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Political Allegory, Absolutist Ideology, and the “Rainbow Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Daniel Fischlin
Daniel Fischlin*
Affiliation:
The University of Guelph
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Extract

It is somewhat surprising, given the nature of royal investment in various forms of political and religious iconography associated with Renaissance portraiture, that the well-known “Rainbow Portrait” (c. 1600-03; fig. 1) of Queen Elizabeth I, held by Robert Cecil, Lord of Salisbury at Hatfield House, but of unknown provenance, has not received sufficient attention to its political allegories. Much has been made of the religious symbolism associated with the portrait, especially by René Graziani, who argues, for example, that “Elizabeth wears the gauntlet on her ruff in right of her title, Fidei Defensor, official champion of the Christian religion” (255), and that the hair style of the Queen with its “Thessalonian bride allusion … [contributes] to the sponsa Dei theme” (259).

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 175 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1997

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Footnotes

*

I am indebted to Ann Rosalind Jones, Julia Burnside, and Leslie Marshall for their help in locating some obscure references at a late stage in the writing of this essay. I also wish to thank Andrew Taylor for his perspicuous comments on my argument.

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