The Elizabethan Miniature

Rather than focusing on the technical aspects of miniature production, or even on the achievements of particular artists or the peculiarities of their style, this chapter on the Elizabethan Miniature seeks to understand the cultural and ideological function of the miniature's diminutive aesthetic. It approaches the miniature via a certain deliberate circumlocution-looking first at its antithesis, the monument, in order to argue that it is only via such an oblique approach that can be began to make a more momentous pronouncement on the miniature than to reiterate the well-worn axiom that at its finest, the early modern English miniature is jewel-like and exquisite. The miniature epitomizes both the ideological and technical problems presented by portraiture in early modern England. After the zenith of its achievement, the miniature continued to develop as an art form in England even as its supremacy was supplanted by larger paintings.