The Tudors and Renaissance England at the Met

I thought the Wall Street Journal review (might be behind a paywall!) was interesting, because it starts off by mentioning what's NOT in the Exhibition:

This is no stroll through the long gallery of Tudor-era celebrity. Sir Thomas More, the speaker of truth to power in Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” is here in Hans Holbein the Younger’s remorseless portrait of 1527, but More’s nemesis Thomas Cromwell, the manipulative meritocrat of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” is absent. Sea dogs such as Sir Francis Drake, the first man to circumnavigate the globe and survive, or lifelong diplomats like William Howard, who served four of the five Tudor monarchs, are nowhere at all. Of the all-rounders who exemplified the ideal of the Renaissance man, Sir Walter Raleigh appears only as the source of a set of porcelain and gilt “China dishes,” and Sir Philip Sidney, the soldier-poet who pioneered a theory of English literature, is missing in action. There are no portraits of Shakespeare, either.

That's because The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England is not aimed a collecting lots of portraits from the Tudor era, but exploring the uses of art to display power and majesty, as reviewer Dominic Green explains:

Curated by the Metropolitan Museum’s Elizabeth Cleland and Adam Eaker, and gathering more than 100 objects from an impressive range of collections, this exhibition instead reframes the Tudors as patrons building a political myth. Its introductory gallery and five thematic zones (such as “Public and Private Faces,” “Languages of Ornament,” “Allegories and Icons”) catch the long arc of image projection.

Even if one can't go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the museum's website for the exhibit might be the next best thing to being there, as it provides 131-page booklet, the audio guide, and detailed visiting guide.

One more comment of Green's I cannot pass without my own reaction:

The imagery of power struggled to mask the political reality of dynastic weakness. His heir, the sickly boy-king Edward VI, died in 1553. Edward’s Catholic half-sister, Mary (reign 1553-1558), burned heretics as well as books, and preferred prayer to patronage.

Mary is the odd woman out in the Tudor lineup. The only Catholic among Henry VIII’s children, she risked England’s independence by marrying Philip II of Spain. Here, however, her familiar portrait by Hans Eworth emerges as a template of continuity, a source for the images of her half-sister, Elizabeth.

The second paragraph rather belies the first, doesn't it? It demonstrates that Mary I both understood her predecessor's use of portraiture to convey majesty, and provided Elizabeth I with a model for a female monarch. Also, his comment ignores the facts that Mary I was engaged, through her Archbishop of Canterbury and the surviving faithfully Catholic bishops, with restoring Catholic churches and teaching in the five years she reigned. While Green does mention that Henry VIII had that Catholic patrimony of art and books burned in the paragraph above, he doesn't mention that her father also burned--or hanged, drawn and quartered or mercifully beheaded--heretics, Catholic or Protestant.