English Lessons
Fig. 1. Edward VI as a Child by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/1498–1543), probably 1538. Oil on panel, 22 3/8 by 17 3/8 inches. The Latin inscription on the cartellino in the foreground is an exhortation signed by royal propagandist Richard Morison, which encourages the young prince to “emulate thy father [Henry VIII] and be the heir of his virtue; the world contains nothing greater.” National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Andrew W. Mellon Collection. It is tempting to believe that all the nations of Western Europe belong to a common culture and that each nation had an equal share in creating it, whether in literature, music, or the visual arts. That the latter proposition was never true, however, is borne out in a fascinating new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England. Through more than one hundred objects and works of art, including paintings, engravings, tapestries, and sculptures, the show offers a compelling account of Britain’s visual art at the dawn of the modern age. Fig. 2. Front elevation of Burghley House in Peterborough, Stamford, Lincolnshire. Photograph by Anthony Masi, courtesy of DavidArthur on Wikimedia Commons. England’s literary achievement during the reign of Elizabeth I speaks for itself: even if we remove the transcendent Shakespeare from the equation, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, and Ben Jonson—to say nothing of a dozen other worthies—easily rival any writer on the Continent. But at the very moment when they were creating their immortal works, the Sceptered Isle remained, in terms of visual culture, a pallid backwater, its artists struggling to keep pace with those on the Continent. Pietro Torrigiani, Hans Holbein the Younger, and Antonis Mor—the foremost artists in England from the accession of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, in