The Tudors, Metropolitan Museum — bloodless majesty

You probably know what at least two of the Tudor monarchs looked like — how they stood, glared, dressed and wore their hair. As the longest-reigning emblems of their clan, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I deployed their own likenesses with the flair of great brand strategists. More than 400 years after the dynasty died out, their look remains instantly recognisable, which could be why, on a first visit to the Metropolitan Museum’s The Tudors, you may feel like you’ve seen it before. You may even feel like you’ve experienced more vivid versions.

The show aspires to marry the Met’s own marvel from a year ago, The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570, with the Morgan Library’s Holbein: Capturing Character to produce a widescreen, in-depth multimedia portrait of the dynasty’s 118-year sojourn at the apex of British power. Unfortunately, The Tudors lacks the rigour and sensitivity of those models, and so comes off more as a collection of memorabilia than an insightful analysis of the relationship between power and image-making.

The museum does have some good paintings and sumptuous artefacts to work with, including fabrics, jewels, candelabra, manuscripts and tableware. The ever-imposing XXL suit of armour smithed for Henry VIII and beloved by children who visit the Arms and Armor gallery provides physical bulk, if not much intellectual heft.

The exhibition is serendipitously timed, allowing us to view the expanse of one Elizabethan era from the aftermath of another. The recent death of Hilary Mantel has sent readers back to the Wolf Hall series’ intimate panoramas of the 1530s and its scents of roses, beer and blood. And the topic itself promises drama, with a family saga that overflowed with enough betrayals, beheadings, conversions and funerals to furnish an HBO mini-series.

Somehow, though, these ingredients fail to combine into an interesting whole. Rather than compete with either history or fiction, the Met’s curators came up with a weak-tea survey, presented with prim neutrality. Bloody Mary makes barely a cameo. Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day queen, gets erased — again. Her cousin, Edward VI, leaves scant traces, except for one stunning Holbein portrait of the child prince.

Instead, the Met focuses on the Tudor monarchs’ tiresome obsession with legitimacy. They compensated for their insecure claims to the throne by emblazoning every available surface with the Tudor rose, an amalgamation of the red Lancaster and white York varieties. But that’s hardly why we remember them, or why we should continue to care.

Amid all this assertiveness, two absences loom large. For one thing, the most famous full-length portrait of Henry VIII doesn’t actually exist. You know the one: the sovereign in his wide stance, arms akimbo, chin felted in that ginger beard, broad torso made even more massive by layers of velvet and fur. Hans Holbein the Younger, a Swiss-German émigré who got himself appointed king’s painter, applied that personification of royal might on to a wall of the Privy Chamber in Whitehall. In 1604, the Dutch writer Karel van Mander noted its uncanny realism, calling it “so lifelike that anyone who sees it is afraid”. That may have been true, but nobody alive today has seen it or even a photograph because the work was destroyed by fire in 1698. All that remains are sketches and inferior copies.

The Tudors used goods, ornament and art to give their version of Britishness a concrete form, yet they depended on imported talent

The other void in the Met’s celebration of Tudor visual culture is anything more than a passing acknowledgment of the mountain of works that were pulverised and burnt in attacks on the religious establishment. In 1536, Henry ordered the dissolution of all monasteries in England and Wales, triggering spasms of destruction that left the countryside dotted with picturesquely ruined abbeys. Henry’s faithful ransacked libraries and ripped pages out of books — “some to serve theyr jakes [jokes], some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes”, recounted the playwright John Bale in 1549. “Some they solde to the grossers and soapsellers.” The illustrated manuscripts at the Met are among the few that survived.

The Tudors used material goods, ornament and art to give their version of Britishness a concrete form, yet they depended heavily on imported talent. The curators, Elizabeth Cleland and Adam Eaker, take an oddly defensive posture about that fact. The catalogue quotes the physician and engraver Richard Haydock lamenting that painting “never attained any great perfection amongst us”. Cleland and Eaker argue that Haydock judged his countrymen’s technique by Italian standards rather than assessing homegrown creations on their own terms. English art wasn’t humdrum; it was just supremely English. That argument might be stronger if 16th-century connoisseurs hadn’t formed their tastes by gazing across the Channel and bringing in all their highest-quality tapestries, carvings and carpets from abroad.

Foreigners and immigrants supplied the official mythology of Elizabeth I. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger arrived in London from Bruges as a child, but he nurtured the Flemish eye for opulent detail. He is presumed to have lavished it on the flamboyant (and tentatively attributed) “Rainbow Portrait”, in which the queen appears costumed in a collection of symbols, with serpents of wisdom entwined on her sleeves and a cloak festooned with disembodied eyes and ears, emblems of an omniscient sovereign.

When the echt-English goldsmith and miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard looked at Elizabeth, he saw a pure collection of attributes, shorn of personality. The “Phoenix Portrait” gets its name from the lovingly depicted jewel between her nonexistent breasts. The bird speaks of the Virgin Queen’s chastity and her implausible promise to regenerate the Tudor line. (It didn’t work.)

For Hilliard, flesh, light, modelling and shadow could only get in the way of the portrait as shrine to authority. Flatness was all, the better to read the meanings encoded in the queen’s outfit and to memorialise the mask-like precision of her face — that ghostly skin, long nose and bladelike jaw. The portrait is more a devotional icon than a close study of a fellow human being.

Perhaps it is the Tudors who doomed The Tudors. First the artists and now the museum found themselves conforming to a blinkered insistence on splendour and the projection of absolute power. All these centuries later, Their Majesties are still calling the shots.

To January 8 2023, metmuseum.org

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter