The approximate period between 1540 and 1620 has proven a malleable and interpretively challenging moment in the history of English art. As classically derived notions of formal and polite workmanship began unevenly to take root from their continental seedbed and traditional religious imagery came under fire, more firmly established elements of late medieval gothic, native vernacular, and other approaches were severely challenged. In the interim, painters and patrons even at the highest levels experimented with all sorts of idiosyncratic, fanciful, and even surrealistic approaches to the human figure and other subjects. We see this in many of the familiar portraits of Queen Elizabeth especially, from the Armada Portrait and the Ditchley Portrait on down. By about 1620 courtly connoisseurship had won the day by establishing the refined standards of polite portraiture drawn from the wellspring of Renaissance classicism.
This distinctive era in the history of English art has attracted numerous efforts at explanation and analysis. Christina J. Faraday now offers her own ambitious and innovative approach by offering the notion of “liveliness”—the “powerful realistic effect [which] had the power to influence others’ thought or behaviour” (1). Such an approach allows her to propose (and putatively to exhume) a lost mode of looking at art, one which counters the tendency to see Tudor art as surrealistic or merely inept. She proceeds to trace the appearance of liveliness through religious art (chapter 2), portraiture (chapters 3 and 4), book illustration (chapter 5), and domestic interiors (chapter 6). In all these applications she situates the concept of liveliness in the parallel realm of contemporary rhetoric—the art of eloquence—drawn from the works of Quintilian and others. In its ability to “do something” for its patrons and viewers, liveliness offered “a more general concept of vividness in communication” (2) no less than the rhetoric of a Sidney or a Spencer. The subsequent discussion unfolds to show how this concept operated across the visual media, asking as it proceeds what particular images were “doing” and how they were doing it.
In effect, Faraday powerfully challenges what she sees as the current, “presentist” aesthetic critique of Tudor art. She asks us instead to recognize and appreciate such art on its own terms and then proceeds to suggest what those terms might be. Those who produced and viewed art in this era are not, then, to be held to the refined standards of continental, classically inspired art, nor are they to be seen as avoiding naturalistic depiction merely out of the iconoclastic imperative of Tudor Protestantism. Instead, they are to be seen as fashioning their imagery according to classical rhetorical traditions and especially to the notion of energia: the particular ability to convey the world by its effect on the viewer rather than by its literal representation.
This bold and innovative work (magnificently illustrated as usual by the largess of the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press) certainly asks the right questions. We do indeed need to understand in new and more satisfying ways what often seems the idiosyncratic imagery of post-Reformation English art. We do indeed need to value that imagery for what it was rather than for what modern academic criteria would prefer it to be. But whether liveliness is an entirely appropriate lens, and whether it applies to all Tudor art as is implied here, remains open to some question, while the effort to root it in classical rhetorical traditions sometimes begs the swipe of Occam's razor.
If liveliness is “the power to influence others’ thoughts and behaviour,” and to “make a vivid impression” (1), much would depend on the viewer and the multiple contexts in which he or she undertakes the viewing. What may appear lively to some viewers may not appear so to others even of the same time and place. Faraday opens her discussion with the aptly reconstructed tale of how the diplomat Sir Henry Unton employed a “lively” portrait of Queen Elizabeth to win for her the affection of Henry IV of France. But who is to say that what appeared lively to a French King will have appeared lively to others? Then, too, the determination to credit liveliness as the driving force of these works fails to consider that a good many Tudor works of art were merely vernacular expressions, conveying their striking effect—if at all—by a laconic, even folkloric, innocence rather than by design or classically inspired objectives. Faraday is surely correct to note that one need not have read Quintilian, for example, to have absorbed some of his rhetorical notions. But one has to take on faith how deeply those notions penetrated to all those who wielded their brushes for a living in this era. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that the twelve surviving c. 1600 portraits of the worthies of Gloucester and many other such crude but vivid images of the time were even indirectly inspired by such sources. Yet much of the art produced in these years—especially that which curatorial tastes have relegated to the local history and folk museums rather than to the gallery of art—offers just such an unschooled, folkish, and crudely produced approach to post-Reformation art.
In sum, we do indeed need a new critical framework to appreciate the myriad expressions of Tudor art. Such a framework might further legitimize these expressions as part of our visual heritage. It might continue to embrace the considerable width and breadth of the subject and further to probe contextual questions about those who made and those who viewed such imagery. In the meantime, Faraday's bold and thought-provoking efforts will surely advance our conversation in refreshing directions.
