Wandering Things: Agency and Embodiment in Late Sixteenth-Century English Miniature Portraits.

PORTRAIT medallions; 16TH century art; ANTIQUITIES; HILLIARD, Nicholas, ca. 1547-1619; ARISTOCRACY (Social class) in art; ARISTOCRACY (Social class); SLAVERY

ENGLANDReport Available; EUROPE

This essay engages with current debates on the character of objects as material artefacts, focusing on a genre that can be reappraised especially fruitfully from such a perspective: the small-format portrait medallion. The first part sets out how lockable portrait medallions were ‘wandering things’, artefacts of transcultural networks, and possessed ‘agency’ (to use Alfred Gell’s term). The second part is devoted to analyzing an example from England around the year 1600 by Nicholas Hilliard, the so-called Gresley Jewel, against the backdrop of European slavery at that time. It vividly exemplifies, it is argued, the active semanticization of skin colour, and in doing so repositions white, aristocratic identities. To what extent, the study centrally asks, have portrait medallions like this not only helped to establish the hegemonic pretensions of white aristocratic identity but also to undermine them as well? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]