I found the names of the hypertrichosis family. The father was Petrus Gonsalvus, born 1556 (death date uncertain). The little girl above was named Antoinetta. Their portraits were hung in Schloss Ambras. They were Spanish peasants and regarded as curiosities (though surprisingly not as unholy considering the age) and basically had comfortable livings as resident freaks for the nobility and portraits of them were very popular throughout Europe.
As with most families in which hypertrichosis appears, some members were born perfectly normal and others with the condition. There’s a famous Mexican familyof circus perfromers with the condition. What I always thought was admirable was that the teenaged brothers who joined the circus only did so if they’d be trained on the trapeze and not just sideshow attractions, and while they have no intentions of treatment themselves they’ve used some of their earnings for electrolysis and other treatments for the girls in the family born with the condition. I wonder if they’re descendants of the Gonsalves family.
Yes, the Hapsburg family was notoriously inbred, much more so than the English nobility, I think. Beginning with Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, and all the way up until Carlos II, who looked like the guy from “Mask,” the Hapsburgs were famous for their enlarged chins and lower lips, and underbite. Carlos II got it the worst though - in addition to the physical problems, he was also mentally retarded and completely impotent (his queen was probably thankful for that.) Poor guy - due to his inability to produce an heir, the Hapsburg dynasty ended with him.
Henry VIII, on the other hand, looked like Brian Posehn. A far cry from Jonathan Rhys-Myers.
I have a question: How come some of those royal portraits suck so badly? Couldn’t a King or Queen afford a decent artist? It’s not just that they are early portraits - lots of contemporaneous ones are excellent. But I think my daughter could paint King Stephen better than this. The same goes for the painting of Edward IV.
And what’s with the tinyheads? Was that an actual artistic style? Or did these artists simply have no sense of proportion?
I’ve seen very good portraits dating back hundreds of years earlier than the earliest of these, so what’s up with that?
There may have been better portraits, but those ones are the only ones that survive.
Francis’s head just looks tiny in that portrait because he’s wearing a ridiculously puffy tunic with huge shoulders. The portrait is technically pretty good. The painting of Edward IV is kind of washed-out and basic but I think it provides a fairly realistic rendition of what he looked like. This painting of Edward IV is much more detailed.
I don’t know what the deal is with Stephen’s portrait, although I do know that he’s definitely the scariest looking English monarch if that painting is at all accurate. As an aside, it’s weird to think that there was once a king of England named “Stephen.” So many of the English kings are named Henry and Edward that “Stephen” just doesn’t sound “right.” I guess he is the only English king besides John who never had any other king share his name.
For one thing those were both pre-Renaissance when portraits were more stylized than realistic. They look more like icons than likenesses.
Stephen was hated by his successors, the Plantaganets, because he was an usurper. The throne was left to his cousin (the Holy Roman Empress) Matilda by her father/his uncle Henry I. (He had many illegititmate children but she was his only surviving legitimate heir after her brother drowned on his honeymoon.) Stephen swore a sacred oath to his uncle that he would honor the succession, then found the first excuse to break it and steal the throne, and the result was 20 years of civil war before settled by treaty (Stephen would rule for the rest of his life then the crown would pass to Matilda’s son Henry [II]). To most of his sucessors, naming a kid Stephen would have been a bit like naming a kid Brutus. (Add in that Henry II was rumored to be Henry’s biological son, though I don’t know if that was a contemporary rumor or one started centuries later by romanticists.)
Like shwah ( ah as in “say ah” ), only dropping the sh- and replacing it with bl- ( as in “blue” ). Roughly blwah as a single syllable. Very French :D.
Stephen was also a weakish king in terms of governance, but in his defence he faced difficult times, had some positive characteristics and much of the English nobility seemed to have preferred him to Mathilda. Even his great opponent Robert of Gloucester ( Henry I’s very wealthy and very capable bastard son ) initially backed him. It was a very popular coup, women at that point in time not being regarded as fit rulers by most. Plus the predominantly Anglo-Norman nobility were generally slightly suspicious of their long-time territorial antagonists the Angevins ( as in Mathilda’s new husband Geoffrey Plantaganet ).
My personal taste lies to denim jeans 99.9% of the time; flannel shirts 49.9% of the time, and Tees and whatever the hell those blue work shirts are 49.9% of the time.
I suppose I am a Simple Man. (Bah to the link - scroll down to hear a not-very-good sample - it doesn’t include the chorus wherein the words “Simple Man” are actually spoken.)
My mundane tastes tend towards silk, corduroy, velvet and linen, with colourful accents and patterns where appropriate. Hand-knitted cashmere scarf. Brocade waistcoat. Black corduroy blazer lined with paisley silk. 100% organic linen shirt.
Pretty much the same as my SCA tastes, although I don’t think I can get away with as much gold trim in my everyday wear as I can in my Elizabethans.
This statement from the wiki article on chaperons that Guanolad linked to makes me giggle:
I can just imagine the wild and crazy kids of the 14th century:
W&C Kid 1: “Dude, that is like so, so, radical - you’re wearing your chaperon with the face hole on the top of your head! But what’s your dad going to say?”
W&C Kid 2: “Who cares? Like, who made him king of me, anyway?”
Just like wearing baseball caps backwards, I guess.
On a sidenote, your username strikes me as funny because of the nearest townto where I grew up (where the name did not quite accurately describe the town).
Why are you assuming that they would have been commissioned by the king or the queen? Take the portrait of King Stephen. That’s part of the set from Hornby Castle I previously mentioned and which includes one version of the Henry IV painting. Without checking, I’m fairly certain that this set never belonged to a member of the Royal Family. It will instead have been commissioned by an aristocratic or gentry family who simply wanted some royal portraits. Quality was probably not the issue and one doubts that they even considered the option of using one of the top London artists. A cheap hack capable of churning them out quickly was sufficient. At that date (the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century), merely having a collection of paintings, however rubbish, would have been enough to make the new owners highly fashionable.
Some such paintings have subsequently been acquired by later kings and queens. The Royal Collection has one version of the Henry IV portrait. But those later acquisitions tended to be made for antiquarian reasons rather than aesthetic ones. Moreover, when portraits had been collected by earlier kings and queens, they were often the better examples. The superior example of an Edward IV portrait cited by Argent Towers is a rare case of a portrait that can be traced back reasonably securely to the collection of Henry VIII and which may well have belonged to the Royal Family from the start.
Then one must bear in mind that there were only a handful of portrait painters working in England in the fifteenth century and that, by European standards, none of them was more than merely competent. The perennial theme of the early history of English portraiture is that England long lacked either the critical mass of native artists or a sizable market for their output. Even as late as the seventeenth century the leading court artists in London had to be imported from abroad.
I’m not an artist, nor am I particularly interested in the mechanics of drawing comics, but I read long ago in some book on the art of SF/Fantasy that superheroes are generally drawn with smallish heads to make them look more imposing. Where the head of a normal adult human should be a seventh of the total length, the ratio for a heroic figure is about 1:9 or 1:10. Could the portrait painters of yore be using the same technique as modern comic artists?
I second Argent Towers’ observation on Francis. In addition, high-heeled boots and shoes were the fashion during the time of James I, to make the wearer look taller and their legs longer. (Speaking of James I and legs, the ones belonging to the young Duke of Buckingham here have always looked freakishly long to me. Was James I a leg man, possibly?)
