An Introduction to the 'Depicting Anna of Denmark' Blog
Welcome to Depicting Anna of Denmark. This distributed digital exhibition will catalogue all of Anna of Denmark’s portraiture, as far as possible in chronological order, from her early life to her death in 1619. Following the usual gallery or museum exhibition architecture, each new post represents a new, themed room filled with Anna’s beautiful portraits. We aim to publish new posts or rooms on a regular basis until the catalogue is completed in its entirety.
Have we missed anything? Want to contribute something? Let
us know at depictingannaofdenmark@outlook.com
!
Sitter Iconography; Or, What is the
Purpose of this Blog?
A sitter iconography is a method
of analysing the portraiture of a named sitter, with a view to illuminating its
contemporary significances.
By arranging the known likenesses
of Anna in more or less chronological order, we can bring to light new
relationships between her likenesses in different media and facilitate new
thinking about how such images operated in the social and political spheres in
which they were made. This also allows us to think in more complex ways about
likeness. Likeness is usually meant as the extent to which the portrait faithfully
records the features of its individual sitter at a specific point in time. This
understanding of likeness as facial specificity is often conflated with modern
ideas of individuality, autonomy or unique personhood. [1] But understandings
of likeness in the early modern period were percolated through natural
philosophy, myth and religious narrative, bound together into an all
encompassing worldview structured in layers of analogy and networks of
relatedness.
For example, Anna was an early
modern princess and queen consort first and foremost, a prized status rooted in
her blood relationships. [2] We believe that where pendants of James exist for
Anna's portraits, they should always be considered within the context of this
relatedness. This interdependency situates Anna's “identity” as consort,
daughter and mother of kings in her body, as well as her face. Likeness for or
to Anna is discoverable not just in the patterns of her face, but in her
representations’ relatedness, to those of James especially, but also to portraits
of her relatives, to the established conventions of portraiture for queen
consorts, or to visual patterns encoding
queenship in performance, manuscripts, in emblems or in allegorical
prints, expressed by figures’ poses and attributes. Modes of likeness operating
within a portrait, besides fidelity to the contours of a sitter's face, can be
traced vertically in the sitter iconography and horizontally (or maybe,
rhizomatically), within a portrait's contemporary visual culture and pictorial conventions.
[3] During Anna's lifetime, neither the artwork nor individual identity, could
be thought of as something entirely independent.
[1] See: Maria H. Loh, “Renaissance Faciality,” Oxford
Art Journal 32:3 (2009): 341-63.
[2] See: Sara Ayres, “A Mirror for the Prince?
Anne of Denmark in Hunting Costume with Her Dogs (1617) by Paul van Somer,” Journal
of Historians of Netherlandish Art 12:2 (Summer 2020).
[3] See: Hans Belting, An
Anthropology of Images (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2011).