Tea at Trianon: The Aged Elizabeth

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, July 18, 2015

The Aged Elizabeth

From The Guardian:

Elizabeth I ruled a much bigger territory than Isabella, and got a law made in England prohibiting the circulation of unflattering portraits of her. Elizabeth's portraits are notoriously fictitious in always showing her as a pearly-skinned icon of Renaissance beauty even when she was old. This is what makes a newly revealed portrait of her from the workshop of Marcus Gheeraerts so remarkable.

The portrait shows an unmistakably ageing Elizabeth, her wrinkles unconcealed by makeup, with heavy, dark lines under her eyes. The reality of fleshly deterioration and melancholy age is revealed almost as brutally as in a notorious portrait of the present Elizabeth by Lucian Freud. The glittering crown on Elizabeth I's head in the 1590s painting, the extravagant lace collar and jewels seem almost ironic surroundings for a face that is not just time-marked but miserable. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, as one of her subjects wrote.

Marcus Gheeraerts, whose studio seems to have produced this portrait, usually gave Elizabeth a far more idealised aspect. In his glittering Ditchley Portrait, she stands in a silver dress on top of a map of southern England, a beautiful colossus seen against a stormy sky in which the sun is breaking through. The story behind this painting reveals the culture in which Elizabeth had to be beautiful. It was commissioned by the courtier Henry Lee after Elizabeth got angry with him for taking a mistress: the painting commemorates her forgiveness. She is the fairy queen, taking pity on Lee. (Read more.)