 Hello, and welcome to the Paul Mellon Centre in the room and online. My name is Christine Afarade. I'm a research fellow at GBC in Cambridge. I am a post doctoral friend of the Paul Mellon Centre. And I specialise in the art and ideas of the Tudor period. And it's my honor to be the convener of this summer public event series. Tudors now exclamation mark. The exclamation mark will very fond of. Mae ymddai'r disgwch, cymrydd, cyfnodol, a'r awrchwyll, dychydig ddysgu y dyma eich cyfnodol yn ddweud ar gyfer y gweithio ar hyn. Ydw i'r ddweud, mae'r ddweud eich gweithio ar y gyfer cyfnodol o'r Cymru ar yr argynnu ar gyfer y gweithio ar gyfer y gweithio ar gyfer y gweithio ar gyfnodol. Mae'r gweithio ar gyfer y gweithio ar gyfnodol, oherwydd mae'n cyd-rhyw ymwysig, Mae'r argyllteidau yn llwyddo ffrind ymydd yn Llyfrgell, ac mae'r ardu yn cefnogi, mae wedi defnyddio i ymdilydd sigur i lathau o ranir Caerdydd yn ymydd iawn. Mae'n rhoed o pob ni – cwyl erioed, mawr o'i ddaeth'i arddangos unig hefyd – byddai erioedd yr ardygroddol, meddwl, oedd yn ysgolwyd, eu gennangorowen, ac mae'n meddwl iawn astudio piwg ar gyfathor ac meddwl a'r argyllteidau. So Tudas now is an attempt to capture the state of the field, taking stock of what's been achieved over the last few decades and opening paths for further discussion in the future. So our first event brings together three scholars of the Tudas period, who are helping to broaden our understanding of what Tudas art was and what it could do. So it's my pleasure to introduce Tara Hamling, a reader in Early Modern Studies in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the visual arts and material culture of Early Modern England with a particular interest in religious imagery, decoration and domestic context. She's the author of Decorating the Godly Household, Religious Art in Post Reformation Britain, and with Catherine Richardson she also wrote A Day at Home in Early Modern England, Material Culture and Domestic Life 1500-1700, both with Yale University Press. And she's currently an investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort, Writing and Material Culture 1560-1660. Also with us this evening is Helen Hackett, Professor of English Literature at University College London, specialising in Shakespeare Renaissance literature, women's writing and feminist criticism. She is interested in the intersections between literature, art and history in the Early Modern period and intercultural encounters. Her latest book, The Elizabethan Mind, published with the Yale University Press last year, explores competing and conflicting ideas of the mind in the late 16th century and how these generated the extraordinary literary creativity of the period. And there are flyers on your seats for those of you in the room, and if you're online you can achieve the discount by putting Eliza in capital letters into the checkout at Yale University Press. Finally we also have Larry Lynn, a fashion historian and author, currently head of exhibitions at the National Museum of Wales and a trustee of the Royal School of Needlework. She's previously been an assistant curator at the V&A and the curator of Royal Ceremonial Dress at the Historic Royal Palaces. She's the author of several monographs including Tudor Fashion, which won the Historians of British Art Prize and Tudor Textiles, and she's also the curator of several major exhibitions including The Lost Dress of Elizabeth I, Hampton Court Palace in 2019, and she's recently appeared on BBC Two's Art That Made Us and BBC One's Elizabeth-Fashioning a Monarch. So welcome to making the Tudors. Each speaker will present an object of particular interest for about five to ten minutes, and then we will come together for a discussion before opening up to the floor here and online for further questions and discussion. If mention of any of those books has piqued your interest, they are also all available in the Paul Mellon Centre Library downstairs. So thank you, and first up is Tara Hamling. Great, well hello everyone, and thanks so much to Christina for organising this event. I'm very excited to be here and celebrate Tudors now, exclamation mark. So Christina's been very strict with us, we're only allowed five to ten minutes to just introduce our object, a particular object, and then we're going to hopefully tease out some of the issues that these objects raise in discussion. Okay, so this is the object now that I'm going to be talking about, as it appears now in a place called The White Swan Inn in Stratford upon Avon, the hometown of Shakespeare, as you'll know. They're in a fragmentary state, as you can see, and behind glass to protect them and what remains of them. It's now a hotel and a pub and in the front room, so it's possible to go in and see them, but it's very, very difficult to make out the detail of the wall paintings. So I do have these drawings that were made some time ago and are in the V&A's collection, the Victoria and Albert collection, but I'm going to use this pictorial representation of the wall paintings to talk through what we can see within them. So The White Swan was operating in as early as 1560 in Stratford, an important landmark in the town, possibly even earlier, and based on the style of the clothing worn in the paintings, the painted characters, the paintings probably date from the 1580s or the 90s. So there Elizabethan in date, coinciding with the time that Shakespeare would have been just leaving the town to come to London. So two sections of wall painting remain on one wall, on the left here as you can see, and it's on the ground floor, as I say, in the street-facing room. But originally the scheme would have extended around all four walls, and that's one of the things I'd like to talk more about in questions is modes of viewing, sort of moving around spaces, and looking at Tudor art. The larger section is quite large, it's over nine foot wide, and three foot in height. And the error underneath, as you can see, is blank, and it's probably likely there was some kind of settle, some kind of fixed furniture, sort of built-in benches underneath. The outer edges, as you can see, are painted with this amazing kind of foliage and large flowers, much larger than the painted scenes. And between these floral motifs in this first section are two pictorial scenes. They're depicted within classical columns, as if you're sort of looking through them onto a sort of colonnade or lodgy. It's like you're in a lodgy looking out. These scenes show two moments from the story from the apocrypha, the Biblical apocrypha, and it's the story of Tobit. So this well-known story describes the journey of the blind Tobit's son Tobias to another town, and he's accompanied by the angel Raphael in disguise. Along the way, the angel advises Tobias to keep the innards of a fish that he catches from the river on arrival in the town. The burnt heart of the fish is used to exercise a demon from a young woman called Sarah so that Tobias is able to marry her. The couple returned to Tobit, the father, and used the gall of the fish to cure Tobit's blindness. So the essential story here is that through faith God redeems his chosen people. I'm interested in how storytelling works through Tudor Art, so that's what I'd like to tease out. How does that story convey in the paintings as we can see them? So as you can see, the first scene shows Tobit and his wife sending their son off with this other figure, which we presume to be Raphael. Raphael is half hidden by these green drapes, these green hangings that suggest an interior space. Next to this, the next scene along, which is in quite poor condition, it's a bit difficult to make out, but you can see the townscape in the background. So there's a scene of Tobias and Raphael setting off into this landscape. I think what's interesting is that there's a notable difference. The two scenes are next to each other. You sort of think that there's a linear mode of viewing. They actually look quite different. The figures are different in scale. You've moved from an interior setting to an exterior setting with lots of foreground, background, and the figures sort of moving through the space. So they evoke those different moments in time and space. And the second scene does lack the drapery of the first. And then at the top you can see there's just these little bits of text that again spell out the kind of gist of the narrative. They're not so much telling the story as just sort of mentioning the key moments in it. And again, we've got these flowering plants that sort of guide us along to the next section. So there's a wall post, which you can just see on the far right of this first slide here. And that then opens out into the third scene that survives from what would have been a larger scheme, as I said. And this section is interesting because it extends down. It's no longer looking out through these columns into a lodgier. It sort of moves out of the space a little bit. And it kind of has that sense of movement. Here we see the river coming down and Tobias and Raphael catching the big fish. So no other painting survives, but it's almost certain, is that my eight minutes? Okay, almost certain that other scenes kind of continued around the room, but not necessarily a complete narrative. And I say that because the broadside ballad on the far right there also recounts the story of Tobit and Tobias and the Angel. But it tells the story with these woodcuts and only four scenes are represented. So it jumps. It kind of just picks out the key moments from the story. And it's kind of expected that the viewer will understand exactly how they slot into the wider narrative. So these four woodcuts include the first two scenes in the wall painting. So the setting off of Tobias and the catching of the fish. And then the marriage of Tobias and Sarah, the happy sort of resolution of the story, and then the healing of the Father Tobit's blindness as well. So you can see how it jumps a lot of the narrative. So this is getting to my point. The images in print and paint then do not tell the story so much as evoke it. The surviving scenes, they lack the detailed portrayal of action and they rely on prior knowledge of the story to recognise these various significant moments in the arc, the story arc. So setting off on the journey, catching the fish, arriving, using the fish to affect happy union and using the fish to return to the family and again affect another healing. So these paintings I think express in very efficient manner the core themes of divine protection and deliverance. It shares these themes with other popular Old Testament stories, tales of young men leaving the security of family and experiencing adversity before returning home. So there are examples such as the story of the prodigal son which features in wall paintings in a house in Hertfordshire and the story of Joseph, originally depicted in a house in widemastery of Hertford. So these are middling sort houses, they're not grand elite spaces. So the story of Tobias also had the added value of special relevance for travellers because the angel Raphael who accompanies Tobias on his journey acts to ensure his safety and ultimately to restore the sight of his father. The providential care of a young traveller is a highly appropriate subject for decoration in an inn. The emphasis on landscape, if I go back on second across these paintings and the cityscapes and the rolling countryside as well as the oversized floral motifs all serve to evoke a sense of travel and movement even where the pictorial style is somewhat static. The story also intersects with popular providentialism where huge fish for example on the left here, another broadside ballad were interpreted as divine portents. So here a printed account of monstrous fishes 27 feet long caught in the river a mile from Ipswich in 1568 ends with the lesson. And this you must see the perfect and true description of these strange fishes wherein is to be noted the strange and marvellous handiworks of the Lord, blessed be God in all his gifts. So in the space of an inn where ballads were displayed and sung these allied forms of visual and oral culture come together in a rich layering of themes and motifs. Viewing this kind of painted decoration then if I go back again to how it is now therefore required mobile manoeuvring of the mind and creative responses to its prompts. The culture of early modern England demanded static agility in making connections between different media and genres, drawing allusions between different stories, places and materials from theological questions interrogated in sermons to the painted surfaces of social spaces like inns. Okay, thanks for now. Hello everyone, I'm Helen Hackett. My chosen object is a page from an Elizabethan manuscript in the Houghton Library in Harvard. There it is. The manuscript is a miscellany. That means it's a personal scrapbook of diverse materials including poems, prose and drawings and they're mostly religious in theme. They include allegorical materials, Protestant polemic and chronicle entries. The main compiler of this manuscript was a man with a wonderful name of Stephen Batman. He was a Church of England clergyman. He published various religious and didactic works with a very widely used encyclopedic work called Batman Upon Bartolome. He also collected ancient books and manuscripts and was known as a limna, which is relevant to this item. A limna was a practitioner of the kind of detailed painting that was used in making portrait miniatures. We can date this miscellany to the early 1580s partly because it contains dated chronicle entries and partly because we know Batman died in 1584. It seems to be related to a printed work by Batman published in 1581 called The Doom, Warning All Men to Judgment. Both that and the manuscript contain lots of interest in prodigies, apocalyptic omens. There's a strong sense throughout this manuscript that England is in peril. The page I'm interested in as you saw contains a drawing and some verses. I'm going to zoom in here on the drawing and I hope you can see it's an image of a man and woman. They're posing as if for a portrait of a respectable married couple but if you look closely you can see that in the upper parts of their heads there are lots of tiny figures representing their secret thoughts and you should have found on your seat a text handout of the accompanying verses which explain what's going on in the image so if you can get hold of that you can look at line 9 for instance. Batman writes there, these faces deformed Bids England beware and he says in line 10 that the man personifies upstart gentility oppressing clergy for Romish liberty. So in other words these are social climbers and not only that they're also Catholics and that's confirmed, you probably can't see it very well but there's a tiny figure above the man's ear priest saying mass so that confirms that he's a Catholic and remember I mentioned that Batman was a Church of England clergyman so of course he's hostile to Catholics. In line 12 he says the man's mind is fraught with treasons so we can see in his mind ships soldiers fighting, we can see a town on fire and because this is a manuscript from the early 1580s it's very much from the time of the build up of anxiety fear of a Spanish naval invasion which of course would materialise in 1588 as the Spanish Armada. Batman also explains the figures on the left of the man's head, he says in line 14 of the verses, the devil in his ear you can perhaps see the little horned figure of the devil in his ear let's discord go free so the figure he's letting down is discord flattery holds will who does not see so will is the horse down here a horse was a traditional representation of will which needs to be bridled as for the female figure on the right line 19 explains that her speech is deceit so that's represented by a serpent's head with a forked tongue just poking out between her lips Batman says that her diet is adultery on the right we can see a couple just above her shoulder in a four-paste of bed having sex and according to line 20 on her eyebrows are spoil of lordships to maintain prodigality presumably Batman means by that misappropriated estates which are represented by houses and trees maintaining her wealth and from line 24 Batman sums up what these figures represent in a series of antithesis under the colour of amity treason under the show of activity popery outward countenance love inward dissimulation and all of this relates to intensive Elizabethan debates about whether the inner character could be read from the face Batman discussed this in Batman upon Bartolone that encyclopedic work of his that I mentioned earlier there he asserted that in the head all the wits be seen and therefore in a manner it presented the person of the soul that counselleth and ruleth the body and he proceeded still in Batman upon Bartolone to discuss the eyes, the eyebrows and the forehead and how all of these indicated in their outward form the inner state of the mind for example he writes brows have a virtue hid that showeth outward the passions of the soul you didn't know your eyebrows could be read did you but they can apparently as saith Aristotle the forehead showeth outward the imagination and disposition of the thought and so on now that would imagination that he uses there you can read the imagination from the forehead that's crucial I think and that had different connotations for the Elizabethans than it does for us also in Batman upon Bartolone Batman sets out the standard 16th century explanation of the structure of the brain which is that the imagination was at the front where it made mental pictures so you could think of Batman's drawing as revealing the imaginations of the two figures these mental pictures originated either from sense impressions of the outside world or from the imagination's own resources in which case the imagination was then called fantasy it passed these images to reason in the middle part of the brain for evaluation and then they were passed to memory at the back of the brain for storage and this theory of the mind meant that mental functioning was conceptualised in highly visual terms basically all thoughts originated as images created by the imagination but it also meant that the imagination was regarded as deeply unreliable its sense impressions of the material world could be distorted by various factors well the images it generated itself when it was acting as fantasy had no basis in reality and all these negative associations led to the imagination being associated with both religious and political transgression and subversion the book of Genesis taught that the imagination of man's heart is evil even from his youth and this was picked up by many Protestant theologians including William Perkins who preached on this text he said that man's imagination stands in thoughts the understanding divides this by thinking and these thoughts of the imagination are all naturally wicked meanwhile the law defined treason as to compass or imagine the death of the monarch William Lambard in a conversation with Elizabeth I about the Essex rebellion referred to it as such a wicked imagination so Batman's drawing is showing us just such wicked imaginations in the minds of his subjects thoughts which are sinful and treasonous Protestants especially associated Catholics with a deceptive concealment of thoughts in 1580 to 81 so around the time Batman's making this manuscript Edmund Campion and other Jesuits were in England pursuing their underground mission and there was increasing alarm amongst Protestants about the controversial Catholic practices of equivocation and mental reservation that meant not fully answering incriminating questions silently reserving the full truth in your mind for Catholics this was a legitimate and necessary form of self-preservation but for Protestants it was seen as duplicitous treasonous and very alarming I'll just mention briefly another interesting point about Batman's drawing that it seems to draw on portraits of Elizabeth's predecessor her sister Mary I and her husband Philip II of Spain here are two typical portraits of Philip and Mary from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery these were widely reproduced next to Batman's drawing you can see how very similar they are now clearly Batman tells us in his verses that his subjects are upstart gentry they're not Philip and Mary, they're middle class but it's so interesting that for a kind of template and archetype of Catholic wickedness and duplicity he turns to the most recent Catholic King and Queen I'll just sum up very briefly some key features of Batman's drawing this kind of interaction between image and word is typical of Elizabethan Protestant culture as we saw also in Tara's presentation alongside the idea that images have allegorical meanings and that they require interpretation images are there to be read secondly Batman's participating in a general Elizabethan preoccupation with how thoughts can be represented this generated much of their literary creativity but here we see it producing a visual representation of thoughts as well and this relates to Elizabethan ideas about the imagination that all thought began as a process of visualisation but that this could be unreliable and morally compromised all of this is in the context of debates about whether the inner nature of the mind could be read from outward signs and these were as I've said especially acute in the case of Catholics who were becoming notorious for concealing secret thoughts so it seems to me that Batman's drawing offers us lots to consider in terms of the thinking behind visual images in the Tudor period, thank you Good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is Ellery Lynn and this is the Bacton altar cloth which is the object I'm going to speak to you about so my relationship with the Bacton altar cloth began when I was researching for my book Tudor Fashion published by Yale and available in all good book shops ladies and gentlemen at the time I was the curator of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection for Historic Royal Palaces and it was usually my sad duty to inform inquirers that I'm very sorry you can't come and see the wardrobe of Anne Boleon or Elizabeth I because it just doesn't survive so I was following a Google rabbit hole as one does over lunch while eating a sandwich and happened upon a photo of this altar cloth hanging in the small church of St Faith's in Bacton, Herefordshire and I thought to myself well that looks a little bit 1590's so I better go and have a look at it so I did, I visited the church I was met by the church warden and other parishioners and I knew that I was looking at something very special indeed so prior to working at Historic Royal Palaces I had spent 10 years working at the V&A where it was my privilege to get at objects of textiles and fashion for researchers and students and I had never seen embroidery of this quality from that period anyway what I saw and what you can see here was a T shaped altar cloth made of professionally embroidered floral motifs wrth in gold, silk and silver thread they're embroidered directly through the cloth of silver which is a white ribbed silk woven with silver bullion in it this in itself makes it incredibly valuable cloth of silver was of course reserved by some tree law in the Tudor period to the highest levels of royalty or at the very top to the earls and countesses and the amount of silver in this altar cloth equates to a very very nice house during the 16th century so what is it doing in Bakden these primary floral motifs that you can see are very helpful they date stylistically to the very end of the 16th century any later and they start to develop this sort of scrolling look that look a little bit more Jacobean in style but I had never seen embroidery of this quality before these primary floral motifs are further embellished with motifs you can see there of birds, butterflies a hunting scene, animals, boats and sea monsters which loomed large in the popular imagination of the time and these are done by domestic embroiderers not professional embroiderers so that's going to be your nobility your ladies following a gentile pastime two things made this even more intriguing one is that you can see from the patterns here perhaps the way that the patterns form that this wasn't made as an altar cloth it used to be something else before it was an altar cloth and secondly Bakden is the birthplace of one Blanche Parry one of Elizabeth I's closest servants and confidants Blanche was with Elizabeth from cradle almost to grave and even though she wasn't a lady Elizabeth treasured her and gave her gifts from her own wardrobe so the cogs start turning could this be so I asked to borrow this and to take it to Hampton Court Palace for research and conservation and they were very helpful and happy to facilitate because they'd always known it was special and they'd always made the link between it and Elizabeth or at least with Blanche and they had conserved and framed it themselves at their own expense in 1909 and it was this conservation that saved it probably preserving it for us it had received some attention before of course Janet Arnold had noted it for her magnificent book The Queen's Wardrobe Unlocked received some further documentation in the early 20th century but perhaps Janet Arnold didn't do what I did which was to climb up into the pews and noticed that just under the frame there was evidence of some pattern cutting tucked away which suggested that it might be cut from a dress so we began about a thousand hours of conservation and research on the cloth itself a fantastic intern working for me recognised the little bear in the sea sort of in the top right quarter she recognised it immediately as a little bear from print book by Nicholas de Bruin called Four Legged Animals from 1494 and the most likely inspiration for the floral motifs were in a pattern book Le Clefthe Chant that's the key to the fields by Jacques Le Moyne from 1586 whose patron was Lady Mary Sydney and whose preface said it should be used for silver work gold work and embroidery my colleagues in the textile conservation studio unpicked the cloth from the 1909 frame and unstitched the threads that it kept it on its mounting board through the conservation though the conservation had saved it back then they'd put it onto cotton which was warping and moving in different ways from the silk so really we got to it and saved it because it was starting to buckle and the team carefully reattached it to especially dyed conservation silk backing it with threads as thin as a human hair but in the process the original colours were revealed on the back and while the silver on the front glimmers and glitters the colours on the back were vivid so we had vibrant bright yellows, vivid blues bold reds and it was actually quite emotional to see those colours for the first time in so many years I invited lots of experts to come and see it thank you Helen who came and shared expertise and every time we saw it more and more evidence that we were looking at something made for the very highest level of customer emerged here we had blue indigo dye from India we had cochineal red from Mexico so evidence of tangible global trade at huge expense the stitches were worked through the cloth itself rather than being applied like applique slips and we discovered that this was without parallel anywhere in the world so we were looking at it as a virtuoso piece a master showing off basically and of course we have similarity here in the pattern to the bodys that the queen herself is wearing in the rainbow portrait from Hatfield House now I've spent many hours staring at this and the rainbow portrait together to see if I can match them up well they don't match up but we do know that they both date to around 1600 and we do know that around this time Elizabeth was very sensitive about her image and her dignity she didn't really like to have women at court and retained only a handful of ladies and maids of honour who she required to dress much more modestly than her in fact we have a story from an early 17th century account that told of how one Mistress Howard was starting to wear clothes or a little bit too nice and so the queen went into her chamber and donned Mistress Howard's clothes Mistress Howard was a little bit shorter than the queen so the queen came out wearing it and challenged the assembled company to say how do I look and her clothes weren't fitting so they had to fess up and the queen basically said well if it is not becoming on me then I'm sure it would not be becoming on Mistress Howard or something to that effect I imagine that must have been pretty terrifying if this is true so of course this is a very nice probably apocryphal, nice little anecdote but it does summarise some facts which we know to be true and actually demonstrates that the back of an altar cloth especially seen through the lens of the rainbow portrait is fit for a queen and that was a very jealously guarded state so the altar cloth conserved and remounted formed the focus of the exhibition The Lost Dress at Hampton Court alongside contemporary embroidery slips books by Jacques Le Moyne and Nicholas de Bruin and of course the rainbow portrait now the lighting and the context of that exhibition was illuminating no pun intended actually in the damask lined room and the low lighting of Hampton Court the altar cloth absolutely popped the light picked up all the detail of the embroidery and the silver it absolutely glittered and here perhaps we have the defining piece of evidence for me that we're looking at an elite garment here in a court where most people were dressing wool and velvets that absorbed the light even fine silks whoever was adorned in something like this would have stood out they would have been ethereal and magnificent and to be crass it's Tudor Hyve is basically and of course the rainbow portrait so replete with symbolism almost every inch of that portrait is covered in textiles and actually even the picture that symbolises that represents our talk today is absolutely replete with textiles demonstrating the worth of textiles to the Tudor mindset among the symbolism flowers aren't mere decoration they are derived from print books rare and valuable they demonstrate of course man's classification of and mastery over the natural world they demonstrate knowledge and women's access to it which we must consider it's a fantastic object it's very close to my heart and it's full of amazing access points to the long Tudor century so hopefully it's a good platform for us to kick off our discussion thanks very much wonderful, thank you everyone for those three fantastic objects to kick us off so I thought it would be nice if we could use those as a starting point for a broader discussion about the state of the field Tudors now and what we're learning and what we maybe still have to learn so I wonder if we could perhaps start by taking stock and if you'd like to talk about how our perception of the Tudor art landscape has changed in recent years who'd like to go first I'm happy to start I think one thing I'm struck by just thinking about all the objects that we were talking about is I think they were all produced to some degree collaboratively probably, am I right? and I think that's something we've thought about a lot more recently so I think perhaps in the past we used to think much more in terms of who is the artist particularly when we thought about portraits who is the artist, you know, we wanted a kind of single maker and a single mind who created this artifact and of course there are lots of analogies there with literature where we tend to want to look for a single author or we want a great mind like Shakespeare but we want to think of them as creating something entirely on their own and I think both in literature and the visual arts and that's not really how it worked in Shakespeare's case he was working in the playhouse obviously in collaboration with actors and with other workers in the playhouse producing the plays the object I was talking about I said the main compiler of it was Stephen Batman but actually other members of the family contributed to that miscellany that's often the case that's often a place where we find women writing and circulating writings is in miscellanies like that and I think in the visual arts too we're coming to understand how things like funerary monuments, buildings various kinds of structure women might have a role as what's been called Peter Davidson and Jane Stevenson used a really useful form of divisor that a woman might not literally be the person who used the stone to make the funeral monument and who carved the inscription on it but she might have discussed what kind of statue she wanted on it, what kind of inscription she wanted on it she might have written actually a poem to go on the monument and so there's a kind of collaborative process going on and that in itself is interesting but also it gives more opportunities to women to get involved in artistic production Absolutely, I think definitely questions being raised about our conception of authorship but I think also originality I mean you know Tara your objects based on print culture and that's not something that's seen as a fault in the artist it's just it's pretty much all domestic decoration isn't it that we know that we can sort of trace usually to a print source would you say, I mean maybe there's more originality there but Yeah but it's not the slain British copy No printed sources and that's the important point so I think one of the ways in which we might think about art in England in this period is around the balance of convention and invention so the use of printed sources is a really good example of that you know there's a playing around with a particular printed source that may or may not be recognised embedded within interior decoration if you get the reference you're in the know but it doesn't matter if you don't but you know it's not a question of just having it exactly as is in the printed source it's very often adapted sometimes different cartouches and surrounds are incorporated from other prints so again I think that kind of element of invention was appreciated even though there is one of the things that runs to the art down is that kind of sense that but it's just reliant on printed sources I think we need to move away from that subject and that's necessarily a bad thing in the Tudor mindset that's kind of playing around that's actually kind of showing your knowledge and indeed your kind of oftentimes continental exposure to continental sources as well Right exactly in places we wouldn't necessarily expect them and I think the word I mean even the word invent comes from Latin Invenere which is to find as much as it is to invent in the sense that we know so I think new things being built out of the old and Eilir I wondered if you wanted to say anything about that kind of collaborative process with the combination in your Baxian Autocliffe Yeah absolutely I think there's a few things that spring to mind as we're talking and one of those was thinking about the idea of intention and patronage as well I was thinking about Lady Mary Sydney as the patron of Le Cleftochon and how she had intended it I think you know there's a lot of work recently that shows you know the intention for embroidery pattern books and print books to be sources of knowledgeable women and that actually embroidery was intended as an intellectual activity not just a kind of gentile pastime so I think there's definitely something to be explored there around the role of the patron and their intention and their collaboration in the work but absolutely I mean you know a work a piece like the Baxian Autocliffe would certainly have been the work of many many hands and many different sources so professional domestic but you know also I think what we're seeing in some later Elizabethan embroidery is also the intention there's a world of women that's happening here there's a codified language as well which is really interesting perhaps we'll get into that and perhaps a bit too broader a thing to start with Fantastic absolutely so that's the sort of concept that perhaps we're now paying a bit more attention to in scholarship but I wonder if there are also changes in terms of even the genres that we're looking at and the kinds of art Tara you're nodding So when I started out I would notice things that were sort of hiding in plain sight as we go to kind of country houses and look around Elizabethan, Jacobian houses and you know I was looking at the overman tools where I noticed that the guided tools were sort of directing you more to the state portraits or you know the grand portraits so they'd kind of been there they'd always been there they'd been left alone but they'd kind of fallen out of favour they'd been neglected they were seen as awkward crude these are all words that are used to describe them in some of the early accounts but again where does that kind of language of judgement come from what are we comparing this work to and why do we see it as inferior are we comparing the decorative arts to the fine arts and therefore it's a lesser art form or are we comparing the decorative arts of England to the decorative arts of the continent and therefore it's lesser and less quality than the work there do those comparisons matter in a Tudor context would early modern people have worried about those questions of fine versus decorative or the kind of terms of crude or these even terms that were used at the time so I think one of the huge advances is thinking about art works in different places not in churches not necessarily at court although your example brings them together in a fascinating way but you know also in perhaps lesser houses in say inns and public spaces and again let's just abandon some of those old frameworks of judgement Aneri you're nodding nodding thickly absolutely I think what we're doing we're all rather what scholarship perhaps has done for a long time which is changing now is looking at Tudor art through a hierarchy that is more modern and contemporary so for example Hans Holbein is revered of course rightly so but actually Hans Holbein at court was paid relatively low amounts compared to tapestry weavers and in Henry VIII's inventory from 1547 he had 200 paintings he had 2,000 tapestries they were the most valuable thing in his collection tapestries the embroideries we haven't been seeing art and decorative arts and visual culture through Tudor eyes for a very long time and I think that's starting to change so I often start my talks with you know my colleagues will tell you that Tudor art and architecture is the pinnacle of you know Tudor majesty they're completely wrong through Tudor eyes it's textiles but equally so we have to definitely challenge the hierarchies that we understand and try and reframe them absolutely so we've mentioned a few of the kind of value judgments that perhaps are clinging on still in some areas so that's obviously one reason behind perhaps the overlooking of these genres but I wonder if there are other aspects to this I think there's also been a tendency to assume as I was saying at the beginning that these things are not intellectual they're not interesting in any way other than a sort of antiquarian it exists and that's that you know I just wanted to mention another genre but I think we're discovering a lot more recently which is the kind of illustrations that we can find in books and in manuscripts of the kind that I was showing which we perhaps used to think of as primarily textural resources but we're becoming more and more aware of the pictures in them there's been a lot of attention to things like emblem books books of anatomy with their diagrams all those kinds of things and I think one reason that we haven't looked at them so much before is just because they weren't very accessible to us actually because they would have been in scholarly libraries where you need to be a professional scholar with a reader's card or you know if they were in a manuscript library they'd be even more inaccessible but lots of them are available online now so we're much more able just to you know have a look at them and get a kind of overall sense of them and I think you know they've partly been neglected also because of the kind of value judgments that we're talking about that often they're seen as rather kind of crude rather sort of basic but they just give us access to the kinds of images that many more tutors would have been seeing you know if we think about the portraits how many people would have actually seen them if they were at court in an aristocratic household whereas books and perhaps manuscripts too would have circulated rather more widely and yeah I mean they give us a different kind of view of the culture if I think about Batman for instance he writes a book called The Crystal Glass of Christian Reformation which has lots of illustrations of people committing different sins or people's personifications of different sins like covetousness and pride and so on and in many of those images there's a figure of the devil and he might look rather old fashioned to us he looks rather kind of medieval because he's got batty wings and he's got claws instead of feet and he's got horns and we might not have thought of that as an Elizabethan image but it is and it tells us a lot about the persistence of that kind of imagery after the Reformation on right through to the end of the 16th century and beyond so we get a rather different kind of angle on the culture if we're looking at these sources that are circulating more widely and that are more kind of in the hands of the middling sort and having a kind of existence in that wider culture Absolutely, I think there's obviously a tendency among political historians and social historians to call this period the early modern period which already puts a skew in terms of what we're thinking about is new and what heralds something in later centuries but I think particularly in the arts we're also looking backwards at persisting traditions and guilds and methods of working that can tell us a lot more about what the Tudor's valued would you say you want to jump in So another thing I was thinking about in terms of the genres that have opened up to us, the categories the media that have opened up to us more recently is the question of survival so I suppose that links with the survival of the medieval tradition into the Tudor period and into the 17th century and an awful lot more survives is stripped away actually so the symbolism that we've all been talking about the absolute mode of understanding artworks which is about thinking about symbolic meaning that's something that's prized and praised in medieval art but seen as somehow awkwardly didactic or something in Tudor art I don't understand why the medieval period is kind of lauded as being anyway and then somehow there's a sort of sense of decline that is associated I think wrongly with the Reformation but at the same time we've got that survival and persistence of tradition but then the sources that are available to us the artworks that are available to us are what have been, what survived and there have been all kinds of choices made about what survives partly through recycling partly through family collections with my material there are enough examples to suggest that this kind of interior decoration these kind of paintings on walls was incredibly ubiquitous in the period through the 17th century sometimes covered over and uncovered during the Victorian period where it was noted as you said Christina purely through antiquarian interest not because it was considered something worthy of study but because Shakespeare might have seen it and I think that that's another really interesting aspect of this kind of what survives how we view what survives and then the kind of framework that we impose on it in terms of ascetic judgement Can I just jump in there because one of the challenges that textiles have is that they don't survive and there are probably a number of cases where that's true if you think of Hampton Court so the Hampton Court kitchens 200 men worked there daily feeding a court of hundreds more and that's a tangible footprint that people can go and see is the palace itself as many women were doing the laundry by the river but that doesn't survive there's no archaeological footprint for that so that's not part of the guide books and equally textiles were so valuable it's because they were so valuable they don't survive, they were reused they were cut up, they were handed down they were changed, their provenance is lost they must be there somewhere but because they haven't survived they're not part of that traditional lexicon and I think one of the things as to your first question actually one of the things I think we're seeing more and more in academia but also in museums and heritage is trying to uncover and find those hidden stories possibly I think this feels like a kind of new thing but it's those hidden stories and perhaps even those invisible stories that I think we're starting to really get to grips with yeah absolutely maybe something that digital is also helping with us with accessibility so I wonder then perhaps Helen you might like to speak to this but what can Tudor theories of mind tell us about attitudes towards images and how might that change and we've already talked about the kind of perception of hierarchy being distinct from theirs but are there other thoughts you have on that? I think what's fascinating is how different Elizabethan ideas about the mind are if we're talking about things that are elusive and don't survive, the mind of course is very elusive to access not only across time but even in your own time and in yourself and the Elizabethans were fascinated by the saying which means know yourself that's one of their favourite motos and also their religious outlook their protestant faith taught them to look within to try and explore themselves but they're very much surrounded by competing and conflicting intellectual frameworks which tell them different things about how they can understand the mind so on the one hand they have Aristotle who says the mind is embodied it's an organ of the body they have humoral medicine which also says that the mind is very much a kind of integral organic part of the body but on the other hand they have frameworks from classical philosophy and from religion which say that the mind is divided from the body it should be divided from the body that the mind is purer and higher than the body and it should govern the body or they're even sometimes enemies to each other, they're hostile to each other so all of this is kind of in circulation and I think they're grappling with ways of trying to reconcile these different models and I think that's one of the reasons why they are so very creative in producing new literary genres like the dramatic soliloquy the sonnet sequence, these are all ways of trying to look within and express what you find there and in the visual arts I think it very much informs their portraiture there's a fascinating example I know you're also interested in him there's a musician called Thomas Whitehawn so he's not one of the aristocrats or royal figures who's having their portrait painted he's a musician and composer who writes a manuscript autobiography in the 1570s and one of the things he describes in it is having his portrait painted which actually he does four times which is quite unusual for someone of his station but he does it at different points in his life and it's because he's so interested in understanding he says what I am of mind myself so I think he's getting his portrait painted for two reasons one is for that inner understanding and he understands it as part of a kind of suite of artefacts including his autobiography and the music he's composing which all kind of display to an audience what I am of mind myself but also he's interested in how those four portraits through his life show his mind the term the Elizabethans would have used is the inward self or the inner man and he's interested in how that inner man changes over time so he recounts how he compares a later portrait with an earlier one he sees how his face has changed he's got wrinkles on his forehead his eyes are hollow but he says as my face was changed so were the delights of my mind also so he's reading inside from outside but the Elizabethans are never quite sure that you can do that and I think portraits always exist in that elusive space between are they giving as in the artefact I was talking about do they give us an image where we can read the mind from the face or is the mind not legible from the face Shakespeare gives us contradictory views on this he has Julius Caesar say of Cassius that he has a lean and hungry look he thinks too much such men are dangerous so in that case you can read the mind from the face but Hamlet says I have that within that passes show you can't read inside from outside and all the time they're in conflict between these different positions I think I think that's true and obviously in terms of words we have what the poets have to go on and it's a drum that I bang quite a lot yes the poets want to say no you can't read interiors through surfaces because only the poets have access to those interiors but actually if you look at what the artists are doing making a counter claim and saying actually look I can show you the delights of the mind whether it's through an impraiser for example talking about people's philosophy or even something else intangible like your heritage shown through heraldry so there are ways of manifesting these things but we've not really thought about what you know whether the painters might have a different opinion about that to the poets and also how a painting a portrait particularly is very often a kind of multimedia image as you say that it's not just a visual image of that person it will have an inscription it might have a motto as you say it might have a heraldic crest it's got lots of different ways lots of different readable items and I think what we're all perhaps thinking about in our different artefacts is how text and image work together even the back to an altar cloth it doesn't have text actually on it but those flowers are kinds of legible aren't they they're not just flowers they mean something and so I think there are lots of different ways in which that inward man that inner self intention can be conveyed through visual images I think it's really interesting the way that changes over the Tudor period so when you know the beginning of the Tudor period the Burgundian concept of magnificence which is you the way you dress for example it's virtue you know if you're magnificent that's virtue made tangible so if you look magnificent that's because you are magnificent you deserve to be at your status but absolutely that's that changes I agree I'm really interested in that idea because in the later Elizabethan period where you have all these codes and symbols you know as you say the plants aren't just plants they're standings for knowledge and mastery over nature and each of them has a different symbol that's changed somehow and so we have the concept as well of Maltham in Parfa which is much in little and it has changed your life from that kind of early Burgundian idea and you know even thinking about Elizabeth I herself with her poem you know Monsieur's Departure I'm paraphasing terribly because I can't remember the words but I love an idea not show that I love so everything is hidden everything is hidden and codified and it's like a puzzle to one pick but she still wrote a poem about it which I always think is you know how private was that poem why she wrote it wasn't to him so she said yes exactly it's not to the Duke of Alunso it's for somebody else everything absolutely they invite us into a kind of intimacy but at the same time they have a mystery there is this kind of duality that you're talking about of things being in codes which invite interpretation that draws you in but something remains elusive something remains baffling and I think that reflects for me a lot of these kind of conflicts in thinking about the mind and the inner self whether it's legible or not yes absolutely wonderful Tara you didn't have anything to add on that great well in that case let's move on to perhaps thinking about how religious and political and social shifts in this period impact the visual arts because I know that's something you're thinking about both in terms of religion in terms of social status but I think that has the potential to reveal things to us that were perhaps hidden before as well yeah for sure so absolutely the changes that we can't even begin to imagine the changes that are taking place in the middle of the 16th century and how that radically did alter the visual landscape but I suppose I'd be more interested in continuity than in the changes and one aspect of continuity is what I've called synoptic images or kind of monocenic images so it's the emphasis on storytelling through just a single scene a scene that can encapsulate a whole story through a single dramatic moment and that's something that moves through really seamlessly from the medieval period right the way through the Tudor period so the examples in my wall paintings are sort of several of these monocenic scenes that encapsulate the story but a whole story can be told through just one scene so this example is Abraham sacrificing Isaac from Genesis 22 where that whole story and it's a long drawn out story that takes up the whole of that chapter can be told through one single scene of the father Abraham just about to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command and he's holding the sword aloft just about to do the deed when an angel swoops in stays his hand so you get the angel swooping in as well and it's also this frozen moment and that scene was incredibly popular in the 16th century it moves through the Reformation without any issues because it's an Old Testament scene but it has incredible spiritual meaning long standing spiritual meaning as a type for the sacrifice of Christ so young Isaac is like an early precursor to Christ and Abraham's also a symbol of obedience to God and it's also about the covenant with God so it's incredibly rich image but expressed very simply through a very simple dramatic image and I think that again thinking about how Tudor people interacted with their images on one level it's quite it can appear quite surface quite superficial because it's a simple image but think about all those meanings that are embedded and encoded within it so in that sense did the Reformation affect a change in the form and presentation of imagery did that kind of monocenic kind of form did that allow images to continue to do what they'd always done and to kind of but at the same time the other side to the big changes taking place in the 16th century is the opening up of the middling sort where more and more people have disposable income and ability to invest in their belongings and their identity and to show that status to others and of course the visual material objects are the main way that you show that status so those sorts of images are then appropriated and included on objects that you wouldn't necessarily expect so not just on the walls of houses but also on clothing, on night caps so there's a fantastic description of a night cap that has Adam and Eve and Abraham and Isaac on it so thinking here about the performance of religion and the performance of status together you're actually showing your priority and your status at the same time is up to allow you to be accepted into this new class of upper middling sort Just to button there with what you're describing could also be applicable to today to image making on Instagram or on social media because you're creating monocenic narratives that capture so much and democratises image making and perhaps and I'm thinking out loud but perhaps you know actually there's a lot from this from the Tudor visual arts that's perhaps feeling very relevant to us because so many of you know it's something that's so alive in popular discourse today I think particularly the reuse of images I mean I know a lot of emblem historians who get extremely excited about memes and the parallels between you taking an image that people recognise and that has some currency already in the culture but then overlaying your own text or images onto it to kind of give it extra meaning I mean I think that possibly accounts for perhaps the increasing interest in some of these images in Tudor period which perhaps previously were denigrated as you know bit wonky, bit weird why is there text all over it that kind of thing having you had something to say I just wanted to come in if I may was talking about which was fascinating I think about the continuities from medieval to post reformation because of course the one thing that does change is the context of those kinds of images of the wall paintings, the bedcaps and so on with old testament narratives on them that they can't be in church anymore the one rule is that they must not be in church which might seem a bit surprising to us but I think that tells us a lot about how images at the time were informed by their context the context was so important in terms of how you read, how you responded to an image whether it was acceptable in that context or not one of my other research interests is in images of Elizabeth I both in literature and in the visual arts and it can often seem to us that portraits of Elizabeth look a little bit like religious icons that used to be said by new historicist critics of the 1980s and 1990s that she'd been kind of erected as a sort of substitute for the Virgin Mary that the English people had a kind of psychological void because they couldn't worship the Virgin Mary anymore so they just put the Virgin Queen in her place and it obviously can't be as simple as that people were not stupid if they'd been told not to be idolatrous they weren't going to just be idolatrous to another alternative object that looked very similar and actually they think about this a lot and about what they're doing with these images of Elizabeth the point of them is that she personifies the English Church the English nation so she's a strong Protestant image there's a text from the Old Testament from Isaiah which says that the godly ruler is the nursing mother or father of the church that gets projected onto her that the true godly ruler will establish and protect the Protestant faith so they would say she was being represented as God's agent not being worshipped in her own right and they come up with this phrase William Perkins whom I was quoting on imagination he wrestles with this a lot and he comes up with the phrase civil worship which I think almost to us seems like an oxymoron but basically it's okay if it's an image that you're attributing with a certain kind of you're going to venerate it in some way it's okay as long as it's in a civil context not in a religious context which to us can seem like a sort of contradiction in terms but that's the Protestant position which I think we have to try and reconstruct and understand Yeah, absolutely I think context is, I mean we're increasingly paying attention to that but I think where we might before have expected there to be blanket bands on even things like the image of the crucifixion actually it's highly context dependent I wonder if we could talk briefly about text because it's come up a few times the interaction between text and image and I know it's a common place of Reformation historians to say they put text on these images to communicate properly and there's this proliferation of English text on images with the Reformation but I wonder if that has its origins a little bit before in humanist culture and actually partly the proliferation of English text is a reflection of how many more people can read I wonder if you have sort of thoughts about text and image relations Yeah, I mean I think literacy is obviously still not a kind of majority faculty that you know it's very hard to quantify to measure how many people actually were literate and there might be differences between reading literacy and writing literacy more people might have been able to read than could write so we don't really know how many people are literate but it does seem to be growing in the period and you've got the spread of the grammar school network which is kind of driving education I think I would want very much to think in terms of dialogue between text and image and how they're kind of working together and kind of doing different things in all the artifacts that we've been talking about. The Batman image and the manuscript that I was showing people it would be very hard to decipher without the text but equally the text would make no sense without the image they have to work together and I think we have to this takes us back to portraits as well and thinking about them as these kind of multimedia artifacts where it's not just the face it's not just the visual that we should be thinking about again you know you can make a comparison from literature where Philip Sydney and his defence of poetry he says that poetry should be a speaking picture and I think we need to think of pictures as visual texts there's so much interaction between these media in the period I mean even for you Larry I think that's true we think of text and textile from text or a to weave writers leaving clues and plots those are all textile related words yeah absolutely and so you know a lot of the source material for the imagery on two detect styles they're from images in books and you know there's no words but I think it's really important that they're from books you know that's certainly something that whoever created these images was really keen to convey they wanted to show out you know they've done a they've copied some of these images from books so precisely it's to demonstrate that they have access to books and access to knowledge and what that all that entails yes yes at the moment I'm writing something about wall texts in churches so you know the writing on the wall the writing of scriptural verses in churches which was encouraged by Elizabeth and continued throughout the early part of the 17th century and I was just well I'm trying to do with that that when Elizabeth recommended the writing of texts in churches she the instruction says that this should be for edification but also for calmly ornament and demonstration that the place the same is a place for prayer and so I'm trying to shift the emphasis to the calmly ornament the calmly decoration bit because we naturally tend to look at the text and starts trying to decipher the text because we are a literate society I'm trying to suggest that because of my training because I'm always looking at decorative cartouches and that's what my eye goes to that that's probably more how the majority of people would have looked and seen and interpreted in this period so probably would have looked to the surround first and made a judgement about that before they turned to the text if they could read the text at all if you think about the make up of most parishes that again trying to move things away the tyranny of the text is long reign supreme and we should now be thinking about how that intersection that kind of balance of the visual and the text or operated in the period yeah and just thinking that there's an interplay there thinking of Geoffrey Whitney's choice of emblems which was published in 1586 the patron's Robert Dudley and in it is an image of a symbol and then a little poem about what the symbol means but each is the image is as important if not more important than the text and that was with the dedication that this would be a puzzle for the virtuous and a conundrum for the unworthy or something so if you could say one thing that you think the Tudors valued most about the artworks that you think about what would it be yeah you go and you start I think just building on what we've been saying it's meaning and message it's presenting something that's soliciting interpretation but not offering interpretation easily that has a kind of intricacy and an encodedness an elaboration to it that makes you want to unravel it and engage with it but you've got to work at that you're being engaged in a very laborious kind of way that you've got to decode and deconstruct that seems to me to be the main characteristic and the main thing that they value working images, speaking images if you like no Netflix so something to do yeah I can't summarise it in one thing but for the Tudors textiles were meaningful for either practical or portable but they also had they could convey a symbolic narrative through arms and heraldry but also complex narratives and biblical and classical illusions but also because they really liked status and hierarchy and they liked to show magnificence and power and certainly with the sort of textiles that I'm talking about with royal and elite textiles it's about the display of power and wealth and majesty I'd agree with all of that and add or return to my idea of comeliness which I'm obsessed with at the moment because we think of comeliness in relation to kind of being attractive or fair or becoming but actually there's two meanings and one of the more often used meanings in the period was to do with appropriateness appropriateness of place and position so you would want comely ornament in order to exemplify your status and that had to be fitting and everybody knew the language of what was fitting and if it wasn't fitting then it's a breach of decorum and everybody would know and it would be horrendously embarrassing so being comely is incredibly important lovely thank you so before we move to questions from the floor I just have one more question for each view which is what are some of the most exciting directions for the future of Tudor art history? I'm really interested in the way that recent scholarship has started looking outward I'm really interested in seeing the Tudors on an international stage a yes a little plug for our next round table which is globalising the Tudors in a few weeks hello yeah I think there's a lot more work to be done in conversations between literary scholars and those who work on the visual arts and in thinking about the mind if I can give a little plug for your work Christina's fantastic book Tudor liveliness which she's written Tudor liveliness which has just come out you're working with the idea from rhetoric of Enarghaea which is an idea we're very familiar with in literary studies that rhetoric manuals of the time promoted Enarghaea which is a vivid description a vivid evocation of a scene so that you feel like you're present and Christina's been showing how that's really relevant to lots of forms of the visual arts in the Tudor period but perhaps particularly portraiture to creating this sense of presence and this sense of a kind of exchange of passions of emotions between the viewer and the sitter in the portrait and I think there are other terms from rhetoric you know we've talked a little bit already today about invention and imitation which are important terms for the Elizabethans we could talk about in Genium which is a Latin term they're used to mean a sort of cleverness or wit and all of this I think comes back to the way that they're not so interested in originality as we are they have quite different aesthetic principles and they are very interested in as we've said things that are very elaborate very intricate so that the word artificial for the Elizabethans we think of that as a pejorative term it's not pejorative for them for them for something to be artificial means it's been made with great artifice with great artful skill great skill in crafting and I think we've still got further to go in thinking about these very different aesthetic principles that we need to apply for producing Absolutely and I should just say there is a flyer on your seats for a discount for my book and if you want to online then you put Tudor in capital letters into the checkout of Yale University Press's website I should probably have mentioned that at the beginning and Tara finally So I think what's most exciting is that there's still a lot of material to be discovered so going back to those the fact that we're looking in different places now and that there are these rich survivals but because we haven't been looking in the right places or we haven't been noticing other than fine art means that there's still an awful or out there waiting to be looked at and reconsidered and so I think that's the most exciting thing that there's still so much more to do There's so much to say and I hope that's heartening to any graduate students listening who might be thinking oh what could I possibly work on well Tudor art is definitely there's a lot up for grabs so thank you, thank you to the panel so can we now move to questions from the floor does anyone have anything they wanted to ask or I've got to hand you this microphone I wanted to mention the great tapestries where people did it all together and I feel that's very much part of that period Did anyone want to respond? I couldn't make any more I think that tapestries the labour and skill that went into tapestries put together the huge tapestries they still survive in wonderful places I think they're also very interesting for their narrative techniques aren't they, they're very like the wall paintings that you have that thing of the same characters being seen all in one tapestry in different stages of the narrative and you have to kind of read it as a sequence which we're not really familiar with but yeah that's another part of that kind of richness isn't it That's it, one of the things I wanted to say ahead of talking about my wall paintings which I hope came out in the way that I described them is that we're stuck in this kind of mode of linear viewing and you look at one scene you move on to the next you move on to the next and actually one of the themes that I think we've all addressed in one way or another is that sense of movement and I think that people viewed on the move people wore things that were appreciated on the move but also the mode of viewing was actually quite circular and you would move around in artwork again and again or jump around rather than kind of moving in there and tapestries are a fascinating example of that I think because they're so vast so you're kind of looking all around and taking it all in Yes I'm interested in the pre-reformation art forms ecclesiastical I'm talking about so for example altercloths or vestments or wall paintings or stained glass because obviously a huge amount was destroyed Do we know whether there was a sort of continuity of that style within the ecclesiastical style or was it sort of you know they wanted to whitewash effectively everything that was pre-reformation and start again or can we see a link between what came pre and post-reformation I think there's definitely a disruption so if you imagine the portraits of Thomas Cranmer saying he's in his white and his black and there's a somber appearance to vestments and we know that for example the Stonyhurst vestments which were commissioned by Henry VII were actually wrapped up and stolen out of the country by the Jesuits to take to Saint-O-Mer so they rescued them the rest were burnt so we know that vestments with all of the iconography were either recycled and reused so a lot of them ended up in you know hardwix tapestries the cloths of gold and so on or they were you know they were burnt and melted down for the gold bullion so there's definitely there's definitely a disruption during the reformation but we see it come we see the ground vestments then return in the 17th century so it's a fleeting disruption and in terms of wall decoration not everything was whitewashed the process of reforming churches in the 16th century was actually quite piecemeal and quite selective so you would whitewash over the great doom painting over the Chancellor's Arch because that has images of Christ in Majesty you would get rid of images of saints and saints lives maybe some aspects of Christ's passion but other imagery because churches were full obviously of all different kinds of narrative series things like the dance of death could be allowed to remain so what's really interesting is that a lot of the imagery that was eradicated as a result of reformation happens in the mid 17th century not under the Tudors I'm not saying there wasn't a huge amount of destruction and whitewashing but I think it's been overstated because there was a tolerance and an appreciation for artworks that didn't contravene the guidance around idolatry if it could be allowed to remain the name of the Tudors if it could be allowed to remain then it usually was allowed to remain and there's a fantastic character called William Dousing in the 1640s that takes it upon himself he's a Puritan, he takes it upon himself to go around and kind of remove the remaining offending imagery and he's kind of the one that gets rid of every last sort of element of the Tudor rich heritage of the kind of late medieval Tudor period Interestingly just to jump in there that Oliver Cromwell retained the Abraham Tapestries at Hampton Court because they were he was happy to have them reflect his status within the palace I mean I think Keith Thomas has the line that the Victorians were worse for medieval art than any of the reforming movements before that Any further questions? Yes, oh yes, some online So this is a question online from anonymous attendee So this is for Helen How do you ideas of imagination impact on early modern ideas about madness and distraction? Yeah they're really closely linked So the imagination was thought to be particularly active in people who were suffering from melancholy and melancholy wasn't just a kind of state of gloominus or sadness as we might think of it now it was that but it also came along with a whole range of symptoms and it was thought of as rooted in the body because through the whole kind of scheme of humoral medicine melancholy was one of the fluids known as the humours that circulated in the body it was thought to originate in a substance called black bile and if you had too much of it if you had an excess of it you would be afflicted with melancholy your whole kind of system would get out of balance and one of the things this would do is to have your imagination and so you would have particularly active and fearful dreams you could be very creative so melancholyx were thought of as having enhanced intellectual powers and being very creative and being great thinkers but at the same time you'd be very much afflicted by your kind of fear and suspicion and wanting to be on your own all the time perhaps suicidal thoughts seeking out darkness seeking out solitude I'm sure you're all kind of hamlet from this, hamlet is a textbook melancholyx so melancholy and madness are very much linked in this period quite how we can relate that to the visual arts we can certainly think of lots of representations of melancholyx because it also through its association with high intellect with creativity it becomes an aspirational identity so we get various aristocrats wanting to be depicted as melancholyx we get portraits for instance of Henry Percy Earl of Northumberland dressed all in black lying down under a tree with his head propped on his arm being a kind of textbook melancholyx not mad so yeah there are some versions of melancholy where it gets more towards a kind of madness other where it's a more controlled sort of state of reflectiveness and contemplation but yes there's certainly a connection there between melancholy and the overactive imagination brilliant thank you and then we've had a couple of questions for you Larry so I'm just going to package them all together about conservation so someone has asked if a cloth of silver would it tarnish unlike gold and then how and how often has the altar fabric been cleaned so metal thread does tarnish and so when it is preserved that's just through that's just a you know through happen chance and good good circumstance so silver and gold will tarnish through oxidisation so with contact with the air so you can imagine that most metal threads after this amount of time have tarnished so the fact that the back of an altar cloth must have been kept in a chest or some kind of enclosed place to have the threads still so vibrant after so many hundreds of years if you go to see the Abraham tapestries at Hampton Court they've been exposed to the air for hundreds of years and they're grey and they're dull and so actually when you go and you see them and they're grey and they're dull and they look a bit beige actually all of that dullness would have been silver and gold and it would have glimmered so it's just luck that preserves it unless you can get oxygen out of the air and then the other question was how many times has it been cleaned and how so I can't speak for before it got to Hampton Court we know that they did some conservation on it in 1909 so the parishioners probably the ladies of the parish got together and did some rudimentary conservation on it I don't know if they cleaned it at that point I doubt it because the silks and the dies would have run so it's been in very it's in very good nick really the textile conservators at Hampton Court Palace cleaned it with cosmetic sponges so the same sponges that you apply make up with they actually dabbed it very very gently it took weeks months of time to do it and that lifted off some surface dirt not all of it because to clean it or to wash it in any way would be very very risky so that's one of the amazing things about seeing the colour on the back which has been away from the light and away from dirt and seeing them vibrant and you know it was quite something great and then there was another question for Helen um is there a possible connection between Batman's drawing and drama in general with regards to the imagination this is referring to Jesus comments at the end of MND Midsummer Night's Dream that's the one for anyone who's not hasn't recently seen or read a Midsummer Night's Dream in Act 5 after everyone's had that kind of crazy night in the woods Theseus makes a speech about what he calls shaping fantasies it's a speech all about the imagination and he starts out meaning to disparage the imagination to take the conventional Elizabethan line which I described which is that imagination is unreliable it's fantasy it creates images out of its own workings they're deceptive they'll lead you astray so he talks about how the lunatic the lover and the poet are of imagination or compact but as that speech goes on he kind of undoes himself because it ends up sounding like a celebration of the imagination he says as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown the poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name I always get slight shivers when I speak those lines because I think there's no more brilliant description of the poetic imagination I think that Shakespeare really kind of reveling in his sense of his own imagination that's very new in the period that sense of the imagination as a wonderful creative power to celebrate is something that we rarely find and that Shakespeare's really been very innovative in putting forward in that way so I think what Thesis is setting out to say is very much in tune with the Batman drawing which is showing imagination as treasonous as being associated with religious and political subversions being a kind of disorder in the mind which is related to disorder in the state and that's something that I haven't talked about so much today but I'm very interested in what I call in my book the politics of the mind the way that the mind was thought of as almost like a common wealth like a state or nation that had to be ruled hierarchically with reason governing imagination and governing the passions I think Batman very much subscribed to that Shakespeare makes Thesis start off because Thesis is of course a great kind of patriarchal authority figure the Duke of Athens Athens being the kind of seat of reason Thesis starts off trying to espouse that kind of politics of the mind which is very hierarchical and rigid and top down but through the course of his speech we can sort of hear Shakespeare speaking through him and celebrating the imagination instead. Have we got time for one more? One more I think sorry this isn't particularly specific it was brought up in the discussion does anyone know the name of the composer who was mentioned as having written his autobiography and had several portraits painted? That's Thomas Whitehorn and it's spelt different ways but usually it's spelt W-H-Y T-H-O-R-N-E Thomas Whitehorn and he wrote an autobiography only in manuscript in its own time there are two modern editions of it from the 1960s both by the same editor I think it's James M Osborne and one of them is in Whitehorn's original spelling which is really eccentric he came up with his own phonetic spelling system and the other one is in modern spelling which is a lot easier to read so you'd have to go to a library to get access to them but they're well worth a look they're really fascinating Thank you Fantastic I think unless there are any other burning questions in the room or online I think it might be time to move to drinks sadly not for the people online well you may be able to move to drinks but if the people in the room would like to join us next door for drinks and coffee and I'd just like to thank again to the fantastic panel I think we've really raised some exciting questions for the future of future art history Thank you