You would be forgiven for thinking that Princess Diana had very little in common with Henry VIII or the artist Hans Holbein. But you would be wrong. The Tudors invented the portrait as a means of projecting personality, often by linking striking images with words.
If you look at any member of the Royal family in the last few hundred years capable of playing the same game, it’s the late Princess of Wales, posing alone in front of the Taj Mahal, anticipating the headlines.
In the first episode of a new series, The Genius of British Art, I will be examining how royal portraiture has reflected and defined the changing face of England. Five other presenters, including Jon Snow and Sir Roy Strong, will then explore other areas of our artistic heritage, from war art to landscapes.
In so many ways, the Tudor reign was transformative, and art is no exception. In 16th-century England, the idea of using a painting to capture and transmit the personality of a ruler was revolutionary. Until then, royal portraits consisted of a squiggle and a crown on a coin or a seal – they were merely tokens. But if you look at Hans Holbein’s 1537 portrait of Henry VIII, what you see is the man himself: there are no royal emblems, no crown, no flummery. The painting shows the King in all his thuggish dignity, a rugger player gone to seed. While paint can flatter or lie, steel in the form of a made-to-measure suit of armour with a 54-inch waist cannot. It’s clear from Henry’s surviving armour that the painting shows his actual, hulking physique.
There were two factors which drove this transformation of the portrait. One was the Renaissance: English artists and thinkers were influenced by continental Europe’s urge to recreate the lavish, realistic art of Rome. The second was the Reformation. The idea of English identity was invented in Henry’s reign after the break from the Catholic Church and Rome; you could say that he was the first Eurosceptic.
