Global Interests Renaissance Art Between East and West
Global Interests Renaissance Art Between East and West
Global Interests Renaissance Art Between East and West
+ Gentile Bellini, Portrait of Mehmet II, +y, oil on canvas. National Gallery, London.
potential impact on our outlook, crying out for further intercultural
investigation of this kind of cultural mobility.
Once
he had established his residence in the Ferrara convent assigned to him
by the council organizers, he hunted so enthusiastically that on two
occasions the local ruler Niccol dEste had to ask him to restrain
his enthusiasm for the chase owing to the damage he was causing to
the property of the countryfolk and the decimation of the game
that the Marquis had imported for his own pleasure. According to
Syropoulos, even after the council began its formal meetings, John
Paleologus continued to absent himself from many of its sessions
and go hunting instead.
As early as +88, Weiscker identied the horse on the reverse of
Pisanellos Emperor Paleologus medal, with its curiously long body
and powerful head, as originating in the Danube area or in the steppes
of Russia.
The Pisanello portrait medal of the Emperor John Paleologus, and the
council it celebrated, were crucial components in an interpretation
of Piero della Francescas mid-fteenth-century Flagellation of Christ
(illus. +:), which Ginzburg maintained fullled his three rules and was
thus the most likely version of the paintings programme or agenda.
There is a clear relationship between the seated gure on the left of
the painting and the prole portrait of the Emperor John on Pisanellos
medal. On the basis of an essay-length argument, Ginzburgs proposal
is that this gure is indeed John VIII. He presides in the place of Pilate
at the scourging of Christ, a scourging occurring under the direction of
the turbaned Turk who stands with his back to us. In other words, here
is a representation of the tribulations of the Eastern Christian Church
at the hands of Islam, with its secular leader powerless to intervene.
jo
The paintings dramatic architectural perspective, Ginzburg argues,
o
separates two areas with what he calls different ontological status.
The scene just described is a political and theological allegory, located
in an imaginary space, whose details recall Greco-Roman antiquity
and the shared intellectual tradition of the Eastern and Western
Churches. The gures to the right in Pieros painting, by contrast, are
real gures recalled from that critical late +os moment in attempted
East-West reconciliation (the painting, according to Ginzburg, was
executed in late +j). The gure on the far right is shown, on
compelling evidence, to be Giovanni Bacci, the Medici representative
in Arezzo who commissioned the work. The gure on the left, whose
clothing, hat and beard identify him as Byzantine and who gestures
welcomingly to Bacci, is, Ginzburg maintains, Cardinal Bessarion,
one of the prime movers in the Eastern Church delegation to the
Florentine Council. In +o, in the wake of the collapse of the agree-
ment signed in Florence, Bacci travelled to Constantinople as Papal
emissary, to bestow the title of Cardinal upon Bessarion on behalf of
the Western Church. By the +jos, Bessarion had returned to the West
and was permanently resident in Florence.
j+
According to Ginzburg,
the Flagellation of Christ is designed as a direct gurative appeal to
the parties meeting at the Ecumenical Council in Mantua in +j,
as part of a campaign urging the Italians to send a crusade eastwards
to recapture Constantinople for Christendom.
It was Bessarion, according to Ginzburg, who owned a copy of the
Pisanello portrait medal showing John VIII and who devised the
programme for the Flagellation of Christ. Whether the Byzantine
gure is Bessarion himself (it is a good deal more dashing than any
other surviving image of the Cardinal) or an idealized representation
of the Eastern Church, the overall interpretation of the painting as a
politically charged recollection of a critical moment in recent interna-
tional Church politics is a plausible one. It complies with Ginzburgs
own explanatory rules by achieving maximum explanatory force on
the basis of a single historical event.
Ginzburgs detective work uncovers another Florentine Council-
centred image, whose symbolic content is equipoised between East
and West, legible to both Eastern and Western Churches (though not,
it seems, to us). Carefully crafted out of precisely those doctrinal and
hagiographic elements which belong to a shared heritage, they enable
either Eastern or Western adherents to meditate on the predicament of
the Christian Church, with its second spiritual home in Constantinople
in the possession of Islam, and the Ottoman forces at its door.
j:
+
V
The reciprocating East-West and West-East cultural exchanges to
which we have drawn particular gurative attention are vividly
developed in two commemorative items which postdate the Fall of
Constantinople (the event the Council of Florence was intended to
prevent) and in which the original unicatory occasion pivots across
the East-West divide, developing locally and specically in its Eastern
and Western locations. One is Costanzo da Ferraras portrait medal
of Mehmet II (illus. +o, y8), the other Benozzo Gozzolis Adoration of
the Magi frescoes in the Medici Chapel in Florence.
In spite of the high anxiety of the Eastern and Western Churches
and the political standoff between Western Europe and Mehmet II
following the latters conquest of Constantinople, cultural exchange
between West and East ourished in the +os and yos.
j
One of those
Europeans who spent many years at the Ottoman court was Costanzo
da Ferrara. According to the practice whereby Gentile Bellini was
loaned to Mehmet for a period by the Venetian Doge, Costanzo may
have been sent in response to a direct request to Ferrante I of Naples
for a suitable artist to assist in the decorations of Mehmets new palace,
then under construction.
j
A number of early drawings of Ottoman
subjects once attributed to Bellini have recently been assigned to
Costanzo, including a standing gure (illus. :o) which Bernardino
Pinturicchio later borrowed for his fresco in the Sala dei Santi at the
Vatican, the Disputation of St Catherine (illus. +).
jj
Executed sometime circa +8+, Costanzos portrait medal of
Mehmet II is a resolutely Ottoman artefact, yet in a strenuously
:
+o Costanzo da Ferrara, Portrait medal showing Mehmet II (obverse and reverse), c. +8+,
bronze. National Gallery of Art, Washington, nc.
++ Antonio Pisanello, Vision of St Eustachius, c. +8, tempera on wood.
National Gallery, London.
+: Piero della Francesca, Flagellation of Christ, +j?, oil on panel. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino.
+ Bernardino Pinturicchio, Disputation of St Catherine, c. +:, fresco. Sala dei Santi,
Appartamento Borgia, Vatican.
+ Benozzo Gozzoli, Journey of the Magi, +j, fresco. Chapel of the Palazzo
Medici-Riccardi, Florence.
+j Benozzo Gozzoli, Journey of the Magi, +j, fresco. Chapel of the Palazzo
Medici-Riccardi, Florence.
+, +y Benvenuto Cellini,
Portrait medal of Francis I
(obverse and reverse, the
latter inscribed Fortunam
virtute devicit), +jy,
bronze. Museo Nazionale
del Bargello, Florence.
+8 Titian, Portrait of Francis I, +j8, oil on canvas. Muse du Louvre, Paris.
+ Costanzo da Ferrara, Seated Scribe, c. +yo8o, pen and gouache on parchment. Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
Western European artistic tradition. Mehmets prole, encircled in
Latin with the formidable title The Ottoman Sultan Muhammed,
Emperor of the Turks, became, like Pisanellos portrait prole of
John Paleologus, the lasting likeness of the Conqueror, transposed to
generations of representations of Ottoman rulers.
j
The reverse of Costanzos medal, however, was even more inuential,
its guration of the Sultan on horseback exerting an uncanny hold
eastwards and westwards (illus. +o, y8). In +j, visiting Italy for
the rst time, Albrecht Drer copied a wide range of Italian drawings
to add to his gural repertoire. Among these, as has been well
documented by Raby, are a number of oriental gures, copied from
from life drawings made in Venice and Florence during the +yos
and 8os, including a number that Drer subsequently included in
+
:o Costanzo da Ferrara,
Standing Ottoman,
c. +yo8o, ink on
paper. Muse du
Louvre, Paris.
large-scale works. Because of Drers own artistic prestige, copies were
also widely disseminated and found their way into orientalist works
by other artists.
jy
One of these drawings, Drers Ottoman rider (illus. :+), however,
is based not on a drawing by Bellini or Costanzo da Ferrara, but on
the reverse of the Mehmet medal. This goes some way to explaining
the curiously awkward pose of both horse and rider in the drawing.
The image became a standard, immediately recognizable representa-
tion of Eastern power. Thus, for example, a +j: German woodcut
of Sleyman the Magnicents inuential grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha
clearly recalls the image, in spite of modications to the gure of the
rider (particularly his headgear).
j8
Here we have a portrait medal from Constantinople, commissioned
by or on behalf of the Sultan, in direct emulation of a Western artistic
practice. An imported Western artist is employed to produce a coveted
art object whose cultural and political worth will be equally recogniz-
able to both East and West. The images it incorporates (carefully
chosen to conform to visual idioms of imperial might in the West)
then re-circulate westwards, to provide an archetype of the oriental
power-gure that is at once a Western stereotype and authentically
Eastern in its origins. We argue that this is a typical movement of
cultural currency, creating an undivided, seamless cultural sphere
within which each distinct power centre recognized and responded
appropriately to the items circulating.
j
Although it goes somewhat beyond the scope of the present study,
we should also point out that the sort of circulation of images we are
tracking here in fact went beyond the Ottoman Empire, producing
percolations that enabled recognition and disseminated signifying
art objects yet further aeld. One of the from life oriental drawings
recently convincingly attributed to Costanzo da Ferrara is an exquis-
itely observed seated scribe (illus. +).
o
There is a remarkably
faithful late fteenth-century copy of this drawing by the Persian
artist Bihzad (illus. ::), who has his seated Turkish gure at work
on a portrait of a gure in Persian dress.
+
Later drawings in this
genre (which became extremely fashionable in Persia) show the artist
at work on a painting of a European.
:
A further example of this
absorption of a Western image into an oriental tradition can be seen
in Abul-Hasans copy of Drers St John the Evangelist (illus. :),
taken from the German artists engraving of Christ on the cross in the
+j++ Passion series.
Our second example derives directly from the East-West encounter
at the +8 Council of Florence, which circulates its vivid images
:
eastwards and westwards: the frescoes in the Medici Chapel, executed
by Benozzo Gozzoli in +j (illus. +, +j).
The most compellingly economical explanatory programme for the
Gozzoli frescoes of the Adoration of the Magi that densely ll
the chapel walls identies the allegorical occasion as the Florence
Council.
:+ Albrecht Drer,
Ottoman rider,
c. +j, brush
and watercolour.
Graphische Sammlung
Albertina, Vienna.
:: Bihzad, Portrait of a painter in Turkish costume, late +jth century, colour and gold.
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, nc.
cheetahs, hawks and hounds). In the distance, the chase is actually
taking place in all its varied forms. There could hardly be a more
appropriate reminder that a passionate interest in blood sports united
the European and Byzantine aristocracies and provided lasting memo-
ries of shared pleasures during the long, often tedious months of the
council. The Gozzoli frescoes are, indeed, animated by the hunting
scenes, which bind the individual entourages together.
Lorenzo de Medici is followed by his family, on horseback and on
foot, while behind them are ranged a collection of exotic portrait heads,
around the portrait head (conveniently labelled) of the artist himself.
Some of these are strongly reminiscent of gures in Pisanellos
paintings as, indeed, are many of the animals and birds.
Processions
of exotic travellers snake through the background landscape, accom-
panied by mules heavily laden with boxes and including camels, two
of them with African riders.
In +j, Pius II (elected Pope in +j8) summoned the Italian States
and Christian princes to another council, in the hope of raising the
money and troops to launch a crusade against the Ottomans and
j
: AbulHasan (after Drer, +j++), Figure of
John the Evangelist, c. +oo, drawing with gold
tint. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
recapture Constantinople. This time, the council was held in Mantua,
and the power broker who lavishly hosted the gathering of dignitaries
was Ludovico Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. Ludovico exploited his
connections with the Holy Roman Emperor to persuade the Pope to
hold the council in Mantua by promising that he could get Emperor
Frederick III to attend. Although the Emperor never arrived, the
Papal court spent nine months in the city.
j
Bessarion once again led
those pleading passionately for intervention to retrieve his native
Constantinople for Christendom.
j
Ambassadors are above all lite travellers. Jean de Dintevilles status
as a traveller-scholar, a man possessed of esoteric knowledge that
gave him power over more mundane matters, is succinctly symbolized
in the Order of St Michael he wears round his neck.
Once this
singular honour had been awarded, the recipient was obliged always to
wear it. Under specied circumstances, however, he might dispense
with the elaborate and heavy Great Collar, an elaborate chain of linked
cockleshells, from which the image of Michael the Archangel was
suspended:
He shall not be obliged to wear the Great Collar when bearing arms, when
the image of Saint Michael may simply be worn suspended from a thin gold
chain or a silk lace, however he prefers to wear it. And similarly when the
King or one of his Knights of the Order is travelling, or is in his private
home, or hunting, or in other places where there is no gathering or assembly
of men of distinction, then he only needs to wear the emblem of the Order,
as indicated.
j
Jean de Dinteville is represented fully in public, in the company of
another person of distinction. He wears his order as permitted, on
a thin gold chain, because he is in transit a traveller in a foreign
land. In Holbeins programme for the painting, the equipment of astro-
nomical inquiry, navigation and travel encodes Dintevilles knowledge
status, and thus his ambassadorial prestige and power.
I
In +j+, one of the most prestigious tapestry weavers based in Brussels,
Pieter van Aelst, completed a series of ten tapestries entitled Acts of
the Apostles (illus. ). Commissioned between +j+ and +j+ by Pope
Leo X, the Apostles series, based on cartoons by Raphael, was one
of the most ambitious tapestry cycles of their day.
:
Unveiled in
Rome in December +j+, they caused a sensation, being celebrated
for their size (most were over twelve metres long and four metres
high), lavishness and artistic verisimilitude. Drawing on Raphaels
skills as a draughtsman, the tapestries achieved a depth and richness
in tone and modelling beyond anything that had been accomplished
in previous fteenth-century tapestries woven in the workshops of
the Low Countries. In his life of Raphael, Vasari gives a vivid account
of the transfer of cartoon to tapestry, and of the reception of the
nished product:
Raphael drew and coloured in his own hand all the cartoons in the exact
form and size needed and these were sent to be woven in Flanders. After
they had been nished, the tapestries were sent back to Rome. The completed
work was of such wonderful beauty that it astonished anyone who saw it
to think that it could have been possible to weave the hair and the beards
so nely and to have given such softness to the esh merely by the use of
the threads.
These
new art objects consisted of a series of monumental images, drawing
on the increasing vogue for narrative tapestries, designed to instruct
the young Emperor in the attainment of princely virtue. The tapestries
were designed to offer him models of personal behaviour, military
valour and imperial authority in line with the responsibilities that
came with his control over his new dominions.
j
The rst tapestry in the series, entitled Fortune (illus. ), ostenta-
tiously bears the explicit imprint of Hapsburg imperial power: the date
of Charless coronation is woven into the fabric. At the top, the tapestry
depicts the blindfolded goddess Fortune riding across the heavens
astride a rearing mount. She scatters roses upon those she favours
among the gures depicted on the left, and with her left hand drops
stones upon the unfortunates on the right. From the upper left corner
of the tapestry, Phoebus Apollo watches over the fortunate, whilst
in the upper right corner, Vulcan showers the unfortunate with ery
thunderbolts struck from his forge.
The Fuggers
involvement in the sale of the tapestries was particularly appropriate
and in many ways unsurprising. Charles had borrowed the enormous
sum of over 8jo,ooo orins from them to offer inducements to the
German Electors, who were crucial to his election to the imperial title
and thus to the defeat of his main rival, Francis I.
Charles took possession of the complete cycle of Los Honores in
+j:, and the tapestries were put on display in Seville to coincide
with the festivities that commemorated his marriage to Princess
Isabella of Portugal an event representing another increment
added to his growing dynastic authority. The overpowering presence
of all nine tapestries at the union underlines the fact that from the
beginning of Charless reign, tapestries were the visual focus of his
self-presentation as a supremely powerful, virtuous and legitimate
imperial sovereign.
Today, any attempt to unravel the meaning of such an iconograph-
ically ambitious series of tapestries as Los Honores inevitably involves
the critical tradition of iconography and iconology established in the
work of art historians of the rst half of the twentieth century,
most notably Erwin Panofsky, Jean Seznec and Ernst Gombrich.
+o
According to these inuential authors, Renaissance artists reworked
j
classical themes and subjects so as to combine the recognizable story
lines and moralized arguments of their sources with an emotional
and intellectual vigour that infused new meaning into the old forms.
According to this approach, where the Middle Ages had Christianized
the Greek and Roman stories and used them to contrive equivalencies
between pagan and Christian morals, the Renaissance generated
powerful new relationships with what was dened as the typical.
Here, for example, is Panofskys account of how a well-known
drawing by Drer, representing the Rape of Europa (illus. :8), is
fundamentally modern compared with the at, naive versions of the
Middle Ages:
A drawing by Drer, copied from an Italian prototype probably during his rst
stay in Venice, emphasizes the emotional vitality which was absent in the
mediaeval representation. The literary source of Drers Rape of Europa is
no longer a prosy text where the bull was compared to Christ, and Europa
to the human soul, but the pagan verses of Ovid himself as revived in two
delightful stanzas by Angelo Poliziano: You can admire Jupiter transformed
into a beautiful bull by the power of love. He dashes away with his sweet,
terried load, her beautiful golden hair uttering in the wind which blows
back her gown. With one hand she grasps the horn of the bull, while the other
clings to his back. She draws up her feet as if she were afraid of the sea, and
thus crouching down with pain and fear, she cries for help in vain. For her
sweet companions remain on the owery shore, each of them crying Europa,
come back. The whole seashore resounds with Europa, come back, and the
bull looks round and kisses her feet.
Panofskys conclusions emphasize Drers artistic treatment of Europa
as constitutive of the emergence of the very notion of what it means
to be humane:
Drers drawing actually gives life to this sensual description. The crouching
position of Europa, her uttering hair, her clothes blown back by the wind
and thus revealing her graceful body, the gestures of her hands, the furtive
movement of the bulls head, the seashore scattered with lamenting compan-
ions: all this is faithfully and vividly depicted; and, even more, the beach itself
rustles with the life of aquatici monstriculi, to speak in the terms of another
quattrocento writer, while satyrs hail the abductor.
This comparison illustrates the fact that the reintegration of classical themes
with classical motifs which seems to be characteristic of the Italian Renaissance
as opposed to the numerous sporadic revivals of classical tendencies during
the Middle Ages, is not only a humanistic but also a human occurrence. It is a
most important element of what Burckhardt and Michelet called the discovery
both of the world and of man.
++
Our own view is that Drers drawing looks most like a sketch based
on a tapestry like the section containing Europa on her bull from
the Fortune panel in Los Honores (illus. :). Panofsky, however, identi-
es precisely these tapestry-like features as the innovative elements of
acutely observed and felt psychological realism not only humanistic
but humane overlaid on the originating classical tale, which are
the typical contribution to Western art of the Italian Renaissance
of civilization.
y
:8 Albrecht Drer, The Rape of Europa, c. +j, ink on paper. Graphische Sammlung
Albertina, Vienna.
The text critic readily recognizes and responds to the art historians
strategy. He or she reinserts the visual description into a graphic
history of genres and themes and reads the gural representation with
the condent expectation that the poet or dramatist will have located
in it a taut relationship with the narrative or plot, and that exegesis will
yield interpretative clues in the form of moral comment and emotional
colour. To the art historian following in Burckhardts footsteps, the
resulting interpretation will be historical in the broad sense that it
is grounded in that founding moment of modern consciousness for
which the transition from Medieval to Renaissance stands. Our aim in
this chapter is to historicize more precisely the reading that accompa-
nies our experience of the tapestry.
The text critic who invokes art-historical iconology and iconography
as a strategy for reading Renaissance images does so unreectingly.
But we would argue that iconographic interpretative techniques are
not agenda-free. Returning for a moment to Panofskys discussion of
Drers Europa, we might detect that the account of Renaissance
iconology that licenses this kind of literary reading carries a recog-
nizable freight of assumption about the humaneness of Renaissance
creativity that goes beyond the merely interpretative:
Drers drawing actually gives life to this sensual description. The crouching
position of Europa, her uttering hair, her clothes blown back by the wind
and thus revealing her graceful body, the gestures of her hands, the furtive
movement of the bulls head, the seashore scattered with lamenting compan-
ions: all this is faithfully and vividly depicted.
8
: Detail of illus.
showing Europa.
Faithfulness and vividness here carry connotations of emotional
sensitivity and a deftness of touch with psychological realism that
we could trace back to Burckhardts version of what constitutes the
civilized. So it is not altogether a surprise to nd a more traditional
European historian like John Hale using this very graphic represen-
tation of Europa to ground an argument about the Renaissance as
precisely the period when Europe as we know it became civilized (as
we understand the term):
To an age that liked to have pictorial images of abstractions, whether it was
Architecture, or Commerce, or Theology, or a Continent, how would Europe
have looked to the minds eye?
It was the only continent whose name was linked to a Greek myth. Europa
was the daughter of Agenor, King of the Levantine city of Tyre. One day
Jupiter, who from Olympus had noted her charms, swam ashore in the form
of a white bull when she was whiling away the time with the young women
of her entourage. The attraction was immediate (though the encounter was
later sensationalized as a rape). The story was paraphrased in the late +yos
by the Florentine scholar-poet Angelo Poliziano . . . [Hale then quotes the
same verses as Panofsky].
Jove carries her from Asia to Crete. Here he turns into a man, impregnates
her, and her progeny, thus divinely sired, become the Europeans and she
the tutelary deity of their continent.
+:
Sure enough, the visual representation of this myth of origin, which
Hale goes on to gloss in detail, is Drers, selected because it caught
the Italian habit of revitalising myth and assuming a familiarity with
its subject matter:
Leaving her wailing maidens, Europa, wondering but unfrightened rides on
while one hand grasps [the bulls] back, the other his horn, across a sea peppered
with reedy islets and those creatures, satyrs and sea-nymphs, through whom
the Greeks had expressed their feelings about natural phenomena.
+
As in Panofskys account, Drers Europa is used here to capture that
essential humaneness that is Hales version of an emerging Renaissance
European consciousness. It is important at this point to remember
that the Renaissance was the rst age in which the words Europe
and European acquired widely understood signicance.
+
It saw the
emergence of a new and pervasive attitude to what were considered
the more valued aspects of civilized life and, according to Burckhardt
(as we saw in the previous chapter), witnessed the most concentrated
wave of intellectual and cultural energy that had yet passed over the
continent. We nd, predictably, the following in Hales preface:
I hope it will not be thought presumptuous that my title adapts that of a
book of really seminal importance, Jacob Burckhardts The Civilization of
The magnicent
Acts of Joo de Castro (illus. j) were woven in the Brussels workshop
of Bartholomaeus Adriaensz. The series clearly took its inspiration
from Franciss Scipio and Charless Tunis series, as well as anticipating
Ferrantes Fructus Belli tapestries in their dramatic sweep and vivid
attention to military detail.
These tapestries, all commissioned and woven in the Low Countries,
are testimony to the power of the Portuguese seaborne empire to
create a vision of its power and authority over geographically distant
cultures through recourse to both a legitimating classical past and
the relatively novel techniques of tapestry production. Yet as with the
Tunis series, the Acts offer increasingly strident images of imperial
authority which cash in their two-way legibility between East and West
in favour of a more overtly aggressive image of military superiority
and territorial possession over and against the East. This stance
becomes dominant in graphic images of the latter half of the sixteenth
century. Tapestries transactive status nonetheless remained embedded
++
in their very fabric. Themselves made up of raw materials extracted
by the Portuguese from the East, they are also visually compelling
objects of Portuguese encounters there, in particular in India.
yo
If these Portuguese tapestries offer a model of the ways in which the
material and artistic practices of the East are woven into the fabric
of their design, then our other example emphasizes the ways in which
transactions could also ow in the other direction. In +j, one of
the draughtsmen for the Tunis series, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, was
employed by the van der Moyen tapestry rm, makers of the Scipio
tapestries subsequently purchased by Mary of Hungary, to undertake
a speculative commercial journey to Istanbul. The rms aim was to try
and interest Sleyman the Magnicent in commissioning tapestries
and hangings. According to the contemporary German chronicler
Karel van Mander, van Aelst was to go to Istanbul and make drawings
of the kinds of scene used as designs for tapestries: The Van den
Moeyen rm intended to establish a trade and make rich carpets and
hangings for the Great Turk, and to this end they employed Peter
Coeck to paint divers things to be shewn to the Turkish Emperor.
y+
On a personal level, van Aelst did not do badly out of the venture,
according to another contemporary account:
Peter of Aelst published some remarkable drawings of the life and manners
of the Turks, which he had studied at Constantinople. There, for his rare
skill in his art, he was so highly esteemed by the Emperor Suleiman, that that
potentate, forgetting the law of his Koran, desired to have his portrait painted
by him. By the royal bounty of Solymans own hand, Peter was dismissed with
honourable gifts, a ring, a jewel, horses, robes, gold, and servants, which at
Bruxelles he converted into an annual pension.
y:
Having already proted from the imperial rivalry between Francis
and Charles, van Aelst and the van der Moyen rm were clearly happy
to establish a trade in luxury goods with Istanbul. As van Aelsts
beautiful engraving of Sleyman riding through the Hippodrome in
Istanbul with his entourage emphasizes (illus. j+), these were cartoons
designed as studies for tapestries, powerfully broadcasting the military
might and imperial grandeur of the Ottomans. Our analysis of the
permeable nature of the political and artistic boundaries between East
and West suggests that this was not simply an unprincipled attempt
to sell sumptuous but iconographically incomprehensible tapestries
to the Ottoman court. Rather, it showed an astute understanding of the
shared imperial and iconographic preoccupations of the courts based
in Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, London and Istanbul, skilfully (if ultimately
unsuccessfully) manipulated by a rm, and designer, situated at the
nexus of the European tapestry industry.
+:o
The tapestries we have analyzed so far shed sharp light on the
investments made in production throughout the sixteenth century by
all the aspirant imperial powers of Renaissance Europe. These cycles
all announce urgent and aggressive claims to authority, whether
imperial, religious or commercial dominion over those who viewed
such overwhelming images at various crucial places and moments in
the lives of the various courts with which they became associated.
Despite their size, the portability of such tapestries allowed them to
be packed up and exhibited in different locations at different times,
thus permitting their imagery to take on a range of connotations at
varying moments.
Thus the Tunis tapestries were a vivid image of Charless imperial
power and authority throughout Central and Southern Europe. But
viewed by the English court at the dynastic alliance of the Hapsburg
Philips marriage to Mary Tudor, they took on an added religious
signicance. Whilst many of these tapestries share close iconographic
similarities, as has been pointed out by several art historians,
y
our
concern here is to emphasize the political distinctions that led to signif-
icant differences in the ways in which such items were commissioned
and displayed, as a way of complicating standard iconographically
+:+
j+ Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Procession of Sultan Sleyman II through the Atmedan
(left-hand side), woodcut from Ces Moeurs et fachons de faire de Turcz . . ., +j.
based readings of such cycles. In this respect, the relationship between
Francis Is Scipio series and Charles Vs Tunis tapestries tells us that
the superior military power of the Hapsburg empire allowed Charles
to produce a series that effortlessly attracted iconographic associations
(such as the identications with Scipio Africanus). However, these
tapestries were more specically focused on disseminating a politically
and militarily enhanced image of Charles, an image based upon a
series of successful, if limited, military and political objectives. The
Portuguese court was similarly focused upon its attempt to fashion
a recognizably imperial image of its maritime power and overseas
inuence with tapestries of the stature of The Spheres and Acts of Joo
de Castro.
The Portuguese series seemed as determined to offer an identiably
global currency legible to rival international communities (such as
the Hapsburg, the Valois and the Ottomans) as they were to match
Portugals maritime expansion to that of the Roman Empire. However,
the attempts by the Valois court, and Francis I in particular, to
broadcast a similarly compelling image of imperial power was far
more tenuous and disingenuous. Franciss imperial self-fashioning, in
paintings and portrait medals as well as in tapestries, was a highly
speculative attempt to inhabit iconographically compelling roles which
bore little relation to his imperial stature in the face of the global
power of his arch-rival Charles.
Franciss death in +jy and Charless abdication in favour of
Philip II in +jjj left Europe riven by religious division and political
conict, one of the consequences of the contestation over political
authority that had characterized the relations between the courts of
early sixteenth-century Europe and that was given vivid expression
in their carefully chosen tapestry collections. By the +jjos, tapestry
production had been decisively expropriated for the announcement of
political and dynastic power, a development that was to have signicant
consequences for the weaving industry itself. To elaborate and empha-
size this point, we examine nally what is considered to be one of the
last great series of tapestries produced in the Low Countries in the face
of the Spanish Fury unleashed on Antwerp in November +jy.
V
The Valois Tapestries, currently in the Ufzi Gallery in Florence,
emerged from the workshops of the Low Countries as warfare and
religious persecution effectively ended one of the most inuential
periods in the history of the medium. The series is composed of eight
+::
huge tapestries, most measuring approximately four metres in height
and up to six metres in width. Their subjects are the elaborate court
festivals, or magnicences, that punctuated Valois court life through-
out the +jos and yos. Compositionally, all eight foreground the
main members of the Valois dynasty against the backdrop of these
court spectaculars. The designs have been attributed to a series of six
drawings by the French artist Antoine Caron, undertaken between
+jo and +jyo.
The innovative addition in the foreground of key gures in the
Valois dynasty, presided over by Catherine de Medici, widow of Henry
II, son of Francis I, marks a signicant difference between Carons
cartoons and the tapestries themselves; however Catherine appears
in all eight tapestries, overseeing events from the margins in the same
way that she inuenced crucial aspects of French political life from her
husbands death in +jj until her own in +j8. The tapestries subjects
are drawn from particularly crucial festivals organized under her
political auspices. The rst of these, which took place at Fontainebleau
in +j, has been seen as Catherines attempt to mediate in the open
warfare that had broken out between Catholic and Huguenot factions,
and that had only been uneasily quelled as a result of the Edict of
Amboise (March +j). The Fontainebleau Festival brought together
both factions in apparent harmony, which is represented in the rst
tapestry of the series, entitled Fontainebleau (illus. y). This work
portrays the future King Henry III and his young wife, Louise de
Lorraine, in the foreground, set against the elaborate tournaments
and ftes that characterized the festival. The Fontainebleau event
was closely followed by the Bayonne Festivals held in the summer
of +jj. Ostensibly designed to celebrate the christening of the son of
Catherines daughter Claude, married to Duke Charles III of Lorraine,
Bayonne in fact provided the opportunity for Catherine to meet her
daughter Elizabeth and the latters husband, King Philip II of Spain.
Catherine had hoped to extend the Valois dynastic inuence by
arranging marriages between her own children and Philips. The
Hapsburg King had different ideas and sent his emissary the Duke
of Alva to persuade Catherine to enforce the Council of Trent and
scrap the religious toleration of the Edict of Amboise.
The backdrop for the tense political stalemate played out at Bayonne
was the spectacular tournaments that make up the foreground of
the second tapestry. Simply entitled Tournament, this work portrays
Catherine with her daughter Marguerite de Valois and Marguerites
husband Henry of Navarre, with her daughter-in-law Louise. The
crowning achievement of Catherines festivals, and portrayed in the
+:
series, was the event held at the Tuileries in Paris in August +j to
celebrate the arrival of Polish ambassadors on a diplomatic mission
to offer her son Henry the crown of Poland. The fth tapestry in the
series, entitled Polish Ambassadors, offers this highpoint in Catherines
troubled reign as regent and then Queen Mother in the form of an
elaborate spectacle.
y
Despite the clearly intimate relationship between these tapestries
and Carons drawings of Catherines magnicences, the series remains
enigmatic. There is no rm evidence as to who commissioned or
wove it. It nonetheless provided the foundation for one of the most
remarkable pieces of scholarly detection in Renaissance studies:
Frances Yatess remarkable The Valois Tapestries, rst published by
the Warburg Institute in +j. Yates controversially dated the tapes-
tries to +j8:, arguing that the beleaguered William of Nassau, Prince
of Orange, commissioned them as a diplomatic gift for Catherine
de Medici. Yates claimed that William presented the set in order to
inuence her and her son Henry to support his younger brother,
Franois-Hercule, Duc dAlenon-Anjou, in the struggle against
the Spanish in the Low Countries.
Anjous prominent position throughout the series, especially in
the two nal tapestries, Barriers and Elephant (illus. ), in which he
stands at the right holding the hand of his sister Marguerite, is,
according to Yates, emblematic of his cultivation by William of Orange
and Protestant factions in Antwerp. His elevation is as dramatic as
the occlusion of the king who actually presided over the festivals
at Fontainebleau, Bayonne and Paris for the entry of the Polish
ambassadors Charles IX, King of France from +jo until his
premature death through illness in +jy. Yates points out that whilst
the background festivals emanated from Catherines careful manipu-
lation of magnicences which took place during Charless reign, the
foreground gures reect the state of the Valois dynasty in +j8:,
the time of the tapestries production.
yj
According to Yates, Charles
was virtually erased from the tapestries due to his decision to sanction
the Massacre of St Bartholomews Day, : August +jy:, which horri-
ed the Huguenots and set back Williams plans for a pan-European
Protestant alliance several years. This obliteration of the scapegoat for
the massacre
y
is, Yates argues, obvious if the tapestries are interpreted
as a Protestant cry for help, aimed at a Valois court determined to
resist the religious intolerance personied by the Catholic power of
Philip II and the Duke of Alva. For Yates,
The world of the tapestries is a free world, or a would-be free world, in which
festivals are preferred to the Inquisition and a wide outlook on the theatre
+:
of the world in all its variety is preferred to a narrow rigidity. It is also, in
a sense, a world deliberately returning to a Burgundian type of chivalric
magnicence as a counterpoise to the narrowness of persecuting orthodoxy.
This was exactly the spirit which William of Orange tried to encourage
when he placed the French Valois prince, Franois dAnjou, in the position
of ruler of the Southern Netherlands which his long campaigns had at last
freed from Spanish tyranny.
yy
According to this interpretation, the tapestries become a series of
enlightened, almost utopian visions of a European polity dened by
religious toleration and political liberalism. They portray festivity
and laughter, the mingling of Catholic and Protestant, and costumes
and customs of many nations with the tolerant union of Poland and
France lying at the harmonious centre.
y8
This vision of religious and political concord was made all the
more poignant by the speed with which the projected world of the
tapestries sketched by Yates dramatically unravelled. In February +j8:,
William of Orange achieved his long-cherished political objective
as he witnessed Anjou enter Antwerp and accept the title of Duke
of Brabant.
y
Faced with the Duke of Parmas advancing army,
Anjou planned a reckless coup to take complete control of the town
in January +j8.
8o
Unfortunately, his poorly equipped and disorga-
nized army was routed by local resistance, and Anjou ed the city,
dying in dishonour in France just two years later. William of Orange
never recovered the initiative from Anjous disastrous actions and
was assassinated at Delft in +j8. Antwerp yielded to the Spaniards
in +j8j, and as France descended into religious chaos, Catherine
herself died in January +j8. Henry III was assassinated in August of
the same year.
For Yates, the Valois Tapestries represented a beacon of benign
cultural and religious diversity, prior to Europes slide into religious
fundamentalism, political intolerance and vicious ethnic cleansing.
Sadly neglected by subsequent cultural historians, her study is a
brilliant account of the extent to which, by the latter half of the
sixteenth century, narrative tapestries were recognized as complex but
powerful representations of political power and authority. However,
the implications of our own analysis lead us to offer a radically
different interpretation of the signicance of the Valois Tapestries to
that offered by Yates. Several scholars have already revised some
of her basic assumptions. Roy Strong has questioned her crucial
argument that the tapestries were produced in Antwerp under the
supervision of Lucas de Heere, despite their Brussels markings.
8+
R. J. Knecht has criticized Yatess heavily idealized portrayal of
+:j
Catherine de Medici as an Erasmian, noting that the Valois were far
more circumspect about being drawn into support for the Protestant
Low Countries. He has also pointed out that evidence suggests that,
following the Massacre of St Bartholomews Day, both Catherine and
Henry III were far more receptive to the political overtures of Philip II
than those of William of Orange.
8:
In uniting this renewed historical perspective with our analysis
of earlier tapestries, we would suggest that the Valois Tapestries are
much more aggressive images of dynastic power than Yates would
concede. What our analysis tells us is that the nature of such images
is to broadcast the power of their owners, not provide politique
advice, as Yates suggests. Yates makes no reference to this earlier
tradition, despite the extensive collection of Francis Is own tapestries,
as well as the fact that the villain of her study, the Duke of Alva,
also possessed an impressive collection of military tapestries. These
included a smaller set of the Tunis series, ordered by Alva (a key
gure in the Tunis victory) in the +jjos; a composite tapestry of the
Tunis victory dated to +j8;
8
and an imposing series entitled Victories
of the Duke of Alba woven in the Low Countries in the +jos.
8
A line
of descent can thus be drawn from Alvas threatening tapestries
through Charles Vs Tunis tapestries, right back to the aggressive
assertions of Burgundian dynastic authority represented by the early
fteenth-century tapestries of Duke Philip the Good. In this respect,
Yatess claim that the Valois Tapestries evoke a Burgundian type of
chivalric magnicence as a counterpoise to the narrowness of perse-
cuting orthodoxy is particularly ironic. It betrays an idealized
perception of the Burgundian court from which the Hapsburg empire
of Charles V had learnt all it could about thepolitically calculated
value of tapestries.
Nor was this deployment of tapestries as strategic imperial currency
lost on the Valois court. As we have seen, Francis I was himself adroit
(if ultimately unsuccessful) in his deployment of tapestries. However,
this tradition did not end with him. The artist responsible for the
cartoons upon which the Valois Tapestries were designed, Antoine
Caron, had already executed several highly nished drawings speci-
cally for their incorporation into tapestries prior to those he made
of Catherines festivities.
8j
Perhaps most signicant for our purposes
is his series of :8 drawings done between +jo and +jy, entitled
Histoire Franoyse de nostre temps. Dedicated to Catherine, these
drawings trace the exploits of the Valois from the reign of Francis I
to that of Charles IX.
8
Ten refer to Franciss reign, and two deal with
Catherines marriage to Henry II, celebrated in October +j. This
+:
union was brokered by Francis to form an alliance with Pope Clement
VII, in the vain hope of fracturing the latters alliance with Charles V
and with the more optimistic hope of gaining territorial concessions
from him regarding French claims to Brazil (encapsulated in the
terrestrial globe that we analyzed in Holbeins Ambassadors).
Carons second drawing of the marriage ceremony records the
exchanges of gifts between the Pope and Francis (illus. j:). This
remarkable composition shows Francis presenting Clement with an
unfurled tapestry clearly modelled on Leonardo da Vincis Last Supper.
Here Caron provides a telling impression of Francis announcing his
ability to commission lavish tapestries depicting religious subjects,
which are then presented to the Pope himself at a moment when the
cementing of dynastic alliances through marriage and the making of
artistic claims to an aggressive imperialism come together in a single
powerful image.
We would therefore argue that the coded meaning of the Valois
Tapestries owes more to the tradition of the great court tapestries
of the previous hundred years than to the enlightened and tolerant
political outlook ascribed to William of Orange and Catherine de
Medici. Viewed from this perspective, they become deeply threatening.
The carefree world of festivals identied by Yates starts to look much
+:y
j: Antoine Caron, The Gifts, drawing from Histoire Franoyse de nostre temps, +joy, ink on
paper. Muse du Louvre, Paris.
more menacing in its elaborate scenes of combat, troop movements
and rearing war-horses when these compositions are compared with
the freely circulating images associated with the Conquest of Tunis and
the Victories of the Duke of Alba. Yates surprisingly failed to identify
the extent to which the designer of the Valois Tapestries borrowed
extensively from Franciss celebration of ancient military might and
imperial triumphalism, the History of Scipio tapestries. However, the
Scipio tapestries remained part of the fabric of the Valois court; in his
Eloge de Franois Ier, P. de Bourdeille, Abb de Brantme, records their
strategic presence at the Bayonne meeting between Catherine and
Alva. De Brantme recalls seeing
. . . the Triumph of Scipio, which one often saw hung in large rooms for
important holidays and assemblages [and which] cost ::,ooo cus at that time
which was a lot. Today one could not get it for jo,ooo cus, as I have heard
said, because it is entirely made of gold and silk. It is the best illustrated, and
the characters the best executed, ever known. At the Bayonne meeting, the
Spanish lords and ladies greatly admired it, never having seen anything like
it in the possession of their king.
8y
Here we have graphic evidence of the ways in which the Valois
court utilized its nest tapestries, already marked with the recent
history of imperial competition, as their best currency in combating
the coercive expansionism of Philip and Alva.
88
Ironically, this display
of Franciss Scipio series once again alluded to the humbling of the
Valois monarchy, in the face of the imperial might of the Hapsburgs
depicted in Alvas and Philips Tunis tapestries.
The calculated display of the Scipio tapestries at Bayonne throws
new light on the signicance of the eighth tapestry in the Valois series.
Elephant, as we have seen, portrays Anjou and Marguerite in the fore-
ground, with their backs to the elaborate attack on an elephant by
several groups of exotically attired horsemen, including Turks. The
elephants defenders hurl re down on the attackers. Yates argued that
the elephant was modelled on that depicted in the engravings of
Anjous entry into Antwerp in February +j8:. The Elephant tapestry
is also closely based on Carons painting Night Festival with an Elephant
(illus. j),
8
which quite explicitly draws on the fth tapestry in
Franciss Scipio series, The Battle of Zama (illus. ).
o
As one of the most successful artists at the Valois court, Caron was
undoubtedly familiar with the Scipio tapestries. His painting conates
the two elephants at the left centre in the Scipio tapestry, one raising
its left leg (as in the Caron painting), the other carrying soldiers raining
arrows down on its attackers (also closely reproduced by Caron).
What is particularly striking about the painting is its substitution
+:8
of Carthaginians on the back of the elephant in the Scipio tapestry for
Turks, complete with turbans and crescent-shaped shields. As we
have seen, the Scipio tapestries, like the subsequent Tunis ones, were
graphic, violent images of imperial triumphalism depicting terrible
military violence, utilized (with varying degrees of success) in the
announcement and ratication of imperial power to present and
potential subjects of that power. It is this overbearing atmosphere, we
argue, that the Valois Tapestries inspire, drawing explicitly on earlier
tapestries of imperial triumphalism rather than on a tradition of
toleration and liberalism. In directly refuting Yatess conclusions, we
argue that these works were intended to subdue and intimidate rather
than pacify and conciliate. To determine who they were designed to
intimidate, we have to reconsider Yatess claim that they deliberately
erase the Massacre of St Bartholomews Day.
According to Yates, all references to Charles IX and the massacre
of Huguenots in Paris were expunged from the tapestries due to
their Protestant sympathies. However, as Yates conceded, the imprint
of the terrible events of August +jy: is present throughout the
tapestries, despite her attempts to downplay their presence. Yates
herself recorded one of the most extraordinary set pieces designed
to commemorate the wedding of Marguerite de Valois and Henri of
Navarre just prior to the massacre:
+:
j Antoine Caron, Night Festival with an Elephant, c. +jy, oil on canvas. Private collection.
. . . the Louvre was prepared for the exercise of running at the ring (courir
la bague) with a stand for the watching ladies. Several troops presented
themselves, amongst others the King [Charles IX] and his brother [Henri]
attired as Amazons; the King of Navarre and his troop, dressed as Turks in
long golden robes and with turbans on their heads; the Prince de Cond and
others lestradiotte; the [Catholic] Duc de Guise and his friends dressed,
like the King, as Amazons. It was on the day following that on which this
festival was held that the unsuccessful attempt was made on [the Protestant
Admiral] Coligny . . . In that fatal August, +jy:, Protestant Turks were taking
part in such a show with Catholic-Amazons.
+
This remarkable scene is reproduced explicitly in one of Carons
drawings of the Paris festivities.
:
Yates argued that the terrible shadow
which the subsequent massacre cast over the wedding celebrations
ensured that no such image was directly reproduced in the Valois
Tapestries, but once we realize the importance of attending to the
invariably intolerant conation of Protestants and Turks as inter-
changeable indels, the whole atmosphere of the series changes.
We can, however,
deduce from the ways in which they quote from a range of earlier
sixteenth-century tapestries that their political address was intimidat-
ing rather than benign. We would also suggest that these woven
paraphrases of earlier tapestries of conquest are symptomatic of their
ultimate failure as politically coercive images. As with Franciss
Scipio tapestries, the Valois series is too busy deriving its own politi-
cally situated iconography from far more powerful rivals and patrons,
such as Charles V and the Duke of Alva. The more politically
compelling and visually arresting tapestries like Los Honores and the
Tunis series wove a body of symbolic meanings at the moment of key
political and military events, either Charles Vs coronation or the
conquest of Tunis. Subsequently, such images were appropriated by
political rivals with the aim of producing recognizable meaning. This
appropriation failed in its transparent attempt to siphon off political
authority, yet the symbolic effectiveness of such images contributes to
our own sense that these narratives have become, over the intervening
period, timeless.
++
Managing the Indel: Equestrian Art
on Its Mettle
Both portrait medals and tapestries shared the capacity to circulate
freely between courts and communities, and could be mobilized to
produce mutually recognizable readings at different geographical
locations. Fitting conveniently into the palm of a hand, the portrait
medal was easily distributed, by virtue not only of its size but also of its
replicability. Medals originally struck in precious metal, as items at
the extreme luxury end of the market, could be reproduced over and
over again in base metals and then circulated as required. The extent
of this dissemination can be seen in the ways in which characteristic
proles, poses and settings were reproduced repeatedly across a range
of medals from widely separated regimes and locations.
Despite their size, tapestries too were dened by their remarkably
convenient portability, by the exible ways in which they could be used
and by the fact that multiple copies were produced by manufacturing
workshops from the original cartoons as a matter of course. Tapestries
formed an important aspect of the ostentatious occasions on which
men and women of distinction visited one another. As we have seen,
entire series would be packed up with due care and transported
wherever their courtly owners travelled, to be unpacked and displayed
prominently at crucial moments of diplomatic negotiation and dynastic
alliance-formation.
This practice reached its peak in the sixteenth century as part of the
triumphalist travelling show that was the constantly moving Hapsburg
court. In his abdication speech of +jjj, Charles V recalled that during
his reign he had been ten times to the Low Countries, nine times to
Germany, seven times to Italy, six times to Spain, four times through
France, twice into England and twice to Africa. No wonder, then, that
his triumphal entries and those of his son Philip were conceived
in terms of portable artefacts like the Conquest of Tunis tapestry series.
+
Spreading a revived repertoire of classically derived imperial symbol-
ism Europe-wide, such entries were also widely emulated. The Tunis
tapestries were reproduced to order at least four times in the sixteenth
+:
century, at various levels of lavishness, for key members of the
Hapsburg entourage (Mary, Alva, Perrenot).
:
Their transportation
and relocation were themselves combinations of theatrical event and
logistical feat. Alongside the calculated display of Charless editio
princeps of the Tunis series at the marriage of Philip II and Mary
Tudor, the Duke of Alva spent a fortune on transporting his own set
back to Spain, whilst evidence suggests that another of his tapestries
based on the Tunis campaign remained in the Low Countries.
We have
argued that this movement of luxury consumer objects went beyond
the geographical and intellectual boundaries traditionally inscribed
upon the early modern world. Its currency was the circulation of a
repertoire of images recognizable to both Christendom and the Islamic
world; indeed, it is this common identication which makes such
images potentially so powerful and compelling.
In this nal exploration of our theme, we move beyond the circu-
lation of art objects as such, to focus our attention on another set of
luxury objects with artistic potential that was equally highly regarded
in both East and West. The horse has already reared its head a
number of times during our exploration of the symbolic meanings of
portrait medals and tapestries. Here we examine more closely the way
in which an animal that was itself a recognized thing of beauty, an
object of desire, an exchangeable item of great price, a customary gift
between princes and a status symbol, was given gurative meaning.
I
Cultural identity in early modern Europe, we are arguing, was formed
out of direct encounters between artefacts exchanged amongst inter-
national communities at distinct geographical locations. In the ensuing
process of image-sharpening, representations recognizable by both
partners in the cultural transaction tended to dominate. Ultimately,
the meaning or (in cultural historical terms) reading tended towards
the common interpretative ground between the two. Over time,
further compromises and consolidation may take place, somewhat
loosening the hold of the original strong sense of iconic meaning.
It is as an intrinsic part of that project that we turn our attention
to pedigree horses as living, breathing luxury items, aware that the
fact that they were sentient (and therefore required a more complex
response from, and relationship with, the purchaser than an inanimate
object, however treasured) meant that they created bridges, in some
more specic and potentially instructive way, between geographical
locations and peoples.
+
Around +j, Ludovico Maria Sforza, younger son of Francesco
Sforza, Duke of Milan, then aged twelve, was sent to Cremona to act
as his mothers representative (Cremona was her dower city). While
he was there, his father sent him a horse. As an appropriately lial
display of gratitude, Ludovico Maria commissioned a portrait of his
mount, which he sent to his father with an accompanying letter:
The horse you sent me seemed, and seems still, for excellence and beauty,
one t for a king. I have taken such pleasure, both in the horse itself, but
incomparably much more out of respect for the kindness you have shown
in sending it to me, that I thought I would have its portrait taken, as your
Excellency will see in the little panel which the bearer is carrying. I thought
that I could combine two praiseworthy ideas by sending this portrait to your
Excellency. One in showing you that I, despite having been unwell these
days, have enjoyed discovering the talents and administration that operate
in this city, so as to know where to go as necessary, and the conditions one
will nd. The other is to ensure that your Excellency understands in what
great respect I hold your Highnesss gift. I never tire of looking at and admir-
ing this horse, nor only in the esh, but also in this portrait.
Because of my illness, I was not able to have myself portrayed on the horse,
as I would have wished. I therefore had one of my household shown, although
for the excellence of the portrait I decided it was not necessary to place his
name on it. I believe that in this I have done something that will nd favour
with your Lordship, and to this end I send it.
j
Had the unnamed servant been identied, comments art historian
Evelyn Welch, [this] portrait would have become a portrait of a rider
rather than an image of the horse itself.
Discussing Ormuz
(Hormuz), Pires notes:
Ormuz trades with Aden and Cambay and with the kingdom of the Deccan
and Goa and with the ports of the kingdom of Narsinga and in Malabar . . .
Horses are worth a high price in the kingdoms of Goa, of the Deccan and
of Narsinga, so the Ormuz [merchants] go to these kingdoms with them every
+
year. A horse may be worth as much as seven hundred xerans coins worth
:o reis each when it is good. The best are the Arabians, next are the Persians
and third are those from Cambay.
j
This accurate depiction of the horse trade had its correlative in
Portugals increasingly aggressive control of these activities. In +j+,
Affonso de Albuquerque wrote to King Manuel to inform him that
he had created stables for your horses in Goa whilst playing off the
friendly Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar against the hostile Muslim
state of Bijapur.
The Rai had originally paid a thousand pardaos for twelve to fteen
horses, so he broke even on his investments, as well as building
up his personal holding of valued stock, one that reected Tom
+y
Piress equine hierarchy Arab, then Persian, then local country-bred
horses.
The portrayal of the movement of precious exotic livestock in the
Voyage to Calicut tapestries (illus. ) is a vivid reminder of the ways
in which the Portuguese laid claim to the ability to transport substantial
numbers of horses from one side of the Indian Ocean to the other.
This ability illustrated their power as commercial brokers in such
exchanges between kingdoms and also signied their military strength;
the ability to ship horses
jo
displayed an ability to inuence their
deployment in future military engagements. In this context, it is useful
to reconsider the ways in which virtually all the tapestries we have
examined carefully delineate massed cavalry of readily identiable
horses, from the Alfonso tapestries to the Tunis series (illus. yo).
The practical requirements for transporting such large numbers of
horses on a regular basis led to a signicant development in Portuguese
ship design. The Nau Taforeia, a heavy, round-bottomed ship carrying
around o guns, was specically designed to carry horses in its hold
as humanely as possible for long voyages. Two such ships were used
by Albuquerque in his conquest of Hormuz in +j+j and, subsequently,
to ferry horses between Hormuz, Aden and Goa.
j+
What this brief excursus into the trade and transportation of horses
tells us is that access to and possession of nely graded horses in
considerable numbers was an index of political, military and commer-
cial power, and that the supply and quality-control centre was located
in the heart of the territories of the Ottoman and Persian empires.
j:
Portuguese involvement in this arena tended to be limited to acting
as a lucrative intermediary between the Hindu and Muslim states
of India. The logistics of long-distance travel to and from India via
the Cape of Good Hope made the potentially lucrative scenario of
importing Arabian horses into Europe unfeasible.
j
The need to develop more regulated transportation and breeding
of horses in Europe was quickly appreciated and became a developed
specialism under the patronage of noble enthusiasts. As early as +:,
the Gonzagas of Mantua were crossbreeding Arabian and local horses,
thus establishing distinguished Mantuan bloodlines.
j
By +88, the
Mantuan ducal stud held jo horses, including breeds from Spain,
Barbary, Sardinia, Ireland and England. If we look more closely at
the lifestyle of this famously horsy dynasty, we begin to see how
East-West two-way exchange of horses contributed to a shared cultural
environment, as well as how a passion for the technical beauty of
actual highly bred horses modulated into a sophisticated aesthetic
of horse-related art objects.
+8
In the +os, Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, carried on a
cordial correspondence with the Ottoman Emperor Beyazit II, succes-
sor to Mehmet II, conqueror of Constantinople, sustained by their
shared passion for breeding horses. Francesco collected and raced
pure Arab and Persian horses, and was as expert about these as his
wife, Isabella dEste, was about her collection of antiques. We under-
stand horses and arms better than engraved gems, he once confessed.
jj
By +:, Francesco had sent Alexis Becagut to Istanbul to nego-
tiate the purchase of bloodstock horses. In +j:j, Francescos son
Federico II also attempted to establish a horse-trading relationship
with the Ottoman Sultan, sending his personal chamberlain Marcelli
Anconitano to Istanbul with gifts and a request to buy a signicant
number of bloodstock Arab mares. Anconitano left Ancona on +j
November +j:j, but took : days to reach Ragusa (where an Italian
agent reported his safe arrival) because of violent storms. An Italian
agent in Istanbul reported his arrival there on March +j:: An
emissary from the Marquis of Mantua has arrived here. He has
brought presents for the Sultan of armaments for footsoldiers and
for cavalry, saddles, falconets [small artillery pieces] and other things.
He wants to negotiate for some horses.
On + March, Sleyman responded to Anconitanos approach with a
cordial letter to Federico in Turkish, sent with an accompanying Italian
translation (three years later, the household of the Gonzagas boasted
a Turkish interpreter, retained specically for purposes of corres-
pondence with Turkish horse contacts). Sleyman was preoccupied
with impending hostilities against Hungary, and three months later
Anconitano was still waiting for a nal decision. On +8 July, he wrote to
Federico from Ragusa to say that he had failed to acquire any horses
from the Sultan, describing in minute detail the seventeen mounts
he had managed to buy from other sources.
j
In the Mantuan Filippo
Orsos album of nely executed drawings of horses and armour, dated
+jj, the drawing of a horse labelled Turcho dItalia (illus. +) gives
some idea of the outcome of this carefully controlled crossbreeding.
jy
Federico Gonzagas enthusiasm for ne horses was matched by
his enthusiasm for incorporating them into the lavish art decorating his
Mantua palaces. In his summer palace, the Palazzo del Te, he had
portraits of his favourite horses incorporated into the trompe loeil
fresco decoration of one of the ceremonial receiving rooms (illus. y:).
In the palazzo ducale in central Mantua, the great dining-room was also
decorated with portraits of horses this time concealed ingeniously
behind trompe loeil curtains, which appear to have blown aside to reveal
a hoof and fetlock here, an ear and neck there. Dinner guests could try
+
to identify particular horses from these glimpses, presumably earning
their hosts approval if they did so.
Gonzaga art of all kinds is rich with horse imagery over which our
:+st-century eyes tend to slide without recognition. There is some
irony in the fact that we know of the Gonzagas taste for horse-inspired
art in part because of their passion for horses. They tended to com-
mission wall paintings in place of the more fashionable and expensive
tapestries favoured elsewhere in Europe by the beginning of the
sixteenth century, because so much of their money was invested in
the Mantuan stud and its valuable individual bloodstock horses. On
ceremonial occasions, Isabella dEste was even obliged to hire tapestries
to decorate her receiving rooms with appropriate ostentation.
The fteenth and sixteenth centuries saw an escalation in the
commissioning of visual representations of horses in all media, from
frescoes to statuary, by the princes of Europe. The resulting art objects
laid vigorous claim to prestige on the part of European wielders of
wealth and power. But nothing the European nobility could lay on
could match the ostentatious displays of real horse-power arranged for
+jo
+ Filippo Orso, Turcho
dItalia, c. +jj, pen, ink
and wash on paper. Victoria
& Albert Museum, London.
visiting dignitaries by the Ottoman Sultan (illus. :), who acquired
one perfect bloodstock horse in tribute for every ten shipped through
Istanbul. In +j, an attendant to the French ambassador described
the magnicent sight of Sleyman the Magnicents horses lining the
court through which the ambassadors passed on their way to pay their
respects to the Sultan: The horses were very handsome turkish or
barbary ones, of black, dark brown, bay, grey, dappled or white, each
worth at least :oo ducats (illus. ).
j8
IV
We are arguing that representations of power and a vivid shared
aesthetic combined in ne breeds of horses, and that their circulation
and appreciation were integral parts of imperial bids for recognition.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the English and also the
French were on the lookout for pedigree stock to improve the quality of
their native-bred horses. In the spring of +j+, Giovanni Ratto was
sent by the Marquis of Mantua with a present of bloodstock horses to
Henry VIII progenitors in all likelihood of many of todays blood-
stock English racehorses.
j
On :o March, Ratto wrote to Mantua
informing his master of the success of his mission. He reported that
+j+
: Detail showing
Sleyman the
Magnificent from Pieter
Coecke van Aelst,
Procession of Sultan
Sleyman II through the
Atmedan (right-hand
side), woodcut from Ces
Moeurs et fachons de faire
de Turcz . . . , +j.
after presenting the horses to Henry that same day at Hampton Court,
the English King was so pleased that, Had the marquis given him a
kingdom he could not have been more delighted; and went from one
nobleman to another saying, What think you of these mares? They
were sent to me by my cousin the Marquis of Mantua.
o
The French
Duke of Longueville, present at the gift-giving, told Henry that the
horses exceeded the quality of anything possessed by the French King
(although in fact Francis I possessed far superior horses at this time):
+
Ratto offered the horses as a sign of his masters friendship with Henry, and
added that the marquis had a stud of Barbary mares, of miche and of jennets,
and of great mares, which he offered to the king, together with his territories
and children, and his own person. The queen was present during this
conversation, which induced Ratto to put the bright bay through his paces
in the Spanish fashion, exhibiting the horse to the admiration of everybody.
The king said to him, Is not this the best horse? He answered in the
afrmative, to the gratication of the king, who approaching the horse patted
him, saying, So ho, my minion.
This nal horse was a Mantuan barb or race horse, and the Marquis had
+j:
Filippo Orso, Un Turcho,
c. +jj, pen, ink and wash
on paper. Victoria & Albert
Museum, London.
been offered for him his weight in silver, but preferred making a present of the
animal to Henry VIII. After this the king caused Ratto to be asked secretly
what present would please the marquis, and he replied nothing but the kings
love; though his intention was evinced of purchasing some hobbies, and three
couples of staunch hounds. Having put the bright bay through his paces
again, Ratto presented Henry with a further gift from the marquis: a scimitar.
The king was delighted with that specimen of oriental workmanship.
:
The letter of thanks that Henry sent to the Marquis makes clear the
careful manoeuvring for status and position effected by the choreo-
graphed moves in the gift-exchange of horses:
We have learnt from our intimate friend, Thomas Cene, with what affection,
magnicence, and expression of singular favour and regard towards us he has
been entertained by your Excellency; and that your very noble stables were
thrown open to him, and that he was most earnestly requested to choose for
us what horses he most approved of. When he refused to avail himself of this
generosity, your Excellencys self selected the four most beautiful of them
all for us, which we have received with your letters by your messenger, John
Ratto, a man most circumspect and careful, and very well versed not only
in horsemanship, but also in courteous behaviour, with which I have been
marvellously pleased . . . And so many kind ofces of yours towards ourself
have at once presented themselves to us, that it is not very easy to determine
for what we should rst return thanks. But, foremost, we thank you most
heartily for that your supreme good will towards ourself, which we cannot
mistake; and for your exceeding desire of deserving well at our hands, as
well as for those most beautiful, high-bred, and surpassing horses just sent
for us. These we hold highly welcome and acceptable, as well because they
are most excellent, as that they have been sent from the very best feeling
and intention.
In the autumn of the same year, Henry wrote to the Marquis thank-
ing him for a further four horses and two jennets, dispatching our
intimate friend and knight Grifth with some English horses saddled
and harnessed in their full trappings and destined for Mantua.
Horses played a prominent part in the Field of the Cloth of Gold
meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I which took place in June
+j:o, between the villages of Guines and Ardres in the English pale
of Calais. The occasion was designed to show diplomatic amity
between the two young sovereigns in the face of the growing political
power of the new Roman Emperor Charles V. The ostentatious display
of wealth and sophistication on the part of both sovereigns included
the exchange and display of ne horses. In preparation for this, Sir
Edward Guildford, Master of Henrys Armoury, was ordered to make
extensive purchases of both arms and horses in early +j:o.
Guildford
and his ofcers went as far aeld as the Hague, Brussels, Delft, Arras,
+j
Lille and Zeeland in search of horses to be conspicuously displayed
at the meetings. The price of purchasing and transporting the animals
was considerable: the cost of ferry transportation exceeded that of a
mass in Brussels (d.). The horses purchased included a grey belong-
ing to one Pierre de Lannoy and presented by Henry himself to his
head of security at Guines, Sir Grifth Rice; a sorrel horse intended
for the Queens litter; and a black bald horse, bought at the Hague and
presented to the Duke of Suffolk.
However, when it came to horses required for the dramatic and
politically sensitive jousts and tournaments, Henry looked even further
aeld. As early as +j+, Sir Thomas Cheyney had acquired ten mounts
on Henrys behalf in the Neapolitan kingdom; he was subsequently
offered a selection from the Mantuan stud, whose owner, the Duke of
Ferrara, volunteered to forward them to Henry along with one of his
own servants. By +j+, Cheyney had returned to England with horses
from Mantua a highly signicant exchange symbolic of the growing
diplomatic amity between the two kingdoms.
j
Contemporary draw-
ings of the Mantuan horses emphasize their highly selective breeding,
and hence their racial characteristics. Filippo Orsos +jj album
contains a drawing of a Corsier della Razza di Mantova (illus. ), the
type presented to Henry.
The meeting at Guines signied an intensication of horse-trading
based on the need not only for ne mounts for the King and his retinue
but also for coursers of sufcient quality to present to Francis. On
June +j:o, the two monarchs met and exchanged horses, Francis
giving up his Mantuan mount, Henry surrendering his Neapolitan.
On +8 June, Francis presented Henry with six coursers, four of which
were from Mantua, including the dappled Mozaurcha mare believed
to be worth more than all those presented by Henry in exchange.
It seems safe to assume that when Henry established the rst royal
studs at Tutbury in Staffordshire (owing to the lack of space at
Hampton Court), the bloodstock was made up of Barbary and Arabian
lines drawn from sources like the Mantuan stud.
y
The effect upon Henrys imperial bargaining power of this new-
found ability to trafc in ne horses was signicant. By +j:, he was
able to send Francis I a gift of eighteen horses, whilst Charles V
was also now prepared to offer his cousin in equine pursuits :j Spanish
mounts.
8
Nor did these exchanges end with Henrys death. In
December +jj+, the French court dispatched a gift of horses to
Edward VI, who recorded in his diary: Paris arrived with horses,
and shewed how the French king had sent me six cortalles, tow Turkes,
a barbary, tow genettes, a sturring horse, and tow little muyles.
+j
Such exchanges reected the claims of both the Tudor and Valois
dynasties to imperial authority dened in both aesthetic and military
terms through access to and possession of carefully selected and
trained horses. However, as with the trafc in tapestries throughout
this period, these relatively minor imperial courts found themselves
wanting in their claim to equestrian pre-eminence in the face of the
power of the Hapsburg empire of Charles V. As we shall see, in sharp-
ening their ideological and aesthetic hold on territorial and religious
authority in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the Hapsburgs
were quick to deploy the ickering equestrian image to devastating
and terrifying effects.
V
In a letter written in March +j8, the Northern European educa-
tionalist and Reformer Johannes Sturm warned Queen Elizabeth I
that a new, expensive style of warfare was becoming increasingly
important in mainland Europe: a force of reiters (riders) or light-
horsemen, fast, manoeuvrable and armed with pistols, as illustrated
+jj
Filippo Orso, Corsier
della Razza di Mantova,
c. +jj, pen, ink and wash on
paper. Victoria & Albert
Museum, London.
by Drer (illus. j). The prudent ruler, he counselled, needed to
forward-plan to take account of this phenomenon:
There is nothing which more weakens the strength of a kingdom than forces
of foreign soldiers and especially horse, nor any Prince, however wealthy he
may be, in our age, whose resources and treasury would not be exhausted, and
+j
j Albrecht Drer, Soldier on Horseback, +8, watercolour and pen on paper. Graphische
Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.
his warlike strength weakened by the pay of these reiters; so that on account
of want of money, a truce is frequently necessary, during which they may
be able to recuperate, which interval is often harmful to the weaker party,
and sometimes ruinous. And this evil in our century yearly grows greater, and
is enlarged and conrmed.
The answer, Sturm continued, was for the Queen to invest in research
and development in horse-breeding in England, in the long-term
interests of national security:
I know no kingdom more suitable for this equestrian business than your own;
for in the supply of horses, England exceeds other countries. But because the
horses are but weak, I advised that gradually a few stallions could be brought
from Germany and Friesland, unknown to the enemy or to those who may
be enemies in the future, which stallions would make the offspring of the
English mare more robust.
. . . one part of my advice was a stud [equaria] that England might in future
have more robust and stronger horses and the supply of better horses might
increase. Moreover I thought it would be well to invite secretly a few German
saddlers and makers of greaves and shoes, not heads of households, who
would need large pay, but their serving men, who, equally skilled, would
come amongst us and be their own masters, for moderate pay. Also German
tailors for making clothes and blacksmiths for making coats of mail, with
a few saddlers.
This should be done, not in show only, but in substance; not only that there
might be a new form of saddle but the saddles themselves, with guns and
engines of war, and also the anaphrates of the saddles, which some call stirrups
[stapedes]; as also by the valour of the captains of horse and foot and the
discipline and military exercise of the men, which is easy to effect if the law
for the same be conrmed by the will and authority of your Majesty.
yo
Coming from a scholar and schoolteacher, this was well-informed
counsel. Friesland horses, or Frizes (illus. ), were heavily built,
tractable and sturdy, with good wind and stamina, but better suited
for haulage than riding.
y+
Crossing them with no-name English stock
could plausibly be expected to produce a fast, strong horse, suitable
for modern military manoeuvres.
Sturms advice raised an issue that had been on the English military
agenda continuously since the +jos.
y:
Following a drastic depletion
in horse stocks caused by their serving as literal cannon-fodder for
the French military campaigns in the early decades of the sixteenth
century, rst Henry VIII and then Elizabeth I had introduced policies
for increasing the number and improving the quality of English horses,
specically for military service.
y
This involved legislation to prevent
English horses from being exported, requirements for landowners
to re-allocate deer parks (hunting lands) as parks for the rearing of
+jy
horses and provide specied numbers for musters of national militia,
and exhortations to the nobility to contribute to the national war
effort and arrest the general decay of the generation and breeding
of good and swift and strong horses, which heretofore have been
bred in this realm.
y
Henry VIII had involved himself personally with an ambitious series
of stud farms for horse breeding. Sir Edward Willoughby gave up
his park at Henley for the Kings stud in +jo; in +jj, Sir Nicholas
Strelley, a Warwickshire gentleman, took o mares from the royal stud
at Warwick Castle into his park for grazing at d. per week apiece.
yj
In +j, Henry bought two hundred Flanders mares and had to
enter into delicate negotiations with the Hapsburg Queen Regent for
permission to export them to England.
y
The French ambassador
reported to Francis I in +j: that Henry had two stables of a hundred
horses which he had seen, and could draw +jo horses per annum from
his stud parks in Wales and Nottinghamshire.
On the eve of his departure for the Low Countries in +j8j, when
Elizabeth nally authorized military assistance for the Netherlanders
against the Spanish (immediately after the fall of Antwerp in August),
Leicester toured the stud farms, including surveying the Quenes
+j8
Filippo Orso, Frisone, c. +jj,
pen, ink and wash on paper.
Victoria & Albert Museum,
London.
great horses at the Royal stud at St Albans, presumably looking at
equipment for the campaign.
yy
He and other prominent gures at
the Elizabethan court such as Walsingham owned stables of over a
hundred horses apiece, including signicant gift horses from great
studs. Thus Walsinghams horses in +j8 included Grey Bingham
(a gift from Sir Richard Bingham), Bay Sidney (from Sir Henry
Sidney) and Pied Markham, from Robert Markham, whose son
Gervase Markham wrote a notable book on horsemanship.
If we look more closely at Sturms letter, there is something
disturbing in its insistence on the superiority of all things German
where horses and horsemanship were concerned.
y8
Native German
blood was to be surreptitiously introduced into England to strengthen
both indigenous breeds and their management. National character
traits (which were assumed to be replicated in beasts and humans
alike, born and bred in the Low Countries) and local skills were
elided. Both animals and their keepers were to be covertly introduced
into England to improve English horse stock: Gradually a few stallions
could be brought from Germany and Friesland, unknown to the enemy
or to those who may be enemies in the future, which stallions would
make the offspring of the English mare more robust; Moreover I
thought it would be well to invite secretly a few German saddlers and
makers of greaves and shoes.
German stallions are to be crossed with English mares; German
military suppliers and trainers are to be introduced alongside native
English soldiers to produce a similar military cross. Somewhat
surprisingly, perhaps, crossbreeding of this kind was regarded as
strengthening the bloodline. Yet at the same time, there is a clear
implication that an inux of foreign matter polluted and weakened:
There is nothing which more weakens the strength of a kingdom
than forces of foreign soldiers and especially horse, wrote Sturm.
Where the visual imagery of breeding absorbs the idea of hybridi-
zation or crossing with apparent ease an applied science of
improvement and renement, which in the days before Mendelian
genetics was of necessity approximate texts betray an underlying
anxiety. This suggestion that the crossbreeding that strengthens
and improves a breed also sullies the pure national bloodline recurs
in literature in and around horse breeding. In Shakespeares Henry V,
it is the basis for the Dauphins outburst of humiliation after the
French defeat at Hareur and on the eve of Agincourt, faced with
the formidable military men of England, with their mixed Anglo-
Saxon and Norman blood:
+j
O Dieu vivant! Shall a few sprays [bastards] of us,
The emptying of our fathers luxury,
Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,
Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds
And over-look their grafters?
As we might expect, metaphors of animal crossbreeding overlap with
a corresponding set of images drawn from horticulture and plant
grafting. The Constable replies:
Dieu de batailles! Where have they this mettle?
Is not their climate foggy, raw, and dull,
On whom as in despite the sun looks pale,
Killing their fruit with frowns? Can sodden water,
A drench for sur-reined jades their barley-broth
Decoct their cold blood for such valiant heat?
And shall our quick blood, spirited with wine,
Seem frosty?
To which the Dauphin responds in a nal explicit linking of animal
crossbreeding and human miscegenation:
Our madams mock at us and plainly say
Our mettle is bred out, and they will give
Their bodies to the lust of English youth,
To new-store France with bastard warriors.
y
The language is the same as Sturms, as are the racial assumptions
(as the reference to the Mantuan stock has already emphasized, breeds
are razze in Italian). Cross a quick-blooded French stallion with a
cold-blooded English sur-reined jade and youll get a tough, bastard
warrior. But at what cost to national self-esteem?
8o
This is a topic fraught with difculties. We have indicated that the
enthusiasm among the European nobility for horse breeding needs to
be looked at alongside other competing strongly held beliefs about
purity of blood. In the sixteenth century, the same territory in south-
ern Spain that bred Andalusian horses, whose pedigree was a known
cross between Arab and Spanish stock, insisted that Muslims and
Jews could never become true Christians because of their blood.
When the Archbishop of Toledo was attempting to block the bestow-
ing of a benece on the converso Fernando Jimnez, he used the
example of the practice of a horse dealer to deny Jimnezs pedigree as
a Christian. If a horse dealer is offered an imperfect horse, he wrote,
even if he is offered it free, he will not accept it into his stable, because
the rst thing he will want to know is the animals race. Such is his
+o
8 Andrea Mantegna,
Detail of the Camera
Picta fresco showing the
portrait of a riderless
horse with a groom,
+jy. Camera degli
Sposi, Castello San
Giorgio (Palazzo Ducale),
Mantua.
Paolo Uccello, Painting of an Imaginary Equestrian Statue of the English Mercenary
Sir John Hawkwood, +, fresco. Duomo, Florence.
yo Jan Vermeyen, Disembarkation off the Cape of Carthage, c. +j8jo, charcoal and
watercolour cartoon on paper. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
y+ Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Anne of Cleves, +j, oil on canvas.
Muse du Louvre, Paris.
y: Giulio Romano, Frescoes showing horses, c. +j:yo. Salone Cavalli,
Palazzo del Te, Mantua.
y Franois Clouet, Portrait of Francis I on Horseback, c. +j8, oil on panel.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
y Titian, Charles V at the Battle of Mhlberg, +j8, oil on canvas. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
yj Mark Wallinger, Race Class Sex, +:, oil on canvas. The Saatchi Gallery, London.
concern in case the bloodline of his stud is polluted that he is bound to
refuse, even if he is assured that the horse is of noble race (illus. y).
8+
One further fundamental assumption made about race and breeding
in the sixteenth century is detectable in these passages, though more
explicit elsewhere. It is the stallion alone, according to conventional
breeding theories, that contributes the fundamental characteristics
to the product of a reproductive union. As Shakespeares Dauphin
implies, nurture in all its aspects inuences the outcome: the mothers
temperament, the suitability of her womb as a receptacle, plus
geographical location, climate, nutriment. But breed, type or race is
determined by the breed, type or race of the stallion.
8:
Some receptacles were considered likely to provide particularly
successful incubators. Low Countries breeds were considered parti-
cularly strong, steady and manageable. After Charles Vs acquisition
of the Netherlands, he favoured local Flemish horses for breeding
purposes.
8
Which (together with the negotiation for brood mares
referred to above between Henry and the Hapsburg Regent in the
Netherlands) casts a somewhat different light on Holbeins portrait
of Anne of Cleves (illus. y+), and on Henry VIIIs comments when
he nally clapped eyes on her in +jo: The King found her so different
from her picture . . . that . . . he swore they had brought him a Flanders
mare. A breeder, not a looker was what he meant. In the event, of
course, the breeding was a failure, and the union lasted a mere six
months. We do not, of course, have to take seriously the divorce
testimony that the marriage was not consummated. Indeed, our
current argument would suggest that quite the opposite was the case,
and that the problem was Annes inability to full even her role as
Flanders mare by failing to become pregnant.
+
y Barbary horse,
engraving from The
Duke of Newcastle,
Mthode de Dresser les
Cheveaux (London,
+yy). The black groom
indicates the assumption
of shared otherness.
We might note further implications for transnational relations here.
This version of the suitability of Low Countries horses as receptacles
for bloodlines passing through (as it were) which we have taken
from respectable sources on early horse breeding is uncannily close
to the contemporary version of the nation itself. In the opinion of
sixteenth-century Europe and in the hierarchy of early modern states,
the Low Countries were an entrept a kind of receptacle, like the
mare, which was crucial for the development of Empire, but not a
global power in its own right.
As a Protestant reformer addressing the hoped-for (if reluctant)
Deborah, leader of Protestant Europe, Sturms advice on investing
in military reiters turned out to be prophetic. Lack of a clear under-
standing of the appropriate use of new-fangled light-horsemen during
the English campaigns in the Low Countries in the +j8os contributed
to their poor performance against Philip IIs Spanish forces. It also
produced the symbolic nadir of those operations the death of Sir
Philip Sidney, champion and white knight of European Protestantism,
at the Battle of Zutphen, in September +j8. It was while acting
as an English reiter (in a troop of jo equally skilled young equestrian
noblemen) that Sidney met his death. This dashed the hopes of
European Protestants that the young man they thought of as the rising
star of the English aristocracy might provide a lasting bridge between
groups of Calvinists separated by the English Channel (illus. y).
Reiters required quality horsepower the equivalent of the
modern-day highly manoeuvrable tank. Horses at the Leicester/
Norris campaign were from the Low Countries. Sir John Norris
shopped around for his troops equipment. On this occasion, having
sounded out the English markets, he made an informal recommen-
dation to Walsingham that it would be cheaper for the Crown to send
horsemen unequipped, purchasing both mounts and armour in the
Netherlands when they arrived.
8
On :: September +j8, Leicesters troops encircled Zutphen,
isolating it and surrounding it with trenches manned by musketeers.
Sir John Norris was on the east bank, while Leicester commanded
the main force to the west. Their intention was to draw the Prince
of Parma into battle when he attempted to resupply the city. As Parma
approached Zutphen in dense fog, Leicester (not expecting a major
military engagement) sent Norris to intercept the supply convoy, with
a force of three hundred horse and two hundred foot. Meanwhile, he
himself headed a jo-strong troop of light-horse lancers (or reiters)
to skirmish in and out again, leaving the eld to Norris.
8j
Just
as Leicesters company (including Philip Sidney) swept down on the
+yo
convoy, the fog lifted, revealing a train of over ve hundred carts
escorted by three thousand Spanish troops. Behind them were Spanish
muskets, well dug into their own trenches. Sidney was wounded by
a musket ball in the thigh a minor injury which became infected
and proved fatal.
8
Here again, our tendency to let our eye slide over the image of the
horse as literally insignicant damages our understanding of Sidneys
reputation in his lifetime (as opposed to his posthumous hagiography).
As he reminds us at the beginning of his Apology for Poetry, he was
something of a skilled horseman by profession a soldier-hero in the
European power stakes of a highly specic and up-to-date kind.
VI
One of the reasons we overlook the highly specic nature of individual
horses in this period is because of the familiarity of certain sorts of
equestrian representation a familiarity we have learned, through the
+y+
y Philip Sidney on
horseback, woodcut from
Geoffrey Whitney, Choice
of Emblems (London,
+j8).
work of scholars like Gombrich and Panofsky, to associate with the
classical tradition. From the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome to
Leonardos ambitious, unfullled dream of an immense statue of a
horse for the Sforzas, we believe we recognize in monumental gures
of horses, and in gures on horseback, a timeless, universal representa-
tion of power.
8y
Precisely because there is a link between Leonardos
horse studies (illus. yy) and antique equestrian statues, we condently
identify the tradition in which the studies stand as both classical and
Renaissance in its conception, setting aside any idea of the need to
bring a specically contemporary real context to bear on these art
objects as well.
For a moment, we should look at the way in which such images
evolved during the early modern period, alongside growing expertise
and understanding of horses as international goods (we do not
believe we can call them a commodity).
88
Because in fact the equation
horse = power was both Eastern and Western, and this has impli-
cations for its use in representations of imperial might during the
fteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Some of the most successful equestrian power-promoting images
+y:
yy Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies for the Sforza
horse, c. +o, silver-
point on paper. Royal
Library, Windsor Castle.
are not in fact large-scale at all. They are to be found on the reverses
of the fteenth- and early sixteenth-century portrait medals we looked
at in our opening chapter. As the Christian West and Muslim East
struggled for control of Constantinople, the gateway between them, in
the rst half of the fteenth century, portrait medals of the contending
gures competed with each other for ownership of the most resonating
symbols of imperial rule. Costanzo da Ferraras portrait medal of
Mehmet II (illus. y8) shows with particular clarity the way in which
a portrait head of the great ruler, accompanied by a reverse incorporat-
ing some iconographically compelling scene based around a horse,
provided such objects with equal recognition value, and equal vigour,
from West to East and East to West. As we put it in chapter +, the
Mehmet medal is a resolutely Ottoman artefact, yet in a strenuously
Western European artistic tradition,
8
drawing as it does on Pisanellos
medal of John Paleologus (illus. y).
Our suggestion is that the circulation of portrait medals traces with
peculiar clarity a sequence of key iconographic moments as images of
power, consolidating their symbolic effectiveness and contributing to
+y
y8 Costanzo da Ferrara, Portrait medal of Mehmet II (reverse) showing the Sultan riding,
c. +8+, bronze. National Gallery of Art, Washington, nc. See also illus. +o.
our sense that these narratives and images are timeless. Medals crossed
and recrossed the invisible ideological boundaries supposedly isolating
Christian from Muslim, European from Turk. As is familiar in our own
day, the urge to acquire transcends boundaries, and trade percolates
where embargoes Papal or otherwise insist it should not.
The exchange of portrait medals with their art horses mirrors
that of the animals on which they were modelled. Horses were
traditional gifts exchanged between heads of state; Arab horses were
particularly coveted or, failing pure Arabs, Andalusian or southern
Spanish horses derived directly from Arab stock. When Henry VIII
married Katherine of Aragon, he promptly requested horses of
good Spanish-based breeds a Spanish jennet, a Neapolitan and a
Sicilian from his new father-in-law.
The horse on the reverse of Pisanellos medal showing John
Paleologus was drawn from life (illus. 8o), and was the horse on which
the Emperor pursued his enthusiasm for hunting during the Council
of Florence. Whether the medal was commissioned by John himself
or by his Este or Medici hosts, it was intended to be legible as a symbol
by both Eastern and Western audiences. Both the Mehmet medal
and Sperandio of Mantuas medal of Giovanni Bentivoglio (illus. 8+)
are later, and were probably directly inuenced by Pisanello as well
as by the Paleologus medal. In the case of the latter, the transaction was
between Eastern and Western Christian powers.
o
The fact that real
horses were enthusiastically exchanged between them as symbols
of magnicence and courtly generosity only went to amplify the
resonance and claims to global importance of such public announce-
ments in artistic form.
+y
y Antonio Pisanello, Portrait
medal showing John VIII
Paleologus (reverse), +8,
lead (see also illus. 8).
Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin Preuischer
Kulturbesitz.
VII
Where horses are concerned, we are arguing, the real and the represen-
tational converge, competing for meaning in early modern graphic
and plastic imaging of imperial power. The more realistic the horse,
the more convincingly captured in the moment of surging strength,
mastered by the horseman, the more certain we are that our response
is natural and inevitable. The real animal, controlled by his noble
+yj
8o Antonio Pisanello, Preparatory drawings for the horse on the reverse of the John
Paleologus medal (illus. y), c. +8, ink on paper. Muse du Louvre, Paris.
master, converges with the fantasized (and sometimes allegorized)
representation of the imperial gure on a rearing mount, crushing
his idealized adversary, graphically emphasized in Leonardos designs
for the Sforza monument (illus. 8:).
By now, we hope, the reader will have grasped the carefully contrived
process by which these equestrian images were executed, and their
meaning manipulated, in the period we are examining. It is interesting,
in this light, to contrast an equestrian image by an accomplished
artist which, we would argue, set out to achieve a different response
on the part of the onlooker.
At the end of Francis Is reign, in the +jos, the court painter
Franois Clouet produced a small panel portrait of the King on
horseback (illus. y). No such equestrian image had hitherto been
executed (although one had been part of the temporary decorations
for the entre into Rouen in +j+y, as an image of imperial grandeur
following the Kings military victory at Marignano). Janet Cox-Rearick
has convincingly associated this portrait with the equestrian statue
of Louis XII above the main entrance at Blois, where the image of
the roi-chevalier (knightly king) is placed against a blue background
decorated with eur-de-lis.
+
Clouets background is also bright blue.
Francis, metamorphosed from ageing monarch into iconic knightly
king, is armoured and bejewelled, rider and horse made virtually
indistinguishable in the elaborate decorative programme. The horse is
himself a kind of royal icon, as Cox-Rearick observes, as ostentatious
and formalized as the King. The animals delicate, decorative capari-
son features the same personal emblem of the knotted double-eight
+y
8+ Sperandio of Mantua, Portrait medal of Giovanni II Bentivoglio (obverse and reverse,
the latter showing him on horseback), c. +8o, lead. University Art Museum, University
of California at Santa Barbara.
that decorates Franciss costume in the state portrait of him by Jean
and Franois Clouet from the +j:os.
:
Here, we suggest, we have horseman as emblem, iconically saturated
with superimposed meanings (the Louis XII allusion, the decorative
court elegance, the deliberately youthful stance of the ageing King).