Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and the world of Elizabethan art : painting and patronage at the court of Elizabeth I / Elizabeth Goldring.

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and the world of Elizabethan art : painting and patronage at the court of Elizabeth I / Elizabeth Goldring.

New Haven : Publsihed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, [2014]

xix, 380 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 27 cm

"This book is the first comprehensive survey of aristocratic art collecting and patronage in Elizabethan England, as seen through the activities of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (ca. 1532-1588). One of the most fascinating and controversial people of his day, Leicester was also the most important patron of painters at the Elizabethan court. He amassed a substantial art collection, including commissioned works by Nicholas Hilliard, Paolo Veronese, and Federico Zuccaro; helped foster the birth of an English vernacular discourse on the visual arts; and was an early exponent, in England, of the Italian Renaissance view of the painter as the practitioner of a liberal art and, thus, fit company for the educated and well-born. Although Leicester's picture collection and personal papers were widely dispersed after his death, this volume's pioneering research reconstructs his lost world and, with it, a turning point in the history of British art. Some of the paintings featured here are little-known images from private collections, never before reproduced in color. "-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: "a noble Mecenas"
The Dudleys and their Milieu, 1509-1559
The 1560s: Creation of an Earl
The 1570s: Princely Pleasures
The 1580s: Leicester and the Netherlands
Kenilworth Castle
Leicester House and Wanstead Manor
Epilogue: Dispersal and Descent.

N5247.L45 G65 2014