ITP 91: Elizabeth I: The Rainbow Portrait attributed to Isaac Oliver
Today is the anniversary of Elizabeth I’s coronation as Queen of England, so this week’s picture is the so-called Rainbow Portrait, which has been attributed to Isaac Oliver and which hangs, as it has done for centuries, in Hatfield House. Oliver was known as a miniaturist, so if he did paint this half life-size portrait it is by some distance his largest surviving work. The attribution, which seems plausible, rests on his known links with Hatfield’s owner Robert Cecil and on the miniaturist’s attention to detail manifest throughout the painting.
Elizabeth stands before a dark archway holding a rainbow above which is inscribed the Latin motto “NON SINE SOLE IRIS”: no rainbow without a sun. With her other hand she lightly touches the hem of her extraordinarily ornate cloak, painted partly in gold leaf and decorated with human eyes and ears. One of its sleeves is prominently decorated with a jewelled serpent. The queen also wears a bodice decorated with flowers, three pearl necklaces, several bracelets, a brooch in the form of a cross and a fantstically ornate head-dress. Her outfit is completed by an open standing ruff, a gauzy transparent veil and a ballooning diaphanous lace-embroidered collar of such extent it makes her resemble some strange hybrid of human being and winged insect.
Elizabeth I was getting on for 70 when the picture was painted, but she has not been made to look it. She controlled her own public image rigorously. Her portraitists knew that in the world of art she was to be frozen in perpetual youth. There is something slightly quizzical about the look on her face, as if she is challenging the viewer to decode the meaning of the complicated allegory behind which she has been veiled. Elizabeth enjoyed codes and ciphers and intellectual games. She set puzzles for her courtiers and they responded in kind. On one occasion her Secretary of State, William Cecil, wrote to his son Robert – the owner of this picture – about an “Allegorical Letter” which he had challenged her to decipher. He had been impressed by the speed with which she solved its meaning: “I think never a lady … nor a decipherer in the court would have dissolved the figure as Her Majesty hath done.”
The first modern historian to attempt to crack the code of The Rainbow Portrait was Frances Yates. She found keys to its meaning in Cesare Ripa’s late sixteenth-century Iconologia, a popular handbook of symbols, allegories and emblems. Yates noted the strong resemblance between Elizabeth in the painting shown here and Fama, or Fame, which Ripa describes as a winged figure, “having as many eyes as she has feathers, also many mouths and ears.” So the eyes and ears on her cloak may symbolise Elizabeth’s Fame, which is flying through the world, seen and heard by multitudes.
Ripa’s book also includes a description of Intelligence represented by a woman holding a celestial or armillary sphere together with a serpent. Just above the serpent’s head embroidered on Elizabeth’s dress there is, indeed, an armillary sphere, encircled by the band of the zodiac. This unusual conjunction of symbols signifies that in order to understand the highest and most sublime things we must start on the ground, like the serpent.
The painting contains a multitude of other meaningful details. The pearls with which she is festooned allude to the unmarried queen’s virginity. The jewelled crescent moon in her head-dress identifies her with Diana, the chaste huntress. Her bodice, embroidered with pansies, honeysuckle and cowslips, recalls descriptions of Elizabeth in the work of contemporary poets, who compared her to Astraea, the Just Virgin of the Golden Age, a time of perpetual spring when the world was a meadow filled with wild flowers. She has brought a new Golden Age to England. Her most prominent symbolic attribute completes this pattern of associations. The rainbow, which comes after storms, signifies serenity and peace. “No rainbow without a sun”, reads the inscription above it. Elizabeth is, herself, the sun: the radiant centre of all, the unmoved mover.
All this is to see the picture simply as a courtly eulogy of the queen, but that may not be the end of its meaning. In 1986 Steven Dedijer, a Swedish expert in the history of intelligence, came up with a fascinating new theory, seeing the picture as a coded political statement about the importance of the Elizabethan secret service. Dedijer’s argument, which rests on the potential motives of Robert Cecil in commissioning the painting, seems fairly compelling to me.
During the 1590s Robert Cecil had taken over the management of an unparalleled network of spies and secret agents first established by Elizabeth’s “spymaster general”, Francis Walsingham. He was, in effect, one of the very first heads of what was eventually to become MI5. His principal strategy was aimed at averting all-out war with Catholic Europe. He used the intelligence gathered by agents all over Europe to foil attempts to invade England and to snuff out the many “popish” plots to assassinate the country’s resolutely Protestant queen. English intelligence was the envy of the world – it was said by one observer that thanks to her spies Elizabeth knew more about the composition of the armada than the King of Spain himself – and its effectiveness had transformed the fortunes of the nation. By 1600, the Catholic powers of Europe had largely given up their ideas of conquering the country; Elizabeth’s personal safety had been secured; and the nation was at peace with itself and its continental neighbours.
Steven Dedijer argues that The Rainbow Portrait celebrates the effectiveness of English espionage as well as hymning the praises of the queen. I think he is right. The eyes and ears on the queen’s cloak, in this interpretation, do not represent her Fame, but the British secret service that has protected her and given her political guidance. The hidden theme of the painting, the appropriately coded message concealed within the code of courtly praise of a monarch, is that peace and national security can only be guaranteed by the maintenance of a totally effective, all-seeing, all-hearing intelligence service. So although it might seem at first like a picture safely embalmed in the long-distant past it is, in fact, distinctly topical.
Date: 13-01-2002
Owning Institution: Hatfield House
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
Renaissance
Today is the anniversary of Elizabeth I’s coronation as Queen of England, so this week’s picture is the so-called Rainbow Portrait, which has been attributed to Isaac Oliver and which hangs, as it has done for centuries, in Hatfield House. Oliver was known as a miniaturist, so if he did paint this half life-size portrait it is by some distance his largest surviving work. The attribution, which seems plausible, rests on his known links with Hatfield’s owner Robert Cecil and on the miniaturist’s attention to detail manifest throughout the painting.Elizabeth stands before a dark archway holding a rainbow above which is inscribed the Latin motto “NON SINE SOLE IRIS”: no rainbow without a sun. With her other hand she lightly touches the hem of her extraordinarily ornate cloak, painted partly in gold leaf and decorated with human eyes and ears. One of its sleeves is prominently decorated with a jewelled serpent. The queen also wears a bodice decorated with flowers, three pearl necklaces, several bracelets, a brooch in the form of a cross and a fantstically ornate head-dress. Her outfit is completed by an open standing ruff, a gauzy transparent veil and a ballooning diaphanous lace-embroidered collar of such extent it makes her resemble some strange hybrid of human being and winged insect.
Elizabeth I was getting on for 70 when the picture was painted, but she has not been made to look it. She controlled her own public image rigorously. Her portraitists knew that in the world of art she was to be frozen in perpetual youth. There is something slightly quizzical about the look on her face, as if she is challenging the viewer to decode the meaning of the complicated allegory behind which she has been veiled. Elizabeth enjoyed codes and ciphers and intellectual games. She set puzzles for her courtiers and they responded in kind. On one occasion her Secretary of State, William Cecil, wrote to his son Robert – the owner of this picture – about an “Allegorical Letter” which he had challenged her to decipher. He had been impressed by the speed with which she solved its meaning: “I think never a lady … nor a decipherer in the court would have dissolved the figure as Her Majesty hath done.”
The first modern historian to attempt to crack the code of The Rainbow Portrait was Frances Yates. She found keys to its meaning in Cesare Ripa’s late sixteenth-century Iconologia, a popular handbook of symbols, allegories and emblems. Yates noted the strong resemblance between Elizabeth in the painting shown here and Fama, or Fame, which Ripa describes as a winged figure, “having as many eyes as she has feathers, also many mouths and ears.” So the eyes and ears on her cloak may symbolise Elizabeth’s Fame, which is flying through the world, seen and heard by multitudes.
Ripa’s book also includes a description of Intelligence represented by a woman holding a celestial or armillary sphere together with a serpent. Just above the serpent’s head embroidered on Elizabeth’s dress there is, indeed, an armillary sphere, encircled by the band of the zodiac. This unusual conjunction of symbols signifies that in order to understand the highest and most sublime things we must start on the ground, like the serpent.
The painting contains a multitude of other meaningful details. The pearls with which she is festooned allude to the unmarried queen’s virginity. The jewelled crescent moon in her head-dress identifies her with Diana, the chaste huntress. Her bodice, embroidered with pansies, honeysuckle and cowslips, recalls descriptions of Elizabeth in the work of contemporary poets, who compared her to Astraea, the Just Virgin of the Golden Age, a time of perpetual spring when the world was a meadow filled with wild flowers. She has brought a new Golden Age to England. Her most prominent symbolic attribute completes this pattern of associations. The rainbow, which comes after storms, signifies serenity and peace. “No rainbow without a sun”, reads the inscription above it. Elizabeth is, herself, the sun: the radiant centre of all, the unmoved mover.
All this is to see the picture simply as a courtly eulogy of the queen, but that may not be the end of its meaning. In 1986 Steven Dedijer, a Swedish expert in the history of intelligence, came up with a fascinating new theory, seeing the picture as a coded political statement about the importance of the Elizabethan secret service. Dedijer’s argument, which rests on the potential motives of Robert Cecil in commissioning the painting, seems fairly compelling to me.
During the 1590s Robert Cecil had taken over the management of an unparalleled network of spies and secret agents first established by Elizabeth’s “spymaster general”, Francis Walsingham. He was, in effect, one of the very first heads of what was eventually to become MI5. His principal strategy was aimed at averting all-out war with Catholic Europe. He used the intelligence gathered by agents all over Europe to foil attempts to invade England and to snuff out the many “popish” plots to assassinate the country’s resolutely Protestant queen. English intelligence was the envy of the world – it was said by one observer that thanks to her spies Elizabeth knew more about the composition of the armada than the King of Spain himself – and its effectiveness had transformed the fortunes of the nation. By 1600, the Catholic powers of Europe had largely given up their ideas of conquering the country; Elizabeth’s personal safety had been secured; and the nation was at peace with itself and its continental neighbours.
Steven Dedijer argues that The Rainbow Portrait celebrates the effectiveness of English espionage as well as hymning the praises of the queen. I think he is right. The eyes and ears on the queen’s cloak, in this interpretation, do not represent her Fame, but the British secret service that has protected her and given her political guidance. The hidden theme of the painting, the appropriately coded message concealed within the code of courtly praise of a monarch, is that peace and national security can only be guaranteed by the maintenance of a totally effective, all-seeing, all-hearing intelligence service. So although it might seem at first like a picture safely embalmed in the long-distant past it is, in fact, distinctly topical.
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