Instead of bombarding everyone with a bunch of individual posts, here are three links that caught my eye in the past few days that I didn’t get a chance to post.

* From The Telegraph:
Rags to riches as tapestry masterpiece is restored to its former glory

A tapestry that has survived against the odds since the fifteenth century is to go on display for the first time in 20 years, following five years of restoration returning the masterpiece to its former glory.

* From The Guardian:
David Starkey on Henry VIII: Famous for 500 years

In this podcast, David Starkey asks why Henry continues to fascinate us in the 21st century, and how did a boy with such a conventional upbringing become such an unconventional king?

* From The BBC:
The map that changed the world

Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought – and indeed in the larger history of ideas.

Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America.

The headline made me do a double-take:

Henry VIII In Wedding Dress (1540) By Hans Holbein The Younger

I know what they meant, but of course my brain instantly jumped to a vision of Henry VIII in white satin and lace with a bridal veil.

The article is an informational one about Holbein, his painting in general and specifically his portrayal of Henry VIII. Read it here

(And while I’m on a kick of being pedantic and talking about some of my reporting pet peeves, there is one in this article. Holbein was not at the British court, he was at the English court!)

From The Daily Mail:

Scotland’s earliest harp music was encrypted in an unknown binary code in a ceilings at Stirling Castle.

Wood carver John Donaldson discovered the mysterious code around the head of a woman in a wood panel that adorned the bed chamber of King James V of Scotland.

And now, for the first time in almost 500 years, the historic music has been brought to life on harps played by pupils at Allan’s Primary School in Stirling.

Mr Donaldson, 62, noticed the 0 and I Roman numeral markings immediately when he began creating new versions of the roundels over five years ago. But he failed to understand the meaning of the unusual sequence of Roman numerals.

It was his musical son, Gregor, who eventually converted the markings into a sensible sound.

Full article, with pictures

Previous posts on the Stirling carvings:
16th century wood carvings from Stirling Castle studied
Stirling Castle carvings update

Update: Here’s a BBC article with a recording of the music

From the Times Online:

Is this Mary Tudor, England’s Catholic queen who has gone down in schoolroom history as Bloody Mary?

If it is, as some scholars believe, the painting could make a virtuous circle to delight the heart of a Home Counties Jesuit parish priest. “It could be a small miracle,” says Canon Timothy Russ. And the secrets it contains could also bear new witness to the torrid religious politics of the mid-16th century.

Canon Russ is prepared to sell the painting he inherited in order to rescue Sawston Hall, near Cambridge, the 16th-century home of the recusant Huddleston family, and turn it into a Catholic heritage centre and refuge.
…
This year it was seen by Dr Tarnya Cooper, 16th-century curator at the National Portrait Gallery. “We concluded that while it is undoubtedly a very interesting and important painting, it cannot represent Mary I mainly because of facial dissimilarity with other authentic portraits of her. It is more likely to be a member of the nobility, possibly from within Princess Mary’s circle,” she said.

Sir Roy Strong, former director of the NPG and an authority on Tudor portraiture, is a patron of the charity set up to save Sawston. He said he has never been convinced that the portrait is of Mary, “and I have seen nothing to change my mind. The mid-16th century was a very dark time and it is extremely difficult to be certain.” But Professor Jack Scarisbrick, the Tudor and Catholic scholar, says it is too grand a portrait to be of anyone but royalty. “There was nobody outside the royal family important enough for such a lavish full-length painting — and if it is isn’t Mary, who is it? Nobody else fits the bill,” he said.

So convinced is Linda Porter, the author of a recent biography of Mary Tudor, of the sitter that she used the image on the cover of her book. “I’m certain it’s Mary,” she said. “It was quite fashionable in the last decades of the 20th century to question the identity of sitters in several well-known Tudor portraits, but some of this scepticism has now come full circle — the portrait of Katherine Howard that was questioned at this period is now thought to, indeed, be her. My own view is that family traditions are very often reliable. Plus which, to me at least, it looks like her.”

Full article

Here’s a larger, full-length scan of this portrait

I saw word of this upcoming exhibition at the National Gallery in London floating through articles, but I was waiting until the gallery had a page on their website before I posted about it. And now they do!

Thanks to the Lady Jane Grey Reference Guide blog for posting the link to the exhibition since I kept forgetting to go back and look for it.

From The Oxford Times:

This year is going to be Henry VIII’s. Imprinted on to our minds as a big rotund man, a tyrant of a king famous for having six wives and beheading two of them, and for the break with Rome and dissolution of the monasteries, with the 500th anniversary of his accession to the throne of England coming up, everywhere and anywhere with any association with this Tudor monarch is set to hold some sort of special event.
…

From this April until April 18 next year, Windsor is holding in its Drawings Gallery an exhibition of treasures from the Royal Collection and the archives of St George’s Chapel.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, ‘Henry VIII: A 500th Anniversary Exhibition’ has some exquisite artworks in it. Exhibits include drawings, paintings, key religious texts, illuminated manuscripts, and objects of interest, among them pieces from the Mary Rose and the Great Seal of Henry VIII.

Full article

Henry VIII: A 500th Anniversary Exhibition – The Drawings Gallery, Windsor Castle

In a follow-up to a post from last year, here is an update on the Stirling Heads. The replica set mentioned in the previous article have now been unveiled.

From the BBC:

A hand-carved replica set of 41 giant medallions that once covered the ceilings of Stirling Castle’s Royal Palace have been unveiled.

It took expert wood carver John Donaldson five years to reproduce the oak heads, which each measure a metre.

The original 16-century medallions feature vivid depictions of medieval kings and queens as well as mythological heroes.

Full article – including small set of images with a carving of Henry VIII and another possibly of Margaret Tudor.

If you’ve ever wondered what goes in to researching portrait identification, head on over to Stephan Edwards’ (a.k.a PhD Historian) website to see some fascinating work that he recently did.

Here’s the abstract:

In mid February 2009, I was contacted by a private collector in regard to a painting he had recently purchased from an estate. The painting, seen above, bears the label Princess Elizabeth (afterwards Queen) , “The Harington Portrait” and has been attributed in the past to the artist Antonio Mor (d. ca. 1578). The collector questioned the identification and requested my opinion on it. I was able to determine at first glance that it was not, in fact, an authentic portrait of Elizabeth Tudor, so the owner asked for my assistance in determining who the sitter may have actually been. Thus began a two-month period of intensive research, and the results of that investigation are now presented here for the first time.

AP photo

This is pretty cool… I can have both a history and tech geek-out!

From The Telegraph:

Scientists have managed to “virtually restore” the faded hues of his 28ft long tapestry using coloured light beams.

The Manchester University researchers looked at the back of the heavy wool and silk tapestry, which has been less affected by sunlight, to gauge what the original colours might have been.

They then measured the colour of every yarn on the front and used computer software to calculate how much of the original pigments of woad (blue), weld (yellow) and madder (red) had been lost.

High-definition projectors have now been used to beam two million pixels of different coloured light on to the tapestry.

Full article

Also check out the BBC story, with videos

This just goes to show you how many things may still be hiding in archives, libraries, attics, etc.

From The Guardian:

A drawing of Henry VIII’s famous victory over the French at the “Siege of Boulogne” in 1544 is to go on public display for the first time in more than 400 years after lying undiscovered and mislabelled in the British Library archives.

The image, drawn by a “war artist” commissioned to record the Tudor king’s military achievements, dates to 1545 and is one of four “views” documenting Henry’s second invasion of France.

For centuries art historians have pondered why there was never a final picture showing the surrender of the city. Just three drawings survived, one showing Henry landing in Calais, another of him on the way to Boulogne, and a third of the siege in progress.

“Everybody just assumed that the end of the siege had not been done,” Peter Barber, head of map collections at the British Library, told the Observer. But due to a cataloguing error the existence of a fourth drawing had gone unnoticed. It only came to light when Barber began re-cataloguing the manuscripts of Sir Robert Cotton, which had been left to the nation by his grandson, Sir John Cotton, in 1702 and passed to the British Museum on its founding in 1753.

Full article

The drawing will be on display at the British Library’s “Henry VIII: Man and Monarch” exhibition

These are mostly updates to previous topics, so I’m just going to lump them all together:

* Henry, Mind of a Tyrant by David Starkey will be running on Channel 4 in the UK on Mondays in April. You can listen to a stream of the soundtrack by Philip Sheppard on the composer’s website

* A new painting of the Mary Rose that was reconstructed with new information of examination of the wreck and artifacts.

* Rediscovering Henry VIII – An article by David Starkey from the Times Online about the upcoming British Library exhibition Henry VIII: Man and Monarch that he is the guest curator of.

* Two articles about information that may have been lost during the restoration of the Cobbe portrait (that may or may not be of Shakespeare): Forsooth, restorers botched up bald bard William Shakespeare from The Guardian and Restorers ‘wiped away’ precious details from rare William Shakespeare portraits from The Telegraph

There were a lot of follow-up articles on this possible new portrait, but I thought this particular one (with some interesting comparison images) was good.

From The Times Online:

Shakespeare Unfound(ed)?
The real identity of the sitter for the new “Shakespeare” portrait

A claim by the eminent Shakespearean Stanley Wells that a Jacobean painting from the family collection of Mr Alec Cobbe, long held in Ireland, is a “life portrait” of Shakespeare, has been widely publicized. From April 23, Shakespeare’s birthday, the painting will be the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon entitled Shakespeare Found. Meanwhile, an illustrated brochure by Mark Broch and Paul Edmondson outlines the basis of this exciting claim. Four surviving versions of the portrait, of which the “Cobbe” is claimed as the original or “prime”, can be shown to date from around 1610. “Long traditions” are mentioned which identify the sitter as Shakespeare. However, no dates or sources are provided for these “traditions”, which appear to relate chiefly to the version now owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, whose close similarity to Alec Cobbe’s picture seems to have got this ball rolling.
…
Last week Dr Tarnya Cooper, the sixteenth-century curator at the National Portrait Gallery, declared herself “very sceptical” about Wells’s claim, and remarked that “if anything . . . both works [the Folger and Cobbe portraits] are more likely to represent the courtier Sir Thomas Overbury”. A suggestion made long ago by David Piper that yet another version of the portrait, the “Ellenborough”, is of Overbury, is waved away as “mistaken” by the authors of the brochure. Yet the views of experts such as Cooper and Piper cannot be dismissed so easily.

An authentic portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury (1581–1613) was bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1740. This picture bears a startling resemblance to the “Cobbe” painting (and its companions). Features such as a distinctive bushy hairline, and a slightly malformed left ear that may once have borne the weight of a jewelled earring, appear identical. Even the man’s beautifully intricate lace collar, though not identical in pattern, shares overall design with “Cobbe”, having square rather than rounded corners. The original is now shrouded in the air-conditioned bowels of the Bodleian, alongside many such treasures awaiting restoration.

Full article

Original post on the portrait

Henry VIII’s mother unveiled

The link above from the BBC News site has a video of the unveiling.

As expected, it is a variation on the Elizabeth in the red dress portrait that we’re familiar with. In fact, I think I was correct in my guess that Hever bought this portrait. When they show a close-up of the portrait in the video you can see the painted round bottom, the same as the link above.

I’ll add additional links in this post as they come in.

Previous post on this topic

First up, from The Times Online:

Is this the real Shakespeare at last?

A PORTRAIT owned for nearly 300 years by a family will tomorrow be claimed as the only known picture of William Shakespeare painted during his lifetime.

No other image, executed at first hand, is thought to exist of Britain’s greatest writer.

The claim will be supported by the world’s foremost expert on Shakespeare, Stanley Wells, emeritus professor of Shakespeare studies at Birmingham University and general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare series for 30 years.

The portrait, which was painted in 1610, six years before the playwright’s death, has been in the possession of the Cobbe family since the early 18th century. It was initially kept at a property in Hampshire but more recently in Hatchlands, the family house in Surrey, which is run by the National Trust.

Full article (with picture)

Update: Here’s an article from Time magazine with a full view of the portrait

And from The Guardian, a related object:

Mystery relic found during London excavation is linked to Shakespeare

The bearded Tudor face, framed by long hair and a ruff, certainly looks familiar. As the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust prepares today to unveil what it says is a portrait of the Bard painted during his lifetime, archaeologists may have beaten them to it.

A team working on the site where Shakespeare learned his trade has discovered a piece of 16th-century pottery that features a face resembling that of the great man.

It was found during excavation work in Shoreditch, east London, at the site of what used to be The Theatre, lost for more than 400 years and where Shakespeare performed as an actor, as well as staging his earliest plays.

Archaeologists unearthed the Tudor structure last summer while working at the site – which, by coincidence, is to be turned into a new theatre.

There is no proof that the face on the fragment of Beauvais pottery is that of the Bard’s, but insiders are excited by the discovery.

Full article (unfortunately without a picture)

I got an email about this yesterday (thanks again Tom!) and here is a BBC article about the new service (currently in beta testing):

A group of the UK’s most famous museums, including the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, is creating a collective website.

As well as finding information about exhibits, museum lovers can use the website to create communities based on their historic and creative interests.

The National Museums Online Learning project is to be launched this week.

The £1.5m, Treasury-funded project also involves the National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, the Tate, the Wallace Collection, Royal Armouries, Sir John Soane’s Museum and Imperial War Museum.

These major museums have always been popular places for meeting places and days out – drawing tens of millions of visitors each year. Now they will offer an online meeting place.

The museums are collaborating to allow online visitors to search across their combined collections, so that a single search might gather material from any of them.

It will also allow visitors to set up social networking groups on the website where they can talk about what has inspired them and about their creative interests.

The project allows visitors to collect scrapbooks of images or text or videos that they find in the museums, which they can share with other website users.

Full article

Here’s the main site home and you can learn more about the site here.

The ability to search across several of these museums at once is really useful to me when I’m trying to find out more about a portrait, or looking for additional copies of a portrait, etc. Pretty cool!

From This is Kent:

TELEVISION presenter David Starkey is set to unveil a rare royal portrait in Hever in March.

The Tudor historian will unveil the 16th century portrait of Henry VIII’s mother Elizabeth of York, which will mark the start of Hever Castle’s celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the famous monarch’s accession to the throne on March 13.

A spokesman for Hever Castle said: “The portrait will form part of the Henry VIII: The Pampered Prince exhibition, which will provide an insight into a mother who spoiled and doted on her son, which had a great affect in shaping Henry VIII, famous for his pursuit of fame, indulgence and women.” Visitors will also see a representation of the complete collection of portraits of the six wives of King Henry VIII.

Hever Castle re-opens on March 1 and is open Wednesdays to Sundays.

Source page

Official Site of Hever Castle

From the BBC:

Images from Scotland’s national collections are available online for the first time.

The photographs, many of which are previously unpublished, can now be downloaded for licensed use.

The images on www.scotlandsimages.com are from the National Archives of Scotland and other collections.

Culture Minister Linda Fabiani said: “I’m delighted that our unique National Collections which capture so much of our nation’s story, are now available.”

She added: “The new website features images ranging from people, places and objects, to maps, plans, drawings and iconic documents offering a remarkable illustration of the life, history and culture of Scotland and the wider world.”

Full article

Scotland’s Images website

From The Telegraph:

A partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation charity will see the paintings – 80 per cent of which are not currently on public display – placed on the internet by 2012.

Some are in storage and others – such as 2,500 oil paintings in the Government Art Collection – are scattered across the globe in embassies or municipal buildings.

These include famous portraits of Byron, Mary Queen of Scots and Winston Churchill alongside unfamiliar landscapes, abstract works and specially commissioned pieces.

Full article

From The BBC:

Researchers are working to uncover the mysteries of 33 wood carved medallions which would have decorated the Royal Palace at Stirling Castle.

Historic Scotland is trying to find out why the works, known as the Stirling Heads and carved between 1530 and 1544, were created and whom they depict.

The carvings are thought to feature monarchs such as James V and England’s Henry VIII.

The research is part of £12m plans to refurbish Stirling’s Royal Palace.
Historians are in the process of restoring the palace to how it would have looked in the 1540s and creating a new gallery where a replica set of heads will go on display.
…
The palace was begun by James V in about 1538 as a home for his new French bride Mary de Guise.

Full article

From The Telegraph:

Rare Holbein work bought for a few thousand could fetch millions

An art collector who bought a painting for less than £2,000 is celebrating after experts declared it a genuine Holbein worth millions.

The painting was thought to be a reproduction of the Renaissance artist’s work and bought for just £1,900 at an auction in France.

But, after cleaning and expert analysis, it emerged the work is a genuine Holbein and as such is worth millions.

The unnamed Swiss collector, who owns the work, discovered the painting at a sale of heirlooms and bric-a-brac. The sale was linked to the once-stately Lamoignon family, who had connections to Holbein through another painting, The Ambassadors, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

However the portrait was thought to be by one of the great man’s imitators when the painting of Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, came up for sale as the family sold off the last of the heirlooms in 2000.

Marco Grassi, a New York conservator who was at the auction, said he advised the Swiss collector to make the purchase, which cost 2,000 euros.

When the crude background had been removed a painting created by Holbein emerged. The hands, book and fur had been painted in the style of the artist and infrared photography showed that the underdrawing for the hands also resembled Holbein’s methods.

Full article

And another article (from the The Independent) with an image of the painting