ABSTRACT
The visual arts in Elizabethan England have until relatively recently been heldin what can only be described as cultural disdain. The opening sentence of the 1964 volume Sculpture in Britain, 1530-1830, which was to remain the standard textbook on the subject for the next thirty years, declared that ‘The history of English sculpture in the sixteenth century is a sorry tale.’1 The equivalent standard history of painting dismissed Elizabethan portraiture as ‘of an even mediocrity’.2
A similar contempt was broadcast to a wider public by Kenneth Clark in his magisterial survey, Civilisation (1969), in which he considered it ‘debatable how far Elizabethan England can be called civilised’.3 His dilemma was only alleviated by recalling such names as Shakespeare, Spenser, Dowland and Byrd. Within this list of poets and musicians there was clearly no place for individuals associated with the visual arts. It would appear that Elizabethan England had singularly failed to produce its Michelangelo, its Titian or even its native successor to Holbein.
