Art and Patronage in Late Medieval England
To accompany the major exhibition opening at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Janet Backhouse explores the varied roles of patronage in the art of the later Middle Ages.
A major exhibition of late medieval art opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London this October. Entitled ‘Gothic: Art for England 1400-1547’, it presents a comprehensive range of treasures, from acknowledged masterpieces of painting, sculpture and goldsmiths’ work to the relatively humble but nonetheless fascinating accessories of everyday life. Concentrating on the fifteenth century and the reigns of the first two Tudor kings, it embraces the introduction of printing, the discovery of the New World and the initial stages of the Reformation, now widely regarded as stepping stones to the modern world. The iconoclasm of Protestant reformers in the century after the death of Henry VIII was, of course, to be responsible for the widespread destruction of much medieval art in England, a major proportion of which was bound up with the church, so what we have today is largely dependent upon the arbitrary lottery of survival.
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