Tudor Royal Iconography, by John N. King

CITATION: King, John N. Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Understanding

• Question: How does royal iconography change reference throughout the Tudor period?
• Answer: Iconography consistently represent royals as God's governors, and in terms of Old Testament kings and queens, but inconsistently acknowledge the authority of other sources: Henry VII founded his legitimacy on the veneration of Henry VI and the degradation of Richard III; Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Philip II enjoyed the Pope's cap and sword of maintenance; the Davidic imagery of Henry VIII   extended to Edward VI; Mary I rejected Reformation books and icons in favor of conservative images; Elizabeth I erased Mary's dynastic position. 
• Method: King connects Tudor dynastic politics with references in contemporary visual arts, with an emphasis on religious woodcuts (esp. John Foxe),  literature, with emphasis on The Faerie Queene, and religious texts, especially Bibles.
• Assumptions: King reproduces Ruth Luborsky and Betty Ingram's classification of adapted, copied, emplematic, narrative, representational, and symbolic images.
  King treats sponsored, sanctioned, and spontaneous artworks as equally representative of authorized Tudor aesthetics.
• Sententiae: "These illustrations [from Acts and Monuments] differ from most prior English work in the attention devoted to detail, but they retain the tendency toward verticality that is a traditional hallmark of native design... When [John] Day commissioned woodblocks for the books he published, he played the central role of artistic 'middleman' so successfully that he gained a reputation as the publisher of the finest illustrated books of sixteenth-century England... In general, woodcut images are subordinate to the texts in which they appear. For this reason, and because the author's extensive printed commentary offers a detailed program containing many allusions to imagistic details and cross-references to the body of history, Foxe must have joined Day in planning the woodcut series. He might have designed some of the sketches for illustrations" (133-4).

Overstanding

• Assessment: King's survey provides excellent through-lines for the turbulent Tudor periods. There are moments when he explicitly repeats or re-explains Davidic imagery, but that's a minor sin.
• Synthesis: Like Fowler, King relies on the mutual intelligibility of multiple arts and texts. But unlike Fowler, King does not treat narrative or perspectival image-texts as allegorically or politically structured.
• Application: King's analysis could be extended to explain the influence of politics on structure or perspective of images and texts, on the invitation of Fowler.