‘Tudors’ exhibit gets behind the era’s camera-ready intrigue

From Bette Davis to Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth I, from Charles Laughton to Jonathan Rhys Meyers as King Henry VIII, from “Fire Over England” to “Wolf Hall,” the Tudor era has kept movies, operas, TV series and books stuffed with drama and intrigue. And beheadings.

Now the roots of that drama — in paintings, jewelry, tapestries, sculpture and personal mementos — are on display in “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England,” at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum through Sept. 24.

It’s more scholarly than spectacular, but it includes commanding portraits and everything from a tiny broach depicting Elizabeth (and Noah’s ark) to elaborately engraved armor probably made for Henry VIII, and more than 6 feet tall.

There is plenty of intrigue, too, if you trace the social and political moves during the Tudors’ 118-year reign, from 1485 to 1603. Britain was becoming the British Empire. The merchant class was expanding. And though he’s not part of the exhibit, Shakespeare was cranking out histories, comedies and tragedies.

Elaborate gifts among the royal family, the elite, and foreign nobility were meant to impress and curry favor. One of the exhibit’s curators, Adam Eaker of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, sums it up as “the Tudor art of the gift.” For Elizabeth, this began even before she became queen in 1558.

“As a princess whose mother had been beheaded as an adulteress and whose legitimacy was repeatedly called into question,” he writes in the catalog, “Elizabeth used gifts to secure her ever-shifting position at court.”

Throughout their reign, the Tudors used art — especially portraits full of symbolism — to promote their legitimacy, authority and power.

“Thanks to Hollywood movies and TV dramas like ‘The Tudors,’” notes museum director Thomas Campbell, “many Americans have heard of King Henry VIII and his six wives, as well as the ‘Virgin Queen’ Elizabeth I, but few may be aware of the distinctive art and visual propaganda that was central to the splendor and drama of the Tudor court.”

In the exhibit’s three paintings of Elizabeth, two of them full-length, there is more than initially meets our 21st century eyes.

In the earliest surviving full-length portrait (circa 1567, attributed to George Gower), the queen wears an elaborate crimson dress and stands on a Turkish carpet. She holds a carnation, a symbol of marital love, in her right hand, and there’s a background of fruit including pears and pomegranates — all of which “characterize the young queen as a marriageable beauty,” the caption notes.

A decade later, a portrait by Nicholas Hilliard (at the exhibit entrance), depicts a seemingly ageless, unblemished, inexpressive queen, in elaborately jeweled attire.

It’s different, and yet it’s not. Hilliard produced the image while in France as part of an English delegation negotiating, unsuccessfully, a marriage between Elizabeth and Hercule-Francois, duc d’Alencon, the younger brother of the king of France. The “Virgin Queen” remained so.

As revealing as anything in the exhibit are paintings by German-born Hans Holbein the Younger, one of the great portraitists of all time, who became Tudor court painter in the 1530s.

Holbein’s portraits are almost photorealistic and packed with emotion. Here is Henry with the hint of a snarl; his son Edward VI as a toddler, a miniature version of his father; Jane Seymour, the lady-in-waiting who would become Henry’s third wife after he accused his second wife, Anne Boleyn, of adultery. They were married 11 days after Anne Boleyn was beheaded.

This survey of the Tudor’s “art and majesty” could have been spectacular and nothing else; it is somewhat smaller than the original version at the Metropolitan Museum last year. But the San Francisco museum has added items of its own, and thankfully arranged the artwork — and the rulers — chronologically for clarity.

The focus is on art within historic context, and there are details worth searching out among the exhibits.

A gold locket is encircled with diamonds and rubies, but there’s still room for two striking images of Elizabeth, an Old Testament illustration and an encouraging motto in Latin.

Among the paintings displayed, a not-very-expressive portrait of Sir Amias Paulet reveals itself only in the caption. Paulet was governor of the Island of Jersey, then Elizabeth’s ambassador to France. Then he was entrusted to serve as jailer of her half-sister, Mary Queen of Scots, until her execution in 1587.