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Images of Charles I of England, 1642-1649

出版	Brown University, 2009
ISBN	11093060329781109306033
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=_sWqYgEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Through the analysis of paintings, coins, prints, broadsides, military banners, and medals, this dissertation analyzes images of Charles produced during the most tumultuous period of his reign, 1642-1649. This imagery illuminates various aspects of seventeenth century social, religious, intellectual, and political history. Prior to the Civil War, especially during the period of the Personal Rule, 1629 to 1640, an overwhelming portion of cultural production represented, reinforced, and advanced the power and authority of Charles I. Anthony Van Dyck, as the official royal portraitist, established the visual paradigm of Charles's authority. The war and Van Dyck's death in 1641 brought an end to the consistent image of Charles. With the definition of royal authority in crisis during the war, both Parliamentarians and Royalists documented the royal image. Rather than a single paradigm of royal authority, the images studied in this dissertation show an inconsistent, unstable portrayal of the King. At the same time, the King's complex and contradictory image was represented in an unprecedented variety of media and venues. This dissertation argues that between 1642 and 1649 images of Charles I were sites for the representation of contested paradigms of royal authority. During the period, Charles's image begins to devolve into Ernst Kantorowicz's theory of a king's two bodies: the divine, eternal body of the kingship and the mortal body of a man. This separation of Charles (the man) from Charles (the king) created through imagery from all sides of the conflict may ultimately have helped to create the context for Charles's execution, an action without precedence in Western Europe at the time. By 1649, the mortal Charles was tried and executed, thereby putting an end to the divine King Charles. Only after the destruction of Charles's troublesome physical body, could the kingship again become a potent symbol of royal authority. After the execution, the situation once again changed. Ironically, Charles became a more powerful symbol of kingly authority after his execution than he had been during his lifetime.