Abstract
Readers of this anthology can examine portraits of Elizabeth Tudor with far more ease than all but the most privileged of the queen’s own subjects. We can study the paintings in person in museums and galleries open to, and supported by, the public; we can, by appointment or luck, view them in private homes; we can pore over careful reproductions of them in books; we can call them up on our phones, or order digital files that permit intense scrutiny. Most students and scholars of the period can easily tell the Darnley from the Ditchley, or the Pelican from the Phoenix, and can give at least a brief report on the iconography of the Rainbow Portrait. But for most of Elizabeth’s subjects, these paintings were not the images they had of their queen. For those without access to her portraits or person, Elizabeth’s appearance was familiar in forms easily acquired and handled: the queen’s image as it was found on coins, on broadsides, on legal documents, on the frontispiece, or in historiated capitals of widely available books. In many of these portraits, unlike in the gorgeous formal portraits whose iconography has been meticulously studied by scholars such as Roy Strong and Frances Yates, Elizabeth is sitting.
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Notes
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© 2013 Debra Barrett-Graves
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Loomis, C. (2013). “Bear Your Body More Seeming”: Open-Kneed Portraits of Elizabeth I. In: Barrett-Graves, D. (eds) The Emblematic Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303103_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303103_4
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