Spectacle and Power: Apollo & Solomon at the Court of Henry VIII
The transition of Henry VIII from Renaissance monarch to the Reformation patriarch, supreme head of the Church of England can be charted through the visual images of spectacle and power emanating from the royal court.
In 1547 Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, gave signal testimony to the importance of visual information in the Tudor state. 'Images', he said, uphold, 'religion and the state of the world with it.' Images proclaimed and secured the social and political order: 'And specially the nobility, who by images set forth and spread abroad, to be read of all people, their lineage and parentage, with remembrance of their state and acts.’
The heraldic apparatus to which Gardiner refers, with its pennants and badges, emblems and arms, made, and continues to make, a potent appeal to the eyes. In the sixteenth century, as Gardiner reminds us, heraldic imagery achieved precise identification of particular families, and secured a vivid display of aristocratic power.
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