Thursday, October 16, 2014

Three fragments from Ovid

A Calydonian boar hunt for Katherine of Aragon’s successful campaign against Caledonian invaders (Scots); find the boars, not to be confused with bears. 
Proserpina thinking twice before eating seeds from a pomegranate for the well read child Mary Tudor, taken away from her mother the princess from Granada. 
A Fall of Icarus for Henry VIII’s fall into a river. 
Hopefully these help to establish the date of the triptych. The comparison between Katherine of Aragon combating the Caledonians in the 1513 Battle of Flodden and Atalanta participating in the Calydonian boar hunt might have been made years earlier, but Mary Tudor was not born until 1516 and Henry VIII’s fall in the water was in 1525. It was reenacted in the television series The Tudors, season 1, episode 4.


Friday, June 20, 2014

Henry Tudor in a Hieronymus Bosch Painting

A young Henry Tudor is accompanied by Elizabeth of York. For those of us who have trouble remembering roses they are color coded as Mr. Red and Mrs. White. Henry Tudor is easy to identify but he appears to be confronting a more difficult puzzle. Is the boar-face man Richard III back from the dead? Or the hunchback? But meanwhile obviously the whole drama is only the kind of thing Saint Anthony was able to resist watching.