Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485-1649

The wealthy and powerful of Renaissance Europe aimed to acquire and practice a wide range of accomplishmentsexpertise in dress and jewellery, building and gardening, dogs, horses, hunting and horsemanship, discernment in collecting everything from stuffed animals to old masters, appreciation of classical and contemporary literature, knowledge of foreign languages, and political, diplomatic and military skills.During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the emerg- ing apparatus of academia picked and chose which aspects of that curriculum to dignify with the status of a "professional" discipline.And since this was the era par excellence of academic specialism, the result was that the wide worlds in which these early modern aristocrats travelled were split up and studied either as narrow "fields" (art history, diplomatic, military, political history), which rarely connected with each other; or they were not studied seriously at all (curio collections, hunting, and so on).With the fences between disciplines set up, attempts were made to climb over them: but the nature of the result has greatly depended upon which "field"especially whether art history or political historythe scholar in question started from.The relationship between art and power in this period was a theme pioneered by Sir Roy Strong, approaching from the "art history" side.Among historians, Hugh