Imagine trying to export the Tudors without the help of Hilary Mantel. After her untimely death in the autumn, the Cleveland Museum of Art has managed, with assistance from the Met in New York, where The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England began its US tour. The person they needed more desperately was Queen Elizabeth II, its most significant lender, but the exhibition opened two years late because of Covid-19, and after she had died.
The curators have scoured the world for evidence of the Tudors’ cultural legacy and found most of it very close to its original home, in England and Wales. There doesn’t seem to have been much demand for it elsewhere, except in the United States.
This show is about more than art. The battle for England’s soul is at its core. By the look of the outcome, the iconoclastic spirit of the Protestant Reformation has won. There appears not to be a single crucifix in view. Even the statement-piece bejewelled cross that hangs from the neck of the iconophile Mary I is without a corpus.
Being an exhibition about a dynasty, the curators can’t avoid referring to the writer who brought some of the three generations to life. Turning their backs on Mantel’s writing – described as “fictionalised” – they do concede that the tendency to make blockbuster entertainment out of the Tudors goes back a long way. One of the first moving pictures ever made was the 1895 silent film Mary Stuart (an honorary Tudor, at least).
They have also managed without the candlelit gloom of the BBC’s Wolf Hall. There is just enough murk, on occasion, to give a feel of shadowy times filled with suspicion and religious persecution. Elsewhere there is a white celestial glow from ceilings adorned with Tudor tracery. It feels like a clear, dispassionate light being cast on troubled times.
The Tudors were obsessive portrait sitters. Self-promotion was everything; identities are often unknown. The curators have tried hard to find an image of Anne Boleyn. There is no consensus on whether any true portraits exist. Her daughter, inevitably, is so ubiquitous in this exhibition that it would be possible to point her out while blindfolded.
The first Queen Elizabeth is the poster girl on the cover of the catalogue. Being the last of the line doesn’t make Gloriana any less triumphant. It’s a different story with her half-sister. Having spotted a portrait captioned “Mary Tudor”, I was filled with a sense of relief at the fresh, harmless face. It couldn’t be more different from the usual depiction of an uncompromising Catholic fanatic who, apparently, terrified her subjects into using the letter M as a talisman against her.
It turned out to be a different lady altogether. This one was Queen of France, not England, brought over from a museum in Vienna. Her niece, the “Bloody” Mary Tudor of Protestant schoolbooks, glares from a nearby wall; her portrait is a veritable inferno of colour, mostly red. Painted by Hans Eworth, it transforms Queen Mary I of England into a brief star of the show. She is given some credit for her popularity when she ascended the throne, and her Catholicism appears not to have been an impediment in those early days of 1553. An (admittedly biased) Italian resident of London exclaimed that there was enough welcoming light in the capital that “from a distance the earth must have looked like Mount Etna”.
The curators then bring out the statistics on heretics. According to their calculations it was a horrifying 283 public burnings in five years. For her younger half-sister it was a mere four over a 44-year reign, which excludes all the other means of execution. No wonder they move hurriedly on to the next monarch. Elizabeth I was unquestionably a good thing for the English nation, but it’s less certain that she turned England into a cultural powerhouse. Literature prospered, and those miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard will forever embody the more intimate side of royal life. Some spectacular houses were built during her reign and before, but almost all have either been destroyed or altered beyond recognition. There’s also some fine needlework and a few psalters, which are just about all that’s left of a Catholic legacy.
The greatest surviving Tudor achievements really come down to one man. What would the dynasty – and exhibition – be without Hans Holbein the Younger? This Catholic sympathiser had to leave his hometown of Basel after rampaging Protestants had ruined the business of image-making artists. Although Erasmus later complained that Holbein had sold out to the Reformers, he managed to create the most memorable portraits of the era. I didn’t spot his famous Thomas Cromwell painting, but the more saintly Thomas is there with his chain of office and his un-Cromwellian red-velvet sleeves stealing the show.
Unusually, St Thomas More is almost obscured by his less-publicised friend and fellow martyr, St John Fisher. The sight of the polychrome terracotta by Pietro Torrigiano makes you think that England really did have a Renaissance. It’s as sensitive a portrayal as Holbein’s, and much larger. While More’s sainthood is admitted in small print, Fisher’s is not. At least this sculpture gives the former Bishop of Rochester the presence that tends to elude him. The curators can’t resist Henry VIII’s joke about sending Fisher’s head to Rome to receive his cardinal’s hat.
Torrigiano was selective about his commissions. Holbein drew or painted anyone of consequence. Scattered among the big-name and no-name sitters are less-celebrated figures such as Robert Cheeseman, falconer to the king. The most exceptional subject is not by Holbein, nor is he a Catholic or a Protestant. He is a Muslim, and probably the first to be painted in England. The Moroccan emissary Abd al-Wahid bin Mas’ood visited as part of Elizabeth I’s complicated dealings with her enemy’s enemy. Having been cut off from Europe, she was in constant communication with the Islamic world. Unlike the Ottoman commercial initiatives, the Moroccan legate’s trade deal never happened. In 2019, Elizabeth II’s ministers attempted and failed to secure the same arrangement.
The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England is at Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio until 14 May
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