The Cult of Elizabeth

The Cult of Elizabeth
Author: Roy C. Strong
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 1986-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520058408

No other woman in world history has been of such compulsive interest as Elizabeth Tudor. While the rest of the 16th-century Europe was subject to the bloodshed of religious war, Tudor peace brought England its great flowering of the arts. Central to that flowering was the enigmatic legend of the Queen herself, a myth deliberately created and sustained over four decades by public spectacle and courtly chivalry, by private sonnet and official oration.

Joachim Wtewael

Joachim Wtewael
Author: Anne W. Lowenthal
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 96
Release: 1995
Genre: Mars (Roman deity)
ISBN: 0892363045

The Dutch history painter Joachim Wtewael is widely admired for his astonishing small paintings on copper. The Getty Museum's Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan is one of his finest works in this unusually demanding medium. Though only eight inches high, this Mannerist painting contains eleven figures in three different spaces, captured in a dramatically charged moment from the famous story told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The author's detailed analysis of Wtewael's painting also serves as a fine introduction to Dutch art of the Golden Age. Illustrated with seventy reproductions of paintings, drawings, etchings, and decorative objects, Anne W. Lowenthal's study ranges over the broad historical and cultural context in which Mars and Venus was created.