Tudor Art, a Lively Story

Christina J. Faraday explores how the rhetorical concept of “liveliness” sheds light on a lost mode of Tudor art criticism and appreciation. Her new book Tudor Liveliness:Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England will be published by the PMC in April 2023. Christina is Research Fellow and Director of Studies in History of Art, Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.

For Tudor viewers, artworks were often “lively”. In the sixteenth century, this word referred to an especially potent kind of vividness – visual and textual – and came freighted with resonances from classical rhetorical theory. Rhetoric held a central place in the Tudor curriculum. Its guidelines for effective communication would have been familiar to everyone who had received a formal education, but also to many who had not. “Liveliness”, or enargeia to give it its technical title, was seen as an essential characteristic of effective communication. The use of the word “lively” about artworks suggests that they were seen as conjuring a realistic effect comparable to vivid speech.

Such a view runs counter to the traditional idea that Tudor England was hostile towards imagery, especially vivid imagery, partly a legacy of iconoclastic Protestant edicts. Indeed, Tudor artists’ enthusiasm for inscriptions and awkward efforts at perspective have often been seen as deliberate attempts to limit realism and avert idolatry. Yet looking at rhetorical ideas about “liveliness” reveals Tudor artworks courting a kind of vividness dependent not on “naturalistic” artistic principles (single point perspective, proportion, and historical accuracy) but on detailed and multi-sensory depiction.

In what ways could Tudor artworks have been seen as “lively”? The extraordinary Unton Memorial of about 1596, now in the National Portrait Gallery, illustrates some of these principles. Designed to commemorate Henry Unton, Elizabeth I’s ambassador to France, the panel represents his biography through a series of scenes, Unton featuring multiple times. His life begins in the bottom left corner, where he appears as a baby in his mother’s lap, the shield of arms above her head revealing his illustrious family background. We are taken through his career at Oxford, his bravery in the Netherlands, and his diplomatic success in France. Counterbalancing his public life is a representation of his home at Wadley, opened like a doll’s house to reveal Unton at home: entertaining, disputing, and playing music with friends and relations. Finally, his funeral procession wends its way to the church and monument in the bottom left corner, the route lined with the grieving recipients of Unton’s charity.

In telling us the story of Unton’s life, the panel illustrates his virtues, commemorating him but also encouraging the viewer to follow his example. Distributing scenes of Unton’s life around a large-scale portrait, the panel mimics rhetorical advice for the vivid depiction of a person in “demonstrative oratory”, a genre used for the “praise and blame” of individuals. In this genre, the vivid description of the subject’s appearance, heritage, deeds, and virtues helps to win over an audience, convincing them of the subject’s virtues and encouraging them to lead a similarly righteous life. The panel’s multiple narrative, inconsistent perspective, and unrealistic heaping of scenes has often been characterised as anti-realistic. Yet, setting it alongside the principles of vivid, full description, we can see how, for viewers at the time, the panel would have presented a “lively” account of Unton’s life.

Art history’s focus on visuality can sometimes minimise the role of the other senses, particularly the sense of touch. Yet, an appeal to multiple senses was key to powerful, memorable speeches, and, by extension, images. The classical rhetorician Quintilian, whose handbook featured prominently in Tudor curricula, writes that a speaker “as a sort of salesman of eloquence, will allow the customer to see and almost to handle [paene pertractandum] all his most attractive maxims”.

Unknown artist (possibly Richard Scarlett), The Henry Unton Memorial Portrait (details), circa 1596, oil on panel, 74 × 163.2 cm.

Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 710).

Touch helped the audience to “grasp” a point and images could also appeal to this sense. This was particularly true of interactive prints, once extremely popular, but only a handful of which now survive. One of the most intriguing was commissioned in the mid-sixteenth century by Thomas Gemini, a Flemish physician, copperplate engraver, and all-purpose rogue. At the front of his pirated edition of Vesalius’s anatomy textbook, Gemini incorporated an interactive anatomy print. Much like today’s “pop-up body books”, these prints enabled users to perform a paper dissection, lifting the flaps to “see inside” their own anatomy. Not only did this multiply the number of senses through which information entered the mind, but it also illustrated the process of anatomical discovery. This made anatomical information more memorable and vivid, making the viewer feel like an eyewitness to the unveiling of the body’s organs. This evocation of witnessing was vital to rhetorical liveliness. It could be achieved through detailed, sequential narration of events, as Quintilian recommends in his account of the invasion of a city:

No doubt, simply to say “the city was stormed” is to embrace everything implicit in such a disaster, but this brief communiqué, as it were, does not touch the emotions. If you expand everything which was implicit in the one word, there will come into view flames racing through houses and temples, the crash of falling roofs, the single sound made up of many cries, the blind flight of some, others clinging to their dear ones in a last embrace, shrieks of children and women, the old men whom an unkind fate has allowed to live to see this day… “Sack of a city” does, as I said, comprise all these things; but to state the whole is less than to state all the parts.

Although history and genre paintings on panel were few and far between in Tudor England, sequential narratives do appear in other media such as wall painting, plaster, and needlework. A case in point is the Parable of the Prodigal Son, from about 1600, represented at Knightsland Farm in South Mimms. Across four surviving scenes, the viewer observes the prodigal son’s revels, his bankruptcy, his nadir at the pig trough, and his return to his father. Although the story derives from the Bible, at South Mimms the figures are shown in contemporary dress, wearing slashed hose, codpieces, and ruffs. The houses too are of a Tudor type, with diamond windowpanes, reflecting the appearance of the houses and villages surrounding Knightsland Farm at the time when it was painted.

“R.S.”, “Interiorum Corpus Humani Partium Delineatio”, woodcut with skin flaps lifted, bound in Thomas Gemini, Compendiosa Totius Anatomiae Delineatio, 1559 edition, 37 × 37 cm.

Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection (EPB 2731/D/2).

Two print sources have been identified as possible patterns for the paintings: one by Claes Jansz Visscher after David Vinckboons (1608) and the other by Gyles Godet (1566). Yet, even if these are the sources, the English artist was no slavish imitator. Visscher’s prints represent the story with consistently Dutch costume and landscape; Godet’s is more or less classical. The English paintings, by contrast, transfer the story to a setting more familiar to viewers in South Mimms. This can be compared to the rhetorical technique known as enallage, or the historical present tense: when past events are narrated in the present tense to emphasise their relevance and immediacy. By representing the parable in contemporary dress, the artist mimics preachers who used their sermons to link biblical stories with current events, underlining their ongoing relevance for the congregation. Furthermore, the paintings show the narrative unfolding scene by scene, allowing the viewer to witness the prodigal’s fall and salvation, and inviting them to draw comparisons with their own lives.

These are just some of the ways that the rhetorical principles of “liveliness”, or enargeia, can be seen in Tudor artworks, revealing them to be a potent and persuasive source not only of moral lessons, but also of memory, knowledge, and entertainment. These parallels do not represent an act of conscious translation for artists or patrons; rather, rhetoric permeated their expectations of communication to such an extent, we can confidently argue that rhetorical ideas informed any attempt to see or be seen. In a culture where art criticism was almost non-existent, rhetoric provides us with a framework to talk about these issues in terms that people at the time would have recognised, re-enlivening their art, and thus restoring its vividness and vitality.

Unknown artist, East room of Knightsland Farmhouse, depicting the Parable of the Prodigal Son (details), circa 1600, wall painting. Knightsland Farm, Hertfordshire.

Courtesy of Historic England Archive (BB84/02753).