Subject Area
Art History/Criticism/Conservation
Abstract
This dissertation examines three monarchical bodies and the portraits that promoted them: Henry VIII’s imagery by Hans Holbein the Younger, Charles I’s portraiture produced Sir Anthony van Dyck, and Queen Anne’s representations constructed by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Combing theories of kinship and disability with a re-evaluation of early modern court culture, patronage, and portrait production, I argue that cultural expectations and anxieties regarding bodily health and attractiveness were negotiated through repetitive portrait conventions, fabricating royal authority.
Projecting the king’s sovereignty during the Protestant Reformation and drastic alterations to the succession, Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII conceal the king’s immobility, obesity, and poor reproductive health through an emphasis on bejeweled adornment and exaggerated bodily proportions. Suffering from stunted growth due to childhood rickets, Charles I required Van Dyck to replicate the royal family’s image, demonstrating that the locus of authority resided with the king’s blood rather than with Parliament. Aggravated by gout and seventeen difficult pregnancies, Queen Anne’s obesity and immobility are obscured by Kneller’s compositional recycling of other young, beautiful elite women, revealing that the aging female body is a problem of female rule.
Painting the monarchs’ disabilities out of sight, shared portrait conventions highlight informal networks of relatedness where the royal image is informed by and reliant upon the visual familiarity between monarch, courtier, and kin. The monarchs’ healthy and attractive legitimate likeness emerges through these networks of repetitive portrait conventions, projecting the ruler’s legitimacy, articulating the parameters of their authority, and conditioning the ideal aesthetics for sovereign embodiment.
Degree Date
Spring 5-16-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Art History
Advisor
Dr. Amy Freund
Second Advisor
Dr. Catriona Murray
Third Advisor
Dr. Anna Lovatt
Fourth Advisor
Dr. Adam Jasienki
Number of Pages
484
Format
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Christensen, Jean Marie, "Bodies of the Crown: Kinship, Health, and the Construction of the Royal Body in Early Modern English Portraiture" (2026). Art History Theses and Dissertations. 26.
https://scholar.smu.edu/arts_arthistory_etds/26
Included in
Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons
