page_title: Portraiture of Elizabeth I
section_title: European context
hierarchical_section_title: Portraiture of Elizabeth I / Overview / European context
context_page_description: The portraiture of Elizabeth I illustrates the evolution of English royal portraits in the Early Modern period from the representations of simple likenesses to the later complex imagery used to convey the power and aspirations of the state, as well as of the monarch at its head.
  Even the earliest portraits of Elizabeth I contain symbolic objects such as roses and prayer books that would have carried meaning to viewers of her day. Later portraits of Elizabeth layer the iconography of empire—globes, crowns, swords and columns—and representations of virginity and purity—such as moons and pearls—with classical allusions to present a complex "story" that conveyed to Elizabethan era viewers the majesty and significance of their Virgin Queen.
context_section_description: Far the most impressive models available to English portraitists were the many portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger, the outstanding Northern portraitist of the first half of the century, who had made two lengthy visits to England and been Henry VIII's court artist.  Holbein had accustomed the English court to the full-length life-size portrait, although none of his originals now survive.  His great dynastic mural at Whitehall Palace, destroyed in 1698, and perhaps other original large portraits, would have been familiar to Elizabethan artists.
  Both Holbein and his great Italian contemporary Titian had combined great psychological penetration with a sufficiently majestic impression to satisfy their royal patrons.  By his second visit Holbein was already moving away from a strictly realist depiction; in his Jane Seymour "the figure is no longer seen as displacing with its bulk a recognizable section of space: it approaches rather to a flat pattern, made alive by a bounding and vital outline".  This tendency was to be taken much further by the later portraits of Elizabeth, where "Likeness of feature and an interest in form and volume have gradually been abandoned in favour of an effect of splendid majesty obtained by decorative pattern, and the forms have been flattened accordingly".
  Titian continued to paint royal portraits, especially of Philip II of Spain, until the 1570s, but in sharply reduced numbers after about 1555, and he refused to travel from Venice to do them.  The full-length portrait of Philip (1550–51) now in the Prado was sent to Elizabeth's elder sister and predecessor Mary I in advance of their marriage.
  Towards the mid-century the most influential Continental courts came to prefer less revealing and intimate works, and at the mid-century the two most prominent and influential royal portraitists in paint, other than Titian, were the Netherlandish Anthonis Mor and Agnolo Bronzino in Florence, besides whom the Habsburg court sculptor and medallist Leone Leoni should also be mentioned.  Mor, who had risen rapidly to prominence in 1540s, worked across Europe for the Habsburgs in a tighter and more rigid version of Titian's compositional manner, drawing also on the North Italian style of Moretto.  Mor had actually visited London in 1554, and painted three versions of his well-known portrait of Queen Mary; he also painted English courtiers who visited Antwerp.
  Mor's Spanish pupil Alonso Sánchez Coello continued in a stiffer version of his master's style, replacing him  as Spanish court painter in 1561.  Sofonisba Anguissola had painted in an intimately informal style, but after her recruitment to the Spanish court as the Queen's painter in 1560 was able to adapt her style to the much more formal demands of state portraiture.  Moretto's pupil Giovanni Battista Moroni was Mor's contemporary and formed his mature style in the 1550s, but few of his spirited portraits were of royalty, or yet to be seen outside Italy.
  Bronzino developed a style of coldly distant magnificence, based on the Mannerist portraits of Pontormo, working almost entirely for Cosimo I, the first Medici Grand-Duke.  Bronzino's works, including his striking portraits of Cosimo's Duchess, Eleanor of Toledo were distributed in many versions across Europe, continuing to be made for two decades from the same studio pattern; a new portrait painted in her last years, about 1560, exists in only a few repetitions.  At the least many of the foreign painters in London are likely to have seen versions of the earlier type, and there may well have been one in the Royal Collection.
  French portraiture remained dominated by small but finely drawn bust-length or half-length works, including many drawings, often with colour, by François Clouet following, with a host of imitators, his father Jean, or even smaller oils by the Netherlandish Corneille de Lyon and his followers, typically no taller than a paperback book.  A few full-length portraits of royalty were produced, dependent on German or Italian models.
caption: Eleanor of Toledo and her son Giovanni, Bronzino, 1545
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