The Tudors: Humanist Sovereigns or Cultured Thugs?

A visit with the original Bloody Mary and world-bestriding Elizabeth I -- too bad dumbed-down labels mar the project.

O n Thursday I wrote the first part of my story on The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England, which opened last month at the Met and will later travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The exhibition and book look at how the Tudor kings and queens used art to enhance their legitimacy as a ruling family.

This was a foundational challenge since Henry VII, once Henry Tudor, might have won the crown militarily but, in bloodlines, had only a remote claim. An ostentatious Tudor style with pushy iconography emerged. Once entrenched, the Tudors combined this flashy brand of marketing-through-art with contemporary Netherlandish and Italian styles and a humanist impulse. Art, religion, and politics stewed in the same pot in crisis after crisis, especially in the reigns of Henry VIII and his two daughters, Mary I and Elizabeth I.

In my Thursday review, I concentrated on the Tudor rulers themselves. Today, I’ll look at a broader cast of characters and at what’s missing in The Tudors. I recommend the exhibition and the catalogue, but, overall, what we get in the galleries is a fraught proposition.

Life under the Tudors, as Thomas More, John Fisher, Anne Boleyn, Cardinal Wolsey, and so many others learned, could turn sour fast. Henry VIII picked favorites. He loved romantically and politically, but, once crossed, even slighted, there was no going back. His strategy, in part, was to keep everyone on pins and needles and fearing they might one day face the axe or the pyre. In part, both fates profited the king. The crown grew fabulously rich through confiscating monastic wealth but also through attainder when, say, you got nabbed for treason or any other capital crime.

Lady Dacre, brilliantly portrayed by Hans Eworth, Hans Holbein’s court successor as court painter, lost her family’s title, land, and money when her young nobleman husband was convicted of murder in 1541. Lord Dacre was a high-stepper in Henry’s court. Together with Lady Dacre, the Duke of Buckingham’s daughter, they were part of the elite delegation welcoming Anne of Cleves to London. Dacre carried the ceremonial canopy over Jane Seymour’s coffin at her funeral. He was, sad for him, involved in a drunken poaching party and killed a gamekeeper. He was executed not for intrigue like countless others but simple murder.

By law, the crown got his estate. His formidable widow, starting with Henry and ending with Elizabeth I, cajoled the crown until she got the attainder reversed and the title back for her son’s sake. Eworth’s fussier than Holbein but gets her grit. She was a steamroller, slow-moving but sure to flatten obstacles.

The Dacre stash was a drop in the bucket in the Tudor confiscation racket. The dissolution of monastic wealth was the Tudor version of a Texas gusher. One of these days, we’ll see our own version of the Tudors’ eye-bloated endowments owned by lazy, hubristic foundations and universities and empty those, too. It’s inevitable. They’re oblivious to how much they offend and insult so many elements of the country.

There are lots of detours in the exhibition, either filler or signs of sloppy thinking that can’t decide what’s topical and what’s tangential. Eworth did lots of work for the Tudors, some of it in the show, but his Allegory of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, from 1570, has nothing to do with the Tudor court, fun and weird as it is.

Sometimes irrelevance is, well, irrelevant. A pair of extraordinary and fancy women’s gloves from 1600 is a detour, too, since they’ve got no Tudor connection. Their tranks, covering the wrists, are scalloped and embroidered with weeping, disembodied eyes, parrots, and pansies. They might have been a token of lost love or a sign of availability. “I’ll stop crying when I find the right guy.” They’re so fantastic, I didn’t care that they have nothing to do with the show.

Things like a Tudor-era hourglass, a 1550 chessboard, a small tapestry belonging to Henry VIII’s Spanish sister-in-law, Juana la Loca, and two large, long New Year’s gift rolls recording gifts to and from Elizabeth I are filler. A chapter in the catalogue explains the gift rolls — the Tudors used and expected gifts as political tools — but it’s wrong to show something like this to visitors without telling us at least some of what the thing reports. The big Portrait of an Unknown Woman from the 1590s depicts a full-length figure in a lovely floral gown, outside in the woods, escorted by a stag. We know next to nothing about it except it’s English. Why are these objects in the show when so much that’s on-target, like silver and architecture, is minimized?

One medium that’s definitely not minimized is tapestry. Henry VII, who actually had once been poor, was a frugal king but patronized Europe’s best tapestry makers on a massive scale. The Creation of the Fall of Man is part of a set of ten tapestries Henry acquired in 1502. It’s in the exhibition’s first big space, near the bronze angels and candelabrum.

Tapestry and other textiles were essential parts of Tudor power iconography, far more so than painting. Tapestries covered more space — some are 20 feet long — so more people could see them. Court painters produced royal portraits, but these usually went to aristocratic houses where few saw them. A ten-piece Story of David and Bathsheba, bought by Henry VIII in the late 1520s, presented David, and, indirectly, Henry, as a transformative king and stud nonpareil.

There are half a dozen big tapestries in the show. Made from wool, silk, and gilded silver-wrapped thread, they shine and sparkle. They’re definitely lux. Packed with detail as well as narrative, they were fodder for humanist erudition, so important to both Henrys.

Considering the centrality of silver in Tudor image-building, there’s not much in the show. A massive silver-gilt ewer and basin from around 1567, packed with engraved Elizabethan and biblical iconography, is going to San Francisco and Cleveland only. Why in the world is this so? Surely the Met wanted it. Could the MFA in Boston, which owns it, have been so churlish? The so-called “English Monument,” from 1558, is in the exhibition. That’s the pillar-shaped covered cup made for English Protestants exiled in Frankfurt during Mary’s rule.

There are a few other silver things, too, but, at least at the Met, it’s a mere soupçon. Most Tudor silver was melted down over the years. Enough still lives, though, to make a grand display. Henry VII and Henry VIII spent a fortune on silver. Royal dining was a ceremony meant to impress, and silver was part of the game plan. The exhibition cries for silver excess, much as we get an excess of tapestry.

One of the curators at the Met, Elizabeth Cleland, wrote an engrossing essay on Tudor palace design. This gets short shrift in the exhibition, alas. Richmond, Greenwich, and Nonsuch Palaces — “Nonsuch” is a Tudor-era word meaning “beyond compare” — sequenced ceremonial and private spaces to make those up the ladder feel the love when they accessed intimate royal rooms. Those kept in more public spaces felt either shunned or aspirational. The old palaces, packed with warrens, little rooms, and odd wall configurations, weren’t suited for sweeps of tapestry or big receptions.

There’s a watercolor, chalk, and ink drawing of the exterior of Nonsuch, built in the late 1530s on Henry VIII’s orders as a hunting lodge, country palace, and way to celebrate his 30th anniversary as king. It’s one of the first buildings in England to show a deep awareness of the Renaissance and, the catalogue tells us, is “the single greatest work of artistic propaganda ever created in England.”

That’s sayin’ something, yet all Nonsuch gets is a drawing, and one behind a curtain that visitors have to lift. Only the brave, experienced, and transgressive do so. “The single greatest work of artistic propaganda,” I learned when I read the book, was a massive program of stucco panels illustrating the Tudors’ similarities to the best Roman emperors. It’s gone now. By the 1690s, nothing of the palace remained. It wasn’t so much demolished as picked to pieces. Since palace-building was so central to the Tudors, why not go big in telling us and showing us how and why?

The Tudors’ last act is fiery, even awesome. Elizabeth I, far more than her Tudor predecessors, both simplified her iconography and tightly controlled it. By the time she became queen in 1558, Tudor acquisitiveness seems to have been sated. There was a lot of stuff. Money was tighter, too, and Elizabeth was naturally frugal, having, I think, inherited her grandfather’s, Henry VII’s, caution with money. Having declined dozens of suitors and, eventually, crafting herself as the Virgin Queen, she was practiced in restraint. Still, in six or seven large portraits, at least five in the last gallery, we see power writ large.

The Darnley Portrait, from 1575, again lent by London’s National Portrait Gallery, shows Elizabeth as a middle-aged woman, not ideally beautiful but with a distinct, recognizable face. Versions of this picture, with that face, were in many aristocratic homes as a sign of fealty. Mary I’s reign was fraught for many reasons, among them the novelty of a woman ruler. Elizabeth, following Mary, thus broke no glass ceilings. Projecting power, for Elizabeth, was less of a stretch.

Her face and frontality ooze authority, as does her doublet, decorative, to be sure, but more of a man’s garment. The Ditchley Portrait, from 1592, places the queen standing on a map of England. Latin inscriptions tell us that “she gives but does not expect” and “she can but does not take revenge.” Nice to say, but that wasn’t the Tudor MO. It’s Elizabethan virtue-signaling.

Quentin Metsys’s portrait from 1583 shows the queen in black and austere. In the background is a grand palace hall packed with partying courtiers. Between the queen and the festivities is a globe showing Europe and Africa. England has imperial aspirations, it suggests, and Elizabeth is too busy realizing them to don dancing shoes. A full-length portrait from 1599 depicts Elizabeth in a crazy embroidered or painted gown packed with flowers, fish, birds, and animals. It proposes her hegemony over the natural world. The Rainbow Portrait, from 1602, painted a year before her death, is direct, too, though her face is very much idealized. Semper eadem, or “always the same,” was the queen’s motto. By this time an old lady and not far from death, she sought to project timeless durability. An armillary sphere suggests her perception is lofty. A burrowing serpent suggests her intelligence is profound.

I would have ended the exhibition with the Elizabethan portraits. Rather, it ends with Robert Peake’s portrait of Henry Frederick Stuart, James I’s son, hunting with friends. It’s from 1603, the year Elizabeth died and the Tudor dynasty ended. James I was, of course, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots. The Stuart century was a parlous one, to say the least.

Peake’s portrait changed royal iconography, at least in painting. James I, like the Kennedys after Eisenhower, brought a young family with him. Stuart imagery often showed the royals in action. The Tudor look was static, even fixed. Elizabeth’s dresses weigh her to the floor. Henry VIII’s full-length portrait from 1540, possibly a Holbein workshop effort, shows him standing firm, legs apart, feet planted. All good points but a distraction. Best to end a show about the Tudors with a Tudor, and with a Tudor called Elizabeth I. Not to put too fine a point on it, but The Tudors opened a scant month after the end of our own Elizabethan era.

I think The Tudors should have been bigger, allowing the show to accommodate more of the era’s rich narrative. The Met, as I’ve written many times, does too many exhibitions. It’s got five shows on view now. Focusing on fewer shows and giving them the space they need would give the public the depth it craves and also save money. The Met has just hiked its general admission charge to $30 a head. Thirty dollars! No wonder its attendance has stalled.

Meatier labels would be a good idea, too. For instance, the show tells us that the portrait of Abd al-Wahid bin Mas’ood Mohammad ’Annouri from 1600 is the earliest surviving depiction of a Muslim in England, period. Nice to know, but I learned from the book, not the in-gallery label, that ’Annouri, the sultan of Morocco’s envoy to London, visited to negotiate an Anglo-Moorish treaty facilitating a Moorish invasion of Spain. Morocco supplied most of England’s sugar and, besides, busying Spain with a reverse Reconquista would have been great mischief. ’Annouri might also have been a model for Othello. Information like this enriches the public’s experience. Bad lighting, bad placement, and tiny type make the labels hard to read. After 150 years, you’d think the Met would have learned how to do this right.

The two Met curators, Cleland and Adam Eaker, wrote smart, elegant essays on how the Tudors used art in politics, the Tudor aesthetic, courtier culture, and Holbein’s time as court painter and, later, as inspiration for the crisp, precise Tudor court style.

Sarah Bochicchio’s essay on Elizabeth’s reputation in the 17th century was good, too. During the Stuart century, she never disappeared as England personified and as the peerless Protestant and politician. The centennial of the Armada in 1688 fed the Glorious Revolution. James II, it was felt, was about to undo what Elizabeth had won. Marjorie Wieseman’s essay on the Tudor revivals of the late-19th and early-20th centuries was good, too, but too remote. Neither essay is represented by art in the galleries, so, engaging as they are, there’s a whiff of irrelevance.

Exhibition and book, taken together, make for a satisfying experience, all of my quibbles aside. I’d recommend the catalogue for its high production values, abundant illustrations, and great essays, all art-focused, but it’s a great way to learn about Tudor history.