Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II. Studies in British Art 18 (review)

This volume has a complicated ancestry. Its grandsire was the exhibition, Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II, mounted first at the National Portrait Gallery in 2001 and then at the Yale Center for British Art in 2002. That show begat both a splendid catalogue and a pair of accompanying conferences, one in London and one in New Haven. Some of the nine essays in this collection (which appears to mark the end of the Painted Ladies franchise) were first presented at those conferences. Readers may be forgiven for mistaking this book for the Painted Ladies catalogue: the two are roughly the same size, have the same editors and the same publisher. Each shows a Lely countess on the dust jacket, and each opens with an essay by Kevin Sharpe (the former with one on "Politics, Society and Culture," the latter with another called "Aesthetics, Sex and Politics"). Both volumes are handsomely produced and lavishly illustrated.

Despite the similarities, however, this volume is far from redundant. While the Painted Ladies catalogue was more solidly art historical in focus, Politics, Transgression and Representation casts its net more widely and aims to "stimulate thinking across traditional disciplinary boundaries" (xi). Scholars of the Restoration, the editors maintain, have been slow to cross these boundaries and the field has "remained relatively compartmentalized, particularly with regard to the visual arts" (xi). This claim is perhaps debatable; boundary-crossing works by Joseph Levine and James Winn come to mind. (And, more generally, the claims that representations are political and that politics is representational are more or less articles of faith in contemporary criticism. One would be more surprised nowadays to find a collection of essays that tried to cordon off the political from the aesthetic.) Nonetheless, this collection certainly bears out its editors' claim that the Restoration age is "one of the richest for the study of the intersection of politics and culture" (xix), and it will surely please and instruct students of the period, whatever their disciplinary affiliations.

Part of Yale's Studies in British Art series, the volume is dedicated to the late Sir Oliver Millar, and the editors characterize the essays it contains as "rang[ing] from the type of document- and object-based art history of which Sir Oliver was such a notable exponent, to more theoretical analyses that reflect developments in recent decades" (xiii). And while they hasten to add that "[t]hese approaches are not mutually exclusive" (xiii), the essays that follow do begin to sort themselves into two categories. Some pose relatively straightforward and finite art-historical questions: were the Windsor Beauties portraits commissioned or conceived as a single set, or how were women depicted in seventeenth-century popular prints? Others make the visual arts less central to their proceedings, relying instead on written documentary evidence to address such historical topics as how Charles II's court was perceived by the populace or the extent to which women at court exercised political power. Rachel Weil, the historian who treats this last subject, modestly suggests in conclusion that her broader topic—"[t]he complex interplay between female political symbolism and female political agency"—calls for "the joint efforts of art historians, literary scholars, and political historians working together" (189). The volume as a whole mounts this collective effort and shows some of the dividends that such an effort can pay.

Within the "joint effort" of the volume as a whole, there are individual essays which deliver on the promise of cross-disciplinarity, essays that are not only flowers in an inter-disciplinary bouquet but that are also themselves hybrids. Susan Shifrin's discussion of various portraits depicting Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin as Cleopatra or Diana instructively places visual iconography alongside verbal depictions of the duchess (and of Cleopatra and Diana...