Abstract
Surprisingly little attention has been paid by scholars of Henry VIII to the heraldic ceiling of the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace (fig. 1). Study of its decoration has fallen somewhere in between surveys of Tudor architecture and painting. In this article specific problems relating to the ceiling will be addressed: when it was made, the iconography, the reasons for the iconography, the visual source of the ceiling and how it was transmitted, and who made it. The ceiling warrants attention because its programme of Henrician heraldry is a key to the understanding of the political iconography of the Royal Supremacy. In addition, the ceiling's dependence on a contemporary Italian architectural treatise for its design is unusual for its time.
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