![]() Looking back … Portrait of a Young Lady by Bartolomeo Veneto, c 1500-10. Henry sent Holbein to portray her, smiling enigmatically in a painting that’s now in the National Gallery, and fell in love – he claimed – with the image. The monkey-like three-year- old at the right of the group is Christina, who would later be sought as a wife by Henry VIII of England, when she was still just 16 and already a widow. Jan Gossaert’s The Three Children of Christian II of Denmark shows young children with pungently characterful, comically chubby faces: ordinary kids who will one day be beautified for the marriage market. He seems to have died alone of plague in London – no one bothered to give him a marked grave – so it’s comforting to picture him sitting in his neighbour’s garden, sketching Jane to mark her betrothal.Īnother woman who was to be portrayed by Holbein appears here as a toddler. This artist left his own family in Basel when he came to London to make a living at Henry VIII’s court. She was not a member of one of Europe’s great families like other people here but the wife of a London merchant who happened to live near Holbein. This intense, almost occult shrinking of Jane Small is a rarity in more ways than one. His little circular portrait of Mrs Jane Small, done in about 1540, shows her patiently posing, eyes down, a red carnation round her neck. Hans Holbein was a pioneer of the miniature, a pocket-sized portrait, minute enough to carry an image of your lover on your person. If the portrait of Madeleine of France is a delicate token, love’s portraits got even more tiny and intense in Tudor England. There are no crass characterisations, conclusions or rushed judgments here – rather a gentle interrogation of these ghosts. The lives of these people are shadows in time, whispers from a lost world. But its real, more tantalising theme is the emotional lives those portraits may reveal. Painted Love offers itself as a simple survey of how portraiture was used in Renaissance Europe to advertise potential mates and celebrate marriages. Photograph: © The National Gallery, London Portrait of a Lady by Alesso Baldovinetti, c 1426–1499. She died just a couple of months after he got her home to Edinburgh. In spite of that, and against the rules of arranged marriage, James V of Scotland seems to have fallen for her sincerely, severing his previous engagement and getting wed in Notre-Dame. A tiny painting by Corneille de Lyon depicts Madeleine, fifth child of Francis I of France: such paintings of young women were adverts to attract princely husbands, but the artist is honest enough to show Madeleine as frail and unhealthy. The higher up you went in the sociopolitical stratosphere, the more hung on who you got hitched to. He and Sybilla could afford to join the European elite captured in this show, which spans the rulers and super-rich of a continent and follows their marital intrigues. Jacob was a rich Fugger, the head of Germany’s leading commercial family. A possessive gesture or a tender one? Burgkmair leaves us to guess. How much can you read in their faces, their touching hands? In Hans Burgkmair the Elder’s Marriage Portrait of Jakob Fugger and Sybilla Arzt, painted in 1498, this Augsburg banker and his wife stand with pinched formality, but he puts a hand round her arm. L ove, death, marriage and power haunt the single, darkened room where this exhibition invites you to contemplate people who lived half a thousand years ago.
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