"Politics, Print Images and the Royal Favourite in the 1620s" by Alastair Bellany

CITATION: Bellany, Alastair. "Buckingham Engraved: Politics, Print Images and the Royal Favourite in the 1620s." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 215-235. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did print images respond to the popular conception of the Duke of Buckingham?
• Answer: Print images variously endorsed Buckingham's courtly persona, maturity, or martial skills. 
• Method: Bellany seeks to "capture fully the political significance of printed images of the duke [by] locat[ing] them within the complex dynamics of specific political contexts that could shift, complicate, and multiply any one image's political meanings." He surveys a progression of print images of the Duke as an expansion of early modern political history.
• Assumptions: Bellany subscribes to a view that aims to expand the variety of aesthetic artifacts under consideration in "the new political-cultural history". Yet he's ironically mute regarding the restrictions on the means of production surrounding these artifacts: there is no discussion of the expense, sales, or circulation of any of these illustrations.
• Sententiae: "The equestrian motif is key to the image's political meanings: the rider on horseback was a palyvalent image of government, widely used in this horse-centered culture to represent imperial, monarchic, chivalric, military, and aristocratic power... So standard was the imagery that the [Willem] de Passe engraving itself was twice recut to represent new figures: in the early 1630s Buckingham's body and face were replaced  by those of the Marquis of Hamilton, then fighting in the Swedish army in Germany, and after 1653 Hamilton's head and collar were replaced by Oliver Cromwell's." (223)
  "A rather different printed product is the single-sheet broadside published by the cheap print specialist John Wright... But placed in a commanding typographic position is a stock woodcut image of an (anachronistically) armoured knight on horseback, intended to depict Buckingham whose titles and offices were listed prominently above. Similar generic woodcuts of knights on horseback illustrated a variety of cheap print in this period... Wright's woodcut was a stock image, not an engraved portrait, but it may nevertheless have served to associate Buckingham visually with a popularly genealogy of mythic and historical chivalric forbears." (227) 

Overstanding

• Assessment: This is a article with a relatively small audience and application, and an article without an exceptionally theoretical or provocative thesis. It is proficient in its readings and coverage, but it seems like background research for a larger project. The most notable finding regards the re-use of de Passe's engraving for Carolingian and Republican causes.
• Synthesis: Like King, Bellany describes printed images as consequent to or contingent upon politics, culture, and other components of history. But unlike King, Bellany does not trace out the roots of Buckingham's representation in religious or civic traditions. Like Pierce, Bellany traces the representation of a powerful political figure through a print-illustrative tradition. But unlike Pierce, Bellany does not consider the printed image as reciprocally constituitive in Buckingham's reputation.
• Application: It would be interesting to trace the consequences of Buckingham's representations: Did the publishers profit in patronage for their propaganda? Did Buckingham's rivals and detractors engage with this sort of printed image, or did they patronize caricature artists? And how were the adapted images of Hamilton and Cromwell received with the same sartorial trappings as Buckingham?