Tatiana String provides an extremely valuable analysis of visual culture in the reign of Henry VIII, through methodologies of “the new art history,” a polyvalent development that proposes both new objects of investigation and new interdisciplinary approaches. String declares her intention to move away from “the artist-as-creative-genius orthodoxies,” which she sees as limiting our view of Henrician media in their attention to the centrality of the works of Hans Holbein the Younger (1). Certainly, her focus is wide ranging: coinage, tapestry, civic pageants, Anne Boleyn’s coronation, miniatures, woodcuts, and, yes, portraits. Her approach borrows from the framework of speech act theory as first delineated by the legal scholar J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA, 1955), a work that has enjoyed an eclectic afterlife in a wide range of disciplines. String therefore studies attempts to “do things” with visual culture.

String provides a nuanced consideration of the potential “viewership” for images and spectacles (often very small) and posits a “sliding scale of intentionality” (29) for them: those designed to display royal magnificence, those that engaged in rhetorical persuasion, and those that she sees as fiercely mounted propaganda. In chapter 1, String provides a wide range of examples for each. She then uses her scheme in three chapters: “Portraits and Communication,” “Prints and Propaganda,” and “Art Appreciation.”

String’s examples are instructive and persuasive. Henry’s performance of magnificence as a princely duty is in evidence throughout his reign. String observes that Thomas Wolsey was the chief curator for such display in the first twenty years of the reign and argues that, compared with his own considerable display of magnificence, Wolsey tempered in Henry the “hegemony of Italian modernism,” strategically maintaining English tradition in the “mise-en-scène of royal ‘theatre’” (21).

“Persuasiveness,” then, is to be found in displays “with the precise intention of communicating specific ideas to clearly identified and delineated groups of targeted viewers” (29). String sees the Whitehall Mural of the King and his family, painted in 1537 by Hans Holbein the Younger on a wall of the Privy Chamber, as exemplary (although some historians have called it propaganda). Clearly aimed at a select and learned viewership, such works are conveyors of “royal ideology” (30).

“Propaganda” is to be found where there is a “perceptible intensification of the communicative loading of art,” notably present during the 1530s, when the goal was not simply to persuade courtiers but rather to transform the masses (30). For the literate, there were massive quantities of printed material by “propagandists” under the direction of Cromwell. String sees such theatrical events as the antipapal spectacle on the Thames in 1539, post Henry’s excommunication and as England was threatened by invasion, as carefully staged for all of London. The King and his courtiers were themselves a focal point, under rose-covered bowers from which flowed rose water down on the viewers in boats below.

In her chapter on portraiture, String argues that Henry’s artists “pitched their works in anticipation of the viewer’s capabilities and experiences” (45). Here Henry self-fashions himself as masculine and potent. Spring next looks at printed works that contain images. Her research here contributes to our understanding of the actual dearth of such images in works printed in England during the period, in relation, for example, to Germany. The cause is not to be found in an examination of aesthetic or political intentions, or in a lack of native talent, but rather in “an inadequate technical infrastructure” (103). Nevertheless, she finds in the title pages of the Coverdale and Great Bibles (1535 and 1539) an active set of images, with complementary text designed to both legitimate Henry as gift giver of the English Bible and call English readers to take action to change themselves from within.

String’s all-encompassing look at visual culture in Henrician England is likely to be inspiring to art historians, useful and sometimes challenging to historians of the Tudor period, and complementary to current work by literary and performance scholars, although some may find her taxonomy of messaging and intentionality unconvincing or underdeveloped. Her final chapter, however, in my view contributes the book’s most original and important thesis in its reconsideration of art and aesthetics in early Tudor England. In “Art Appreciation,” String observes that in contrast to continental endeavors, “there was virtually nothing that could be construed as ‘art theory’ emanating from England during the reign” (111). Nevertheless, she provides important new evidence to suggest that art may have been appreciated as art in the period. She finds commentary on the value of artistic practice and aesthetic beauty in such works as Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governor and in the poetry of John Leland. Most convincingly, however, String examines three exhaustive inventories from the 1540s of Henry VIII’s “moveable possessions … [including] several hundred paintings” and their specific locations in the King’s residences (123). She finds that the paintings were hung in the long galleries of the several palaces, thus establishing them as “exhibition spaces” (126), as would become the fashion in the homes of later Tudor elites. In the inventories as well are numerous devotional images (many of the Virgin Mary). These works, although clearly created to inspire Catholic devotion, were not grouped together, as were other portraits by subject, but were dispersed in the galleries. She deduces that these images were “intended to provoke reactions on the basis of their aesthetic and technical qualities alone” (129). The galleries were thus “art spaces,” and these formerly devotional works were “redeployed to create the shock of the new” through the desacrilizing work of context (131).