Abstract

The works of the early modern English painters Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver disclose a tension between the miniature portrait, or “limning,” and its frame. While the frame of the typical Elizabethan and early Jacobean miniature tightly circumscribes an oval space of merely a few square inches, an abundance of visual details, symbols, and inscriptions threatens to burst beyond the border and upstage the face at the center of the portrait. Drawing from the concept of the “parergon,” this article analyzes the miniature portrait’s connections with external physical borders and internal marginal spaces, as well as parergetic devices which enclose, ornament, and supplement the image. Within the historical context of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, frames and framing strategies play an important role in artistic theories and practices, aristocratic culture, the creation of meaning, and conventions for displaying art. The author argues that the relations between strategies of framing and the communicative powers of the face are central to the limning’s mode of representation within elite culture.

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