Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Please be reminded that on 3rd November at 6 p.m. Dr. Elizabeth
Goldring will speak to us on
‘Princely Pleasures: The Picture Collection of Robert Dudley
(1532/3-1588), Earl of Leicester.’
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was one of the most colourful,
fascinating, and controversial people of his day. Although best known
today as Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite (and the most militant Protestant
at her court), Leicester was also the most important and innovative
patron of painters and collector of paintings at the Elizabethan court.
With the help of his nephew and heir, the poet-courtier Sir Philip
Sidney, Leicester amassed a substantial collection of art, including
commissioned works by Nicholas Hilliard, Hendrick Goltzius, François
Clouet, Paolo Veronese and Federico Zuccaro. Leicester also fostered the
birth of an English vernacular discourse on the visual arts and was an
early exponent, in England, of the Italian Renaissance view of the
painter as the practitioner of a liberal art and, thus, fit company for
the educated and well-born. In spite of the fact that Leicester’s
pictures and personal papers were widely dispersed in the immediate
aftermath of his death, new archival research has permitted Elizabeth
Goldring to bring to life this lost world – and with it, a turning point
in the history of British collecting. Drawing on the findings presented
in her newly published book, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the
World of Elizabethan Art: Painting and Patronage at the Court of
Elizabeth I (YUP/The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art,
2014), Dr Goldring will provide an overview of Leicester’s picture
collection and of the broader cultural environment in which it was
created and experienced.
Dr. Goldring is an Associate Fellow of the Centre for the Study of the
Renaissance at the University of Warwick. She is the author of /Robert
Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the World of Elizabethan Art: Painting
and Patronage at the Court of Elizabeth I/, which has just been
published by Yale University Press/The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in
British Art, and General Editor of John Nichols’s The Progresses and
Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early
Modern Sources, which was published in five volumes by Oxford University
Press earlier this year.
The seminar takes place at The Institute of Historical Research, Senate
House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU.
We look forward to welcoming you.
Susan Bracken Andrea M. Gáldy Adriana Turpin
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