The Queen's Alman

Up listening to what I read once somewhere was 'our Dread Sovereign's' favorite Alman, Orlando Gibbon's 'The Queen's Alman.'  Which, on a time, I have played myself, and not much worse (I complacently note) than this full-voiced virginals version.  

Speaking of whom (Elizabeth Tudor), I often muse on the strange encounter I had once with one of her official 'diplomatic' portraits, in, of all places, a 'Museo Pinacoteca' in Siena.  I was with my Renaissance Art class on one of our not infrequent field trips to see repositories of mostly pre-Renaissance (pre-perspective) art, of which there is an overwhelming lot in Italy (They don't throw anything away, seemingly).  When you see room after room filled with pre-perspective art, the cumulative effect on your seeing-habit is much the same as seeing a lot of post-perspective ("modern") art:  Without your being aware of it, you abandon your "normal" view of a painting as an approximation of a photograph, or as a window onto or into something.  Instead, what you begin to notice first in paintings are their over-all patterns and color-masses, which give you their immediate sense; and then, as you approach, you become aware of isolated fragments, groupings and details within the paintings, from which, by reflection and ratiocination, you derive their significance.  You can, and do, go back and forth between sense and significance in non-perspective painting, but you never have the constant, unconsciously arrogant "self-evidence" of perspective.  So, when our class walked from the rooms containing pre-Renaissance religious painting into the first of the rooms containing late 15th century painting, I said rather loudly, "E poi, hanno imparato a disegnare!"  Which won snarky snickers from my classmates, and a rueful chuckle from our instructor.   What was funny-odd though, was that re-entering the "rational modern" world of automatic perspectival vision--while it brought everything into focus, and seemed to dispell the cobwebs at the edge of one's perceptions--it did not evoke a sensation of "beauty" so much as one of ease and comfort; rather like opening the windows of a room that without your noticing it has got stuffy.

But back to il ritratto ufficiale e diplomatico di Elisabetta I di Inglaterra.  So, having "progressed" yet once again to, and through, the clear splendors of perspectival painting, the thirteen or fourteen young persons, and me, of the Renaissance Art class of the Università per Stranieri di Siena were filing down the broad backstairs of the Museo Pinacoteca, headed out--and there, on a landing about halfway down, suddenly staring out at me was one of Queen Bess's official diplomatic portraits; one of dozens that were made to pattern, with only the face painted in "live" (apparently after an original considered a good likeness), and handed out to envoys all over Europe.  I've seen three or four, and most biographies of Elizabeth have one in the illustrations; it's a three-quarters "head-shot" that clearly shows the striking resemblance between her and her grandfather Henry VII:  What a face!  even in its official, death-mask guise, there's no mistaking it.  And there was no title, nothing in the catalog; it was called simply "ritratto di una donna inglese."  But anybody who knows Elizabeth, and her grandfather, knows who it is.