Elizabethan portraiture skin#
Elizabethan portraiture series#

There is a very interesting Wikipedia entry on the broad picture of art in Tudor timesДЄnd another looks at Elizabethan portraiture in particular: With the virtual extinction of religious painting at the Reformation, and little interest in classical mythology until the very end of the period, the portrait was the most important form of painting for all the artists of the Tudor court, and the only one to have survived in any numbers. Indeed the art of painting fell yet further into disrepute in the common life of England through the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I.Д®ven so, certain aspects of visual culture were actively developed in royal and court circles вЂ“ principally portraiture (which weвЂ™ll look at here) and the art of miniatures, which evolved from the traditions of illumination (next time). Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the exhibition has been curated by Dr Hannah Murphy, Department of History in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities.As John Rothenstein notes in An Introduction to English Painting, Hans Holbein, for all his fame and renown at the court of Henry VIII, never founded a school of art in Britain.

Elizabethan portraiture skin#

вЂVisible SkinвЂ™ was organised in collaboration with KingвЂ™s Renaissance Skin research project and KingвЂ™s Culture. We hope this intervention in the public spaces around the Strand will provoke comment, dialogue and discussion.вЂ™ДЄll 11 images will also be displayed in an online gallery accompanied by audio interpretation clips. BrathwaiteвЂ™s photography asks us to look again at the visibility of race in the Renaissance period in Europe. It has been a privilege to work with Peter Brathwaite and Hannah Murphy, Lecturer in History at KingвЂ™s on Visible Skin, an exhibition inspired by our Wellcome Trust funded in-depth research on Renaissance Skin. His work brings to the fore the contemporary importance of historical presence вЂ“ turning this collection of images from a meditation on the past to an interrogation of the present.Д®velyn Welch, Professor of Renaissance Studies, Provost & Senior Vice President (Arts & Sciences) at KingвЂ™s College London said: вЂSkin is the most visible part of our bodies вЂ“ sometimes we ignore it, many times we define and categorise it. In the larger project Peter has reimagined not only Renaissance images but representations from the 11th century to the present day, daring viewers to consider how people of colour have and should be seen and portrayed. Princes and diplomats, Black travellers, merchants, emissaries, performers, clergymen, and skilled craftsmen all appear in the records, and the visual art, of the Renaissance. But not all Black or African people in Europe were enslaved or connected to slavery, nor were all Black people African. From the 1440s onwards the trade of enslaved peoples began to overlay this longer history.

European countries had a long history of trade and diplomatic contact with African kingdoms.

The images in this exhibition not only testify to the presence and prominence of Black life in Renaissance Europe, they also mirror its complexities.

Elizabethan portraiture series#

I hope Visible Skin can start a dialogue that allows us all to speak about a past that is often avoided in the present.вЂ™ДЇrom the 10 September 2021, photographs from this series will be shown in windows across KingвЂ™s Strand buildings, as part of Westminster City CouncilвЂ™s launch of the Strand Aldwych project, which will transform the traffic dominated gyratory into a new pedestrian-focused destination public space in London. My collaboration with the Renaissance Skin research team at KingвЂ™s College London represents some of the stories and lives that have remained hidden from view. Peter comments: вЂ Rediscovering Black Portraiture is about platforming less dominant voices - specifically the Black lives silenced by the canon of Western Art. Peter restaged works that focused specifically on Black portraiture (#BlackPortraiture) using items from his familyвЂ™s past, and from his cultural heritage in Barbados and Britain. Starting in the first COVID-19 lockdown, the opera singer and BBC broadcaster Peter Brathwaite embarked on a Twitter project as part of the #GettyMuseumChallenge: restaging famous paintings with everyday household objects. They included portraits drawn from life as well as a wider cast of imagined Black identities such as biblical subjects, saints and allegorical figures. Portraits and images of Black people abounded in the Renaissance. A still largely unexplored facet of the Renaissance is the diverse, multicultural European life represented in its art, particularly the representation of Black individuals. Today the Renaissance is remembered as a time of cultural вЂre-birthвЂ™, a flowering of the arts that gave rise to artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo and enshrined new ideals of beauty.