The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I of England is the name of any of three surviving versions of an allegorical panel painting depicting the Tudor queen surrounded by symbols of imperial majesty against a backdrop representing the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
The combination of a life-sized portrait of the queen with a horizontal format is "quite unprecedented in her portraiture", although allegorical portraits in this format, such as the...
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The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I of England is the name of any of three surviving versions of an allegorical panel painting depicting the Tudor queen surrounded by symbols of imperial majesty against a backdrop representing the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
The combination of a life-sized portrait of the queen with a horizontal format is "quite unprecedented in her portraiture", although allegorical portraits in this format, such as the Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory of the Tudor Succession (1572) attributed to Lucas de Heere, pre-date the Armada Portrait.
English art in this period was isolated from trends in Catholic Italy, and owed more to Flemish manuscript illumination and heraldic representation than to Renaissance ideas of unity in time and space in art. The Armada Portrait is no exception: the chair to the right is viewed from two different angles, as are the tables on the left, and the background shows two different stages in the defeat of the Armada. In the...
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