* 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.

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!)

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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