The Story of Tudor Art: Online Members’ Book Club

Excellent online lecture from the National Gallery looking at art from the Tudor period.

Aliki Braine interviewed Christina Farady, author of a book of the same title as the talk, as part of the Members’ Book Club series. Faraday explained how the Tudors hit a sweet spot in research terms and in the popular culture as they are strange enough to be a mystery but close enough for us to be able to find out more. She said the monarchs are iconic and identifiable “like face cards in a deck of cards”.

She explained how she hopes the book fills a gap as she covers both paintings and objects and looks at art not just for the court but also for the newly rising middle class or Middling Sort. She explained the objects were more valuable than paintings at the time and had the advantage of being portable. She used this portrait of Margaret Beaufort to point out the sort of valuable objects they owned.

Faraday also pointed out that the country wasn’t as isolated as we tend to think and talked about how goods were coming in from the Ottoman Empire as well as Italian artists coming to England.

It finished with a lively Q&A session including queries about how art and the performing arts interacted and how the Tudors used imagery to create a fictive lineage.

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