Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry
No other woman in world history has been of such compulsive interest as Elizabeth Tudor. While the rest of sixteenth-century Europe was subject to the bloodshed of religious war, Tudor peace brought England its great flowering of the arts. Central to that flowering was the enigmatic legend of the Queen herself, a myth deliberately created and sustained over four decades by public spectacle and courtly chivalry, by private sonnet and official oration - the arts moving in concert in homage to an earthly deity.
This is the thread which is followed in this book, as the source and meaning of the most famous and potent of all Elizabethan pictures and pageantry are unravelled: of Nicholas Hilliard's hypnotic "Young Man Amongst Roses", the famous "Blackfriars Procession":, the Ermine and Rainbow portraits of the Queen, the story picture of Sir Henry Unton, the festivals of Accession Day, and the ritual of the Garter.
In this fascinating book illustrated throughout with black and white images, the fruits of nearly twenty years of research, Roy Strong fuses history, politics, religion, literature and the visual arts into a unique revelation of what actually constituted the Elizabethan image. The illustrations, through choice of telling detail and illuminating juxtaposition, develop further the iconographic exploration of the Elizabethan era.
