The Cult of Elizabeth [antikvár]

PREFACE The Cult of Elizabeth brings together six studies in Elizabethan portraiture and pageantry. When I first started to put this book together it was to consist only of new pieces, studies of the Procession Picture at Sherborne Castle, Hilliard's Young Man amongst Roses and the pageantry of the Accession Day Tilts. But as it began to take shape it became clear that these pieces were part of a thought pattern about Elizabethan portraiture and pageantry which went back to my earliest research years at the Warburg Institute. Somehow other pieces asked to be there, those on the Memóriái Picture of Sir Henry Unton, the Queen's Day festivities and the Order of the Garter under Elizabeth - all articles scattered in various learned journals. These do represent early work, but I have left them virtually unchanged as part of a coherent stream of research and work on the Elizabethan period extending over fifteen years. Together these six essays round out and complement my Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (1963), The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (1969) and Tudor and Jacobean Portraits (1969). In the first of these I was primarily concerned with categorizing the hundreds of images of the Queen into somé sort of iconographical order, in the second I attempted to place the study of sixteenth-century painters on to a firmer footing by reconstructing convincing groups of pictures around particular names, and in the third I tried to compile a portrait index covering the whole period down to 1625, including virtually everyone of any importance. In each case I was struggling to reduce a morass of material to somé sort of antiquarian order. That process is still at an initial stage but I feel that the broad outlines at least have been laid down and one can walk those paths with a greater degree of certainty than was possible twenty years ago. All the time that I was working on these books I was aware of the eventual implications for the overall stydy of the Elizabethan age, in particular the assumptions about optics and sight, pictorial space and order, the use of image and allegory and, in turn, their connection with the wider world of poetic imagery. It is still too early to write that particular book, but The Cult of Elizabeth represents somé fitful steps along the path towards it.