Me, me, me … the Elizabethan earl who kept portrait painters busy for 30 years

[snokitty]

Me, me, me ? the Elizabethan earl who kept portrait painters busy for 30 years | Art and design | The Guardian

If you can tell a person by their collection of paintings, what are we to make of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who commissioned more portraits of himself than any other courtier in Elizabethan England?

"If he lived today, we'd probably call him a selfie-addict," said the historian Elizabeth Goldring, who has uncovered details of Dudley's extraordinary collection for a new study of the man who probably won the heart, although not the hand, of Elizabeth I.

Goldring has discovered that Dudley commissioned at least 20 portraits of himself over 30 years. "Of course it is entirely possible he commissioned more than 20," she said.

"However you look at it, he was commissioning vastly more portraits of himself than any other courtier in Elizabethan England. I'm not sure any of the continental Renaissance princes could quite match Dudley's statistics."

He was clearly a man of high self-regard. "I'm sure vanity came into it but I think he was also very astute about the ways in which images could be used to shape perceptions of himself and his family, both in the eyes of contemporaries and posterity."

Goldring, associate fellow at Warwick University's centre for the study of the Renaissance, has spent two decades researching Dudley, piecing together 20 separate inventories of his collection dotted around in different places.

"The really exciting bit has been watching these pieces of the jigsaw falling into place over time."

Most Elizabethan aristocrats sat for portraits perhaps once or twice in their lives. Between Elizabeth's accession to the throne in 1558 and his own death aged 56 in 1588, Dudley sat, on average, once every 18 months.

[HistoryGirl]

This is believable.

[TLLK]

And I'm grateful to the fact that we know have these pieces to help understand the era.