The Tudor age

Hans Holbein painted the court of Henry VIII, the Reformation stripped the churches of images and Elizabeth I turned her own portrait into a political weapon.

When Henry VII took power in 1485, England was still a Gothic country. Late medieval building reached its peak in the fan vaults of King's College Chapel in Cambridge and of the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey. But Italian artists such as Pietro Torrigiano also brought the forms of the Renaissance. The Tudor kings wanted to show that their young dynasty stood on a par with the princes of France and Italy, and they used art to say so.

The most important artist in Henry VIII's England was an immigrant, the German Hans Holbein the Younger. His portraits of the king, the courtiers and the scholars have shaped our image of the entire era. At the same time Henry broke with the pope in Rome, and the Reformation led to the closure of the monasteries and the destruction of images in the churches. Religious art, which had dominated for a thousand years, suddenly had almost no place, and the portrait took over as the leading pictorial form.

Under Elizabeth I the image of the queen became part of statecraft. Her portraits followed carefully controlled patterns and were filled with symbols. The miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard created small, jewel-like portraits that were worn as ornaments and given as gifts. The nobility built vast country houses with enormous windows, known as prodigy houses, to receive the queen. The era ends in 1603 when Elizabeth dies childless and the Scottish king James VI inherits the throne. Beneath the surface a quiet change was also under way, as more merchants and country gentry began to commission portraits of their own.

• The last splendour of Gothic
• Holbein at the court of Henry VIII
• The Reformation and the empty churches
• The miniature – Hilliard and Oliver
• The queen's image and the great houses