Art in Renaissance England

Abstract

The literature on the visual arts in the English Renaissance, which largely tracks the reigns of the Tudor and Jacobean monarchs, was, until the 1990s, heavily focused on portraiture. An important and comprehensive catalogue of Tudor portraits in the National Portrait Gallery was produced by Roy Strong (Strong 1969b, cited under Portraiture) The Tudor period was traditionally treated by art historians as a prologue to an identifiable British style that emerged only in the seventeenth, and even eighteenth, century. Gradually, a new generation of scholars began producing close examinations of different media: architecture, tapestries, funeral monuments, portrait miniatures, and gardens, as well as a wider range of paintings and portraits, extending to those of the middle classes. These examinations were rooted in documentary evidence and enlivened especially the study of the visual arts in the reign of Henry VIII. Milestone anniversaries, such as the five hundredth anniversary of Henry VIII’s birth, in 1991, and the quincentenary anniversary of his accession to the throne, celebrated in 2009, contributed to a growing number of scholarly monographs, exhibitions and their catalogues, and edited volumes based on academic conferences devoted to the study of Tudor visual art. This field has taken the lead in technical analysis of works of art. The five-year Making Art in Tudor Britain project, led by Tarnya Cooper, then at the National Portrait Gallery in London, pioneered the focused study and comparative findings of more than one hundred English Renaissance paintings through the use of the latest technologies.