Abstract
This essay offers a new reading of the pose of Anna of Denmark in the hunting portrait, Anne of Denmark (1617) by Paul van Somer. Specifically, it attends to the significance of the queen’s pointed elbow as a marker revealing the precedence of her rank over her gender in the composition of her identity (Fig. 1).1 To evidence this precedence, I will retrace the figural patterns encoded in the imaging of women’s bodies, their elbows akimbo – types, allegories, and portraits – across media such as printed emblems, within paintings, and performances such as the courtly masque.2 These patterns established the norms and paradigms of this portrait’s visual cultural context, a body of images informed by discourses of state, theology, medicine, and natural philosophy, which in turn imprinted the practices of royal portraiture. As Maria H. Loh has observed, Renaissance ‘facial identity was a very nebulous...
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