'The Portrait and National Identity'
Wednesday 29 August 2007
A picture tells a thousand words, or indeed many, many more.
Dr David Starkey delivers his Caldwell Lecture
Dr David Starkey's Caldwell Lecture examined a pivotal moment in the development of the modern political imagination where the rise of representational portraiture combined with the invention of moveable-type printing saw the emergence of a new type of political art, one that had powerful impact on the outcome of the English Reformation. The pictorial representation of the act of writing, and then of books, which reached a zenith with Quentin Massys's famous portraits of Erasmus and Pierre Gillis, transformed from being a symbol of the soul of the figure represented, into an explicit expression of the will of the ruling class, above all the King.
Such portraits, the master of whom was Hans Holbein the Younger, are, literally, texts that can be read as much as images to be interpreted visually.
Dr Peter Tregear, Dean.