice al nostro cortegiano non giova­ ne, voglio pur condurlo un poco piú avanti; perché star in questo termine è pericoloso assai, atteso che, come piú volte s’è detto, l’anima è inclinatissima ai sensi; e benché la ra­ gion col discorso elegga bene e conosca quella bellezza non nascer dal corpo e però ponga freno ai desidèri non onesti, pur il contemplarla sempre in quel corpo spesso preverte il

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Fig. 28: Albrecht Dürer, Young Couple threatened by Death, or, The Promenade, c. 1498

for virtuous contemplation, Van Dyck’s portrait of Buckingham alludes to the neo­ Platonic aesthetic of courtly love that desires beauty solely as an object of divine vi­ sion and thereby speaks of the spiritual integrity of the king. James’s appreciation of a painted representation of his beloved above physical consummation would have

vero giudicio; e quando altro male non ne avvenisse, il star assente dalla cosa amata porta seco molta passione, perché lo influsso di quella bellezza, quando è presente, dona mirabil diletto all’amante e riscaldandogli il core risveglia e liquefà alcune virtú sopite e congelate nell’anima, le quali nutrite dal calore amoroso si diffundeno e van pullulando intorno al core, e mandano fuor per gli occhi quei spirti, che son vapori sottilissimi, fatti della piú pura e lucida parte del sangue, i quali ricevono la imagine della bellezza e la formano con mille varii ornamenti; onde l’anima si diletta e con una certa maraviglia si spaventa e pur gode e, quasi stupefatta, insieme col piacere sente quel timore e riverenzia che alle cose sacre aver si sòle e parle d’esser nel suo paradiso.’

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Fig. 29: Nicolo Boldrini, after Titian, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1565

appeared appropriate to the new relationship between the Stuart king and his newly­ wed favourite. Van Dyck was well versed in the conventions of figurative composition, and he employed the basic rules of the classical tradition, while quietening the luscious landscape of Titian’s mythological scene to a more northern setting ultimately de­ scending from the canonical landscapes of Albrecht Dürer. This suggestion has first been raised by Michael Jaffé, who saw in Van Dyck’s composition a reference to Dürer’s 1498 Young Couple Threatened by Death, or, The Promenade.169 (Fig. 28) The pose of the couple, the outstretched landscape view in the left background and the wind­ ing tree trunk in the far right indeed bear similarities to Van Dyck’s composition, yet its reference to the northern tradition of landscape drawing reaches much further. Upon his return from his first visit to Venice in 1495, Dürer had published an engraving of St Jerome in the Wilderness, dated to 1496, which became the most influential portrayal not only of the Saint’s years in the desert, but of the tree stump as a dramatic motif in European representations of landscape.170 Dürer’s composi­ tion, with the prominent trunk in the left foreground, is generally considered to 169 170

See: Jaffé (1990): op. cit., (note 123), p. 700. See: Aikema, Bernard (1999): Venice and the North. Crosscurrents in the Time of Bellini, Dürer and Titian, Ex. Cat., Venice: Palazzo Grassi, cat. no. 40.

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have inspired a woodcut by Titian that represents the same subject, but which shifts emphasis to the display of a big, entwining tree and a much smaller stump in front. (Fig. 29) As Peter Dreyer was first to show, this woodcut became the model for a number of landscape drawings, which incorporated the prominent elements of tree and trunk into representations of other subjects, such as a pen­and­ink drawing by Lucas van Uden, who painted landscapes for the workshop of Rubens.171 (Fig. 30) Titian’s woodcuts were mentioned in chapter eight of Karel van Mander’s Schilderboeck (1604), where the artist was mentioned as one of the few Italians from whom the art of landscape painting could be learned.172 In her insightful study of the land­ scape painting of Jan Brueghel the Elder, Leopoldine Prosperetti has shown how this advice formed the beginning of a visual philosophy in the depiction of nature, which employed trees and trunks as emblems in the representation of moments of transition, treating the tree as a ‘yardstick’ for the path of life.173 These landscapes, which Van Dyck would have known both in the original and from engravings such as Aegidius Sadeler’s Riverscape with Two Figures Sitting under a Tree, engraved after Brueghel in 1606, typically depicted an oak. (Fig. 31) Together with the aesculus, the oak was mentioned as specific to the countries north of the Alps in Virgil’s catalogue of trees of the world, given in his second book of the Georgics. Van Dyck took great care, especially in the branches above Buckingham’s head, to render the leaves of his tree clearly identifiable as that of an oak, thereby creating a northern version of the Ovidian myth, similar to the manner in which Shakespeare and other English Re­ naissance poets had created vernacular versions in their Ovidian adaptations. Sig­ nificantly, the detail of the tree with stump in Brueghel’s Riverscape, which seems to have served as a model for the overall composition of Van Dyck’s canvas, promi­ nently features in a scene design for an unidentified masque by Inigo Jones, as well. The drawing of a forest scene in pen and brown ink, today in at Chatsworth House, seems related to four tree studies with entwining trunks that reinforce the argument of the staging of a masque in celebration of Buckingham’s wedding being under con­ sideration but abandoned due to political circumstances. (Figs. 32 & 33) Compared to Jones’s design, Van Dyck’s canvas almost seems like a close­up into the right fore­ ground of the scene, presenting the mythical pair of Buckingham and his wife, as they would have stood on stage in a masque celebrating the love of a virtuous Adonis 171

172

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Dreyer, Peter (1985): ‘A Woodcut by Titian as a Model for Netherlandish Landscape Dra­ wings in the Kupferstichkabniett, Berlin’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXVII, no. 992, pp. 762, 766–7. Karel van Mander (1604): Het Schilder-Boeck waer in vooreerst de leerlustighe Lueght den grondt der Dedl Vry Schilderoonst in verscheyden deelen wort voorghedragen …, Haarlem: van Wes­ busch, VIII, 24. Prosperetti, Leopoldine (2009): Landscape and Philosophy in the Art of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), Farnham: Ashgate, see esp. chp. 6.

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Fig. 30: Lucas van Uden, Landscape, undated Fig. 31: Aegidius Sadeler after Jan Brueghel the Elder, Riverscape with Two Figures, 1606

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Fig. 32: Inigo Jones, Tree, Wing Design for unknown Masque, undated

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Fig. 33: Inigo Jones, Forest Scene, Design for unknown Masque, undated

to the Goddess of Chastity, and attesting once more to the fruitful relationship be­ tween both genres at the Jacobean court. The rather exceptional pose of the Marquess and his wife finds its model in an­ other, albeit different body of engravings meticulously studied by Inigo Jones at the time of Van Dyck’s first visit to London. Foremost in Jones’s interest in the years between 1615 and 1625 was Raphael, whom the architect and stage designer admired in particular for his graceful way of drawing heads.174 The names listed in his ‘Ob­ servations’ on Italian art as those whose drawing was particular worthy of emulation are Michelangelo, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Polidoro da Caravaggio and Giovanni

174

Jones’s interest for Raphael was first pointed out by Jeremy Wood, who publishes parts of Jones’s annotations to Vasari in the appendices to: Wood, Jeremy (1992b): ‘Inigo Jones, Ita­ lian Art, and the Practice of Drawing’, in: Art Bulletin, vol. LXXIV, no. 2, pp. 247–70.

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Fig. 34: Cherubino Alberti, after Caravaggio da Polidoro, Socrates and Aliciades, c. 1590

da Udine.175 It is from within this context that it is possible to explain the striking resemblance of Van Dyck’s composition to an engraving by Cerubino Alberti, com­ monly identified as Jupiter embracing Ganymede. (Fig. 35) The scene of an old, bearded man, who embraces a young male nude from behind, is part of a series of ten mytho­ logical subjects created by Polidoro da Caravaggio, available in print since c. 1590 and highly sought after by collectors and artists alike.176 Van Dyck would have been familiar with this series – if not from Inigo Jones, or for that matter Buckingham himself, then from the studio of Peter Paul Rubens, who had drawn copies of Poli­ doro’s designs on his own journey to Italy from 1600 to 1608.177 Rather than show­

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Bodleian Library, MS Marshall 80, vol. 19v, reprinted as Appendix III in Wood (1992b): op. cit., (above), p. 269. The other nine subjects of the series are: I. Jupiter Embracing Cupid, III. Neptune Rising from the Waters, IV. Pluto Abducting Proserpine, V. Jupiter Disguised as a Satyr, Surpri­ sing the Sleeping Nymph Antiope, VI. Venus Triumphant and Amor, VII. Mercury with the Head of Argus, VIII. A Bacchanal, IX. Apollo Pursuing Daphne, X. Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan. The entire series, together with a frontispiece showing a Genius hol­ ding a tableau, is reprinted in: Strauss, Walter L. et al. (1982): The Illustrated Bartsch. Italian Artists of the Sixteenth Century, vol. 34, ed. by Sebastian Buffa, New York: Abaris Books, no. 78–88. For Rubens’ drawings after Polidoro da Caravaggio, see; Wood, Jeremy (2002): Rubens. Drawing on Italy, Ex. Cat., Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland.

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ing ‘Jupiter embracing Ganymede’, the subject of the engraving, can by identified as that of Socrates and Alcibiades. The pair of testicles in the youth’s outstretched left hand alludes to the story told by Thucydides of the mutilation of the Herms of Athens, who, one night in 415 BC, were castrated and had their faces mutilated. Under suspicion for this act was the notorious Athenian general Alcibiades, a man famous in Antiquity for his irresistible charisma and extravagant lifestyle.178 Plato describes him in his Symposium as the erastes of Socrates, whose symbolic castration Polidoro seems to have sought to represent. As Victoria Wohl has shown in her as­ sessment of the male subject as a marker of the democratic citizenship of Athens, Alcibiades represents one of the most explicitly sexualised figures in the writings of the fifth century BC, whose aggressive transgression of the sexual Athenian con­ ventions brought him under suspicion as a tyrannical contester of the political order, and who threatened to transform the entire city into eromenoi.179 Plato’s account of the beautiful youth, who paraded his seduction of the old Socrates in the Symposium, presents a reversal of roles that is maintained when the philosopher holds on to Al­ cibiades as his lover even after the latter has started to grow a beard and has become an adult. This powerful ‘queering’ of sexual roles in relation to an older, powerful man – as with the sumptuous lifestyle, notorious charm and charge of corruption – arguably invited comparison of Alcibiades to Buckingham and his dubious relation­ ship to the Stuart King.180 Considered from within this context, Cerubino Alberti’s engraving after Poli­ doro is revealed as a particularly wittily conceived design for the double­portrait of the Marquess and Katherine Manners: holding Polidoro’s scene to the left of Van Dyck’s composition – whether in the mind’s eye, from the necessary distance to the life­size canvas, or with the help of a preliminary sketch that would have been sig­ nificantly smaller – the two images join as a group of three figures: the old man, the young woman and the beautiful male nude between them. The spectacularly flared cloth, which swirls around Socrates and Alcibiades to the upper left, helps the eye to veer over to the figure of Adonis, where, in the previously empty space under the male nude’s outstretched arm, it now finds the figure of Venus, who pulls both her 178 179 180

See: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, vol. VI, 27.3; first translated into English by Thomas Hobbes in 1628. Wohl, Victoria (1999): ‘The Eros of Alcibiades’, in: Classical Antiquity, vol. XVIII, no. 2, pp. 349–85. William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens deals with the story of Alcibiades. Although the text has survived only in fragments, and little is known about the history of its performance, there is a general assumption that it was staged at least once shortly before 1621 – the date of Van Dyck’s canvas. For a reading of the possible interrelation of the play’s fiction and the reality of court politics, see: Bevington, David and David L. Smith (1999): ‘James I and Timon of Athens’, in: Comparative Drama, vol. XXXIII, no. 1, pp. 56–87.

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cloak and the viewer’s attention close to her body from the lower right. While the eye has been performing this movement, the beautiful young man in the middle, whose body remains the motionless pivot of the changeover, has turned his face from the left to the right, as if to acknowledge the parting from an old to a new com­ panion. For the figure of Buckingham’s wife Van Dyck has adapted a posar leggiadrissimo – which Vasari had so famously praised in Raphael’s 1514 Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia. Along with grazia and venustà, the leggiadria of Van Dyck’s Venus, her striking uprightness and appearance of lightness, is one of the qualities requested, as Eliza­ beth Cropper was first to point out, by Agnolo Firenzula in his Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne from 1541 and adopted by artists such as Raphael and Parmigianino in their depiction of female figures.181 However, leggiadria, as Sharon Fermor has com­ pellingly demonstrated in her argument on the formation of a gendered vocabulary for movement in art, was not exclusively a female attribute in painting, but was prominently admired by Ludovico Dolce in his praise of Titian’s Adonis, who ‘in ogni sua parte leggiadro’ was perceived as exemplary in the depiction of beauty that combined both feminine and masculine features in one figure.182 The striking weightlessness and dance­like composure by which the pose of Van Dyck’s Adonis departs from Titian’s composition seems to be inspired by this intellectual discourse on movement and gender identity. Dolce’s famous description of Titian’s Venus and Adonis is found in a letter to his patron Alessandro Contarini, written before the canvas was dispatched to London and then included in his 1559 Dialogo della pittura, which Van Dyck would certainly have known from his apprenticeship in the studio of Rubens, whose own versions of the theme testify to Rubens’ interest in Titian’s iconic composition. ‘Leggiadria ed aerosa dolcessa di movimenti’ had also been cited by Castiglione in his discussion of the courtier’s perfection when dancing in public, forming, as Sharon Fermor has compellingly demonstrated, part of a wider dis­ course of movement documented in dancing and courtesy manuals such as Castig­ lione’s Cortegiano, which provided the terms that Vasari, Lomazzo and Dolce 181 182

See: Cropper, Elizabeth (1976): ‘On beautiful Women. Parmigianino, Petrarchismo and the Vernacular Style’, in: Art Bulletin, vol. LVIII, no. 3, pp. 374–95. See: Fermor, Sharon (1993): ‘Movement and Gender in sixteenth­century Italian Painting’, in: Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (eds.), The Body Imagined: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 129–45. See also: eadem (1998): ‘Poetry in Motion: Beauty in Movement and the Renaissance Concep­ tion of leggiadria’, in: F. Ames­Lewis and Elizabeth Cropper (eds.), Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 124–33; Löhr, Wolf­Dietrich (2003): ‘‘e nuovi Omeri, e Plati’: Painted Characters in Portraits by Andrea del Sarto and Agnolo Bronzino’, in: Tho­ mas Frangenberg (ed.), Poetry on Art. Renaissance to Romanticism, Donington: Schaun Tyas, pp. 48–100.

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adopted for their discussions of movement in painting.183 Considering Van Dyck’s knowledge of this figurative tradition, his Venus and Adonis for the English royal fa­ vourite appears to be a conscious reconsideration of the theatrical principle of the English court masque via a painterly approach. The Flemish painter created an image of his sitter that achieved a more realistic likeness than any of the courtly por­ traits painted before in the Elizabethan, anti­illusionistic tradition, while at the same time creating a non­ephemeral mimesis with a degree of mythical illusion familiar only from the stagings of the masque. The image, which transgresses the natural capacity of a factual corporality, offered a pictorial conditioning of Bucking­ ham’s body, whose elegance and beauty easily exceeded any physical demonstration of skill and grace in the masque. Rivalling the traditional promotion of the court­ ier’s image in bodily performance, the canvas exhibited all the appeal of well­trained but ephemeral movement and pose by an enduring display that in its light and airy sweetness of movement must have resonated with the English court as the materialised image of the Castiglionian vision of corporeal perfection. To the English court, which was accustomed to conceive of the social image of the noble masquer from the attributes of his mythological identity, the highly illu­ sionist style of Van Dyck’s painting must have been immediately appealing. By in­ troducing the allegorical portrayal of courtly identity into English portraiture, Van Dyck arguably created the first role­portrait of the English aristocracy, thereby ac­ commodating the image of the Marquess to the two criteria that Lomazzo, and Haydocke’s translation, listed as the markers of a man’s dignity: ‘first nobility and the famousnesse of his ancestours; secondly, antiquitie, which addeth very much to the glory of nobilitie, and discent.’184 While rank and title had been provided by King James, Van Dyck’s implicit depiction of Buckingham as Alcibiades – the Ado­ nis of fifth­century BC Athens – now provided ancient descent. On a smaller scale the canvas accomplished the kind of imagery that the English king had been trying to obtain from Van Dyck’s master, Rubens, for the ceiling of Whitehall’s Banquet­ ing House since 1619.185 The painting presents a moment of particular interest in

183 184 185

See: Fermor (1993): op. cit., (above). See: Richard Haydocke: A Tracte Containing the Arts of Curious Painting, Carving & Building …, 1598, [s. n.] p. 6. Studying the history of Van Dyck’s role­portrait, Stephanie Goda Tasch classifies Venus and Adonis as one of the artist’s more mature role­portraits, based on Jeremy Wood’s dating of the canvas to between 1628 and 1635. Tasch, however, considers neither the genre of the court masque, nor any literary treatment of the myth, in the context of the painting. See: Tasch Goda, Stephanie (1996): Studien zum weiblichen Rollenporträt in England von Anthonis van Dyck bis Joshua Reynolds, Weimar: VDG. For a detailed discussion of Rubens’ Banqueting House Ceiling, see Chapter Three of this book.

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relation to the wider context of the historic development of the portrait in the his­ tory of European art. Van Dyck’s mythological portrait of Buckingham and his wife was not part of the tradition of the allegorical portrait commissioned by dozens of the English petty nobility and the French bourgeoisie from the later half of the seventeenth century onwards. Instead, it still exhibits the Renaissance conception of courtly identity that seeks to convey a higher truth of the self in the symbolic ap­ propriation of a mythological persona. Contrary to the ludic notion of a temporarily adopted allegorical other, as it became represented in the portraits of Joshua Rey­ nolds, Van Dyck’s mythological depiction of Buckingham as Adonis belongs to a tradition of court culture that registered a symbolic validity and transfer of the pres­ tige connected with the chosen celestial role.186 Unique among the contemporary portraits of his peers, and pre­dating Rubens’ famous mythological programme for Marie de’ Medici, the flamboyant portrait of Buckingham marks the emergence of the painted mythologies that would characterise the patronage of the first two Stuart kings. By enlisting the pictorial skill of Rubens’ pupil, Buckingham had found a device that no longer merely trained his body or fashioned its appearance by the display of luxurious clothes, but rather one that materially visualised a perfected bodily self that conformed to the principles of a body conditioned in poetic and art­ theoretical accounts of ideal beauty, and that exceeded any emulation in courtly per­ formance. Attesting to the intense cross­fertilisation of theatrical and painterly representation at the early Stuart court, Van Dyck’s mythological portrait was cre­ ated from within the context of a growing significance of the refined, artful body in the performances of the masque that resulted in an awareness of and compulsion toward courtly identity as arising from form, stylistic dynamics and a visual modifi­ cation and manipulation of the real.

186

Still the most authoritative discussion on this difference is: Wind, Edgar (1930–31): ‘Huma­ nitätsidee und heroisiertes Portrait in der englischen Kultur des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in: Vorträge aus der Bibliothek Warburg, Leipzig/Berlin, pp. 156–229. For an astute critique of Wind in this context, see: Busch, Werner (1998): ‘Heroisierte Porträts? Edgar Wind und das eng­ lische Bildniss des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in: Horst Bredekamp und Bernhard Buschendorf (eds.), Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 33–48.

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‘The most earnest lover of painting in the world’:187 Rubens’ Equestrian Portrait of Buckingham Through his patronage of art, and through his portraits in particular, Buckingham calculated not only on painting’s supreme faculty in the art of deception, and in the creation of an idealised, illusionistic vision that would outshine nature itself, but also on the painter’s ability to capture the brittle moments of personal fame in an art­ work that would preserve it for future generations of beholders. ‘The arts of osten­ tation’, wrote Francis Bacon in a 1612 essay on Vain-glory, ‘put life into business’.188 The further the courtier exploited his legitimate self­display, Bacon proceeded, the more fully he amplified his virtues: ‘Neither had the fame of Cicero, Seneca, Plinius Secundus, borne her age so well, if it had not been joined with some vanity in them­ selves: like unto varnish, that makes ceilings not only shine but last’.189 Buckingham seems to have consulted Bacon in this matter, and when, in January 1619, King James made him Lord High Admiral of England, a portrait of Buckingham on horseback had already been commissioned from Balthazar Gerbier in the form of a miniature, today in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland. (Fig. 35) As Buckingham’s adviser in all questions of art, Gerbier had probably drawn his patron’s attention to the equestrian piece as a mandatory form of portraiture for any military commander – an iconography despised by James I for its strong emblematic connection with the chivalric ethos of Henry VIII, whose martial reign disgusted the Stuart king. Ger­ bier would have known of Giulio Romano’s addition of equestrian portraits to Ti­ tian’s twelve half­length portraits of Roman emperors in the Camerino dei Cesari, commissioned by Federico II Gonzaga, if not from a personal visit to Mantua, then from his correspondence with Rubens. Buckingham’s desire to associate his image with that of the captain of the imperial troops of Charles V seems likely; the size chosen for the portrait might be explained by the fact that it would provide Bucking­ ham with a picture small enough to behold himself on horseback in private – for this was a vision which his king would not have wanted to see. However, Gerbier’s 1618 equestrian miniature clearly did not suffice – not only, one suspects, on account of

187

Dudley Carleton in a letter to his uncle, Sir Dudley, London, 6 January 1615. Quoted from: Original Unpublished Papers Illustrative of the Life of Peter Paul Rubens as an Artist and a Diplomatist preserved in H. M. State Paper Office with an Appendix of Documents Respecting the Arundelian Collection, the Earl of Somerset’s Collection, the Great Mantuan Collection, the Duke of Buckingham, Gentileschi, Gerbier, Honthorst, Le Sueur, Myttens, Torrentius, Vanderdoort, ect, ed. by N. Noël Sainsbury, London, 1859, p. 303. 188 Francis Bacon: The Essays or Councels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans, ed. by Edwin Abbott, London, 1612, p. 217. 189 Ibid.

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Fig. 35: Balthazar Gerbier, Equestrian Miniature of George Villiers, Earl of Buckingham, 1618

its size but also because of its questionable artistic skill – and it was replaced after James’s death with a life­size version by Rubens himself. Buckingham’s equestrian portrait as General of the Fleet was the most blatantly political of all of his commissions, and it presented a confident projection of a mili­ tary glory that in no way corresponded to England’s martial actions under his later leadership in the field, the misfortune of which arguably led to his assassination in 1628. Delivered to York House in 1627, the large canvas has hitherto only been studied in relation to Buckingham’s unsuccessful attempt to support the Huguenot rebellion against France at La Rochelle in 1627, although the portrait, for which a preparatory sketch is identified, had probably been commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens during the Duke’s 1625 visit to Paris.190 Displaying Buckingham in black ar­ 190

Dispersed with the rest of Buckingham’s collection after his death in 1628, the painting ul­ timately became part of the property of the Earl of Jersey at Osterley Park, where it was destroyed in 1949 in a fire and survives only in the form of a black­and­white photograph. It has been argued that Rubens was commissioned with the execution of the portrait by Buckingham in person, whom he met in 1625, in Paris. Though the meeting – during the

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mour and with a train of allegorical figures in front of the Grand Fleet of the High Lord Admiral, the composition seems intended as an allegorical projection of Buck­ ingham’s military triumph. (Fig. 36 & 37) The study of England’s unstable situation in the diplomatic relations and politi­ cal conflict with its neighbouring countries, however, diverts attention from the pictorial rationale of the composition. As Gregory Martin was first to point out, Rubens’ portrait of Buckingham is the first of the artist’s equestrian compositions to feature the pose of levade – an exercise from the art of haute école riding that had be­ come increasingly popular at European courts since the end of the sixteenth cen­ tury.191 The iconographic model Rubens had employed for his earlier equestrian portraits of European noblemen was a figurative one commonly referred to as the foreshortened-frontalised equestrian type, which the painter had invented for his 1603 Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma, which shows the horse pacing resolutely towards the beholder.192 (Fig. 38) Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas had begun his career at the Spanish court as the confidant to the Infant Philip, upon whose ac­ cession to the throne in 1599 he was created the first Duke of Lerma. When Rubens came to Spain in 1603, sent by his Italian patron, Vincenzo I Gonzaga, as part of an

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wedding festivities for Charles I’s marriage by proxy to Princess Henrietta of France, dau­ ghter of Marie de’ Medici and sister to Louis XIII – is documented in Rubens’ letters, and Rubens remained in regular correspondence with Buckingham until the Duke’s death three years later, there is no evidence that the Flemish master was given the commission for the York House ceiling on this occasion. The preparatory portrait sketch, which is today in the Graphische Sammlung, Vienna, however, remains the earliest known document of Bucking­ ham’s patronage of Rubens. See: Martin, Gregory (1966): ‘Rubens and Buckingham’s ‘fayrie ile’’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CXIII, no. 765, pp. 613–18. As Frances Huemer has previously pointed out, Rubens advanced the pose from his 1612 so­called Riding School, a canvas sometimes attributed to the artist’s workshop, which was evidently used as a studio model for equestrian portraits and that exhibits three figurations developed for the depiction of the mounted horse. See: Huemer, Frances (1977): Portraits, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, vol. XIX, no. 1, Brussels: Arcade Press. The paint­ ing of the three horsemen, formerly in Berlin, was lost in the 1945 fire of the Flaktower. For the foreshortened equestrian posture and its influence as an important precedent to la­ ter equestrian portraits, among them Van Dyck’s Charles I, Equestrian of 1633, see: Moffitt, John F. (1994): ‘Rubens’ Duke of Lerma, Equestrian Amongst Imperial Horsemen’, in: Artibus et historiae, vol. XXIX, pp. 99–110; and, Vignau­Wilberg, Thea (1999): Peter Paul Rubens: Studie zum Reiterbildnis des Herzogs von Lerma, München: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung; as well as, Sutton, Denys (1962): ‘Rubens’s Portrait of the Duke of Lerma’, in: Apollo, vol. LXXVI, no. 2, pp. 118–23, p. 121. For subsequent paintings by Rubens em­ ploying the iconographic model of the Lerma portrait, the 1606 Equestrian Portrait of Giancarlo Doria and the 1612 Equestrian Portrait of Don Rodrigo Calderón, see: Müller Hofstede, Justus (2000): ‘Rubens Reiterporträt des Don Rodrigo Calderon, Favorit des Herzog von Lerma’, in: Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch, vol. LXIII, pp. 259–82.

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Fig. 36: Peter Paul Rubens, Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Buckingham, c. 1625 Fig. 37: Peter Paul Rubens, Preliminary Sketch for the Duke of Buckingham on Horseback, c. 1625

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Fig. 38: Peter Paul Rubens, Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma, 1603

embassy from the ducal court of Mantua to the court of Philip III, Lerma had be­ come the central figure in Spanish politics, and was increasingly using his power to assemble the most significant private art collection not only in early seventeenth­ century Spain but in all of Europe, which at its height consisted of more than 2,747 paintings, 1,128 of them portraits, dispersed over five different households.193 The 193

The most detailed accounts of Rubens’ first visit to Spain have been given by: Vergara, Alexander (1999): Rubens and his Spanish Patrons, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and Vosters, S. A. (1990): Rubens y España, Madrid: Ed. Cátedra. For the years of Rubens’ service to the Duke of Mantua, see: Huemer, Frances (1996): Rubens and the Roman Circle:

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most important of these households was La Ribera, just outside Valladolid and situ­ ated across the River Pisguera from the Spanish Royal Palace. This house held 631 works by Italian masters, including originals by Veronese, Titian and Giambologna, and in 1606 it had been sold, with all its contents, to the Spanish king, who, on his death in 1621, bequeathed the property to his son, Philip IV.194 Buckingham visited the collection together with Prince Charles in 1623. They travelled without telling the Spanish king, and in so doing they confronted the most rigid court in Europe with what was perceived as an aggressive breach of protocol. The trip, which presented Charles to the Spanish court without any of the splendour and magnificence of a state entry, was intended to impress the Spanish royal family by the arrival of a chivalric British heir ready to woo the Infanta in person, and to accomplish a matrimonial alliance negotiated since 1605. Charles and Buckingham had travelled under the pseudonyms Tom and Jack, accompanied by just one servant and leaving England unnoticed by the court. In a recent study on the cultural politics surrounding the negotiations for a match between the Prince of Wales and the Spanish Infanta, Glyn Redworth has assessed the difficult circum­ stances of the visit.195 As an integral part of James’s grand design to unite the Euro­ pean Protestant and Catholic powers in peace, the match was meant to counterbal­ ance the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, Elector Palatine, which had strengthened British relations with the Protestant princes of Germany. Under the command of Ambrosio Spínalo, the Spanish army of Flanders had invaded the Rhine Palatinate in August 1620. Three months later, James’s son­in­law lost the Bohe­ mian Crown in the battle of the White Mountain, and was banned from the Holy Roman Empire, causing the dismantling of his estates as well as the dissolution of the League of Evangelical Union, and leaving the English monarch with a growing desire to send his troops to the Continent in defence of the Protestant cause. Hop­ ing to restore Frederick to the Palatinate by diplomatic alliance with the sixteen­ year­old Felipe IV, who had inherited the Spanish Crown after the premature death of his father in March, James once more promoted a Spanish marriage for Charles, but the Spaniards, insisting on the freedom of worship for English Catholics, bar­

194

195

Studies of the First Decade, New York: Garland. For a detailed account of the Italian–Spanish relations at the time and the practice of stately gift giving, see: Goldberg, E. L. (1996): ‘Artistic Relations between the Medici and the Spanish Courts, 1587–1621’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CXVIII, no. 168, pp. 105–14. For a detailed reading, see: Schroth, Sarah Walker (2001): ‘The Duke of Lerma’s Palace in Madrid. A Reconstruction of the Original Setting for Cristoforo Stati’s Samson and the Lion’, in: Apollo, vol. CLIV, no. 474, pp. 11–21, who points out that the number of the art­ works within the collection of Lerma depends on the method of calculation. See: Redworth, Glyn (2003): The Prince and the Infanta. The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match, New Haven: Yale University Press.

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gained hard. Having dissolved Parliament after members of the Commons had drawn up a petition that, along with the request for war with Spain, proposed that the Prince of Wales be married to a Protestant, James was left unable to comply with the Spanish conditions, since revocation of the penal laws against the English Cath­ olics was impossible without the approval of Parliament. Eager to secure a commit­ ment from Madrid and conclude the marriage treaty, Charles and Buckingham had finally crossed the Channel. Informed of his arrival, the Spaniards had assumed that the Prince of Wales intended to convert to the Church of Rome; and once in Mad­ rid, the Prince realised that the English Crown had deemed the marriage negoti­ ations much further advanced than in fact they were.196 Having arrived incognito, Charles was escorted out of Madrid to the monastery of San Jerónimo on 26 March to make his ceremonial entry into the capital, where he and Buckingham would ex­ perience six months of high­protocol entertainment. Among the great many events hastily prepared for the English visitors were a number of visits to picture collec­ tions in and around Madrid. Informed of the particular interest of Charles and Buckingham in the arts, the Spanish king had especially appointed a jounta of members of the Council of State to arrange the visits and attend to the English con­ noisseurs.197 Guided by the Conde de Monterrey, leading patron of the arts in the Spain of Philip IV, the English delegation, attended by Buckingham’s painter­agent Balthazar Gerbier, visited La Ribera, which had remained largely unchanged since Lerma’s death, and presented the Englishmen with a living testimony to the glory and connoisseurship of the late Spanish favourite. Here, the Prince of Wales was invited to choose his two favourite works from the collection, the first being Paolo Veronese’s Mars and Venus, and the second Giovanni Bologna’s alabaster group Samson slaying the Philistine, the only monumental sculpture by Bologna ever to have left Italy.198 Having visited La Ribera, Buckingham must have seen Rubens’ Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma which by 1623 had become prominent as the model for a new tradition of state portraiture, and was employed by men of so eminent a rank as Giancarlo Doria and Rodrigo Calderon, whose equestrian portraits Rubens had painted in 1606 and 1612, and which Charles and Buckingham most probably also went to see during one of their arranged visits.199 The prominent Renaissance motif of the rider mastering a horse, symbol of princely virtue and bravery, was not par­ 196 197 198 199

See: Kenny, Robert W. (1970): ‘Peace with Spain’, in: History, vol. XX, pp. 198–208. See: Schroth, Sarah Walker (1997): ‘Charles I, the duque de Lerma and Veronese’s Edin­ burgh Mars and Venus’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. MCXXXIII, pp. 548–50. Both works were removed from the villa by 17 September and delivered to Gerbier, who then prepared them for departure to England. See: Schroth (1997): op. cit., (above). Detailed analysis of the equestrian portraits is given in: Müller Hofstede (2000): op. cit., (note 175).

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ticularly current in Jacobean England. Indeed, the image of the mounted ruler had only briefly been in favour. James’s first son, Henry, the late Prince of Wales, had died in 1611 at the age of just eighteen of typhoid fever. Shortly before his death, Henry had attained fifteen bronze statuettes cast after Giovanni Bologna by Pietro Tacca, Cosimo II’s new sculptor at the Ducal court of Florence, of which two were horses that took the particular delight of the young Prince.200 Prince Charles had meanwhile declared himself prepared to accept Philip’s conditions for a match with his sister, and a triumphant return to England seemed likely. In September 1623, however, the Spaniards declared that the Infanta could not leave for England with­ out the pope’s official consent, which was expected the following spring, and the Duke and Prince agreed that they had been scorned. In October 1623, Buckingham returned to England without a bride for his Prince, but showered with presents from Philip IV, including 24 Spanish and Arabian horses and ample inspiration for the commission of his very own equestrian portrait. In the cursory study of Rubens’ portrait of Buckingham on horseback that is largely confined to catalogue entries in the inventories of his oil paintings and sketches, historians have so far unequivocally considered the canvas without taking into account Buckingham’s visit to Spain in 1623. The 1635 inventory of York House, however, holds a copy of Titian’s Charles V at Mühlberg, which Buckingham had seen in the Great Hall of the Escorial, plainly illustrating the lasting impression left by the canvases in Spanish possession.201 The painting’s transaction entry, noted in the account book of Sir Sackville Crowe and dated 1625, states that the sum of 500 livers sterling was ‘given to Mr Rubens for drawing his Lps picture on horseback’. How­ ever, it is generally assumed that the commission originates from the same year – 1625 – and a closer look at the hitherto undiscussed allegorical apparatus shows how Rubens’ portrait of Buckingham on horseback results directly from his visit to the

200 For a detailed account of the commission of the gift and its significance in the Florentine­ English marriage negotiations, see: Watson, Katherine and Charles Avery (1973): ‘Medici and Stuart. A Grand Ducal Gift of “Giovanni Bologna” Bronzes for Henry Prince of Wa­ les’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CV, no. 845, pp. 493–507. During the preparations for the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition held in Washington in 1985, a portrait of Prince Henry by Robert Peake from 1610 has been revealed from several layers of paint applied to the canvas in the late seventeenth century that embodies the only equestrian portrait of the Stuart reign before Rubens’ depiction of Buckingham on horseback, see: Rooley, Anthony (2006): ‘Time stands still: Devices and Designs, Allegory and Alliteration, Poetry and Mu­ sic and a New Identification in an Old Portrait’, in: Early Music, vol. XXXIV, pp. 443–60; and, Strong, Roy (1986): Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance, London: Tha­ mes and Hudson. 201 For the inventory, see: Betcherman (1970): op. cit., (note 67).

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Spanish court.202 The scene combines the depiction of horse and rider with the fig­ ure of Concord, the victor’s laurel in her hand, as she leads Buckingham, while a winged figure flying behind the Duke holds aloft the trumpet of Fame and scatters flowers over his head. Another allegorical figure on clouds, described as Charity, is accompanied by a little wind god while trailing behind her is Discord or Envy, identified by the serpents on her head.203 The beautiful naiad in the lower left brings forth the treasures of the sea from below, and accompanies the figure of Neptune, who holds out his trident, thereby entrusting his command over the waters to Buck­ ingham as the new General of the Fleet. The significance of allegorical personage, which renders Rubens’ equestrian composition for Buckingham into one of the earliest High Baroque commissions in England, can be demonstrated by comparing the final canvas with its preliminary sketch. It is today held in the collection of the Kimbell Art Museum at Fort Worth, Texas, where it was long thought to depict Don Ferdinand d’Austriche.204 (Fig. 40) The relatively modest use of allegorical devices in the oil sketch suggests that the Flemish master was asked by Buckingham to enlarge the mythological programme of his composition, thereby indicating the political significance of the allegories dis­ played. In fact, the figure alludes to a design proposed by Balthazar Gerbier in March 1623 for what was probably intended as a masque in celebration of his pa­ tron’s return from Spain with the Prince and his bride: ‘The design will represent a marine triumph representing a chariot with the Prince and Princess, Neptune driving his sea­horses, and your excellency as the Admiral of the Sea in the front of the chariot, holding in your hands the reins; and to paint besides on the margin of the water, the nymphs, which shall represent England, which shall come in a dance to receive their Prince, with many angles flying in the air, some carrying the arms of Spain, and others things appropriate to this union.’205

Setting out to Madrid to secure the ultimate conclusion of the English match with Spain, Buckingham had assumed that his return would be a triumphant one. Upon his arrival back in England, the Duke had hoped to escort the Spanish Infanta on 202

See: British Library, add. MS 12.528. See also: Sainsbury, W. N. (1859): op. cit., (note 100), p. 68. 203 For the identification of Discord, see: Held, Julius (1970): ‘Rubens’ Glynde Sketch and the Installation of the Whitehall Ceiling’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CXII, no. 806, pp. 274– 81. For the more common reference to the figure as Envy, see: Martin (1966): op. cit., (190); and Vlieghe, H. (1987): Portraits of Identified Sitters painted in Antwerp (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX), 2 vols., London: Turnhout. 204 See: Held (1970): op. cit., (above). 205 Goodman (1839): op. cit., (note 20), vol. II, pp. 265f.

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her entry into London, approaching Whitehall in a victorious gesture of bringing home a bride to the English heir. An Anglo­Spanish alliance, as intended by James, would have constituted not only the restoration of the Palatinate but also an import­ ant diplomatic achievement for the first man at court. On their return home, the failure of both, which further strengthened the anti­Catholic sentiment prevailing in England, caused the Prince and favourite to detach themselves from the politics of James and to put themselves at the head of the patriot faction at court.206 It seems reasonable, from within this context, to suggest that Buckingham, losing out on a public reward for bringing the Spanish Infanta to England, commissioned a painted version of Gerbier’s triumphant vision from the very painter who had already en­ riched the image of his Spanish peers with power and prestige. Though Rubens’ equestrian portrait of the Duke displays neither the English Prince and his Spanish bride, nor a chariot drawn by Neptune’s horses, the overall scene shows a strong similarity to Gerbier’s design. The painting actually presents a ‘maritime triumph’ with Buckingham as ‘Admiral of the Sea’ surrounded by Neptune, his nymphs and figures ‘flying in the air’. Rubens’ portrait of Buckingham on horseback has much in common with the genre of the masque, not only in terms of its allegorical personage, which seems to resemble the genre’s conventional dramatis personae, but, more importantly, in terms of its focus on the display of the artful body, which in the painting is also ex­ tended to the artful control of the body of the animal. Requiring outstanding skill and discipline by rider and horse, the levade is essentially a rear­on command whereby the horse is directed to rise up to an angle of no more than 45 degrees above the ground and to maintain this position motionless with its forelegs tucked in and its head held straight but close to the body.207 The exceptional difficulty of the pose is caused by the enormous weight that has to be balanced by the horse’s haunches when bending so deeply that the natural centroid is lowered while its weight­press­ ure simultaneously increases – an effect that is emphasised by the rider’s upright pos­ ture paralleling the animal’s graciously erect neck line. The animal’s body exhibits a highly elaborate display of muscular tension and control that differentiates it from the natural movements of the horses commonly carrying Rubens’ sitters in a pose originating from the art of dressage. While noblemen like the Duke of Lerma are shown to control the will of a stormy animal by the mere power of their virtuous character, Buckingham and his horse work together, joined in a mutual endeavour to perform the perfect pose. Rider and horse exhibit what other equestrian pairs can­ 206 For a detailed account, see: Cogswell (1989): op. cit., (note 95). 207 On the figures of haute école riding within the fine arts, see: Liedtke, Walter (1989): The Royal Horse and Rider. Painting, Sculpture, and Horsemanship, 1500–1800, New York: Abaris Books.

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not display: a body trained to excel and to outdo that of others. The horse, in fact, performs a dance­like figure, an exercise characteristic of the High School of the Spanish ‘noble horse’ that was trained to develop perfection in self­carriage, straight­ ness and difficult movement in order to display its artful body in the traditional court performances, and this would certainly have been part of the entertainment given for the English prince and Buckingham during their stay at the court of Philip IV. The full­blooded horse of the Duke’s equestrian portrait added an air of high breeding and noble descent to the display of the man who had begun his career at court without the inheritance of land or title. Judging from Buckingham’s admir­ ation for Titian’s equestrian composition for Charles V, and his remarkable compre­ hension of the semiotic principles underlying the courtly display of the body in the masque, it seems highly probable that the pose of the levade was a feature specially requested in the commission of the painting. Presented in this way, horse and rider convey a splendid, sensuous impression of effortless dignity and weightlessness simi­ lar to the uprightness of bearing and appearance of airy lightness that could already be observed to distinguish Van Dyck’s depiction of Buckingham as Adonis. Just as the costly animal was subjected to the art of dressage, which relied on the body’s ability to remember trained movement, so too had Buckingham acquired the artifice of pose as if it were second nature, transforming grace into a habitual state that be­ spoke of Castiglionian sprezzatura. As Castiglione and his followers in the writing of courtesy books had shown, what was conveyed as ‘inbred’ and resulting from noble birth only, in fact resulted from continuous training that began in early childhood, a perception testifying to the atmosphere of social mobility for which Buckingham’s career at court serves as a prime example. Buckingham’s repeated portrait commissions from 1618 onwards illustrate the courtier’s appreciation of painting as a medium that enhanced the choreographed semiotic of courtly distinction, its emphasis on movement and gesture. By extending established notions of art collecting, the royal favourite perceived painting as a means to overcome the semiotic logic of the masque that kept the English courtier in the principal dilemma of displaying his body in continuous movement and in reference to the monarch, which would be rendered into a stable expression of social prestige only by means of continuity and repetition. The Duke’s portrait commis­ sions demonstrate an appreciation for the particular capacity of Baroque painting to cast movement in the frame of the picture­plane and thereby embody a form of ex­ pression that operated aside from the physical contradiction of movement and sta­ bility by transforming this very movement into the stability of pictorial figuration – a stasis that in early seventeenth­century England evoked the ideal of the unmoved personality, the soul that sustains itself in virtue and admits the flux and turbulence of the world around it. Through the emblematic use of the images of centre and circle as symbols of harmony, completeness and duration, the stability of the self 185

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derived from a Christianised tradition of platonic stoicism regarding the pristine superiority of the inner moral equilibrium that prominently featured in the literary production of late sixteenth and early seventeenth­century England.208 Lauded for their immutability and resistance to change, courtiers like the Earl of Pembroke, for example in a dedicatory poem by Ben Jonson, were esteemed for being men ‘whose noblesse keeps one stature still / and one true posture, though besieg’d with ill’, while others ‘follow virtue, for reward, today; / to morrow vice, if she gives better pay’.209 This distrust in ephemerality was eventually used as a critique of the turning world of the masque, which with canvas, paper and false light built glorious scenes and great sights that, however, remained short­lived, counterfeit, and the antithesis to everything valuable and long­lasting. Arguing for the superiority of his poetry as the enduring part of the masque, Ben Jonson, in the preface to Hymenaei (1606), condensed his critique of Jones’s stage designs by emphasis of their transient nature, which is worth quoting at length: ‘It is a noble and just advantage, that the things subjected to understanding have of those which are objected to sense, that the one sort are but momentary, and merely taking; the other impressing, and lasting: Else the glorie of all these solemnities had perish’d likea blaze, and gone out, in the beholders eyes. So short­liv’d are the bodies of all things, in comparison of their soules. And, though bodies oft­times have the ill luck to be sensually preferr’d, they find afterwards, the good fortune (when soules live) to be utterly forgotten. (…) And, howsoever some may squea­ mishly crie out, that all endevour of learning, and sharpnesse in these transitorie devices especially, where it steps beyond their little, or (let me not wrong ‘them) no braine at all, is superfluous; I am contented, these fastidious stomachs should leave my full tables, and enjoy at home, their cleane emptie trenchers, fittest for such ayrie tastes: where perhaps a few Italian herbs, pick’d up, and made into a sallade, may find sweeter acceptance, than all, the most nourishing, and sound meates of the world.’210

Though written in the context of his rather personal paragone with his collaborator and rival Jones, Jonson’s critique of the ephemeral stage designs conveys the dis­ advantage of the courtier’s self­display in the masque. By choosing the figure of the levade for his depiction on horseback, Buckingham clearly sought to exploit paint­ 208 Compare the motto of semper edem in the personal iconography of Elizabeth I, discussed in the Prologue (p. 6). 209 Quoted from: Ben Jonson: op. cit., (note 111), VIII, p. 96. See also: Greene, Thomas (1970): ‘Ben Jonson and the Centred Self’, in: Studies in English Literature. 1500–1900, vol. X, no. 2, pp. 325–48, p. 331. 210 Hymenaei was the first of Ben Jonson’s masques to be published. Quoted from: Ben Jonson: op. cit., (note 111), VII, pp. 209f.

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ing’s particular capacity to transcend the transient display of the masque. Holding a pose that could be attained only by way of previous movement, the levade empha­ sised like no other figure in the art of equestrian dressage the effect of movement in suspension. By indicating movement through the display of fluttering textures, cir­ cular composition and non­frontal perspective, Baroque painting came to capture the transitory, kinetic quality of the courtly body in a permanent visual represen­ tation that combined the effect of its sensory experience with that of a stable image. It was the self­reflexivity of his illusionistic portrait commissions that allowed Buck­ ingham to navigate the dangerous currents of political life. Unlike the masque, the painted image allowed Buckingham to fabricate his personal frame of represen­ tation, and to distance himself from his peers and rivals at court. Resulting from this was the production of a visual territory reserved for the fashioning and display of his own image. Where the visual economy of the masque afforded the courtier’s inte­ gration in a greater vision of royal magnificence, from which he would seek to stand out by way of performance, painting’s creation of a frame around, and in the scale of, his own body at once kept all uncontrollable visual distraction out of the picture, and intensified the appeal of the vision presented within.211

211 For a discussion of the role of the frame in the history of art, see: Marin, Louis (1972): ‘La lecture du tableau d’après Poussin’, in: Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Etudes Français, vol. XXIV, pp. 251–66; and, idem (1982): ‘Du cadre au décor ou la question de l’orna­ ment dans la peinture’, in: Revista di Estetica, vol. XII, pp. 16–35; Lebensztejn, Jean­Claude (1988): ‘Framing Classical Space’, in: Art Journal, vol. XLVII, no. 1, pp. 37–41. For a read­ ing particularly concerned with the relationship between perspective and the frame, see: Meyer Schapiro (1969): ‘On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image­Signs’, in: Semiotica, vol. I, pp. 223–42. The most remarkable study of the (de)construction of the frame to date is: Derrida, Jacques (1987): ‘Parergon’, in: idem, The Truth in Painting, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 15–147. See especially in the context given here: Marin, Louis (1996): ‘The Frame of Representation and Some of its Figures’, in: Paul Duro (ed.), The Rhetoric of the Frame. Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 79–95.

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‘Antwerpian Rubens’ best skill made him soare’:1 The Duke of Buckingham and the Triumph of Painting at the Court of Charles I

The portraits Buckingham commissioned from Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens portrayed the courtly body in an elegant and dynamic manner that was previously unseen at the English court. They fostered aspirations of social distinction and promoted a reappraisal of the figure of the courtier as an aesthetic object of sight. By augmenting his physical charm through the virtuosity of the artist, the portraits of the king’s favourite advanced a pictorial representation of the courtly body that enhanced the established semiotic of choreographed movement in the Stuart masque as a constituent of courtly distinction, transferring it into the aesthetic of painting as an artwork that was suitable for permanent display. By reassessing the nature of the picture-plane as a medium that worked against the dominant practice of representation in theatrical performance, Buckingham’s portrait commissions, as I have argued in the previous chapter, disseminated painting as a medium that allowed the courtier to shape the appearance of his body in a particular pose. Such a re-shaping of the physical not only accounts for a novel perception of the painted image as a medium of courtly distinction at the Stuart court, but reflects an epistemic change in the perception of painting as a means for the control and manipulation of the visual. By allowing not only for a display but a deliberate design of bodily movement and gesture, the painted image transferred the most distinct signification of courtly identity from an ephemeral into an enduring quality that undermined the necessity for performance in the court masque. By providing the body of the courtier with his own, personal frame of representation, the portrait set his display apart from a spatial relatedness to the body of the king. The increased visibility of Buckingham’s body in the painted image thus promoted a novel semiotic for the expression of courtly power that challenged not only the representation of his social equals in the masque, but also that of the infinite sovereign power of the king’s body itself. 1

Quoted from ‚Felton Commended, etc’, in: Fairholt, F. W. (1850): Poems and Songs relating to George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, and his assassination by John Felton, August 23, 1628, London: Percy Society, pp. 69–70, p. 70.

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This chapter assesses the redefined role of painting at the Stuart court of James’s son and heir to the throne, Charles I, who assembled the greatest royal picture collection of his time in his ill-fated, 24-year reign. It also draws attention to a second known portrait-commission of the Duke of Buckingham to Peter Paul Rubens: his 1625 ceiling for the Duke’s London residence, York House, hitherto commonly referred to as The Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham. The painting, which depicts Buckingham’s ascent to the realms of the heavens, displays a figure of suspense, already familiar from the analysis of Rubens’ The Duke of Buckingham on Horseback, which accomplished the synthesis of the masque in the painted image. Conveying a depiction of liminality hitherto reserved for the representation of the monarch in the masque, Rubens’ ceiling for York House promoted a vision of power which resided in the image itself. The ceiling essentially prefigured the design of the central canvas in the painted heavens of Rubens’ ceiling for the Great Hall of Whitehall Banqueting House, which, in the apotheosis of James I, employed an iconic trope that in reference to Louis Marin can be understood to characterise the royal portrait. Locating the production of sovereign power in the image of the king, Louis Marin has understood the immortality of royal dignity as arising from the image’s neutralising effect on movement and rest that creates, so Marin asserts, the infinite representation of the king in his portrait.2 Marin defines the king’s portrait as the true presence (presence réelle) of the sovereign, and his work on the nature of kingship focuses on this aspect of representation in the constitution of royal power. This interpretation differs significantly from that of Kantorowicz in both method and scope.3 It should be emphasised here, however, that reading Marin on the basis of Kantorowicz’s work on the king’s two bodies clearly illustrates that analysis of the royal image will not suffice in a semiotics of representation, but essentially requires the consideration of its changing identity in political history. Through his study of the image of Louis XIV in Hyacinthe Rigaud’s painting of the French King from 1701 (Fig. 39), Louis Marin has defined the king’s portrait as the royal iconic sign, which purports that ‘the body of the king is really present in the form of his portrait’.4 Unlike Kantorowicz, Marin does not employ the categories of the king’s body natural and politic, but differentiates between the king as the ‘real individual’ and the King, who acquires the capital letter, which signifies his title as ruling sovereign by contemplation of his own portrait.5 Asking us to imagine the king in the moment of 2

3 4 5

See: Marin, Louis (1989): ‘The Portrait of the King’s Glorious Body’, in: idem, Food for Thought, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 189–217. Henceforth referred to as (1989a). See: Marin, Louis (1988): The Portrait of the King, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marin (1989a): op. cit., (note 2), p. 190. Ibid.

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Fig. 39: Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV, 1701

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beholding his own portrait, Marin chooses to examine a scene that, so he says, ‘sums up or condenses all the signs and insignia of a political power operating at the greatest level of efficacy’, as ‘the King only imitates his portrait just as the portrait imitates the king’ and the representations of both ‘are involved in a process of mutual mimesis that reveals the fundamental figure articulating power and representation’.6 It is noteworthy that Marin’s study of the ‘efficacy and performativity of the royal iconic sign’ assumes the efficacy of the king’s portrait as constituent of his power as a given; a natural effect validated by the visible relation that exists between the king and his portrait, which makes the dictum that is the King figurative in sense.7 Marin defines the portrait of the king as the paradigm of representation in the classic episteme, and questions the performativity of the royal iconic sign in analogy to the sacramental word of the Eucharist, hoc est corpum meum, which effects the ontological transformation ‘of an existing thing into a produced body’.8 Referring to the representational dispositive of seventeenth-century France – which he elaborated from his reading of the Logic of Port-Royal – Marin thus compares the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic bread to the presence of the king in his portrait, wherein the king as re-presentation (i.e. the King) says of his portrait: this is my body.9 By investing the king’s portrait with the capacity to constitute sovereign power by presenting an image of the king as King, Marin has developed a complex theory on the significance of the image in relation to both the representation of power and the power of representation that is currently gaining attention in art-historical scholarship as a general approach to the study of visual representation in the Baroque period.10

6 7 8

9

10

Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 192. Marin, Louis (1989): ‘Introduction to the English-Language Edition’, in: idem, Food for Thought, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. xvii. Henceforth referred to as (1989b). See: Ibid., ‘As a heuristic hypothesis, I propose that we consider historical narratives, panegyrics, paintings, medals, or portraits as extensions of the utterance “This is my body”. Proffered by the myth of the prince, these various representations, in their diverse modalities, are transformed into so many signs of the political sacrament of the state, as it is really present in the monarch.’ p. xviii. While the English-language edition of Le portrait du roi had been in print as early as 1988, its translation into German was published in 2005, and was complemented shortly afterwards by a collection of essays on the paradigm of representation in the work of Louis Marin that was edited by Vera Beyer, Jutta Voorhoeve and Anslem Haverkamp. See: Beyer, Vera et. al. (2006): Das Bild ist der König. Repräsentation nach Louis Marin, München: Fink. Note therein especially Dirk Setton’s chapter on ‘Mächtige Impotenz: Zur Dynamo-Logik des Königsportraits’, pp. 217–44, and the German edition of Marin’s introduction to Des pouvoirs de l’image from 1993 (‘Das Sein des Bildes und seine Wirksamkeit’, pp. 15–24), and

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Marin defines the efficacy of the royal iconic sign to be at work in its very performativity, i.e. the immanent and infinite process of signifying the king as ‘King’ every time he faces his portrait, which as such resides within his portrait and in advance of his title. Illustrating the specific quality of time as involved in the constitution of sovereign power, Marin alludes to the pose of Louis XIV’s legs, which Hyacinthe Rigaud chose to show in the fourth position of the classical ballet. The weight of the body is divided between both legs, and this position, with one foot placed in front of the other, marks, as Marin emphasises, a pause within a flow of movement, a pause ‘that begins or ends the future or past execution of a given movement’.11 Marin questions this position beyond its function in the choreography of dance, and understands this pause as the very pose of the King, which marks ‘a suspended instance that fashions something like a corporeal ideality’, and brings together ‘an eternal instance and an infinite duration (…) in the extreme density of a moment’.12 What Marin describes here is the continuity of royal dignity, which Ernst Kantorowicz had shown to rest in the corporate body of the king. For Marin this ‘figure of suspended movement’ makes the king’s body ‘sensuous and feminine by means of suspenders and the silky curve of its legs’, and it is by ‘example of this royal leg’ that we are to understand the portrait of the king as ‘the fetish of representation’, which is ‘directly related to politics and, more precisely, to the monarch’s absolute power, as it is really present in his portrait’.13 Alluding to Deleuze, who understands the fetish as the abnegation of an absence, Marin here understands the royal leg to cause the real presence of the monarch in his portrait by a ‘gesture of abnegation’ that constitutes the ‘infinite expansion of the King’s power’ by saying: ‘No, I do not lack potency; no, I am

the reprint of Jacque Derrida’s ‘Kraft der Trauer. Die Macht des Bildes bei Louis Marin’, pp. 25–46, reprinted from: Der Entzug der Bilder. Visuelle Realitäten, Michael Wetzel and Herta Wolf (eds.), München: Fink, pp. 15–39. 11 Marin (1989a): op. cit., (note 2), p. 204. 12 Ibid., p. 205. 13 Ibid., ‘(…) The King’s glorious body makes itself sensuous and feminine by means of suspenders and the silky curve of its legs, which are shown to be like those of a dancer in the fourth position, the very figure of suspended movement; the King is like a dancer caught in the imminence of another movement in the interspace of a single gesture. Using the example of his royal leg, we should be able to show that the portrait of the King is also the fetish of representation and that eroticism and aesthetics, as the sensuous value of taste, are directly related to politics and, more precisely, to the Monarch’s absolute power, as it is really present in his portrait.’, p. 206.

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not without power’.14 As the fetish, which serves the purpose of suspending the king’s body in a sphere of the ideal that asserts itself over and against reality, Marin denominates the royal leg to safeguard the constitution of absolute power in the portrait of the king – thereby establishing an appreciation of the virile royal body as iconographic model in the political fiction of French absolutism.15 However, although Marin’s reference to Deleuze serves to explain the performative effect of the royal portrait that infinitely transforms the representation of the monarch into the presentation of his sovereign power – an aspect that will be discussed further below – it fails to consider ‘the royal iconic sign’ in historical perspective. This chapter re-reads Marin’s theory on the royal iconic sign in consideration of the changing iconographies of the English royal portrait, and investigates the role of the king’s painted image in constituting the continuity of English royal dignity as a sovereign power ruling autonomously from first the pope and eventually from Parliament. The iconic significance that Marin attaches to Louis XIV’s legs is familiar from Holbein’s depiction of the muscular tights and calves of Henry VIII. As has been shown in the Prologue, Holbein’s emblematic rendering of Henry’s legs had served to confirm the Tudor monarch’s right to sovereign rule by emphasising the king’s sexual power. Through its promotion of a vision of absolute masculinity, Holbein’s painting of the Tudor king embodies the first portrait of an English monarch specifically commissioned to fashion a political representation of royal power at the English court. Created in the very moment Henry turned from Rome and abolished papal power in the kingdom, the royal portrait absorbs the loss of ecclesiastical authorisation and comes to constitute sovereign power within the image itself. The emphasis given within this image to the masculine rendering of Henry’s legs in this context derives

14

15

Ibid., ‘As we know, the fetishist denies that women lack a penis and does so through an image or a substitute phallus: as a child, he or she will choose as a fetish the last object seen before the glimpsing of this absence. The shoe is an example of a fetish with respect to the gaze that wanders up the leg, starting at the feet. The repeated return to this object, the constant repetition of a trajectory that starts from this same point, tends to maintain the contested organ’s right to exist. Gilles Deleuze has shown how the fetish, far from being a symbol, is in a certain sense a stationary image, an arrested image which the gaze leaves only to return to it forever, to repeat eternally the abnegation of an absence. (…) The real presence of the monarch in his portrait is first brought about by the transcendental gesture of abnegation, the abnegation of the limit, which is the abnegation of all possible negation, of indefinite extension of the infinite expansion of the King’s power: “No, I do not lack potency; no, I am not without power” – the hyperbolic value of litotes.’, pp. 206f. See: Zanger, Abby (1998): ‘Lim(b)inal Images: Betwixt and between Louis XIV’s martial and marital Bodies’, in: Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg (eds.), From the Royal to the Republican Body. Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 32–63.

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from the need to convey royal power as absolute and perpetual. In accordance with the juridical doctrine of rex qui numquam moritur, Holbein’s portrait of the English king with his wife, father, and mother creates a painted image of royal dignity, concurring with the immortalisation of dynasty as corporation by succession. Standing between the figure of his father, Henry VII, and his third wife, Jane Seymour, who arguably already carried Henry’s first heir at the time the fresco was commissioned, Henry VIII is depicted uniting the heritage of his father’s reign and the fecundity of the coming reign of his son in his body, which thus simultaneously resides over past, present and future, thereby finding an image for the idea of sovereign kingship as changing and yet infinite, capable of claiming the immortal continuity of royal dignity. While the portrait of Henry VIII thereby asserted sovereign kingship in an image of dynastic continuity, the wildly disseminated portraits of Elizabeth I had deliberately rejected any allusion to the question of a dynastic future within their iconography, aiming, rather, to render the queen’s virginity as an emblem of her sovereign power. As contrasted as those two iconographic strategies in the portrait of Henry and that of Elizabeth may seem at first, both aspired to illustrate their sitters in a liminal state that registered the exceptional status of monarchy as between the human and the divine. Representing Elizabeth as the unchanging icon of virginity, the portrait of the queen depicted her within a dimension outside the normative conception of time, prominently epitomised in her motto semper eadem. By affirming the doctrine of rex qui numquam moritur in the iconography of her personal image, Elizabeth was depicted as Phoenix, the bird that rises from its own ashes, and had been chosen by the magistrates to symbolise royal dignity through its simultaneous embodiment of individual and species, which registered the continuous but exceptional nature of sovereignty. What Marin has discovered in his analysis of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV – the neutralisation of movement and rest in ‘the figure of the pause’ – as such exemplifies a general figure of the royal iconography that constitutes the king’s portrait as a performative evocation, which shall be referred to as the figure of suspense. This figure of suspense underlies the composition of the portraits of Henry and Elizabeth within two pictorially and compositionally different images. Both images convey the exceptional position of sovereignty in the realm of time – that of Henry by visualising dynastic continuity in the form of a family portrait, and that of Elizabeth by offering an emblematic illustration of the queen as the unmoved mover and ageless icon. It is from within this context that this chapter will consider the state portraits of the first two Stuart monarchs, focusing on Peter Paul Rubens’ Apotheosis of James I, the central work of nine monumental canvases installed on the ceiling of the Great Hall of Whitehall’s Banqueting House in 1636 (Fig. 40), after almost fifteen years of its commission, and Anthony van Dyck’s much celebrated Charles I à la chasse from 1635. 195

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Fig. 40: Peter Paul Rubens, Ceiling of the Great Hall of Whitehall Banqueting House, 1621–35

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From Stage to Ceiling Posthumous Portrait: Peter Paul Rubens’ ‘Banqueting House Ceiling’ Because no contract or other substantial documentary evidence has been preserved, the commission of Rubens’ Banqueting House Ceiling has remained uncertain.16 Most recently, however, Gregory Martin has provided what will probably become the definitive study of Rubens’ monumental work, giving an extensive summary of its discussion in art-historical scholarship to date, and, for the first time, collecting all relevant information in a two-volume study.17 In 1970, Julius Held examined Rubens’ sketches and their modelling from Venetian painting, and proposed a rearrangement of the ceiling’s canvases that re-established Rubens’ intention and matched a descriptive plan of the ceiling, discovered by Leo van Puyvelde in 1942, that dates from the eighteenth century. Martin’s summary of the long-standing disagreement concerning the identification of the ceiling’s various figures and commissioners illustrates once more the unilateral perspective from which this most expensive and monumental artwork of the English court of the seventeenth century, has been considered in its art-historical and historical analysis. Detached from the wider discussion of art and culture of the Stuart court, Rubens’ Banqueting House Ceiling appears as a 16

17

The study of Whitehall Banqueting House began in 1957 with Per Palme’s monograph on the building and its interior, which long remained its most comprehensive study. The ceiling’s iconography has been analysed by Oliver Millar, D. J. Gordon, Roy Strong and, most enduringly, by Gregory Martin, whose recent volume for the Corpus Rubenianum represents the most substantial study of the London ceiling. See: Palme, Per (1957): Triumph of Peace. A Study of the Whitehall Banqueting House, London: Thames and Hudson; Held, Julius (1970): ‘Rubens’ Glynde Sketch and the Installation of the Whitehall Ceiling’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CXII, no. 806, pp. 274–81; Puyvlede, Leo van (1942): ‘Rubens’ Glorification of James I at Whitehall’, in: Message, vol. II, pp. 38–41; Millar, Oliver (1956): ‘The Whitehall Ceiling’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. LIXVIII, no. 641, pp. 258–67; Gordon, Donald James (1977): ‘Rubens and the Whitehall Ceiling’, in: Stephen Orgel (ed.), The Renaissance Imagination. Essays and Lectures by D. J. Gordon, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 25–50; Strong, Roy (1980): Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens and Whitehall Palace, New York: Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture; and, Martin, Gregory (1994): ‘The Banqueting House Ceiling. Two Newly Discovered Projects’, in: Apollo, vol. CXXXIX, no. 2, pp. 29–34; idem (1995): ‘Rubens and King James I’, in: Shop Talk. Studies in Honour of Seymour Slive, Cambridge; Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 168–70; idem (2000): ‘Rubens’ Paintings for the Banqueting House’, in: Hans Vlieghe, Arnout Balis, and Carl van de Velde (eds.), Concept, Design and Execution in Flemish Painting, Turnhout: Basil, pp. 171–3; idem (2005): The Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XV), 2 vols., London: Turnhout. See: Martin (2005): op. cit., (above).

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work without context, an unprovoked commission, a message outdated before its delivery. Mentioned in a letter from the Flemish master to King James as early as 1621, the ceiling’s nine canvases were installed almost fifteen years later, in 1636, by which time the first Stuart monarch had long since deceased and his son Charles had succeeded him. Through its display of a cyclic glorification of James’s past reign, the ceiling has posed difficulties for any attempts to study it in the context of Charles’s contemporary politics, for it seems to distract from rather than enhance the representation of the second Stuart king. The iconography and composition of the ceiling have thus principally been studied as an internal discourse, in which the separate canvases are analysed in relation to each other, decoding the allegories commemorating his reign. Rubens’ ceiling for the Banqueting House depicts the apotheosis of King James I, his wise rule and union of the Scottish and English crowns. At the side of the central canvas are two smaller canvases that display a procession of putti and infant Bacchants with animals and two chariots of fruit. In the corners, each set in one oval, are Hercules, Minerva, Abundance and Temperance triumphing over personifications of vice and evil. Upon entering the Banqueting Hall, foreign kings, ambassadors and the courtiers thus first saw The Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England, the middle compartment of the ceiling’s northern end, set at an angle of 180 degrees to the other two parts. Wearing Parliamentary robes and the imperial crown, James is shown enthroned with his left hand resting on the imperial orb. He leans forward and points with the sceptre in his right hand towards two women, kneeling before him and representing the two kingdoms of Scotland and England. The personified kingdoms are united by the embrace of Cupid, who tramples the insignia of war underfoot. Acting as James’s divine agent, Minerva ties together the two crowns held by the women, while from above descend two amoretti, who bring a shield, adorned with the Order of the Garter and white and red roses, that displays the new royal coat of arms and carries the imperial crown.18 The first canvas of Rubens’ ceiling is thus concerned with the display of the first and most significant reform of James’s reign, while the central canvas of the upper, or southern, end of the ceiling correspondingly shows the first Stuart king as promoter and keeper of peace, the role to which he himself had attached most significance throughout his reign, emphasised by his motto: beati pacifici.19 About to be in18

19

The identity of the child between the two women has been a subject of extensive discussion, and is thought by some to represent James’s heir to the throne, Charles I, as a young boy. Resuming the discussion, I would like to follow the interpretation of Gregory Martin, who identified the child as Cupid by referring to the depiction of a quiver at its side in an earlier sketch for the canvas. See: Martin (2005), op. cit., (note 16), p. 211f. For a detailed account of James’s efforts to end the war with Spain which he inherited from Elizabeth and to restore diplomatic contacts with the Continent, see: Patterson, William

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vested with a laurel wreath, James sits in The Wise Rule of King James I, between two Solomonic columns, shielding the personifications of Peace and Plenty with a protective gesture of his left arm. At his side is Minerva, recognisable by her helmet, breastplates and shield, who is armed with Jupiter’s thunderbolts, and Mercury, to the left; together, they ward off Mars, God of war, who falls onto the masculine figure of Discord, similar to that in Rubens’ equestrian portrait of Buckingham. As Britain’s new Solomon, a topos fashioned for the representation of the virtue and wisdom ascribed to his body politic, James hoped to establish himself as the peacemaker between the Protestant and Roman Catholic nations of seventeenth-century Europe. The comparison is already evident within the panegyric imagery from the very beginning of his reign, becoming a standard image of the king’s efforts to resolve the religious dispute which Henry VIII, the first English monarch to include the figure in his repertoire of propaganda, had provoked.20 In the centre of Rubens’ Banqueting House Ceiling, behind a great oval frame, is displayed the Apotheosis of James I (Fig. 41), which shows the king, with grey hair and parliamentary robes, being carried on the back of Jupiter’s eagle, and supporting the globe of the world, upon which his foot is rested. Assisted by Justice, who raises him by his left arm, James ascends to the heavens, where he is to be crowned by Victory and Mercury with the laurel wreath, while two putti remove his imperial orb and crown. Piety, to the king’s right, kneels by her flaming altar, while behind her Religion is clasping a book and raises her eyes to God. The theme of James’s apotheosis, as it is clearly exhibited in this central canvas, has repeatedly been understood as inspired by Rubens’ personal awareness of the theme which he had already featured in one of the 24 canvases of his picture cycle for Marie de’ Medici, produced between 1621 and 1625.21 Indeed, the Apotheosis of Henry IV, today in the Louvre, shows Marie’s husband, Henri IV, carried to the heavens by Jove and Saturn where the arch of the zodiac marks the way to Olympus, who is waiting to receive him. Brown (1997): King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Lee, Maurice (1990): Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms, Chicago: University of Illinois Press; Tate, William (2001): Solomonic Iconography in Early Stuart England. Solomon’s Wisdom, Solomon’s Folly, Lewiston: Edwin Mellon. 20 The comparison of English monarchs to biblical figures was commonplace in the pamphlet literature and political poetry of the early Stuart period, referring to Queen Elizabeth as a new Judith or Debora, to Prince Henry as the new Josiah, and even to Oliver Cromwell as a new Moses, Gideon or David. See: Lewalski, Barbara K. (1979): Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, Princeton: Princeton University Press. See also the discussion of Van Dyck’s Continence of Scipio in Chapter Two. Vaughan Hart pays particular attention to the comparison of James with King Solomon, and includes its assessment in his reading of the masque as an occult practice and Inigo Jones as a Hermeticist. See: Hart, Vaughan (1994): Art and Magic at the Court of the Stuarts, London: Routledge. 21 First mentioned by Palme (1957), op. cit., (note 16).

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Rubens’ apotheosis of Henri IV alludes to the iconic tradition of the apotheosis in imperial Rome, where Julius Caesar, as narrated in Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus’ De vita Caesarum, dreamt on the evening of his assassination that he flew above the clouds and held the hand of Jupiter. The story had been allegorised by Ovid, who writes that Caesar’s soul was carried to heaven as a god by Venus herself. Rubens’ apotheosis of Henri IV mirrors the classical iconic prototypes of the imperial apotheosis wherein Jove’s eagle carries the soul of Augustus to the heavens.22 Through its narration of the virtuous reign of King James in three lavishly depicted scenes from his life and death, Peter Paul Rubens’ monumental ceiling furnished the Great Hall of the Banqueting House with a size of painting that was familiar from the history of the Venetian Republic but entirely new to the Stuart court. Although it must have appeared overwhelming to the eyes of its English beholders, it cannot justifiably remain so in the judgement of the art historian, and it is therefore the more remarkable that Rubens’ commission for the English Crown has only been contextualised as a particular piece in the extensive body of the painter’s own work: a perspective that naturally raises questions of commission, technical history and authorship in iconography over those of the work’s reception and significance within its specific social and aesthetic environment. By proposing a renewed analysis of Rubens’ ceiling for Whitehall Banqueting House that enquires into the way in which the installation of a large-scale painting of the late Stuart monarch might have affected the masque as the hitherto dominant art form at the court of his son, the following discussion goes beyond questions of the ceiling’s political allegory to that of its significance in reshaping the theory of the royal portrait at the court of Charles I. Historians of early modern English kingship still misunderstand the nature of the royal portrait, emphasising that the skill and complexity with which ‘Rubens has invested his image of James I makes this indeed an allegory of the first Stuart kingship and not merely a portrait of the king’.23 Asserting the stereotype of the Scotsman who lacked almost any interest in visual imagery, historians of Jacobean regal imagery have assessed the few existing portraits of James I as an indiscriminate part of the wide range of artistic production concerned with the royal propaganda of the first Stuart monarch. Such thinking neglects considerations of the particular role and function of the portrait, as the one art form capable of re-presenting the presence of the king’s body – natural and politic – in its actual likeness. The pre-eminent 22

23

See: Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus: De vita Caesarum, ed. by Maximilian Ihm, 8 vols., Stuttgart: Teubner, 1993; and, Publius Ovidus Naso: Metamorphosen, trans. Gerhard Fink, Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 2004. See: Howarth, David (1997): Images of Rule. Art and Politics in the English Renaissance. 1485– 1649, London: Macmillan, p. 124.

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Fig. 41: Peter Paul Rubens, Apotheosis of James I, middle panel of the ceiling of the Great Hall of Whitehall Banqueting House, 1621–35

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position of the royal portrait over other imagery of sovereign power springs from its capacity to encapsulate a seamless equation between the individual monarch and the state, an equation that the genre of the masque tried to imitate by juxtaposing the king as spectator with a theatrical representation of his power on stage. James’s staged representation, however, would always remain ephemeral, and when, at the end of his second decade on the throne, the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War caused the decline of his popularity in the country, it was a painted representation that challenged his authority. The posthumous elevation of his predecessor, Elizabeth Tudor, to the Heroine of the Protestant cause returned in the form of her allconsuming portrait.24 Among the images that appeared in the form of engravings and even panel painting, for which the question of commission remains unresolved, has survived a portrait of unknown authorship that shows the queen as an aged woman, seated between the figures of Death, who hovers over her left shoulder, and Time, sleeping to her right, his hourglass lying broken in front of him. With her head resting on her left arm in a gesture of melancholic contemplation, the portrait seems to commemorate the queen after her death. Dated to c. 1620, the panel has been understood to display Elizabeth’s apotheosis, asking its beholder ‘to move through a Petrarchan triumph, on through Death to Fame, Time and Eternity’.25 The panel’s message reads around the figure of the queen, who in the face of death overcomes the law of time and is crowned by two putti with the laurel wreath of eternal glory. Elizabeth is shown triumphing over death and time, and the posthumous portrait thus embodied a strong representation of the late Tudor queen’s sovereign dignity and eternal fame, which was to pose a living threat to the regal power of her successor. Through its commemoration of the queen’s political power by recalling her victory over the law of time that had constituted the performative quality of her lifetime image, the posthumous portrait, I suggest, revived the sovereign power of Elizabeth, seemingly challenging James’s regal authority from above. By demonstrating the portrait’s active role in statecraft, the painted image of Elizabeth rivalled not only the sovereign status of the Stuart king, but strongly questioned the efficacy of the masque as a medium for royal representation. The staged images of state mythology projected by James’s court masques did not seem to equal the power created by the painted image of Elizabeth. Significantly, James’s first approach toward Peter Paul Rubens concerning the commission of a picture cycle for

24

25

For a detailed analysis of the posthumous representation of Elizabeth, see: Dobson, Michael (2002): England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy, Oxford: Oxford University Press; and, Watkins, John (1992): Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See: Strong, Roy (1987): Gloriana. The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, London: Thames and Hudson, p. 164.

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the ceiling of the Banqueting House dates from shortly after the appearance of Elizabeth’s posthumous portrait. This coincidence might rebut the common assertion that the initial motivation of the commission is ‘negligible’.26 In fact, an exploration of the posthumous portrait of Elizabeth might well introduce a new perspective to the analysis of Rubens’ monumental design for the Great Hall of the Banqueting House. A detail that gains new significance in this context is the fact that there existed two previous designs intended for the central oval of Rubens’ Banqueting House ceiling, which are generally assumed to have been devised by Inigo Jones, before the depiction of James’s apotheosis was chosen. The first of the two designs planned depicted the king with ‘a Laurell wreath on his head, holding in one hand a booke open & in the other a penn’, while above him were ‘the muses with theyr severall Ensignes, & some Angells flying with garlands & and strewing of flowers’.27 This vision was intended, as the design further notes, to ‘express [James’s] learning, in wch he exceeded all the Kings of his tyme’.28 Significantly, this circle of early modern monarchs was remodelled into that of the most eminent kings in Christian history, intended to show ‘an open heaven’ and, within it, James ‘sitting upon a Cloude, being carried up by diverse Angells to join King Solomon and Christian rulers (…) bathed in beams shyning downe from the glory of the Deity above’.29 Such a design might have been deemed capable of acting as a counterpoise to the posthumous glorification of Elizabeth as the Heroine of the Protestant cause, and, I would argue, relates to another project pursued by the king, his favourite and Inigo Jones:30 At the same time that the design for the great ceiling was planned, James asked Inigo Jones to join Buckingham at the ruins of Stonehenge near Wilton House, where the king and Buckingham had stayed in 1620, hosted by the Earl of Pembroke. Jones was commissioned by the king to survey its excavations and review on the grounds of his ‘own practice in Architecture and experience in Antiquities abroad, what possibly

26

This opinion has most recently been emphasised by Gregory Martin. See: Martin (2005): op. cit., (note 15), p. 23. 27 Ibid., Appendix I, A, p. 308. 28 Ibid. 29 Quoted from: Ibid., p. 185. The two programmes were discovered among the papers of Sir John Coke, Secretary of State to King Charles since September 1625, and first published in: Martin (1994): op. cit., (note 16), who dates both programme drafts prior to James’s death. See: Appendix I, A. and B. 30 The group of past kings whom James here joins is that of: King Solomon of Israel, known for his wisdom and most frequently associated with James; the Roman and first Christian Emperor Constantine, whose mother claimed to be British; King Edward the Confessor, from whom James claimed descent; King Louis IX of France, the patron saint of France, to whose crown James laid claim; and finally James’s ancestor King James I of Scotland.

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[he] could discover concerning this of Stonehenge’.31 Rejecting previous theories that the group of prehistoric, monumental stone blocks were indeed the remains of a Druidic temple, Jones sought to confirm his patron’s suggestion by measuring the remaining proportions and re-constructing the ground plan that would represent the roofless structure of a circular temple, built in Roman antiquity for the worship of Coelus, the god of the skies. Jones’s transcript of his findings, which was published only posthumously in 1655 by John Webb under the title The Most Notable Antiquity, Vulgarly called Stone-Heng on Salisburg Plain restored, presented the first study of an architectural site in Britain.32 As Orgel and others after him have shown, Jones’s identification of Stonehenge as a Roman temple refers to the drawing of the Roman theatre according to Vitruvius, which Daniele Barbaro included in his edition of I dieci libri dell’architettura. (Fig. 42) Jones’s reference to Stonehenge is generally invoked in order to prove that his argument concerning the building’s origin is questionable, since it overlooked the fact that the Vitruvian ground plan represented a theatre rather than a temple. A different conclusion, which shall be put forth for discussion here, and which is suggested by Jones’s annotations in his copy of Vitruvius which he possessed in the 1567 Venetian edition by Barbaro, is that Jones saw a link between the space of the theatre and that of the temple.33 A fact generally neglected by scholars of Inigo Jones comes to mind here: the wooden can31 32

33

Inigo Jones, The Most Notable Antiquity of Great Britain, Vulgarly called Stone-Heng on Salisbury Plain Restored, London, 1655. As Stephen Orgel was first to emphasise, Webb chose to publish Jones’s findings in the form of an autobiographical account, in order to create the impression of an unedited document, in which the architect describes his interest in Stonehenge as the result of his study of the architecture of Antiquity during his travels on the Continent: ‘Being naturally inclined in my younger years to study arts of design, I passed in foreign parts to converse with great masters thereof in Italy, where I applied myself to search out ruins of those ancient buildings which in despite of time itself and violence of barbarians are yet remaining. Having satisfied myself in these, and returning to my native country, I applied my mind more particularly to the study of architecture. Among the ancient monuments whereof found here, I deemed none more worthy the searching after than this of Stonehenge, not only in regard of the founders thereof, the time when built, the work itself, but also for the rarity of its invention, being different in form from all I had seen before; likewise as beautiful in proportions, as elegant in order, and as stately in aspect as any’. See: Orgel, Stephen (1971): ‘Inigo Jones on Stonehenge’, in: Prose, no. 3, pp. 109–24, p. 110. The most recent, brief but astute treatment of Jones’s reconstruction of Stonehenge is: Eyck, Caroline van (2009): Inigo Jones on Stonehenge. Architectural Representation, Memory and Narrative, Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura. Jones’s copy of Daniele Barbaro’s edition of Vitruvius is presently preserved at Chatsworth House. Underlining the heading ‘Roman Theatre’, he commented on the first paragraph by observing: ‘the Stage in the Roman theatres greater than that of the Greeke and why the Senators Seat desined in the Orchestra’. Jones’s annotations are in book II, p. 66.

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Fig. 42: Daniel de Barbaro, Theatre after Vitruvius, c. 1550

opy covering the stage at the London Globe theatre, built by Shakespeare’s actors in 1599, was painted with the signs of the zodiac from below and referred to as the heavens. This artificial representation of the heavenly sky was equipped with hatches from which actors would descent as deities to the stage.34 (Fig. 43) As a passage from Thomas Heywood’s 1612 Apology for Actors illustrates, the theatrical heavens were perceived to conform with the setup of the Roman theatre: ‘The covering of the stage, which wee call the heavens (where upon any occasion the gods descended) was geometrically supported by giant-like Atlas, whom the poets for his astrology feigne to beare heaven on his shoulders’.35 Considered from within this context, Jones’s referencing of Stonehenge as a temple for the worship of Coelus, god of the heavens, to the ground plan of the Roman theatre in Vitruvius seems to rely on similarities of form. While working on the reconstruction of Stonehenge, Jones was surveying the building of the king’s new Banqueting House at Whitehall after his design; its Great

34 See: Lawrence, William J. (1968): The Physical Conditions of the Elizabethan Public Playhouse, New York: Cooper Square; Keenan, Siobhan and Peter Davidson (1997): ‘The Iconography of the Globe’, in: J. R. Mulryne and M. Shewring (eds.), Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 35 Thomas Heywood: An Apology for Actors, London, 1612, p. 34–5.

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Fig. 43: Artificial Heavens of the Shakespeare Globe, London

Hall was intended for the stagings of the king’s masques, in which the deities of ancient Rome would regularly descend from the sky by way of Jones’s stage machines. Stonehenge, in this context, embodied the ancient model for the celebration of the Stuart king of gods, James alias Jove, who continued the legacy of the Roman Empire in Jones’s Palladian Banqueting House. Prompted by his death in March 1625, the enthronement of King James among the Christian kings in Rubens’ painted heaven had eventually to be redesigned into his apotheosis. Gregory Martin questions the general assumption that this new design was suggested by Jones as well, and considers that Balthazar Gerbier might have had a hand in the formation of the ceiling’s final iconography. Martin asserts that there was a growing awareness of Rubens’ art in England, which might have been promoted by Buckingham’s report of the artist’s picture cycle for Marie de’ Médici, which the Duke and his entourage had seen in Paris in late May 1625 – a speculation causing Martin to date the emergence of the second design shortly after James’s death in March of the same year.36 In support of Martin’s perspective, I should like 36

Historians have long believed that the meeting of Rubens and Buckingham in 1625 in Paris formed the beginning of the relationship between the two men. Monique Riccardi-Cubitt

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to draw attention to a ceiling commission for Buckingham’s residence, York House, which pre-dates the installation of Rubens’ ceiling in the Banqueting House by ten years, and in which the painter showed the Duke ascending to the heavens.

Transcending the Masque: Peter Paul Rubens’ Ceiling for York House Rubens’ canvas shows Buckingham being carried upwards by Minerva and Mercury to the temple of Virtue, who, with Honos the god of chivalry beside her, stands between two Solomonic columns and awaits the Duke. (Fig. 44) The central, dance-like figure of Buckingham embodies the focus of the initially circular composition di sotto in sù, wherein all movement streams towards the figure of his floating body. Supporting his rise from the left is Mercury, Jove’s messenger and leader of the Muses, who is identified by his helmet and the small wings at his ankles, crowning the Duke with the victor’s laurel. Buckingham’s right arm holds on to Minerva, goddess of wisdom, who firmly grabs the Duke’s arm from above and holds her shield in preparation to defend him against the vices trying to impede his ascent from below. Beneath Minerva, a little wind god hurries to assist and blows from bulging cheeks. He looks out from behind one of the three Graces, who joins her hand with those of her sisters to welcome the Duke with a crown of flowers. The Graces sit at the base of a large Solomonic column, one of a pair that frames the entrance of the temple to which Buckingham is conducted. The scene is less crowded to the right of the canvas – a disparity balanced by the agitated movement displayed to the courtier’s left. Fame is sitting on a cloud and blows her trumpet, whereupon a group of three winged putti eagerly advances for the Duke’s coronation. While one of them attends Jove’s messenger with the laurel and another brings a feather whose meaning is obscure, but which might be a feather from one of Venus’ swans. The feather, however, forms the

has, however, recently shown that Rubens was involved in the Aarschot sale of 1619, where he met Balthazar Gerbier. Buckingham’s painter-agent would certainly have commented upon his acquaintance with the Flemish master, whom he had eulogised in his poem on Hendrick Goltzius five years earlier. See: Riccardi-Cubitt, Monique (2000): ‘The Duke of Buckingham’s Cabinet d’Amateur: An Aesthetic, Religious and Political Statement’, in: British Art Journal, vol. I, no. 2, pp. 77–86, p. 78. For the poem see: Chaney, Edward (1998): The Evolution of the Grand Tour. Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance, London: Cass. The meeting of Buckingham and Rubens in Paris is documented in a letter by the Flemish master dating from December 1625, who judges his journey to France a loss, except for his introduction to Buckingham, whose ‘generosity’ he emphasises. See: Magurn, Ruth (1955): The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 132.

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Fig. 44: Peter Paul Rubens, The Duke of Buckingham conducted by Minerva and Mercury to the Temple of Virtue, 1625

diagonal middle axis of the composition, positioned in one line with the elegant pose of Buckingham’s body and the tip of his boot, to which a figure with snails on its head has clutched all its weight in an attempt to tear him down. The figure that has correctly been identified as a personification of Envy is joined by a dragon, a lion and a harpy. Unfortunately, Rubens’ painting was destroyed in the same fire at Osterley Park in 1949 that destroyed the painter’s equestrian portrait of the Duke, and it is preserved only in the form of a black-and-white photograph, documenting its condition after it was cut into an octagonal shape while in the possession of the Earl of Jersey.37 However, an oil sketch by Rubens did survive – it is now in the National Gallery, London – which differs considerably from the final canvas but clearly represents an 37

See: Jaffé, Michael (1967): Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art presented to Anthony Blunt, London: Longman, p. 164, note 64.

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Fig. 45: Peter Paul Rubens, The Duke of Buckingham conducted by Minerva and Mercury to the Temple of Virtue, preliminary sketch for York House Ceiling, 1624/2 Fig. 46: Peter Paul Rubens, Sketch for York House Ceiling, c. 1625

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earlier stage in the execution of Buckingham’s commission.38 The canvas that was initially referred to as The Duke of Buckingham assisted by Minerva and Mercury triumphing over Envy and Anger, is today displayed as The Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham. (Fig. 45) The oil sketch held by the National Gallery is supplemented by another, apparently even earlier, outline of Rubens’ composition, which survives only as a monochrome photography. (Fig. 46) The execution of both sketches and the final ceiling has been dated between 1625 and 1627, which, however, is supported only by stylistic examinations and a contemporary document which records the work’s presence in England before 1628 but not the date of its arrival or execution.39 If we consider the two preliminary sketches – to which Martin does not refer in his study on Rubens’ Banqueting House Ceiling – and the painting’s final rendering in the context of previously unconsidered material, then we should refute this dating. The fact that only the final oil painting, but neither of the two sketches, shows a concrete likeness to Buckingham, while evidence exists that the Duke had his portrait taken by Rubens in Paris for the first – and indeed only – time, suggests that the two preliminary sketches of the ceiling for York House had been produced before 1625, presumably according to a written description similar to those of the two proposals for Banqueting House. It is, however, not the dating that is of particular interest here, but rather the context it introduces into the discussion of Rubens’ two ceiling commissions from the Duke and the King. Rubens’ first sketch for Buckingham’s ‘Apotheosis’ shows a figure climbing up the stairs to a flower-garlanded temple. Leading the way is Minerva, armed with shield and helmet while Fame soars above and heralds his triumph. Looking questioningly at Minerva, the figure representing Buckingham is not yet cast in his likeness. The Duke wears the shining armour of a Roman general, and seizes a flag that adds to his appearance as a chivalric hero, whose ascension to the triumph of virtue can neither be prevented by a figure trying to pull him down from below nor by a lion that lurks along his path. The ascendant is greeted by the three Graces and a winged putto, offering him a laurel and a floral crown. Radically differing from the second sketch and the final canvas, Rubens’ preliminary sketch seems not to have met with the approval of his patron. In the second version the figure of the Duke has been significantly remodelled, for he is now lifted upwards by the mutual help of Minerva and Mercury. Now soaring freely in the air, Buckingham is guided to the temple, whose Solomonic columns are guarded by two additional figures, one standing in armour and another, apparently female, sitting to the side. Rubens has retained the three graces, but they are now further from the centre, and their outline 38 39

See: Martin, Gregory (1970): National Gallery Catalogues. The Flemish School, c. 1600–1900, London: National Gallery, cat. no. 187. See: Martin (1970): op. cit., (above).

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appears more clearly than that of the other figures. The space resulting from the Duke’s movement to the centre of the composition has afforded further elaboration of the figural group representing the repugnant forces trying to obstruct his skyward movement. Thus the figure clutching at Buckingham’s leg, whose hair has been remodelled to resemble serpents, now attacks him straight from below, while an additional figure has been introduced to push him back. Rubens’ second preserved sketch for the York House ceiling seems to have been painted more hurriedly than the first one. Concentrating on the remodelling of the figures surrounding the central depiction of the Duke, Rubens merely suggests many details, such as the Solomonic columns of the temple and its newly introduced guardians. Only the group of the Graces is fully elaborated, and perhaps this is due to the fact that this is at least the third time that Rubens has made use of a design he had developed long before in imitation of Raphael’s Marriage of Psyche in the Farnesina.40 It therefore seems probable that Rubens undertook the reworking of his initial design, which has doubtlessly been altered at Buckingham’s request, during the Duke’s presence in Paris. In the only analysis of Rubens’ ceiling for York House so far, Gregory Martin has looked to the work of Renaissance master painters – who considerably influenced the advancement of Rubens’ pictorial language – in order to trace iconographic models of his ceiling for Buckingham, and he has identified Raphael’s Marriage of Psyche as the model for Rubens’ depiction of the three Graces, and Correggio’s Resurrection of Christ, in the cupola of S. Giovanni Evangelista, as that of Buckingham’s reclining pose. This search for a history of figurative vocabulary might be one of the reasons that the canvas has so far literally remained illegible.41 Iconographic enquiry needs to consider traditions of visual and poetic imagery that originate in English culture or that culture’s very particular reception of continental schools of thought, making it necessary to assess the composition from within the national context of its commission. Though executed by an artist travelling and working all over Europe, Buckingham’s York House ceiling embodies a distinctly English creation, resulting from a specific moment of social, political and aesthetic change in early modern English culture. Representing the most significant commission in the history of Buckingham’s patronage, Rubens’ composition for the ceiling was essentially an expression of the social role the Duke imagined for himself. Buckingham’s frequent

40 This link between Raphael and Rubens’ compositions has been established by Martin (1966): ‘Rubens and Buckingham’s Fayrie Ile’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CXIII, pp. 613–18. 41 The preliminary oil sketch of the ceiling’s final version in the National Gallery, London, is still exhibited under the title ‘The Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham’, a title first suggested by M. Rooses in 1890. See: Rooses, M. (1890): L’Œuvre de Peter Paul Rubens, Antwerp: [s.n.], 4 vols., vol. III, no. 820.

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and very pointedly arranged commissions, which amount to a much higher number than those in the contemporary collections of other English collectors, indicate the particular value the Duke ascribed to painting for his personal self-fashioning. Evidence of the Duke’s leading role in the design of his York House ceiling can be drawn from comparison between the composition’s different versions briefly discussed above. Consideration shall now be given to the altered designs of the Solomonic columns and the snake-headed figure in the final version of Rubens’ ceiling. Like the Solomonic columns that serve as an emblematic reference to the personal iconography of King James, the figure characterised by the serpents on her head illustrates the composition’s strong relation to the particular iconography of the Stuart court. Representing vice and evil in the painting, the serpent-headed figure clearly alludes to the Gorgon, now familiar from the personal iconography of Buckingham. Established as an emblem of Buckingham’s incorruptible and unassailable position at court in the poetry of Ben Jonson’s The Golden Age Restor’d, the masque commemorating the fall of Robert Carr (which has been discussed at length in the second chapter), and enhanced in Van Dyck’s depiction of the Continence of Scipio, the gorgon was a prominent reminder of the status that the favourite of the late king had enjoyed at the Jacobean court. The presence of the gorgon in Rubens’ ceiling for York House is thus certainly no coincidence, but invites a reconsideration of the iconographic models for Buckingham’s ascent into the heavens. The remodelling of the columns supporting the roof of the temple where the Duke is guided is, in fact, of prime importance in the change from the first to the second sketch for the ceiling. Originally designed as three columns in Doric form, the second sketch depicts them as Solomonic columns, reduced in number to two. What has been understood as a simple ‘advance in design’ seems to me to be a calculated manoeuvre to signify the temple as that of James I, whose entrance is guarded by the watch of Virtue, the attribute of his rule.42 The composition thus exhibits clear references to the political tropes of the early Stuart court, advocating the proposition that major sections of its iconographic modelling did not arise from Rubens’ knowledge of the various artistic traditions prevalent on the Continent, but from the particular vocabulary of Stuart panegyric as it was familiar to Buckingham from the masque. The iconography, however, not only shows clear adaptations from the masque, but, as will be shown below, is in fact unequivocally Buckingham’s own invention. Buckingham’s depicted ascent to Solomon’s temple signifies his admission into the heavenly realm of the late Stuart king, and as such might give rise to several kinds of misinterpretation. Dated to the year of James’s death, the canvas suggests Buckingham’s entrance into the realm of James’s afterlife, causing both a misidentification of the temple, and implying the death of the Duke himself. However, since 42

See: Martin (1966): op. cit., (note 40), p. 615.

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there is evidence that the canvas was delivered to York House before Buckingham’s assassination in 1628, its interpretation as the Duke’s apotheosis must be rejected. In contrast, this study argues that the composition does not depict the temple of the late king, but rather the temple of Jove, King James’s mythological alter-ego in the masque.43 To support this claim, emphasis shall be given to a small detail in the final canvas that has remained unnoticed by previous studies of the commission. Renewed consideration of the first of Rubens’ two oil sketches preserved from the preparation of his York House ceiling draws attention to an abandoned arm in the upper right of the canvas that has so far been understood to hold a palm leaf.44 In the second sketch, this arm and the object held by it are nowhere to be found, reappearing only in the final version of the painted ceiling, now held by the putto flying high above Buckingham’s head. Held high in the air, the object can now clearly be delineated as a darkish feather, an apparently costly token brought along with the victor’s laurel to the glory of the Duke. Present in the initial oil sketch as an element obviously alien to the interpretation of Rubens’ composition, the feather is lost in the painter’s reworked version of the second canvas. The oddly displaced detail might find its model, interestingly, in a portrait miniature by Nicholas Hilliard, displaying a Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud (today in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Its unidentified, noble sitter is flanked by a pair of golden parentheses, which read: ‘Attici amoris ergo Anõ Dni 1588’, and which have been assumed to imply a possible reference to ‘Greek love’, and hence a disguised declaration of homosexual desire for the intended beholder of the portrait.45 However, the changing presence of the feather in Rubens’ design, and its prominent position in the final canvas, gives ample evidence of its significance as a detail explicitly requested by Buckingham himself. Significantly, the token of a feather was familiar in early Stuart England from Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, where a number of feathers – the feathers of Juno’s peacock, the feathers of Mercury’s wings, and the feathers of Venus’ swans – symbolise luxury possessions of the gods which Jupiter offers to Ganymede as proof of his love. Furthermore, the figure of Ganymede was prominently associated with Buckingham, embodying the most popular trope of his defamation in contemporary prose and poetry. Ganymede was a young Trojan boy who was so beautiful that Jupiter fell in love with him and abducted him to the heavens where he displaced Hebe as Jupiter’s 43

See also: Hille, Christiane (2009b): ‘“Antwerpian Rubens’ best skill made him soare”: George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham and the elevation of Painting at the Stuart Court’, in: Immediations. Research Journal of the Courtauld Institute, vol. V, 2009, pp. 31–44. 44 Martin (1966): op. cit., (note 40). 45 Toorn, Tai van (2007): ‘Intimate Enclosures: Framing the English Portrait Limning, 1585–1615’, in: Comitatus. A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 129–53, p. 142.

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cupbearer. Reaching back to Cretan, Phrygian and Lydian traditions pre-dating Homer, Ganymede embodies the archetype of the supreme youthful male: the most handsome of mortals, son of the King and Queen of Troy, whom the King of Gods, captivated by his ideal beauty, lifted from earthly life and elevated to Olympus. Since Buckingham had begun his career at court as cupbearer to James, the myth of Jupiter and Ganymede seemed destined to serve as a metaphor for the intimate relationship between the British king and his greatest favourite. Employed as an eponym for the Latin term cataminus, denoting a boy kept for sexual pleasure by an older man, the word first appeared in English texts by 1591, featuring prominently in Richard Barnfield’s 1594 homoerotic poem The Affectionate Shepherd, in which the shepherd Daphnis loves a boy named Ganymede.46 As Bruce Smith was first to point out, the myth of Jupiter and Ganymede was the most widespread metaphor of homoerotic desire in early modern England, featuring prominently in the verses of English poets and playwrights from Marlowe to Marston.47 Early Stuart political commentators typically cast James’s relations with his favourites in such metaphors, thereby employing mythological or historical paradigms of favouritism familiar from the Renaissance stage that, in turn, witnessed renewed popularity with the English audience. Thus Christopher Marlowe’s 1593 completed play Edward II – reprinted twice during James’s reign – pursued the theme of master and minion as a discourse about pleasure and power, depicting King Edward love-sick for his Gaveston. By presenting his two protagonists as both lovers and political players, Marlowe prompts his audience to consider the political implications of sexual power. It has been suggested that Marlowe was inspired to take up this early fourteenth-century episode of English kingship by similar events rumoured to engage the king and his favourite in Scotland.48 Embodying an even more quintessential example of the standardised image of the Stuart favourites in English stage plays, however, was the figure of Sejanus, whose rise and fall under Tiberius provided a historical model for accusing the figure of the male favourite as inevitably corrupting the common good by homosexual debauchery of the king. London’s early Jacobean public was familiar with the figure of Sejanus from a tragedy by Ben Jonson, which historians of early modern

46 See: Brown, Steve (1990): ‘Boyhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines: Notes on Gender Ambiguity in the Sixteenth Century’, in: Studies in English Literature, vol. XXX, pp. 243–63. 47 See: Smith, Bruce R. (1991): Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. A Cultural Poetics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and Goldberg, Jonathan (1992): Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 48 The contemporary connection of Marlowe’s play with Buckingham has been discussed in more detail by: Perry, Curtis (2003): ‘Yelverton, Buckingham, and the Story of Edward II in the 1620s’, in: Review of English Studies, vol. LIV, no. 215, pp. 213–35.

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English literature have interpreted in radically different ways.49 Staged for the first time in 1603, the year of James’s accession, Jonson’s Sejanus did not at first prove popular with its audience. Yet although Londoners remained in doubt as to whether the play was intended to satirise the passing reign of Elizabeth or the new regime of the Scottish king, they certainly did not fail to comprehend the story of Sejanus as a warning about an ambitious favourite who secretly aimed to replace his master.50 Just like Ganymede, Sejanus had been serving at table, and Tiberius, to whom James was compared by implication, was known for his pederast relationship with the young boy. Apparently matching the role of Jupiter’s beautiful cupbearer, Buckingham was thus quickly enrolled into a rhetorical trope of attack against James that then redefined itself in relation to him. Significantly, one of the most widely published diatribes that cast Buckingham in the role of Ganymede appeared in 1623, two years before Rubens’ York House Ceiling was completed. Entitled The Warres of the Gods, the poem depicts the heavens as a place in which the different factions among the gods are in dissent, as Jupiter, representing James, has fallen under the spell of Ganymede and shall therefore be removed from the Olympic throne. Characterised as a ‘white fac’t [faced] boy’, whose ‘upstart Love’ has made Jupiter ‘drunke with Nectar’, Ganymede is intended to resemble Buckingham, whose presence has affected the cosmic reign of Jupiter, so that ‘each Planets course doth alter’ and ‘the spheares begin to faulter’.51 Though the council of the gods has therefore consented that Jupiter should ‘be quite displac’t / or else disgrac’t / for lovinge so ‘gainst nature’, the King of Gods still ‘with Ganymed lyes playinge’.52 Such derision of Buckingham’s manhood by reference to the figure of Ganymede was a recurring motif, not only in the libellous poetry devoted to him, but also in political pamphlets. As early as 1615, Richard Brathwaite, a minor literary figure in early modern England, had 49 See: Evans, Robert E. (1998): ‘Sejanus: Ethics and Politics in the Early Reign of James’, in: Julie Sanders a.o. (eds.), Refashioning Ben Jonson. Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 71–92. 50 Jonson’s Sejanus has simultaneously been understood as a veiled comment on the career of the Earl of Essex, and on the fall of Sir Walter Raleigh. However, both men’s precarious positions at James’s court had not yet become apparent at the time of Sejanus’ first staging, so it seems more convincing to read the play as a general comment on the potential dangers inherent in the relationship of king and favourite. See: Patterson, Annabel (1982): ‘RomanCast Similitude: Ben Jonson and the English Use of Roman History’, in: Paul A. Ramsay (ed.), Rome in the Renaissance. The City and the Myth, Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, pp. 381–94; and, Ayres, Philip J. (1983): ‘Jonson, Northampton, and the Treason in Sejanus’, in: Modern Philology, vol. LXXX, pp. 356–63. 51 Anon. [1623]: The Warres of the Gods, in: BL Add. MS 22603, fols. 33r–34, ll. 7, 10, 11, 21 and 24. (Appendix I) 52 Ibid.: l. 45–7, 64.

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compared the image of the ‘good Souldier’ with that of the ‘Carpet Knight’. 53 While the former was associated with cannons, clattering armour and the battlefield, the image of the Carpet Knight, openly alluding to Buckingham, was linked to perfumes, powders, nimble capering and the voice of amorous Ganymede. The language of early seventeenth-century England contained a lot of phrases with which James’s homosexual affairs could be discussed, referring to his ‘merry boys’ and ‘base fellows’. Reinforced by the fact that pubescent boys played the female parts on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, the word ‘boy’ carried a strong sexual connotation, indicating the ‘beardless’ or ‘womanish’ adolescent, who could be a catamite or a so-called ‘mingle’, both indicating the passive partner of an old man.54 With regard to James’s greatest favourite, however, the language of defamation concentrated on the image of Ganymede. Loved by Jove for his physical perfection, Ganymede was a boyish figure, characterised by an ivory forehead and beardless cheeks, whose appearance Buckingham resembled.55 In fact, the tableau of the beautiful youth infatuating the adult patriarch provided more than a simple metaphor for the relationship between James and his favourite. Featured as a scene in Christopher Marlowe’s c. 1593 Dido, Queen of Carthage, the myth of Jupiter and Ganymede was prevalent as a visual stage emblem in the minds of the early Stuart public. Playing upon the myth’s narrative by Virgil, who described the rape of Ganymede in the ekphrasis of an embroidered cloak, Marlowe’s drama challenges the societal categories of sex, gender and sexuality. Its opening scene starts with a tableau of Jupiter dandling Ganymede on his knee, while Mercury lies asleep beside them. The King of Gods is depicted as a lovesick victim of the domineering, narcissistic youth, who shamelessly abuses Jupiter’s infatuation in order to obtain jewels and finery. ‘Sit on my knee and call for thy content,’ Jupiter induces his playfellow, and lists the most extravagant pleasures to tempt his affection: ‘Vulcan shall dance to make thee laughing sport, And my nine daughters sing when you art sad. From Juno’s bird I’ll pluck her spotted pride, To make thee fans wherewith to cool thy face, And Venus’ swans shall shed their silver down To sweeten out the slumber of thy bed. Hermes no more shall show the earth his wings, 53 See: Fairholt (1850): op. cit., (note 1), p. 183. 54 See: Jardin, Lisa (1991): ‘Boy Actors, Female Roles, and Elizabethan Eroticism’, in: David Scott Karstan and Peter Stallybrass (eds.), Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, New York: Routledge, pp. 57–67. 55 See: Richard Barnfield [1594]: ‘The Affectionate Shepheard’, in: Richard Barnfield, The Complete Poems, ed. by Alexander B. Grosart, London: 1876, pp. 42–87.

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If that thy fancy in his feathers dwell, But, as this one, I’ll tear them all from him, Do thou but say, ‘their colour pleaseth me’.’56

Indifferently, Ganymede names his demand: I would have a jewel for mine ear, And a fine brooch to put in my hat, And then I’ll hug with you a hundred times.57

In Marlowe’s text, Jupiter totally fails to conform to the expectations that his position as a sovereign ruler of the heavenly kingdom demands in terms of his personal behaviour. Deprived of all monarchic deportment, the King of Gods eagerly consents to Ganymede’s command: ‘And shall have, Ganymede, if thou wilt be my love’.58 The scene draws a ludicrous picture of the patriarch God as he lavishes his unrestrained affection on a spoilt boy. Creating a strong visual translation of the Ganymede myth, Dido, Queen of Carthage had established an iconic frame for the imagination of James’s relationship with his favourite. Marlowe’s stage emblem encompassed early Stuart anxieties about a weak ruler consumed with irrational desire, and his insolent, vainglorious protégé who threatened the prosperity of the kingdom. Henry Peacham reinforces this reading of the Ganymede myth, through the inclusion of an epigram of Ganymede riding a cockerel, entitled ‘Crimina gravißima’, in his Minerva Britannica, which was dedicated to Henry, late Prince of Wales, in 1612.59 (Fig. 47) Upon a Cock, here Ganimede doth sit, Who erst rode mounted on Ioves Eaglesback, On hand holdes Circes wand, and ioind with it, A cup top-fil’d with poison, deadly black: The other Meddals, of base mettals wrought, With sundry moneyes, counterfeit and nought.

Characterised as the bearer of witchcraft and murder, Peacham’s Ganymede appears as the purveyor of all the crimes ‘abhorr’d of God and man’. Focusing on the myth’s portrayal of Ganymede as Jupiter’s cupbearer rather than on the portrayal as his beloved, Peacham portrays Ganymede as the epitome of ‘the foule Sodomitan’, thereby 56 57 58 59

Christopher Marlowe [1584], Dido Queen of Carthage, ed. by Roma Gill, 1987, Oxford, l. 32– 41. Ibid.: l. 46–8. Ibid.: 49. Henry Peacham (1612): Minerva Britannica, London, p. 48.

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Fig. 47: Henry Peacham, Crimina gravißima, Minerva Britannica, 1612

reaffirming the image of Jupiter’s malevolent minion prevalent in Dido, Queen of Carthage. Marlowe’s stage scene, a sadistic emblem of James’s supposedly undignified infatuation with his favourite, was thus supplemented by a figurative image of the royal cupbearer promoted by Peacham’s emblem book, which displays a rather disgraceful depiction of a naked youth, sitting on an unwieldy flying cockerel that is hardly capable of keeping the child aloft. Peacham’s representation of the cockerel as a symbol for ‘vile incest’ probably refers to the classical gift courted in homosexual affairs between Greek men of antiquity, where the erastes, an adult man in love with a youth, was expected to give his eromenos tokens of his desire.60 Birds, especially the cockerel, carried a strong sexual connotation in Greek antiquity, transmitted into

60 See: Baird-Lange, Lorrayne (1981): ‘Priapus Gallinaceus: The Role of the Cock in Fertility and Eroticism in Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages’, in: Studies in Iconongraphy, vol. VII, pp. 81–111; and, eadem: (1990): ‘Victim Criminalised: Iconographic Traditions and Peacham’s Ganymede’, in: David G. Allen and Robert A. White (eds.), Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, pp. 231–50.

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Italian literature and art from the Renaissance, where the bird was featured as a synonym for the penis, a notion that persists into the modern use of the English word cock. Being the only known visual representation of the Ganymede myth in early modern England, Marlowe’s stage tableau and Peacham’s emblem embodied an iconographic inspiration for the public image of James’s relation to Buckingham that was both astonishingly poor in style and thoroughly disapproving. While Peacham’s Ganymede is the only English representation of the myth to appear in the form of a picture, the myth of Ganymede figured prominently in artistic representations on the Continent. Thus the frequency and significance of Ganymede’s depiction, especially in Italian art, attests to the widespread popularity of the theme on the Continent from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries.61 In his assessment of the pictorial tradition of the Ganymede theme, James Saslow has identified three principal iconographic treatments of the Trojan boy, corresponding to the three succeeding episodes in the myth, of which the first and most important was that of Ganymede’s abduction. Familiar from Ovid and Virgil, the narrative of Ganymede’s rape inspired artists like Michelangelo Buonarroti to create spectacular new representations of the theme. Preserved only in contemporary copies and a preliminary sketch by the artist himself, Michelangelo’s Rape of Ganymede (1532) actually embodies the single most influential rendering of the theme in Renaissance art. (Fig. 48) Using the established allegorical vocabulary of neo-Platonic humanism, Michelangelo’s drawing simultaneously forms one of the prime visualisations of the uplifting power of divine love, and the paradigmatic depiction of the worldly love shared between an older man and an adolescent boy. Radically approaching the climactic moment of the mythical narrative, Michelangelo creates a powerful visualisation of Ganymede’s abduction that epitomises the ambivalent presence of violence and tenderness that are both at work in Jupiter’s rape. Michelangelo’s composition thus united two aspects of the Ganymede myth that had been treated as opposing concepts since the fourth century BC. Condemning homosexuality as one of the major crimes committed by mankind, Cicero and Plato censured the myth as a fable invented by the Cretans in order ‘to have a divine precedent’ for the practice of sexual intercourse between men.62 In the writing of Xenophon, Ganymede figured as a spiritual allegory alluding to the superiority of 61

62

Still the most extensive study of representations of Ganymede in painting and sculpture is: Saslow, James M. (1986): Ganymede in the Renaissance. Homosexuality in Art and Society, New Haven: Yale University Press. A more recent account is given in: Corsi, Stefano et. al. (2002): Il Mito di Genimede prima e dopo Michelangelo, Exh. Cat., Florence: Casa Buonarroti. Quoted from: Plato, The Laws, ed. by Trevor J. Saunders, Baltimore, 1970, p. 62. For Cicero’s critique of Homer, see: Homer, Tusculum Disputations, ed. by C. D. Yong, New York, 1877, p. 37.

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the mind over the human body, who proposed that the very name of the beautiful shepherd, deriving from Greek γάνυσθαι [to enjoy] and μήδεα [intelligence], denotes that it is the beauty of the mind, rather than that of the body, which wins divine love and confers immortality.63 Artistic representation of the Ganymede myth from classical antiquity parallels these opposing interpretations negotiated in the exegesis of the myth’s text. Thus the portrayal of Ganymede as an innocent youth who becomes the victim of Jupiter’s unrestrained passion and fearfully tries to escape his reach was a common motif of Greek and Roman vase painting. Such early representations emphasise the youth and innocence of the Trojan boy, and often show Ganymede as a little child accompanied by Eros with whom he plays in the heavens, or as a beardless youth, nude or half-dressed, trundling a hoop with a stick, while carrying in his other hand a cockerel, held out as far as possible from Jupiter/Zeus, representing the iconographic model of the virgin or uninitiated Ganymede.64 The bird initially associated with the Ganymede iconography was thus not the eagle but the cockerel, signifying an artistic tradition in the representation of the myth occurring only in antiquity that focused on the pursuit scene where the beautiful youth runs from the King of gods before being carried off to Olympus.65

63

Xenophon’s interpretation of the Ganymede myth has first been noted by Erwin Panofsky in his ground-breaking study of the ‘Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo’ contained in his Studies in Iconology, which has since served for all subsequent examinations of the artist’s Ganymede. See: Panofsky, Erwin (1931): Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Kirschenbaum, Baruch D. (1951): ‘Reflections on Michelangelo’s Drawings for Cavalieri’, in: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 99–110; Kruszynski, Anette (1985): Der Ganymed-Mythos in Emblematik und mythographischer Literatur des 16. Jahrhunderts, Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft; and Saslow (1986): op. cit., (note 61). 64 See: Baird-Lange (1981): op. cit., (note 60). 65 For a detailed discussion of the conversion of the human figure of Zeus into the eagle in the fourth century B.C., see: Sichtermann, Baird-Lange, Walter Copland Perry and Gerda Kempter, who all identify a marble of Leochares as the earliest example of this new tradition: See: Sichtermann, Helmut (1952): Ganymed: Mythos und Gestalt in der antiken Kunst, Berlin: Mann; Baird-Lange (1981): op. cit., (note 60); Copland Perry, Walter (1882): Greek and Roman Sculptures, London: Longman; and, Kempter, Gerda (1980): Ganymed: Studien zur Typologie, Ikonographie und Ikonologie, Vienna: Böhlau. Italian writers of the Trecento, promulgating the ecclesiastical advice to suppress homosexuality, promoted Ganymede as a pure, childlike soul in search of God. See: Panofsky (1931): op. cit., (note 62), pp. 213–23. For a more detailed account of the Ganymede myth interpreted in the context of Saint John the Evangelist, see: Sichtermann, Helmut (1977): ‘Der GanymedSarkophag von San Sebastiano’, in: Archäologischer Anzeiger, vol. III, pp. 462–70; and, Demirsoy, Kemal (2000): ‘Disegno speculativo, amor divino ed arte: Das Ganymed-Freko des römischen Palazzo Zuccaro im Lichte der Thomasischen Kontemplationslehre’, in: Tristan Weddigen (ed.) Frederico Zuccaro. Kunst zwischen Ideal und Reform, Basel: Schwabe,

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Fig. 48: Giulio Clovio, after Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Rape of Ganymede, undated

Widely appreciated by its contemporaries as the ideal visualisation of the myth’s neo-Platonic interpretation, Michelangelo’s composition revolutionised the Renaissance image of Ganymede’s rape. Contemporary emblem books that featured the myth of Ganymede as representing the notion of yearning toward God [desiderio verso iddio] replaced their standard illustrations of the myth by adapting Michelangelo’s drawing. Thus while the 1531 edition of Andrea Alciati’s Emblemata, immediately pre-dating Michelangelo’s drawing, had illustrated its motto of the Ganymede myth ‘in Deo laetandum’ with a simplistic woodcut print showing a child riding on the back of an eagle (Fig. 49), Alciati’s 1551 edition features an illustration of the same motto that clearly stems from Michelangelo’s design.66 (Fig. 50) Forming the dominant iconographic model for the representation of the Ganymede myth in Italian art of the Cinquecento, Michelangelo’s image of the shepherd’s rape became widely publicised, and was shown in emblem books such as that of Alciati, in 1555 and again in 1574, or in Achille Bocchi’s Neoplatonic treatise Symbolicarum questionum de universo genere which included an adaptation of Michelangelo’s drawing by pp. 43–116; and, Boswell, John (1980): Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 66 See: Andreae Alciati emblematum flumen abundans, ed. by Henry Green, The Holbein Society’s Facsimile Reprints, London, 1872. For Alciati’s adaptation of Michelangelo’s design, see: Kempter (1980): op. cit., (note 65); and Saslow (1986): op. cit., (note 61).

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Fig. 49: Andrea Alciati, Ganymede, 1531 edition

Giulio Banasone.67 In this context, the image illustrating the Ganymede epigram in Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britannia from 1612 is somewhat surprising. The cockerel of the crude woodcut strongly resembles the rendering of the eagle featured in Alciati’s first, long outdated, edition of Emblemata from 1631. It is thus rather unlikely that Peacham would not have been aware of its revised edition from 1551, which had been translated into English by William Kearney in 1591. Rather, the neo-Platonic vision of Ganymede as the innocent soul enraptured by God, promoted in the emblem modelled after Michelangelo’s drawing, did not correspond to the early Stuart reading of the ancient narrative. Framed by Christopher Marlowe as a domineering, narcissistic youth, the early Stuart image of Ganymede was employed as a political trope, operating in the specific context of early Stuart political culture. Promoted as an emblem of sodomy, Ganymede’s myth served to conceptualise the private relationships of King James that increasingly became a matter of public concern. Though Rubens’ ceiling for York House does not depict Buckingham abducted to the heavens by Jupiter’s eagle, and as such does not present an obvious adaptation of the Ganymede myth, there is sufficient evidence to identify the canvas as a 67

See: Achille Bocchi, Symbolicarum questionum de universo genere, Bologna, 1574, facsimile reprint ed. by Stephen Orgel, New York, 1979; see also: Kempter (1980): op. cit., (note 65); and Saslow (1986): op. cit., (note 61).

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Fig. 50: Andrea Alciati, Ganymede, 1551 edition

painted interpretation of the ancient myth that was so closely associated with the Duke’s public persona. As the frequent recurrence of the gorgon in the portrait commissions of Buckingham has shown, the integration and re-interpretation of emblematic figures familiar from the iconography of the masque formed a well-calculated strategy by which the Duke sought to fashion his public image. Given his personal interest in the European tradition of painting, and with the distinguished advice of Balthazar Gerbier at his disposal, it is highly improbable that Buckingham would have been unfamiliar with Michelangelo’s version of the Ganymede myth. Significantly, one of the very few partial copies of Michelangelo’s drawing, made by Giulio Clovio in 1532, is held in the Royal Library in Windsor Castle.68 How the drawing came into the Royal collection is not known; its presence there, however, supports an understanding of the myth as the model of Rubens’ ceiling for York House. Rubens had, in fact, retouched a copy by Giulio Clovio of Michelangelo’s drawing himself at the beginning of his career, and was thus familiar with the Renaissance rendering of the myth. The Flemish master had already explored the theme, 68 Giulio Clovio, Il ratto di Ganimede da Michelangelo, Windsor Castle, Royal Library, inv. 13036. Popham, A.E. and Johannes Wilde (1949): The Italian Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle, London: Phaidon, cat. no. 457; and, Joannides, Paul (1996): Michelangelo and His Influence. Drawings from Windsor Castle, Exh. Cat., Washington: National Gallery, cat. no. 15.

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in 1611, depicting Ganymede as a beautiful naked youth seated on the wing of a large eagle, which bears him toward two female figures, whose attention is caught by the golden goblet in his outstretched hand. Ganymede Receiving the Cup from Hebe, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, has initially been thought to represent the moment when Ganymede receives the cup from the goddess of youth, but it has recently been thought to depict Ganymede as he is offering the cup to Hebe in a gesture of reconciliation, thereby eliminating the sexual connotation of the myth’s narrative and rendering it into an allegory of neo-Platonic concord.69 Earlier on, Buckingham had elevated his image through a commission to Van Dyck, who produced, at his request, a vision of his chaste, virtuous love for Katherine Manners in the 1621 Venus and Adonis.70 By commissioning a painting from Rubens that depicted his rise to Jupiter’s temple, the Duke now created another distinguished vision of himself. The composition, in which Buckingham’s pose resembles that of Michelangelo’s Ganymede as he is abducted to the sky, confronts the most popular trope of the Duke’s defamation with a spectacular image that transforms the very attributes of his assault into an emblem of his social distinction. Rubens’ ceiling for York House exhibits a self-conscious artifice in its rendering of the Ganymede theme that recalls the supernatural vision of Van Dyck’s Venus and Adonis and seems to correspond to Buckingham’s self-conscious effort to fashion his public image through portraiture. What is evident here is Buckingham’s particular appreciation of painting as a medium that is capable not only of preserving his likeness and documenting his status, but also of deliberately shaping the appearance of his body in a particular pose. Rubens’ composition complies with the Duke’s intent to restore his body, both politically and aesthetically. Having experienced the distortion and deformation of his physical self through verbal abuse, Buckingham arguably developed a particular awareness of the quality of manipulation inherent in the nature of language – an awareness, though already discernible in the poetry of Shakespeare, that was at the time still undiscussed in England with regard to the art

69 See: Russel, Margarita (1977): ‘The Iconography of Rembrandt’s Rape of Ganymede’, in: Simiolus, vol. IX, pp. 5–18. The most recent study of Rembrandt’s Rape of Ganymede, however, is given by: Busch, Werner (2006): ‘Die Entblößung des Mythos als die Freilegung der Natur. Rembrandts Ganymed jenseits der Ikonographie’, in: Uta Neidhardt and Thomas Ketelsen (eds.), Rembrandt van Rijn. Die Entführung des Ganymed, Exh. Cat., Dresden: Gemäldegalerie, pp. 33–43. For Rubens’ much more prominent Rape of Ganymede, from the series of Ovidian decorations for the Torre de la Parada painted in 1635, see: Alpers, Svetlana (1971): The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, IX), London: Phaidon. 70 See the detailed discussion in Chapter Two.

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of painting.71 While the Jonsonian masque allowed the Stuart courtiers to present themselves in the disguise of the gods of classical antiquity, Rubens’ painterly skill enabled Buckingham to rise aloft, into the heavenly realm of Jove, and display himself in a vision that contested the disgraceful images of Ganymede by artistic power. The ceiling of York House was produced as the inversion of his image in contemporary libel. By promoting his very own perspective, the painting exposed the displacement at work in the language of libel, and exposed the theatricality at work in all representation, whether panegyric or malicious. Installed into its designated place at York House in 1625, Buckingham’s ceiling arguably inspired the commissions of the mythological and allegorical ceilings Story of Cupid and Psyche, which Jacob Jordaens painted in 1639 for the parlour of the Queen’s House at Greenwich, as well as Orazio Gentileschi’s Allegory of Peace and the Art, c. 1635–38, for the Great Hall of the Countess of Arundel’s residence, Tart Hall, a work which the Italian painter produced in collaboration with his daughter Artemisia.72 Investment in painted ceilings became something the distinguished patron of the arts would seek for his or her residence, and Buckingham had been the first to have such a thing. The hitherto unfamiliar format of a painting on the ceiling compelled the beholder to examine the composition from below, and so the Duke’s visitors – regardless of whether they were courtier, ambassador or king – had to raise their eyes and look upwards, where they would behold Buckingham’s painted glorification high above their heads. By taking advantage of the technical superiority of the Flemish school, which had perfected the depiction of the human figure in an asymmetric, turbulent di sotto in sù, Buckingham saw to the decomposition of the figurative unity at work in the masque, and confronted the court with a change in perspective. When Villiers first came to court as James’s cupbearer, it had been Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, whom everyone saw as ‘the primum mobile of (the) court, by whose motion all the other spheres must move, or else stand still; the bright sun of our firmament, at whose splendour or glooming all our marigolds of the court open and shut. In this conjunction all the other stars are prosperous, and in his opposition mal-ominous’.73 With ‘Antwerpian Rubens’ best skill’, it was now Buckingham who would be beheld rather than merely projected in the heavens. 71

For Shakespeare see: Sorelius, Gunnar (1993): Shakespeare’s Early Comedies: Myth, Metamorphosis, Mannerism, Uppsala: Uppsala University Press. 72 On Gentileschi’s paintings for Henrietta-Maria, see: Wood, Jeremy (2000): ‘Orazio Gentileschi and some Netherlandish Artists in London: The Patronage of the Duke of Buckingham, Charles I and Henrietta-Maria’, in: Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. XXVIII, no. 3, pp. 103–28. 73 George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore and Secretary of State under James I, in a letter to Sir Thomas Edmondes from 1 August 1612; quoted from: Birch, Thomas (1848): The Court and Times of James I, London: Henry Colburn, 2 vols, vol. I, p. 191.

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Painting confronted an allegedly stable display of social order with a virtuous depiction of visual imbalance, conveying an expression of the individual and subjective experience of form, space and perspective against the objective certainty of the Renaissance reason of the masque. The Baroque composition corroded established principles of social perspective and its display through a spectacular deconstruction of the Renaissance idea that the reality contained in the human mind equates to its exterior symbol, thereby emphasising the inequality of the experienced and the represented, and the operative character underlying the conveyance of both as one and the same. To the scholar seeking an understanding of the politics of display in early Stuart England, the canvas literally visualises the semantic anxiety of courtly identity; to Buckingham’s peers it would have set a powerful example that this identity could be conveyed other than in the formal paradigm of the masque. The commission broke with the Renaissance scheme of symmetric representation that had just been perfected for the masque. Jones’s introduction of a realistic, three-dimensional stage image, framed behind the proscenium arch, dated back to less than a decade earlier, and now Buckingham was exploring the appeal of his image in the asymmetrical picture-space of Baroque ceiling painting, characterised by light, rhythm and movement, rather than by symmetry. In so doing, Buckingham positioned his body in realistically rendered space that nevertheless did not register his body to a uniform system of linear structure that found its reference in the figure of the king. Whereas the masque conveyed the strictly organised symmetry of the dancing floor as a field for the courtly body to enter in-line, and to attune its movement to a wellordered pattern of spatial and social perspective, Rubens’ canvas displayed the Duke floating freely in a composition that derived the concrete outline of its perspective, emphasis and inner movement from the central figure of the Duke himself, thereby proposing a sense of vision that challenged its audience even more radically than the laboriously propagated perspective stage images of Inigo Jones. As will be shown below, this not only destabilised established Jacobean perceptions of space and order, and demanded the adjustment of the representational system of the masque, but it also eventually introduced to the Stuart court a novel understanding of representation itself. Furthermore, by displaying the Duke halfway toward his reception in the heavens, Rubens’ ceiling for York House appealed to the iconographic tradition of English state portraiture in which the royal sitter is depicted in a liminal state between the human and the divine. In fact, the depiction of a human figure ascending in a painted sky, though long prevalent in the many ‘Assumptions of the Virgin’ painted in the Italian Renaissance, must have appeared to project a radical implementation of the English doctrine of rex qui numquam moritur that had hitherto expressed the sovereign dignity of the English monarch only by way of circumscription: as the dynastic portrait of Henry VIII, the emblematic icon of Elizabeth I, and the performative deification of James I in the masque. The spatial order of Baroque 226

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painting allowed the narrative of sovereign dignity, with its proclamation of continuity that the masque necessarily subjected to the order of temporality, to be displayed in the simultaneity of its inherent co-existence of past and future power. Displaying Buckingham in this liminal state, between the human and the divine, abducted from the clutches of earthly vices to the safe heavens of Jupiter’s realm, Rubens’ York House Ceiling challenged existing expressions of English sovereign dignity through the dazzling figure of visibility itself.

The Triumph of Painting The year that Rubens’ ceiling arrived at York House, 1625, was in many respects a year of crisis; the crisis of King James’s death on 27 March, the crisis of Charles’s marriage to a Roman Catholic princess, and, as I would like to suggest, the first year of a long crisis of the masque that would eventually lead to its gradual substitution by the art of painting. Though the study of the Caroline masque has become a wellestablished field in English historiography, the fact that the first six years of Charles’s reign were characterised by its absence has remained almost unacknowledged and fully unquestioned as a phenomenon in itself. Only recently has Martin Butler acknowledged what he calls a temporary paucity of masquing in the years 1625 to 1631, which he explains in relation to the troubled politics in the first years of Charles’s reign, in which military campaigns increasingly depleted the Crown’s coffers.74 Butler gives a very precise account of the years in question, listing various entertainments, mostly private scene plays rather than masques, which seem to have been commissioned but were not performed.75 Given that the masque, under the reign of King James, had been considered the court’s most powerful tool of political propaganda and diplomatic strategy, Butler’s argument of a temporary ‘trough between otherwise vigorous periods of masquing’, that was caused by the particularly challenging political situation of those years, remains inconclusive. The necessity of dealing with opposing interests in domestic politics and international affairs had been the prime reason behind the commissions of the masques under James’s reign. The last staging of a masque at Whitehall before its six years of absence at the Caroline court was Ben Jonson’s The Fortunate Isles and Their Union, staged for King James in January 1625, two months before James’s death. The next season of the winter 1625/1626 would thus have been the new king’s first opportunity to appropriate his father’s principal form of visual representation for the presentation of a masque 74 75

See: Butler, Martin (2008): The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 276–7. See in particular Butler’s Appendix, ibid., p. 358ff.

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written to inaugurate his personal narrative of royal panegyric. To my mind, the fact that Charles chose not to do so – especially as the political frictions of the years in questions were evolving slowly – implies a deliberate decision taken by a king new to the throne and looking for a way to visualise the dawn of a new era under his very own style of government. It is from this context that I advance the argument of an intentional shift in royal patronage that privileged painting over the masque. With the commission of Rubens’ ceiling for the Great Hall of the Banqueting House under way, and with Buckingham’s ceiling at York House providing an impression of the effect the nine canvases would have, I believe that Charles saw no more need for the staging of a masque, for he considered its semiotic effectiveness to be severely challenged, and he sought instead to shape his visual representation by commissioning his portrait on a grand scale. The nation was highly sympathetic to the new king, and geared itself up for a war against Spain that the late King James had worked to prevent throughout the entire 22 years of his reign in England. Charles’s marriage, in May 1625, to HenriettaMaria of France, a representative of the Roman-Catholic faith, was thus an unpopular choice with the new king’s subjects, who feared that their new queen would undermine Charles’s fight for the Protestant cause. Finally declaring war on Spain, Charles acted according to the people’s will but was refused the parliamentary support he had hoped for. A series of quarrelsome Parliaments assailed royal policies across the board, refused to finance the king’s expensive plans to attack Spain, and blamed Buckingham, Lord Admiral of the Fleet since 1619, for the increasing numbers of defeats abroad. To cover the costs of war, Charles took to his first exparliamentary measure and levied a forced loan, while dissolving Parliament in 1626 in defence of Buckingham, his principal minister, thereby recalling sour memories of King James’s protection of his favourite.76 The image representing the new king in the Great Hall of the Banqueting House supports my argument concerning Charles’s focus on the patronage of painting: it was the first portrait of the new king; a monumental canvas by Gerrit van Honthorst depicting The Liberal Arts Presented to King Charles and Queen Henrietta-Maria. (Fig. 51) Commissioned and installed in 1628, when the artist came to England on the invitation of King Charles, Honthorst’s painting dates from the year of Buckingham’s unexpected death. As the most prestigious and politically significant portrait of Buckingham in his lifetime, it is here assessed as the last in the series of five por76

See: Cust, Richard (1989): Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics. 1603–1642, London: Longman; Cogswell, Thomas (2002): ‘The People’s Love: The Duke of Buckingham and Popularity’, in: Thomas Cogswell and Richard Cust (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 211–34.

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Fig. 51: Gerrit van Honthorst, The Liberal Arts presented to Charles and Henrietta-Maria, 1628

traits that form the subject of this study.77 Though commissioned by the king, Honthorst’s painting displays Buckingham, disguised as Mercury, who leads the train of the seven liberal arts, in the centre, while Charles and the Queen Consort, though elevated on a cloud, appear almost marginalised to the left of the canvas.78 The pro77

78

Buckingham was stabbed to death in August 1628 by John Felton, an infantry lieutenant twice passed over for promotion to captain during Buckingham’s expedition to the Ile de Ré in 1627. Honthorst’s canvas, which today hangs in the Queen’s Staircase at Hampton Court Palace, has only occasionally been considered by art-historical scholarship. In the most notable account, Per Palme has suggested that it hung in the niche above Charles’s throne in the Banqueting House. See: Palme (1957): op. cit., (note 16); Millar, Oliver (1954): ‘Charles I, Honthorst, and Van Dyck’, in: Burlington Magazine, 96, no. 611, pp. 36–42; The commission is recorded in Abraham van der Doort’s Book of all such the kings Pictures As are by his Maiests. (MS. Bodlein Library), published in: Millar, Oliver (1960): ‘Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue of the Collection of Charles I’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, vol. XXXVII, pp. 1–256, p. 179. A differing account by James Yonge (who saw the canvas in 1681 at Hampton Court), stating that it was commissioned by Buckingham and cost him £700, is unlikely. See: White, Christopher (1982): The Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, cat. no. 74, pp 53–6. Charles’s reward

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cession of the seven liberal arts is headed by Buckingham’s wife, Lady Katherine, figured as Grammar, and kneeling in front of the throne with an open book in her hand. Behind her, in two groups, come Logic, carrying a balance, Rhetoric with a scroll in her left hand, Astronomy with astrolabe and dividers, followed by Geometry, with globe and dividers, Arithmetic, holding a tablet and pencil, and finally Music, playing the lute. The arrival of Buckingham and his train causes the banishment of Ignorance and Envy, who are pushed out of the scene together with a goat, presumably symbolising unrestrained passion, by three boys with burning poles. Buckingham is greeted by his king and queen. The couple resides on a throne of clouds, attended by their court. The painting’s exact position in the Banqueting House is a matter of debate. A written account from November 1639 documents that it hung in the hallway between the Banqueting House and the Privy Lodgings.79 This, however, was after Rubens’ ceiling had been installed in the Great Hall. It is doubtful that Honthorst would have been commissioned to paint a canvas so big – 357 × 640 cm – for a hallway, especially as we know that the composition, which was an enormous success with the court, earned the artist 3,000 guilders. He was also presented with a large silver service, and made an honorary citizen.80 It therefore seems more likely that the canvas, which was painted for the Whitehall Banqueting House, first hung in its Great Hall, where it could only have been installed on the south side above the throne, since Inigo Jones’s building had no other wall big enough to accommodate it. The installation of a portrait of Buckingham centrally above the throne – arguably the most iconic place of monarchic power in the realm – upon which Charles presented himself as England’s divine sovereign and ruling monarch, once more attested to the central position of the Duke at court. Thus the first official portrait of England’s new king had at its centre, not the image of Charles, but, significantly, the portrait of his first minister, the Duke of Buckingfor Honthorst was recorded by Joachim von Sandrart, who accompanied his master to London: ‘Sein Sein Ruhm wurde je länger je grosser, desswegen der König Carl Stuart in Engeland ihn zu sich beruffen, um ein sehr grosses Werk zu mahlen, wie nämlich Apollo und Diana (denen er des Königs und der Königin Bildnisse gegeben) beysammen hoch auf den Wolken sitzen und zusehen, wie Mercurius von der Erden, in Gestalt des Herzogs von Bockingam, die sieben freye Kunste mit sich fuhret und dem König vorstellet, sehr herrlich und vernunfti gezeichnet und treflich in Ausbildung eines jede besondeser Eigenschaften coloriert. Hingegen wie die schädliche Untugenden, Neid und Hars, duech die tugendliche Liebe nidergesturzt werden, mit noch vielen andern, so allda in des Banchetin Hauses Königlichen Saal zu ewigem Ruhm zu sehen.’ See: Joachim von Sandrarts [1675– 79]: Joachim von Sandarts Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675, ed. by A. R. Peltzer, Munich, 1925, p. 173. 79 See: Judson, J. Richard and Ekkart, Rudolf E. O. (1999): Gerrit van Honthorst. 1592–1656, Ghent: Davaco, cat. no. 92. 80 Ibid.

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ham, above whom a group of putti, resembling those in Rubens’ two portraits of Buckingham from 1625, blow trumpets in triumph at his arrival and greet him with a victor’s laurel. The canvas has continually puzzled historians. Per Palme has identified the train as that of the seven provinces of the Dutch Netherlands, and has read the composition as an allegory of Charles’s attempt to induce an appeasement between the Netherlands and Spain.81 Rather more likely is Richard Judson and Rudolf Ekkart’s suggestion that the work is a representation of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria’s important role in the patronage of the liberal arts.82 This interpretation still does not fully recognise the centrality of the figure of Buckingham. Figuring as the leader of the liberal arts, Buckingham is the first courtier ever to appear in one canvas with the portrait of an English king, and as such embodies a tremendously powerful demonstration of his position at court. Displayed at the composition’s centre, the Duke is represented as almost equal to the king and queen, from whom only his gesture of reverence before the throne distinguishes him. However Honthorst’s composition shows that this powerful position is accounted for by Buckingham’s patronage of the liberal arts, which, according to Renaissance thought, led to the advancement of human worth and individual dignity. Brought to the throne of the new English king, the liberal arts at first appear as an uncommon theme in Stuart iconography, and, probably for this reason, have so far been misconceived as a representation of the muses, or as a simple refashioning of the dramatis personae of the masque.83 However, Honthorst’s composition, I would argue, seems to be a condensed version of the upper half of Federigo Zuccaro’s design for Il lamento della Pittura, engraved by Cornelis Cort shortly before his death in 1578. (Fig. 52) Zuccaro had come to England in 1574 in order to fulfil a commission by Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, to paint Queen Elizabeth and himself, so that it is quite possible that the design was known at the English Court.84 Honthorst’s canvas is modelled after Zuccaro’s display of Olympus in the clouds, with Jupiter’s throne to the left and the train of the nine muses and a tenth figure in front: the Muse of Painting, who is led to the throne by a winged youth and the three Graces to claim her place in the train of the muses. The story depicted by Zuccaro exists in two versions, one by Francesco Lan81 Palme (1954): op. cit., (note 15), p. 266. 82 Judson and Ekkart (1999): op. cit., (note 78), p. 108. 83 See: Erica Veevers in her otherwise excellent study of the Caroline masque: Veevers, Erica (1989): Image of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta-Maria and Court Entertainments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 84 See: Pouilloux, Jean-Yves (1990): ‘Trois portraits d’Elizabeth I ou comment Frances A. Yates lit les tableaux’, in: Venezia Arti, vol. IV, pp. 70–7; Goldring, Elizabeth (2007): ‘The Earl of Leicester’s Inventory of Kenilworth Castle, c. 1578’, in: English Heritage Historical Review, vol. II, pp. 36–59, p. 38.

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cilotti in his 1509 Tractato di pictura, and the other in Michelangelo Biondo’s Della nobilissima pittura from 1549, both of which narrate Painting’s complaint of not being numbered among the liberal arts, and which fabricate a vision in which she is described as the tenth Muse by Jupiter, whose supreme judgement esteems her as the best of all arts.85 In Honthorst’s design for the Banqueting House the figure of Painting is united with that of Mercury, which Zuccaro had placed to the right, as part of the council of the gods that the canvas leaves out of the picture. The composition, like Zuccaro’s design, now reads as an allegory for Charles’s devotion to painting, and for the supreme role of Buckingham as England’s prime patron of the arts. Centring on the relation between Charles and Buckingham, the canvas illustrates the courtier’s role in setting a virtuous example for his prince through his own mastery of the art, a topos familiar from the Cortegiano, reiterating Ottaviano’s explanation of the courtier’s best service to the prince as conjuring an attractive image of virtue for him and all the court to follow.86 Buckingham’s assassination in August 1628 put a sudden end to the patronage of the publicly criticised Duke, whose death has been understood to mark the beginning of Charles’s personal rule.87 Indeed, historians of the Caroline reign have generally asserted that the death of the Duke, which is often the only event considered with regard to his career at court, led to a fundamental redirection in Charles’s life, whether political, economical or marital. Around the same time that the great canvas for Withehall Banqueting House was painted, Charles had also commissioned a portrait of Buckingham with his Family by Honthorst, which Van der Doort recorded as hanging ‘over the Chimney’ in the king’s Bedchamber at Whitehall, documenting Buckingham’s central role at court and his intimate relationship with the second Stuart king.88 Charles’s practice and taste in the collection and commissioning of painting, however, basically followed that of his late favourite and long-time mentor in all artistic matters. In June 1629, one year after Buckingham’s death, Charles received Rubens at Greenwich Palace. The Flemish master came to London as an envoy of Philip IV, Charles’s political enemy, who had appointed the artist as Secretary of his Privy Council of the Netherlands, and who now sent him to the English 85

For a discussion of the iconography and its various readings, see: Gerards-Nelissen, Inemie (1983): ‘Federigo Zuccaro and the “Lament of Painting”’, in: Semiolus. Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. XIII, no. 1, pp. 44–53. 86 See: Castiglione, Baldassare [1528]: The Book of the Courtier, trans. by George Bull, Harmondsworth: 1971, p. 299. 87 For the effect of Buckingham’s assassination on Charles and his attitude toward Parliament, and the connection between leading parliamentarians and John Felton, see: Sharpe, Kevin (1992): The Personal Rule of Charles I, New Haven: Yale University Press, who has shown that both Sir Robert Cotton and the Earl of Arundel were related to Felton. 88 See: White (1982): op. cit., (note 78), cat. no. 75, pp. 56–7.

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Fig. 52: Cornelis Cort, after Federico Zuccaro, Il Lamento della Pittura, before 1578

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court to negotiate a ceasefire preparatory to the exchange of Ambassadors and the conclusion of peace.89 The stay was longer than expected, and it afforded an occasion for Charles to discuss with Rubens the final designs for the ceiling of Banqueting House, and for the painter to extend his growing international network of royal patronage. On 16 September 1629 Charles swore peace with France, and, three months later, on 15 December, peace with Spain, so that Rubens’ mission eventually proved successful but obliged him to remain in London until March 1630. Rubens’ stay in England is generally referred to in relation to the artist’s famous comment that he had never seen so many paintings by artists of the first rank as in the royal collection of Whitehall and the gallery of the late Duke of Buckingham, which was maintained by Buckingham’s widow and Balthazar Gerbier.90 On his succession to the throne in 1625, Charles had inherited a collection of antique gems and modern bronzes in the antique manner, which his late brother Henry had begun to collect before his untimely death. During his visit to the Spanish court in 1623, where he had admired the collection of the Duke of Lerma at La Ribera, Charles had acquired paintings by Veronese and Titian that formed the nucleus of his own collection. The commission of Honthorst’s canvas for Banqueting House had coincided with Charles’s purchase of the Mantua collection, of which a large part, comprising works by Raphael, Correggio, Titian and Caravaggio, arrived in London before the end of 1629.91 In Buckingham’s collection at York House, however, Rubens saw his own canvases prominently displayed, for he had, up to this time, done most of his work for the Duke, even though he had been offered the patronage of the English king in 1621. Before Rubens left England in March 1630, however, he presented King Charles with a canvas entitled Minerva protecting Pax from Mars, today in the National Gallery. This painting shows Minerva guarding Peace from Mars, who reluctantly leaves the peaceful scene of his intended victims, a horrid Fury at his side. The work has

89 For Rubens’ diplomatic activities, see: Simson, Otto von (1996): Peter Paul Rubens (1577– 1640). Humanist, Maler und Diplomat, Mainz: Tabern; Heinen, Ulrich (2002): ‘Versatissimus in histories et re politica: Rubens’ Anfänge als Diplomat’, in: Rainer Budde (ed.), Sinnliche Intelligenz. Festschrift für Prof. Dr. Hans Ost, Köln: Dumont, pp. 283–318; Ost, Hans (2003): Malerei und Friedensdiplomatie. Peter Paul Rubens’ Anbetung der Könige im Muse del Prado zu Madrid, Köln: Hanstein. 90 See: Magurn (1955): op. cit., (note 36), p. 322. 91 For a more detailed account of the Mantua sale, see: Scott, Elliot (1959): ‘The Statues from Mantua in the collection of King Charles I’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CI, no. 675, pp. 218–27; Chambers, David (1981): ‘Charles I and the Gonzaga Collection’, in: idem (ed.), Splendours of the Gonzaga, London: Victoria & Albert Museum, pp. 95–100; and, Scott, Jonathan (2003): The Pleasures of Antiquity. British Collectors of Greece and Rome, New Haven: Yale University Press.

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been amply discussed as an example of Rubens’ use of painting in international diplomacy, and indeed it seems a suitable subject for the English king, who had just agreed to peace with Spain. Rubens’ gift, however, provided Charles’s court with a second monumental canvas to put on display, thereby promoting a repertoire of visual propaganda that was able to lend the Stuart Crown a prestige that had so far only been associated with the Habsburg and Valois courts on the Continent. Capturing the heroic world of the masque in a vast composition, Rubens’ canvas transferred the ephemeral magnificence of Inigo Jones’s stage to the overpowering imagery of Baroque painting, proving once more the ability of the painted image to embody a powerful expression of Stuart political ideology. With Rubens’ departure in March 1630, Charles’s court was left without the presence of a talented painter who could have been commissioned to enhance the image of monarchy by painting another monumental canvas, and it seems that Charles, after having received a disappointing portrait of himself from Daniel Mytens (Fig. 53), began to resume the staging of the masque, with the performance of Jonson’s Love’s Triumph through Callipolis in 1631. However, as I have already indicated above, this first masque of the Caroline court was anything but a simple continuation of the masque as it was staged for King James. Rather, the Caroline masque was intended to imitate the royal portrait and to provide Charles with an opportunity to present himself in a framed image. The genre’s increasing perception as a visual medium, in which images rather than poetic invention presented the primary mode of argument, is illustrated through the appointment of Inigo Jones for the design of the anti-masque, for which his collaborator Ben Jonson had traditionally been responsible. Jones’s growing influence at court presented a threat to Jonson and resulted in a series of written attacks, which the poet launched against Jones, who, so he asserted, deceived his audience with mere appearances: ‘Pack with your peddling poetry to the stage: / This is the money-get, mechanic age! / (…) / attire the persons as no thought can teach / Sense what they are: which, by a specious, fine / Term of architects is called design!92 Charles, however, was content with the work of his ‘picture-maker’, and began to take centre stage in his designs, while Jonson was eventually replaced by Aurelian Townsend, Jones’s collaborator for the production of Albion’s Triumph (8 January 1632) and Tempe Restored (14 February 1632). Anticipating the court ballets of Louis XIV, Charles reshaped the masque into the spectacle of his own performance, exploiting the use of the proscenium arch as it had been introduced by Inigo Jones in the last years of the Jacobean masque, to present his body outwardly, as a picture framed by the proscenium. The masque began to

92

Quoted from: ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’, in: Ben Jonson. Poems, ed. by Ian Donaldson, New York 1975, ll. pp. 51–6.

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focus explicitly on the figure of King Charles, promoting a portrayal of his royal body that was essentially pictorial. Historians of the Caroline masque have generally overlooked the relevance of Charles’s patronage of painting in their analysis of his dance performances and, instead, have focused on the manner in which the entertainment was employed to sustain the myth of an intact feudal society at a time when Charles’s decision to govern without Parliament made him dependent on an obedient political elite that would maintain his authority throughout the country.93 In this context, the court culture of Charles has been described as a Renaissance of Arcadianism that attests to a culture of revisionism at the Caroline court, and which cast the alternating performances of Charles and Henrietta-Maria in the masque into stagings of chivalrous and pastoral romance.94 However, such a perspective addresses the question of how the aesthetics of the masque changed under the authority of its new patron solely from the standpoint of literary studies, taking no account of the fact that Charles’s opinion of the genre was that of a patron who had developed a taste for monumental Baroque painting and its verisimilitude. It has so far gone unnoticed that Honthorst’s depiction of Charles and Henrietta-Maria as Jove’s twin children Apollo and Diana was the model for Ben Jonson’s 1631 Love’s Triumph through Callipolis, the first of the Caroline masques, which presented the royal marriage as the union of mundane power and divine love, thereby establishing Honthorst’s pictorial composition in the emblem of MaryCharles that would itself become reinforced by succeeding masques in the allusion to The Royal Twins, or, as will be discussed in detail below, Carlomaria.95 Daniel Mytens, of whose work no concise study exists so far, had been made ‘Picture Drawer to the King’ by Charles in June 1625, and was endowed with an annual pension of £70. Until Van Dyck’s arrival in 1632, at least fifteen portraits of His Majesty’s own royal person and several others of Queen Henrietta-Maria are accounted in the books of 93 For a detailed account of the political significance of the Caroline masque under Charles’s personal rule, see: Smuts, Malcolm R. (1987): Court Culture and the Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Sharpe, Kevin (1987b): ‘The Image of Virtue: The Court and Household of Charles I, 1625–1642’, in: David Starkey (ed.), The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, London: Longman, pp. 226–48; and, Reeve, L. J. (1989): Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 94 See: Veevers (1989): op. cit., (note 83); Coiro, Ann Baynes (1999): ‘A ball of strife: Caroline Poetry and Royal Marriage’, in: Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image. Representations of Charles I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 26–46; and, Patterson, Annabel (1985): Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 95 For a detailed assessment of Love’s Triumph through Callipolis in relation to the Treaty of Madrid, which ended the war with Spain, see: Butler (2008): op. cit., (note 74), p. 289ff.

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Fig. 53: Daniel Mytens, Charles I, 1628

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the Lord Chamberlain for approximately £50 each.96 In 1630 Mytens was commissioned to paint a double portrait of King Charles and Queen Henrietta-Maria (Fig. 54), whose relatively stiff execution, however, displeased the royal couple, who then ordered Mytens to retouch the figure of the queen in a Van Dyckian manner. Displeased with the retouched version as well, the whole commission was reissued to Van Dyck (Fig. 55), and, after long-winded negotiations that began immediately after Rubens’ departure in 1630, Charles finally succeeded in persuading the Flemish master to work at his court in 1632.97 Charles’s dissatisfaction with the double portrait in 1630, and Mytens’ subsequent return to the Netherlands, strongly suggest that Charles resumed the performances of the masque in January 1631 out of disappointment with the artistic abilities of the painters in his service at that time. Love’s Triumph through Callipolis and Chloridia were followed in January 1632 by Albion’s Triumph, commissioned by the king, and Tempe Restored, commissioned by the queen, and both were staged in the Banqueting House. Yet three months later, in April 1632, Van Dyck finally returned to settle at the English court, and the following season no masque was commissioned by the royal couple.98 Back in London, Van Dyck reworked the double portrait into an intimate picture of the royal couple, whose glory and splendour are displayed in the brilliance and luxury of their clothes and the grace of their gestures.99 Displaying Charles and Henrietta as romantic heroes, from whose love will spring harmony and abundance for the entire realm, Van Dyck’s portrait defined royal power as the personal aura of the king and queen, whose sovereign distinction is created by nature rather than by art. His portraits of the king and his family be96 For the commission records, see: Stopes, Charlotte C. (1910): ‘Daniel Mytens in England’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. XVII, no. 87, pp. 160–3. See also: Ter Kuile, Onno (1969): ‘Daniel Mijtens’, in: Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, vol. XX, pp. 1–106. 97 For a discussion of Mytens’ painting in comparison to that of Van Dyck, see: Millar, Oliver (1962): ‘Some Painters and Charles I’, in: Burlington Magzine, vol. CIV, no. 713, pp. 324–33. 98 Walter Montague’s The Shepherd’s Paradise, commissioned by Henrietta-Maria for staging at Somerset House in January 1633, is not a masque but a staged pastoral. See: Tomlinson, Sophie (2003): ‘Theatrical Vibrancy on the Caroline Court Stage: Tempe Restored and The Shepherds’ Paradise’, in: Clare McManus (ed.), Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 186–203. On female performance and patronage of Stuart court entertainments, see: Tomlinson, Sophie (2005): Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 99 For a detailed discussion of Van Dyck’s canvas, see: Struhal, Eva (2001): ‘Posen und Gesten in van Dycks Porträts – Das Ehebildnis Karls I. und Henrietta-Marias in Kremsier und das Porträt Elizabeth Porters’, in: Hans Vlieghe (ed.), Van Dyck 1599–1999. Conjectures and Refutations, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 199–210; and, Raatschen, Gudrun (2003): Anton Van Dycks Porträts König Karls I. von England und Königin Henrietta-Marias. Form, Inhalt, und Funktion, Bonn: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität.

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Fig. 54: Daniel Mytens, Double Portrait of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria, 1630 Fig. 55: Anthony van Dyck, Double Portrait of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria, 1632

came an integral part of Charles’s Divine Right Rule, promoting the image of dynastic stability and sovereign power that he wished to convey. Until the artist’s death, in 1641, the English king and queen commissioned a larger number of portraits from the painter than they commissioned masques: namely, twenty portraits of 239

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King Charles, three of them equestrian, seventeen more portraits of HenriettaMaria, and nine of the Royal Family or Children.100 It seems evident that Charles’s resumption of the masque after six years, and his re-conception of the spectacle to provide a framed presentation of his personal body, arose out of the chagrin of having no appropriate painter at hand to provide him with a new, state-of-the-art portrait of himself and his Queen Consort. In consequence, the king sought to reshape the masque after the nature of the painted image, which, under his rule, had become the new medium in royal favour. Having engaged Van Dyck as his personal painter, who received an annual pension of £200 and was knighted only three months after his arrival in April 1632, Charles waited for the arrival of Rubens’ canvases for Whitehall, and, in the meantime, commissioned the performance of the masque in order to introduce the iconography of Rubens’ painted heavens, and to stage a transition from the spatial notion of Jones’s masque stage to that of the painted image. This intention becomes obvious with the staging of Coelum Britannicum on 18 February 1634, a joint production by Thomas Carew and Inigo Jones, which, as will be shown, staged a symbolic abolishment of Jonson’s stage in the Great Hall of Banqueting House that united the terrestrial presence of the court and its imaginary space of cosmic correspondence in a shared spatial arrangement that allowed for the relocation of divine allegory from the temporary stage images to the permanent vision of Rubens’ ceiling. By May 1633, Rubens’ work on the canvases for Banqueting House was known to be far enough advanced to raise expectations regarding its installation the following year. Coelum Britannicum, I argue, anticipated the semiotic implications of this transition from one medium to another.

Inaugurating the Picture-Plane: Thomas Carew’s ‘Coelum Britannicum’ Coelum Britannicum reveals ‘the ruines of some great city of the ancient Romans, or civiliz’d Brittaines’ that corresponds to the contemporary notion of Britain as the true heir of Roman culture and Charles’s emerging claim to personal rule. The opening scene starts with a witty dialogue between Mercury, Jove’s messenger, and Momus, the god of mirth and mockery.101 (Fig. 56) Arriving from Olympus, they report an outbreak of nervous uproar in the heavens, from where Jove has watched Charles’s reform of his country and at last decided to follow this example and remo100 For a list of commissions by Charles I and Henrietta-Maria see Appendix II. 101 For a more general account of the practice of justifying the present by the virtues of the past in late-Renaissance and early modern England, see: Kendrick, Thomas (1950): British Antiquity, London, Methuen.

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Fig. 56: Inigo Jones, Stage Design for Coelum Britannicum, undated

del his realm after that of the British king. While Mercury’s account of this poetic vision elegantly eulogises the rule of the Caroline king and queen, Momus’s mock repetition of his account brusquely shatters Mercury’s flawless image of Charles’s autocratic monarchy that is depicted to outshine even the brilliant lights of the heavenly spheres in its glory. The dialogue between the two gods generates a rhetoric that oscillates between cynicism and reverence and that has repeatedly been noted as the most substantial criticism of royal politics ever to be expressed in a Stuart masque. As Joanne Altieri was first to emphasise, it is Momus’s sharp scepticism and satiric irreverence for Mercury’s report that reveals the latter’s flattering account as a deliberate idealisation of Caroline politics.102 However, Momus’s wanton version of Mercury’s eulogy not 102

Indeed, scholarly analysis of Thomas Carew’s most important masque seems to be trapped in an ongoing debate regarding the genre’s role as a voice of criticism in a court entirely focused on the person of the monarch, who increasingly withdrew himself from society at large. See: Altieri, Joanne (1986): ‘Responses to a Waning Mythology in Carew’s Poetry’, in: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. XXVI, pp. 107–24. At its most radical, the voice of Momus has been understood as overtly subversive of the politics at the Caroline court and the legitimacy of Charles’s absolute rule. See: Sharpe, Kevin (1987a): Criticism and

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only criticises Charles’s rule, but essentially questions the concept of the masque as a celebration of the glory of the English monarchy in the poetic simulacrum of its divine foil. As will be shown below, the authority of a higher, parallel realm of the heavens that necessarily presided over the worldly power of the Stuart monarchy obliged the king to display his sovereign power in the disguise of a masquing persona. This seemed no longer appropriate to a monarch who had seen his power conveyed well by a painted representation of his likeness – and who had the poetic power of heavens abolished by the commission of a masque that staged a reform of the cosmos within the walls of Banqueting House by which he, like Buckingham in Rubens’ ceiling for York House, would ascend to the heavens himself. Praising the ‘exemplar life’ of Charles and Henrietta as the ‘envy’d patterne’ of all spheres, Carew’s verse envisions a world turned upside down, where the heavens form their course after earthly example and the gods pay tribute to the glory of the English monarchy.103 Comparing himself in the ‘Chrystall myrrour’ of Charles and Henrietta’s reign, Jove, the king of gods, discovers the ‘loathsome staines’ with which he ‘fill’d the crowded Firmament’, each of them representing an amorous affair from his former sinful life.104 In raging jealousy, Juno turns each of her husbands’ earthly lovers into beasts, which Jove then ‘retransform’d to Stars’, where they form the constellations of the heavens and shine as the ‘eternal records of his shame’.105 Anxious to ‘expiate the infectious guilt’, Jove now chases the ‘infamous lights from their usurped Spheare’, leaving behind nothing but the ‘vacant rooms’ of an empty sky.106 Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin Butler has emphasised, however, that Momus’s jokes at Charles’s expense were only possible because the ideology of personal government on which they were premised remained substantially unquestioned. See: Butler, Martin (1993): ‘Reform or Reverence? The Politics of the Caroline Court Masque’, in: James Ronald Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds.), Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 118–56. Only in a very recent study has this perspective been somewhat widened, by Hilary Gatti, who assesses the extent to which Carew’s poetry draws on Giordano Bruno’s allegorical dialogue Lo Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante, which had been published in England in 1584 with a dedication to Philip Sidney. Critics have, however, differed over the question of whether Carew’s adaptation of Bruno’s text can be considered significant beyond the superficial. For a detailed discussion, see: Gatti, Hilary (1995): ‘Giordano Bruno and the Stuart Court Masques’, in: Renaissance Quarterly, vol. XLVIII, no. 4, pp. 809–42. 103 Quoted from: Thomas Carew, ‘Coelum Britannicum’, in: The Poems of Thomas Carew with his Masque Coelum Britannicum, ed. by Rhodes Dunlap, Oxford, 1964, pp. 153–85, l. 62 and l. 66. 104 Ibid., l. 84, 85, and 80. 105 l. 79 and 83. 106 l. 86, 88, and 94.

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Mercury’s poetic vision is challenged by that of Momus, who relates how Jove ‘recanted, disclaymed, and utterly renounced all the lascivious extravagancies, and riotous enormities of his forepast licentious life’ and ordered ‘that this whole Army of Constellations be immediately disbanded and cashiered, so to remove all imputation of impiety from the Coelestiall Spririts, and all lustfull influences upon terestriall bodies’.107 To prove his word, Momus effects a scene change by which ‘a Spheare, with Starres place in their several Images; borne up by a huge naked Figure, kneeling, and bowing forwards, as if the great weight lying on his shoulders opprest him, upon his head a Crowne’ appear on Jones’s upper stage.108 Revealed by the partition of the stage shutters, this figure is Atlas (Fig. 57), symbol of cosmic wisdom in Renaissance culture, and familiar from Thomas Heywood’s description of the Roman theatre. He carries a representation of the celestial sphere on which the reformed constellations of Jove’s realm are displayed. Mocking Jove’s purified court as a ‘Monastery of converted gods’,109 Momus lists the numerous new orders that have been read in Jove’s Presence Chamber to all subordinate deities: ‘Injunctions are gone out to the Nectar Brewer, for the purging of the heavenly Beverage of a narcotique weed which hath rendred the Ideaes confus’d in the Devine intellects, and reducing it to the composition used in Saturnes Reigne. (…) Baccus hath commanded all Tavernes to be shut, and no liquor drawne after tenne at night. Cupid must goe no more so scandalously naked, but is enjoyned to make him breeches though of his mothers [sic] petticotes. Ganimede is forbidden the Bedchamber, and must onely minister in publique. The ods must keepe no Pages,

107 108 109

l. 200–3 and 213.–7. l. 189–93. l. 229. Jones’s design of the figure of Atlas has given rise to intense debate among scholars of the masque. It was first identified as borrowed from Annibale Carracci’s Hercules bearing the Globe in the Camerino Farnese of Palazzo Farnese in Rome. See: Douglas Stewart’s review of Stephen Orgel’s and Roy Strong’s Inigo Jones. The Theatre of the Stuart Court (1971), in which he suggested that Jones might have known Carracci’s composition from his visit to Rome, or, indirectly, from an engraving. See: Stewart, J. Douglas (1974): ‘Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court’, in: Burlington Magazine, vol. CXVI, no. 860, pp. 673–77. In 1990, John Peacock pointed out that Carracci’s painting was not engraved during Jones’s lifetime, and instead suggested an adaptation for an unexecuted engraving by Francesco Albani as its model. The drawing is now in the Devonshire Collection at Chatworth, and during Jones’s lifetime was probably in an English collection. See: Peacock, John (1990): ‘Inigo Jones and Renaissance Art’, in: Renaissance Studies, vol. IV, pp. 254–72. See also Jeremy Wood’s 1993 discussion of the design in his argument on Jones’s dealing with the nude figure: Wood, Jeremy (1993): ‘Inigo Jones, Italian Art and the Practice of Drawing, in: Art Bulletin, vol. LXXIV, no. 2, pp. 247–70.

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nor Groomes of their Chamber under the age of 25, and those provided of a competent stocke of beard. Pan may not pipe, nor Proteus juggle, but by especiall permission.’110

By prominently reporting Ganymede’s banishment from the Bedchamber, Momus’s account of the celestial reform contains a clear reference to the contended position of the late Duke of Buckingham at the Jacobean court. Coelum Britannicum here creates an advanced vision of Charles’s reign by demonstrating its superiority over the reign of Jove, i.e. James I, and which the masque retrospectively elevated in accordance with the higher moral standards of James’s son.111 According to the political propaganda of Caroline rule, Charles and Henrietta-Maria exercised a natural claim to sovereign rule based on the order and harmony of their conjugal bond. Ganymede’s banishment from the Bedchamber in Coelum Britannicum thus stands in the context of a poetic affirmation of royal marriage as the central emblem of Caroline prosperity. As Momus goes on to report, Jove’s reform affects not only his court but his marriage. The King of Gods ‘beginnes to learne to lead his owne wife, (…) to eternize the memory of that great example of Matrimoniall union which he derives from hence, hath on his bedchamber dore, (…) engraven the Inscription of CARLOMARIA’.112 In his first speech, Mercury envisions Charles as ascending into the darkness of the emptied sphere, where he would come to sit ‘in the most eminent and conspicuous point’ and ‘with dazeling beames, and spreading magnitude’, shine ‘as the bright Polestarre of this Hemispheare’.113 Next to his side, ‘in a triumphant Chaire’, Mer110 111

112

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Carew: op. cit., (note 103), l. 237–41, 247–55. Michael Young has argued in this context that Charles, having banished Ganymede from the Bedchamber in Carew’s masque, publicly banishes his father’s homosexuality and thus accomplishes in the fictional world of court spectacle what he was unable to accomplish in the reality of court life. Considering Carew’s masque from Charles’s ‘personal family background’, Young has ascribed to Coelum Britannicum a ‘pathetic quality’ that documents the son’s embarrassment for the father. True as this may be on a personal level, this perspective, however, loses sight of the significance of the masque as a medium with the potential for political propaganda that celebrated the love of Charles and Henrietta-Maria as an emblem of the dynastic stability of an increasingly contested reign. See: Young, Michael (2000): James I and IV and the History of Homosexuality, London: Macmillan, p. 110. Quoted from: Carew: op. cit., (note 103), l. 268–76. Momus’ irreverent gossiping about Jove’s marital conduct here forms the corresponding image of Mercury’s formal laudatio to the royal couple’s mutual love. Besides conveying his power through a vision of imperial force, Coelum Britannicum affirms Charles’s sovereignty by depicting him as devoted to the merits of marriage, in which he is inseparably attached to his wife by the same love that safeguards the loyalty to and the devotion of his people. Ibid., l. 92–4.

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Fig. 57: Inigo Jones, Atlas, Stage Design for Coelum Britannicum, undated

cury envisions Henrietta-Maria as ‘the faire Consort of your [Charles’s] heart, and Throne’, so that from the mutual light of the royal couple ‘this lower Globe / shall owe its light’.114 Calling Atlas onto the stage, Momus’s action challenges this vision, which recalls Gerrit van Honthorst’s monumental composition for Banqueting House. In accordance with the logic of the masque, Mercury’s vision must be enacted through the performance of dances. Turning the heavenly vices into ‘human shapes’, 114

l. 95–6, and, 101–2.

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Jove’s messenger sets to work, and commands the dancers to ‘drop from the Sky’ and perform ‘the disorder of their regressive paces here below’.115 In the course of the three dances of the anti-masque, introduced by this command, ‘the Stares in those figure in the Spheare which they were to represent, were extinct; so as, by the end of the Antimasques in the Spheare no more Stars [sic] were seene’.116 By ordering the dancers of the anti-masque from the stage, Mercury demonstrates the fulfilment of his vision to Charles’s courtly elite, causing them to face the dark and empty celestial sphere on Atlas’s shoulders behind the frame of Jones’s proscenium arch. Mercury’s effacement of the stars of Jove’s old cosmos resonates with Prospero’s annihilation of the illusion of the masque in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which had included the staging of the courtly form of entertainment in the 1613 version of the play. Summoning the theatrical illusion had enabled him to defy the laws of a reality otherwise out of reach, which now vanishes: These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air; And – like the baseless fabric of this vision – The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind117

As the spheres cannot be left without light, Mercury and Momus decide to ‘provide an immediate succession’118 to the stars that were removed from the sky and hear the four candidate vices Plutus (wealth), Poenia (poverty), Tiche (fortune) and Hedone (pleasure), whose proposals form the second part of the anti-masque. After all four have been banished from the stage, the hearing is closed and Mercury turns to the audience, introducing the main masque by effecting another scene change that de115 116 117

118

l. 340–4. l. 440–3. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, reprinted in: The Riverside Shakespeare. The complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by Gwynne Blakemore Evans, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997, pp. 1656–88. The Tempest was written and first performed in 1611, and it included the staging of a masque that was produced for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth Stuart in 1613. See: Gildman, Ernest B. (1980): ‘“All Eyes”: Prospero’s Inverted Masque’, in: Renaissance Quarterly, vol. XXXIII, pp. 214–30; Bevington, David (1998): ‘The Tempest and the Jacobean Court Masque’, in: idem and Peter Holbrook (eds.), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 214–43. Carew: op. cit., (note 103), l. 419.

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lighted the members of the audience, who wondered ‘how so huge a machine and of that great height could come from under the Stage, which was but six foot high’.119 Jones’s device consisted of a hilltop that ‘little by little grew to be a huge mountaine that covered all the Scaene’, on top of which sat Britain’s three kingdoms, a winged figure with an olive garland, who entertained the audience with a song for the queen.120 Inigo Jones’s spectacular device was intended to provide the King with the time necessary to leave his throne besides Henrietta-Maria and disappear behind the scene where he would wait for the moment of his own appearance on stage, while Henrietta-Maria was addressed with a song. This song praised the queen’s countenance as the perfect image of neo-Platonic love, whose eyes shed a light ‘more sparkeling’121 and ‘a nobler influence’122 than Jove’s old stars had ever done. It ended with another scene change, during which Inigo Jones’s mountain opened and revealed a cave beneath the stage, from which courtly dancers of the main masque entered the dancing floor, attired as ancient Britons. While the courtiers performed their dance, a cloud appeared from behind the upper part of the proscenium arch that sank down on the mountain and, rising again, ‘beares up the Genius of the three kingdoms, and being past the Airy Region, pierceth the heavens, and [was] no more seene’,123 While the masquers then invited members of the audience to the revels, the mountain sank back into the stage, on the upper part of which was revealed the scene of a pastoral garden that alluded to the royal peace of Charles and Henrietta-Maria’s reign. In the final part of the masque, Britain’s true worthies, Religion, Truth and Wisdom, were installed as the new constellations of the heavens, side by side with Concord, Government and Reputation. They rose on two clouds to mid-height of the stage, while on the lower part of the stage an elegant pastoral perspective was revealed, with Windsor Castle in the distance. Above them, unveiled from an even bigger cloud, sat the figure of Eternity on a Globe, ‘wrought all over with Stars of gold’,124 while aloft, ‘was a troope of fifteene stares, expressing the setllifying of our British Heores’.125 One of them, in the middle, was ‘more great and eminent than the rest’,126 placed above Eternity’s head, and ‘figured his Majesty’ King Charles I.127

119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

Ibid., l. 969–71. l. 884–5. l. 918. l. 919. l. 964–6. l. 1078–9. l. 1081–2. l. 1082–3. l. 1083–4.

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Although Coelum Britannicum has repeatedly been regarded as the most powerful vision of Charles’s personal reign ever designed in a masque, the significance of this final scene has hitherto not been addressed. Charles and Henrietta-Maria come to face each other from opposite points in Banqueting House by the last of Inigo Jones’s devices for Coelum Britannicum. The queen, seated on the throne and surrounded by her court, looks towards the stage, where Charles, enthroned among the celestial heroes of the masque, has taken his place as ‘the bright Pole-starre of this Hemispheare’.128 The king and his train have taken the place of Jove’s old lights after they had been banished from the spheres, creating an image of Charles’s celestial rule framed by the proscenium arch. This image, however, is ingeniously mirrored in that of the queen and her attendants, residing on the throne in front of the stage. As Charles had been made star-like by ascending on one of Inigo Jones’s clouds, the same process for Henrietta-Maria had been undertaken by the masque’s prose: ‘Look up, and see the darkned Spheare / Depriv’d of light, her [the queen’s] eyes shine there; / These are more sparkling then those [Jove’s constellations] were’.129 Jones’s proscenium arch here serves as an axis along which the two corresponding images of king and queen come to reflect each other and thereby conflate to an overarching presentation of sovereign power that abolished the disparity between royal stage and royal presence. The Stuart masque had traditionally undermined the aesthetic difference between the world of its courtly audience and that of its allegorical narrative, its climax being the revels where the final union of fact and fiction was accomplished. In the final scene of Coelum Britannicum, however, the masque’s fiction was not joined with but was superseded by the reality of Charles’s court. By installing Charles as the new monarch of the celestial spheres, Carew’s masque portrays the Caroline court as overpowering the reign of the gods, which was previously understood to shed its glory upon the terrestrial reign of the British monarch, whose association with the gods elevated his reign into the sphere of heavenly power. In contrast, Charles’s reform had unmasked Jove’s reign as corrupt and degenerated, so that Jove came to see his need to resign and cleared the throne for the British king. Charles’s accession to the heavenly throne not only ends Jove’s reign but announces the end of time itself, which has now lost the need to move forth:

128 129

l. 94. l. 916–8.

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‘Be fix’d you rapid Orbes, that beare The changing seasons of the yeare On your swift wings, and see the old Decrepit Spheare growne darke and cold; Nor did Iove quench her fires, these bright Flames, have ecclips’d her sullen light: This Royal Payre, for whom Fate will Make Motion cease, and Time stand still; Since Good is here so perfect, as no Worth Is left for After-Ages to bring forth.’130

The rule of Britain’s king and queen thus brings the movement of the spheres to a halt, causing the turn of the seasons to cease, as no better age can succeed that of the Caroline reign. While the movement of the spheres that formerly conditioned all movement below comes to an end, the courtly ‘shapes form’d fit for heaven’ are far too costly to be despatched to the sky: ‘We cannot lend Heaven so much treasure. Nor that pay, But rendering what it takes away. Why should they that here can move So well, be ever-fix’d above? Or be to one eternall posture ty’d That can into such various figures slide? Iove shall not, to enrich the Skie, Beggar the Earth, their Fame shall flye From hence alone, and in the Spheare Kindle new Starres, whilst they rest here.’131

Carew’s prose turns the cosmos upside down, bringing the spheres to a standstill, while its new constellations remain on earth, illuminating the skies from below. Ascending to Olympus in the final scene of Coelum Britannicum, Charles presents himself as governing the course of nature, residing over its law by personal decree. Contrasted with the supreme order of his worldly court, the perfect state of celestial harmony, hitherto understood to direct man’s course on earth, now appears as not so perfect after all, so that even the gods have to admit Charles’s rule as the more commendable one and voluntarily vacate their position. Carew’s vision of sovereign 130 131

l. 1087–96. l. 985–95.

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power thus breaks the principal axiom of the masque, wherein royal authority is generated by authority of the heavens, and social order is maintained by coherent movement kinetically corresponding to the perceived movement of the celestial bodies. Infringing on the foundation of courtly society that had been portrayed by the Jacobean masque as mirroring the structural harmony of the spheres, Coelum Britannicum abolishes the authorities of the heavens and glorifies the Caroline king as superior to their power. When in the masque the three kingdoms command: ‘breake old Atlas’, and ‘at that instant the Rocke with the three kingdoms on it sinkes, and is hidden in the earth’, Jones’s device stages the collapse of the pillars that of old were keeping heaven and earth apart, thereby equating the status and space of the heavenly realm with the realm of King Charles.132 The authority over the order and structure of society is thus shifted from the heavenly spheres onto the person of the king, around whom the spheres now revolve according to their reformed path. The geometric rationale of Coelum Britannicum provides a clear expression of the Caroline world-view that derived its doctrine from a precise analysis of neoPlatonic geometry. Carrew’s masque expresses the ideals of peace and harmony that underlie the philosophy of Divine Right Rule, and portrays Charles and HenriettaMaria as the ‘Bright glorious Twins of Love and Majesty’, in an animated version of Van Dyck’s 1632 double portrait of the king and queen.133 Translating the celebrated love of Charles and Henrietta-Maria into a physical principle for a well-ordered British realm, the masque redefines the cosmos as a perfect circle, filled with the power of the king and the love of the queen, thereby completing an image introduced in Jonson’s Love’s Triumph through Callipolis in 1631: ‘For Love without his object soon is gone; Love must have answering love to look upon. To you, best judge, then, of perfection! The queen of what is wonder in the place! Pure object of heroic love alone! The centre of proportion – Sweetness – Grace! Deign to receive all line of love in one. And by reflecting of them fill this space. Till it a circle of those glories prove Fit to be sought in beauty, found by Love.

132 133

l. 942 and 966–7. l. 48.

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Where love is mutual, still All things in order move; The circle of the will Is the true sphere of Love.’134

Alluding to the love of Charles and Henrietta-Maria and the overarching symbolism of royal marriage as emblematic of Caroline propaganda, the ‘true sphere of Love’ constructs a ‘circle of will’ representing the new, supreme power of royal command as exceeding the laws of nature. By uniting the traditionally opposed and distinct spheres of heaven and earth on a common level governed by the English king and his queen consort, Coelum Britannicum enacts a neo-Platonic understanding of man’s universal rule over the elements.135 In the final scene, the representation on stage extends beyond the line of the proscenium arch – operating here like the prime meridian of a spherical whole – to form a full circle that includes the space of the audience. Significantly, Coelum Britannicum not only conveyed a vision of courtly reform, but actually integrated this reformed vision into the theatrical experience of the court. This promoted a concept of royal panegyric that no longer conjured monarchic glory by association to divine power, but that symbolically subdued celestial majesty by exhibition of Caroline omnipotence. By staging the moral ascendancy of Charles’s coelum britannicum over the coelum divinum of Jones’s stage, Carew’s masque presented royal power as central and absolute to a degree unprecedented in artistic glorification of the English Crown.

The Royal Body in the Courtly Portrait At the end of Coelum Britannicum Charles and Henrietta-Maria are shown ruling over the conflated spheres of a reformed cosmos wherein the disparity between the heavenly and the worldly had been annulled for the reign of the one, omnipotent 134 135

Ben Jonson [1631], Love’s Triumph through Callipolis, in: Stephen Orgel (ed.) Ben Jonson: Complete Masques, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969, pp. 405–15, p. 406. The integration of contemporary developments in art and science was a common inspiration for the design of the masque. Ben Jonson’s News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1621) had been the first masque to exploit contemporary theories in astronomy by referring to Galileo’s discovery of geological features on the surface of the moon. While Jonson’s masque took Galileo’s discoveries as a mere example for the dissemination of news by the emerging newspapers of Jacobean London, Carew’s much later spectacle exhibits Galileo’s alleged Platonism and its emphasis on the role of mathematics as the basic concept of his narrative. For Jonson’s masque, see: Somerville, John (1996): The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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monarch, whose representation as absolute unity had come to reject the notion of a body divided into a two-fold identity and office as divine and personal. The royal body of the second Stuart king was no longer set up against the spatially differing, signifying distance of the stage but demonstrated this sovereign power in the now congruent spatiality of the Great Hall of Whitehall Banqueting House. The stage that before had served as the signifying difference of the king’s two-fold identity had become his simulacrum. Perceived as the mirror that reflected the power and authority of the king and brought the higher truth of his royal nature to light, the staged visions behind Jones’s proscenium arch had maintained a cosmos predictably ordered by divine law and reason. Its symbolic abolition in Coelum Britannicum transferred this structuring impulse to the unpredictable and unknowable divine will of a monarch in personal, absolutist rule. The traditionally distinct spheres of heaven and earth, of political allegory and courtly reality, were united in one common terrestrial space of representation, for which Carew’s masque invested Charles with the position of the royal creator, the potent monarch whose mind and power devised the vision and outline of a new, superior realm. The transition is from the staged image as emblem of a hidden but accordant divine truth, to a proscenium stage acknowledging its material condition as representation, as the framed image that replaced the immaterial and ephemeral with a mediated presence. Coelum Britannicum prepared its spectators for the sight of Rubens’ painted skies, and set the scene for Charles’s subsequent representation in portraiture – a scene that became powerfully exploited by Van Dyck’s next commission from the king, his 1635 Charles I in the Hunting-Field. (Fig. 6) The first portrait Van Dyck produced for the British king after the staging of Carew’s 1634 masque shows Charles as he takes a short rest from the hunt. The canvas – 272 cm high and 212 cm wide – presents a life-size image of the king. The portrait reveals the particular notion of representation that emerged from the process of aesthetic renegotiation of painting at the Stuart court. The advancement of the representational plane of the painted image over the two-fold signification of both the courtly and the royal body in the masque manifests itself in Van Dyck’s depiction of Charles’s left elbow, thrust out towards the beholder and seemingly piercing the edge of the painting’s surface. What the painter here performs is a deliberate signification of the canvas as engaged in the act of the king’s representation. By emphasising the material surface of Charles’s portrait, Van Dyck marks the representational screen of the painting as the material vehicle through which the king’s sovereign power is conveyed. By displaying the elbow as a point of exchange between the illusionistic space of the painting and the factual space of its beholder, Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I in the Hunting-Field revealed the canvas as a space of mimetic production concerned with the representation of sovereign power, which, like the king’s elbow, encounters a limit on the material surface of representation. 252

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Exposing what the logic of the masque had sought to deny, the materiality of representation, Van Dyck’s royal portrait enunciates the authorship of sovereign power, as a man-made rather then God-given quality that is created and maintained in its visual demonstration. This conscious display of royal presence as something that is evoked by the art of illusion exhibits an understanding of representation that stands opposed to both the Tudor and the Jacobean conception of the two-fold bodily nature of kingship. By locating the representation of sovereign power in the eye of the masque’s spectator, whose bidirectional gaze created the king’s royal dignity in its movement between royal stage and the canopy of State, the masque had excluded the king from the sight of his own power. Meeting his royal portrait in Van Dyck’s canvas afforded Charles the opportunity to contemplate this power as if it were a mirror image. The image of Charles I can only be understood in this context. Unlike Buckingham, whose self-fashioning in contemporary portraiture negotiated the display of the secular courtly body, the king, in shifting the display of his body from the space of the masque to that of the painted image, reconstrued the representational paradigms of his two-fold, bodily sovereignty. Had he followed the established practice for the representation of the two bodies of English sovereign kingship, Charles, like his father before him, would have displayed his body against the mythical narrative of the masque, which represented the corporeal divinity of the king’s natural body through a two-fold construction of signification that generated its signifying power in the oscillation of the viewer’s gaze; the back-and-forth, focusing and unfocusing of the eye as it covered the spatial distance between the king and his stage. In Charles’s portrait, however, this spatial distance collapsed, conflating the coexistence of the transparent and the opaque in the representational screen of the painting, as it has prominently been defined by Louis Marin.136 Charles’s gradual substitution of the court masque with the portrait commissions for Anthony van Dyck thus demonstrates not only a significant shift in courtly taste, but a paradigmatic reform in the contemporary perception of representation itself. Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles at the hunt presents the absolute royal portrait: Standing on a small hill in the plain countryside, Van Dyck conveys the king’s sovereign status without the traditional insignia of kingship, crown, sceptre or imperial orb, or allegories of his royal virtues at his side. In contrast, the portrait evokes an 136

According to Marin, the painting is both ‘a transparent window through which the spectator, Man, contemplates the scene represented on the canvas as if he saw the real scene represented in the world; but at the same time (…) a surface and a material support, (…) a reflecting device on which the real objects are pictured’. See: Marin, Louis (1980): ‘Towards a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds’, in: Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text. Essays on Audience and Representation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 293–324, p. 298.

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image of Charles’s sovereign nature, his natural embodiment of royal power that evolves not from lawful descent or dynastic heritage, but from the natural dignity of his body and person. Significantly, this impression arises from the artful rendering of his body. Clad in a plain but elegant costume, Charles’s body speaks for itself. No red robe, no fur coat underlines his royal identity. The king, in fact, stands, with one of his gloves pulled off, in ostentatious leisure, as he turns his head towards the beholder, and no full frontal view is given. His upright pose, with an elegant sidestep, the short crimson breeches over the heeled boots, the radiant silver-grey of his silken jacket, the slightly displaced hat – all work to give the impression of a body so superior that it naturally exhibits the effortless elegance that Buckingham was first to explore in his own painted image. Now deploying his skills, not for the English favourite but for the king, Van Dyck created an image of majesty that substituted the visual assertions of dynastic and timeless royal power that had secured the reigns of his predecessors, and located sovereign dignity not in the divine but in the natural power of his body. It is the artful vision of the king’s personal body and self that here assumes pre-eminence over the display of his presence as the corporeal embodiment of a God-given, sovereign dignity. By choosing Van Dyck’s portrait over the spectacular performances of the masque, Charles fashioned himself as the beholder and the creator of his royal power, who, in looking at his portrait, would fashion his royal power after his own, absolute, commission. Promoted through the portrait commissions of the Duke of Buckingham, the painted image of the courtly body had challenged traditional notions of visual representation that evolved around a theologico-political perception of the king’s body natural, whose perpetual and immortal sovereign dignity had been conceptualised as bound to his physical presence. This geometry of gesture, which undermined the symmetrical notion of Renaissance space promoted in the masque, gave rise to a new perception of the body as an object of aesthetic display that could be enhanced in contemporary portraiture. Superseding its artful vision in the masque, these painted bodies challenged established perceptions of the individual self and its comprehension and experience of social space. By exploring the sight of his body through the medium of paint, Buckingham had promoted a novel perception of painting, appreciating it not as an historic artefact, but as a modern and forceful instrument that could advance his claim to courtly distinction. In so doing, the Duke had not only heavily shaped Charles’s taste and appreciation for the visual arts through joint visits to foreign collections and shared portrait commissions like that of Gerrit van Honthorst’s great canvas for Banqueting House, but rivalled the representation of the future king, eight years his junior. Paintings like Van Dyck’s Venus and Adonis, and Rubens’ equestrian and ceiling portraits for York House, confronted their viewers – who were still mostly unfamiliar with the advanced virtuosity of the human figure in the drawings of Michelangelo or the paintings of Caravaggio – with a radically 254

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new aesthetic for the display of the courtly body that exceeded even that of the royal body itself. The exalted manner of Buckingham’s portrait commissions rendered his likeness into painted visions of personal glory, promoting painting as an instrument for the single-handed self-fashioning of the personal image that could re-shape reality through its aesthetic elevation. The framed and controllable space of the portrait allowed for a more individualised relation of patron and artist than the inherently collaborative nature of the masque possibly could, enabling Buckingham to confer the aura of the painter’s divine creativity to his own authority in the fashioning of his image. Buckingham’s portraits displayed the courtier as author to himself, a man who commissioned his painted likeness not as a means for its documentation and preservation beyond time, but as something to contemplate, so that, with his next commission, he would be able to reshape his image in an even more perfect and artful manner. Buckingham’s assassination on 23 August 1628 prevented any further commissions. His monumental tomb in Westminster Abbey, however, where King Charles ordered the Duke’s burial in the northern apsidal chapel in Henry VII’s chapel – a site hitherto reserved for the burial of members of the royal family – allows us to suspect that the manifold visions contrived for his personal and public imagination would have held possible designs for many more portrait commissions. The black and white marble monument at Westminster Abbey, commissioned from Hubert Le Sueur, the French pupil of Giambologna, by Buckingham’s widow, Katherine Manners, shows the gilded bronze effigy of the Duke between four large obelisks of black marble, each supported by four skulls, next to which sit the mourning figures of Pallas, Charity, Neptune and Mars. (Fig. 58) Though her own body was later buried at Waterford, Ireland, the crowned effigy of Katherine Manners lies next to that of her husband, whose plate armour bears his monogram on the chest. Behind the pair stand the statues of their four children, while the figure of Fame blows its – today lost – trumpet. The inscription reads as follows: ‘In perpetual memory of the most high and mighty prince George Villiers, Duke, Marquess and Earl of Buckingham, Earl of Coventry, Viscount Villiers, Baron Whaddon, Lord High Admiral of England, Ireland and Wales, Master of the Horse, Warden of the Cinque Ports, Constable of Dover Castle, Chief Justice in Eyre of the Parks and Forests south of the river Trent, Constable of Windsor Castle, Member of the Privy Council, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, President of the Council and Chancellor of the university of Cambridge. So memorable a hero was he; highly endowed in both body and mind; the intimate in turn of two most powerful sovereigns, he was famous in peace and war; most famous in the arts; he was a magnificent patron of letters and literary men; of inexhaustible generosity to any worthwhile project, he was unrivalled for his singu255

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lar humanity and the agreeable nature of his manners; his life was terminated by the most frightful and terrifying murder; to common envy (which is always the partner of virtue and honour) he fell an innocent and undeserved victim. Catherine, most glorious demi-goddess, daughter and sole heiress of the Earl of Rutland, was made by him a most joyful mother of children of the greatest promise and of either sex: Lady Mary, Lord Charles (who died in earliest childhood), Lord George, and Lord Francis his youngest and posthumous child. She honoured the most sweet memory of her dearest husband with all possible piety and respect, and saw to it that these titles should be appended, not to satisfy vanity, but to attest the generosity of the greatest Prince: and most sorrowfully enclosed within this monument, which honours him, his sad remains and whatever of him is not yet due to heaven, in the year of the Christian epoch 1634. Sacred to his dear memory: here he lies, a reproach to the fickle mob: however, Spain marvels at his prudence, France at his courage, Belgium at his diligence, and the whole of Europe at his magnanimity: who was known by the kings of Denmark and Sweden to be irreproachable, by the princes of Germany, Transylvania and Nassau to be upright, by the Venetian Republic to be a lover of monarchy, by the dukes of Lotharingia and Savoy to be a statesman, by the Count Palatine to be loyal, by the Emperor to be a peace maker, by the Turk as a Christian, by the Pope as a Protestant: whom England regarded as Lord High Admiral, Cambridge as Chancellor, and Buckingham as its Duke. Now stay, O passer by, and hearken to what even Envy herself cannot mock. Here is great Buckingham, a man of disastrous virtue: a loving husband, an affectionate father, an obedient son, a most kindly brother, a generous kinsman, an abiding friend, a beneficent lord, a nobleman who was the servant of all: whom kings loved deeply, whom the nobility held in honour, whom the Church lamented, whom the multitude loathed: whom James and Charles, most perspicacious of monarchs, regarded him as their intimate friend, adorning him with honours and burdening him with commissions: he succumbed to Fate before he found a danger to match his courage. What then, O stranger? The riddle of the world is dead. He was all things, yet had nothing: named his country’s father and its foe: both the delight and the plaint of Parliament: who, while he was waging war against the Papists, was accused of papacy: while promoting the Protestant cause, was slain by a Protestant. Behold the dice of human fortunes. Yet it is not the case that malice shall triumph: it was able to kill him, but not to harm him: he who at the moment of death poured forth these prayers: Let me receive thy blood, my Jesus, while the wicked feast upon mine.’ 256

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Fig. 58: Hubert Le Sueur, Funeral Monument of the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham, 1633

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Appendices

Appendix I

“The Warres of the Gods” Anom., 1623 Arme, arme, in heaven there is a faction And the Demy-Gods Now are bent for Action; They are at Odds With him that rules the Thunder And will destroy His white fac’t Boy Or rend the heavens asunder. Great Jove that swaies the emperiall Scepter With’s upstart Love That makes him drunke with Nectar They will remove; Harke how the Cyclops labour, See Vulcan sweates That gives the heates And forges Mars his Armour. Marke how the glorious starry Border That the heavens hath worne, Till of late in Order See how they turne Each Planets course doth alter, The sun and moone Are out of Tune The spheares begin to faulter. 261

Appendices

See how each petty starre stands gazinge And would fayne provoke By theyr often blazinge Flame to this smoke: The dogge starre burnes with ire, And Charles his Wayne Would wondrous fayne Bringe fuell to this fire. Loves Queene stood disaffected To what shee had seene Or to what suspected As shee in spleene To Juno hath protested Her servant Mars Should scourge the Arse, Jove’s marrow so had wasted. The chast Diana by her Quiver And ten thousand maydes Have sworne, that they will never Sporte in the shades, Untill the heavens Creator Be quite displac’t Or else disgrac’t For lovinge so ’gainst nature. The fayre Proserpine next whurryes In fiery Coach Drawne by twelve blacke furies; As they approach They threaten without mercy To have him burn’d That thus hath turn’d Love’s pleasures Arse Verse.

262

Appendix I

Slow pac’d Diana he doth follow Hermes will make one So will bright Apollo, Thetis hath wonne Rough Neptune to this action Æolus huffes, And Boreas puffes To see the Fates protraction. Still Jove with Ganymed lyes playinge, Here’s no Tritans sound Nor yet horses neighinge His Eares are bound, The fidlinge God doth lull him Bacchus quaffes And Momus laughes To see how they can gull him

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Appendix II Portrait Commissions to Anthony van Dyck by Charles I

1632

Charles I, (lost, known only from a copy today at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, oil on canvas, 103 × 80 cm)

1632

Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria with Their Two Eldest Children, Charles, Prince of Wales, and Mary, Princess Royal, oil on canvas, 302.9 × 256.9 cm, Royal Collection

1632

Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 113.5 × 163 cm Archiepiscopal Castle and Gardens, Kromˇeˇríž

1633

Charles I on Horseback with M. de St. Antoine, oil on canvas, 368.4 × 269.9 cm, Royal Collection

1633

Charles I, oil on canvas, 125 × 161 cm, whereabouts unknown

c. 1635

Charles I in three Positions, (produced as a model for the commission of a bust to Gian Lorenzo Bernini), oil on canvas, 84.5 × 99.7 cm, Royal Collection

1635/36

Charles I, oil on canvas, 102.2 × 83.2 cm, Collection of the Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle, Sussex

c. 1636

Charles I in the Hunting Field, oil on canvas, 266 × 207 cm, Musée du Louvre

1636/37

Charles I on Horseback, oil on canvas, 367 × 292 cm, National Gallery

1636/37

Charles I on Horseback, oil on canvas, 96.6 × 61 cm, Royal Collection

1636

Charles I in Robes of State, oil on canvas, 248.3 × 153.7 cm, Royal Collection

1637

Charles I in Robes of State, oil on canvas, 239 × 115 cm, Schlossmuseum Oranienburg, Berlin

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Appendix II

c. 1637

Charles I, (lost, known from various copies, one of them at Kingston Lacy)

c. 1637

Charles I, (lost, known from various copies, one of them at Nothingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery)

c. 1638

Charles I, oil on canvas, 219 × 130 cm, State Heritage Museum, St. Petersburg

1637/38

Charles I, oil on canvas, 102.5 × 81 cm, Private Collection, Europe

1637

Charles I, oil on canvas, 123 × 96.5 cm, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

1639

Charles I and the Knights of the Garter in Procession, oil on canvas, 29.2 × 131.8 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

1635

The three eldest Children of Charles I: Charles, Prince of Wales, Mary, Princess Royal, and James, Duke of York, oil on canvas, 151 × 154 cm, Galleria Sabauda

1636

The three eldest Children of Charles I: Charles, Prince of Wales, Mary, Princess Royal, and James, Duke of York, oil on canvas, 133.4 × 151.8 cm, Royal Collection

1637

The three eldest Children of Charles I: Charles, Prince of Wales, Mary, Princess Royal, and James, Duke of York, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Anne, oil on canvas, 163.2 × 198.8 cm, Royal Collection

1637

Princess Elizabeth and Princess Anne, oil on canvas, 29.5 × 41.6 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

c. 1638

Charles, Prince of Wales, later King Charles II, oil on canvas, 125.7 × 102.9 cm, Private Collection, England

c. 1638

Charles, Prince of Wales, later King Charles II, oil on canvas, 153.7 × 131.4 cm, Royal Collection

c. 1640

Charles, Prince of Wales, later King Charles II, oil on canvas, 150.5 × 130.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

c. 1641

Charles, Prince of Wales, later King Charles II, oil on canvas, 160.7 × 108.6 cm, The Newport Restoration Foundation, Newport, Rhode Island

1641/1642

Charles, Prince of Wales, later King Charles II, oil on canvas, 158.8 × 109.2 cm, Private Collection, England

265

Appendices

1632

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 107.3 × 82.6 cm, Private Collection

1632

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 108.6 × 86 cm, Royal Collection

c. 1633

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 107.3 × 84.5 cm, Lloyd Collection, Lockinge, Berkshire

c. 1633

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 96.5 × 81.9 cm, The Collection of the Duke of Northumberland, Alnwick Castle, Northumberland

c. 1633

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 103.5 × 77.2 cm, Trustees of the Cowdray Estate Settlement, West Sussex

1633

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 219.1 × 134.8 cm, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

1633

Queen Henrietta Maria with Jeffery Hudson, oil on canvas, 228.6 × 129 cm, Trustees of the R t Hon. Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels Settlement and Lady Juliet Tadgell

1635

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 123.5 × 97 cm, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

1637

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 240 × 119 cm, Schlossmuseum Oranienburg, Berlin

1636

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 72.1 × 58.4 cm, The Administrative Trustees of the Chequers Trust

1636/37

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 105.5 × 84.2 cm, Private Collection, New York

1636/37

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 127 × 81.3 cm, The Tussaud’s Group, Warwick Castle

1637

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 63.5 × 48.3 cm, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis

c. 1637

Queen Henrietta Maria, (painted as a model for Gian Lorenzo Bernini), oil on canvas, 71.8 × 56.5 cm, Royal Collection

c. 1637

Queen Henrietta Maria, (painted as a model for Gian Lorenzo Bernini), oil on canvas, 78.7 × 65.7 cm, Royal Collection

266

Appendix II

c. 1638

Queen Henrietta Maria, oil on canvas, 220 × 131.5 cm, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

c. 1637

Princess Mary, Princess Royal and later Princess of Orange, oil on canvas, 136 × 106.7 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

1636/37

Princess Mary, Princess Royal and later Princess of Orange, oil on canvas, 136.5 × 108.5 cm, Private Collection, England

1641

Princess Mary, Princess Royal and later Princess of Orange, oil on canvas, 155 × 106.5 cm, Private Collection, England

1641

Princess Mary, Princess Royal and later Princess of Orange, oil on canvas, 155.6 × 109.9 cm, Royal Collection

c. 1641

Prince William, later Prince William II, of Orange, and Princess Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange, oil on canvas, 182.5 × 142 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

1635/36

James I, oil on canvas, 239 × 148 cm, Royal Collection

267

List of Illustrations

1. Remigius van Leemput, after Hans Holbein, Whitehall Mural, 1667, oil on canvas, 88.9 × 99.2 cm, Royal Collection of HM Queen Elizabeth II 2. George Gower, Elizabeth I, c. 1588, oil on panel, 97.8 × 72.4 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London 3. Nicolas Hilliard, Elizabeth I: The Pelican Portrait, c. 1573, oil on panel, 78.5 × 61 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 4. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Elizabeth I – The Rainbow Portrait, c. 1600, oil on canvas, 127 × 99.1 cm, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire 5. John Case, Sphaera civitatis: Hoc est; Reipublicae recte ac pie secundum leges administrandae raetio, 1588, frontispiece 6. Anthony van Dyck, Charles I in the Hunting Field, 1635, oil on canvas, 266 × 207 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris 7. Paul van Somer, King James I and VI, 1619, oil on canvas, 227 × 149.5 cm, Royal Collection of HM Queen Elizabeth II 8. Daniel Mytens, Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, 1618, oil on canvas, 207 × 127 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London 9. Daniel Mytens, Alathea Talbot, Countess of Arundel, 1618, oil on canvas, 207 × 127 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London 10. Inigo Jones, Design for a Masquer with an Impresa, undated, pen and brown ink washed with brown, 26.8 × 15.6 cm 11. Inigo Jones, Design for a Masquer: Unidentified Queen, undated, pen and black ink washed with greenish grey, 28.5 × 16 cm 12. Inigo Jones, Design for Whitehall Banqueting House, elevation of the penultimate façade design, undated, pen and wash on paper, 36.6 × 43.8 cm 13. Marc’antonio Palladio, after Andrea Palladio, Teatro Olimpico, c. 1585, graphite on paper, RIBA Library Drawings & Archives 14. Plan for a Theatre at Christ Church, Oxford, 1605, British Library, Additional MS 15505

268

List of Illustrations

15. John Webb, The Cockpit Theatre at Whitehall, plan and section, undated, pen and brown ink, 33,5 × 45,5 cm, Worcester College, Oxford 16. Inigo Jones, Florimene, floorplan, 1635 17. Inigo Jones, Scene Design for unknown Masque, undated, pen and brown ink on paper, 25.6 × 18.6 cm 18. Andrea Palladio, Ceiling Detail from the ‘Temple of Neptune’ from I Quattro libri dell’architettura, 1580 19. Inigo Jones, Design for the Ceiling of the Marchioness of Buckingham’s Chapel Closet at New Hall, Essex, c. 1622–3, Worcester College, Oxford 20. William Larkin, George Villiers, later First Duke of Buckingham, 1616, oil on canvas, 205 × 119 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London 21. William Larkin, Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, later Fourth Earl of Pembroke, 1615, oil on canvas, 213.5 × 125.5 cm, Audley End House, Essex 22. Anthony van Dyck, The Continence of Scipio, 1621, oil on canvas, 183 × 232.5 cm, Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford 23. Felix Gem, AD 1-4, AN 1966. 1808, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford 24. Anthony van Dyck, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, 1620/21, oil on canvas, 102.8 × 79.4 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 25. Anthony van Dyck, Venus and Adonis, 1620/21, oil on canvas, 223.5 × 160 cm, Derek Johns Ltd., London 26. Titian, Venus and Adonis, 1553, oil on canvas, 186 × 207 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid 27. Nicholas Hilliard, Young Man among Roses, c. 1587, watercolour on vellum stuck onto card, 13.5 × 7.3 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 28. Albrecht Dürer, Young Couple threatened by Death, or, The Promenade, c. 1498, engraving, 19.6 × 21.1 cm, Private Collection 29. Nicolo Boldrini, after Titian, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1565, woodcut, 38.4 × 54 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York 30. Lucas van Uden, Landscape, undated, pen and brown ink over black pencil and watercolour, 32.6 × 22.5 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin 31. Aegidius Sadeler after Jan Brueghel the Elder, Riverscape with Two Figures, 1606, engraving, 21 × 27.6 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York 32. Inigo Jones, Tree, Wing Design for unknown Masque, undated, pen and brown ink on paper, 40 × 12.8 cm 33. Inigo Jones, Forest Scene, Design for unknown Masque, undated, pen and brown ink on paper, 30.8 × 39.6 cm

269

List of Illustrations

34. Cherubino Alberti, after Caravaggio da Polidoro, Socrates and Aliciades, c. 1590, engraving 35. Balthazar Gerbier, Equestrian Miniature of George Villiers, Earl of Buckingham, 1618, Collection of the Duke of Northhumberland, Alnwick Castle 36. Peter Paul Rubens, Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Buckingham, c. 1625, oil on canvas, formerly Osterley Park, destroyed 1949 37. Peter Paul Rubens, Preliminary Sketch for the Duke of Buckingham on Horseback, c. 1625, oil on panel, 44.5 × 49.2 cm, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas 38. Peter Paul Rubens, Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma, 1603, oil on canvas, 283 × 200 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid 39. Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV, 1701, oil on canvas, 277 × 194 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 40. Peter Paul Rubens, Ceiling of the Great Hall of Whitehall Banqueting House, 1621–35, Banqueting House, London 41. Peter Paul Rubens, Apotheosis of James I, middle panel of the ceiling of the Great Hall of Whitehall Banqueting House, 1621–35 42. Daniel de Barbaro, Theatre after Vitruvius, c. 1550 43. Artificial Heavens of the Shakespeare Globe, London 44. Peter Paul Rubens, The Duke of Buckingham conducted by Minerva and Mercury to the Temple of Virtue, 1625, destroyed 1949 45. Peter Paul Rubens, The Duke of Buckingham conducted by Minerva and Mercury to the Temple of Virtue, preliminary sketch for York House Ceiling, 1624/25, oil on panel, 64 × 63.7 cm, National Gallery, London 46. Peter Paul Rubens, Sketch for York House Ceiling, c. 1625, lost 47. Henry Peacham, Crimina gravißima, Minerva Britannica, 1612 48. Giulio Clovio, after Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Rape of Ganymede, undated and unframed drawing, Royal Collection of HM Queen Elizabeth II 49. Andrea Alciati, Ganymede, 1531 edition 50. Andrea Alciati, Ganymede, 1551 edition 51. Gerrit van Honthorst, The Liberal Arts presented to Charles and HenriettaMaria, 1628, oil on canvas, 357 × 640 cm, Royal Collection of HM Queen Elizabeth II 52. Cornelis Cort, after Federico Zuccaro, Il Lamento della Pittura, before 1578, engraving, 73,5 × 53,4 cm 53. Daniel Mytens, Charles I, 1628, oil on canvas, 219.4 × 139.1 cm, Royal Collection of HM Queen Elizabeth II 54. Daniel Mytens, Double Portrait of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria, 1630, oil on panel, 95.6 × 175.3 cm, Royal Collection of HM Queen Elizabeth II

270

List of Illustrations

55. Anthony van Dyck, Double Portrait of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria, 1632, oil on canvas, 113.5 × 163 cm, Archiepiscopal Castle and Gardens, Krom 56. Inigo Jones, Stage Design for Coelum Britannicum, undated, pen and brown ink, 43.7 × 56.6 cm 57. Inigo Jones, Atlas, Stage Design for Coelum Britannicum, undated, pen and black ink washed with grey, 39 × 25 cm 58. Hubert Le Sueur, Funeral Monument of the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham, 1633, Westminster Abbey

271

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Picture Credits Ashmolean Museum: Fig. 23; Barnes 2004: Figs. 6, 55; British Library Board: Fig. 14; Dean and Chapter of Westminster: Fig. 58; Derek Johns Ltd., London: Fig. 25; Exh. Cat., Van Dyck and Britain, 2009: Fig. 21; Fosekett1987: Fig. 35; Hatfield House: Fig. 4; Hille 2009a: Figs. 44, 46; Humfrey 2007: Fig. 26; Martin 2005: Figs. 36, 37, 40, 41; National Gallery, London: Fig. 45; National Portrait Gallery, London: Figs. 2, 8, 9, 20; National Museums of Liverpool: Fig. 3; Orgel and Strong 1973: Figs. 10, 11, 16, 17, 56, 57; Orrell 1985: Fig. 15; Peacock 1995: Fig. 12; Prosperetti 2009: Figs. 28, 29, 30, 31; RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collection: Fig. 13; Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012: Figs. 1, 7, 48, 51, 53, 54; The Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford: Fig. 22; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: Fig. 24, 39; Victoria & Albert Museum, London: Fig. 27; Worsley 2007: Fig. 19

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