Category: Art News

Two of these come from the very excellent Lady Jane Grey Reference Guide Blog which I’m sure most of you also read, but just in case you don’t I’d like to highlight some recent posts.

In a previous post reminding people about the Delaroche exhibition and Leanda de Lisle’s talk there, I asked for anyone to let me know if they got a chance to go. Here’s a write-up from the Lady Jane Grey blog: Death Becomes Her: The Life and Afterlife of Lady Jane Grey – Lecture by Leanda de Lisle

And on a related note, here is a link to a guest post by Ms. de Lisle: DEATH BECOMES HER – BY LEANDA DE LISLE And similarly related, here is an article from The Express also by Ms. de Lisle: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE QUEEN FOR NINE DAYS

I know I’m way late with this, but better late than never!

News release from The National Portrait Gallery:

MYSTERY SNAKE REVEALED IN ELIZABETH I PORTRAIT. NEW RESEARCH SHOWS CHANGING FACES OF THE TUDOR QUEEN

Scientific detective work has revealed a mysterious coiled serpent in the hands of Queen Elizabeth I, which was painted out by the artist shortly afterwards, in a portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. It has also been revealed that this portrait of the queen, which has not been on display at the Gallery since 1921, was painted over an unfinished portrait of an unknown sitter. The revelations about this painting and three others of the Tudor queen will form a new display, Concealed and Revealed: The Changing Faces of Elizabeth I, from 13 March at the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Making Art in Tudor Britain project led by Dr Tarnya Cooper.
…
Concealed and Revealed: The Changing Faces of Elizabeth I runs from 13 March – 26 September 2010 in Room 2 of the National Portrait Gallery.

Full text of news release

Additional articles:

Art Daily: New Research: Mystery Snake Revealed in Elizabeth I Portrait

BBC: Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I reveals secret snake

The Daily Mail Online: The Queen’s loyal serpent: 400 years on, a painted-over snake reappears on portrait of Elizabeth I

The Guardian: Portrait of Elizabeth I reveals she held serpent where a posy now appears

The Independent: The Virgin Queen, the serpent and the doctored portrait

Now that we’re getting closer to the opening, I thought it was a good time to post a reminder that the exhibition Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey opens next week. Be sure to click on the “Related Events” tab for more events, including information on Leanda de Lisle’s lecture “Death Becomes Her:
The Life and Afterlife of Lady Jane Grey” on March 5.

Here’s a PDF of the full press release for the exhibition.

And if anyone gets a chance to see the exhibition or attend some of the events, I’d love to hear from you!

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

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

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