Art reveals the past – if you know how to look. Not just through the record of a lost landscape, or the personality inherent in a portrait, but in its structure, ingredients, technique and in its choice of subject matter and style. Yet the art of the past is often viewed through a subjective modern lens. We struggle to look and understand because of our preconceptions about what art should be and our prejudices about the period that produced it. With art, context, purpose and language are key.

Christina J. Faraday’s book is as much about language and terminology as it is about art. Tudor Liveliness sets out in pursuit of how late Tudor and Jacobean England produced and viewed artworks, with the aim of constructing an appropriate vocabulary for describing art of the period. Faraday guides us through a confusing lexicon and corrects our misuse of seemingly familiar terms such as ‘perspective’ (more about achieving three-dimensionality through shading and colour than achieving realistic pictorial space) and ‘counterfeit’ (to imitate, not to deceive). More ambitiously, the book challenges our assumption that much of the art produced in England after the Reformation was backward-looking, isolated from the great achievements of the European Renaissance, and necessarily iconophobic, fearful of representing the real world lest this stir inappropriate emotions and encourage idolatry. How can this be the case, Faraday questions, when so much art of the later 1500s and early 1600s was described at the time as ‘lively’?

Tudor Liveliness takes this single word – ‘liveliness’ – and subjects it to a thorough interrogation, stripping it down to its etymological origins, tracing its popularity and usages, and defining its manifold meanings. Essentially, ‘liveliness’ in art could mean three things in post-Reformation England: a lifelike vividness; a forcefulness, or potency; and a delightfulness of execution that brings immersive pleasure to its audience.

These are all principles of rhetorical theory, as it was understood and employed at the time, and the links between rhetoric and art are explored in Faraday’s book. A good artist, just like a decent rhetorician, aimed to teach, persuade and delight through a range of stylistic approaches with inaccessible Greek names like enargeia (engaging all the senses through descriptive vividness), but ‘liveliness’ turns out to be a great shorthand descriptor for the overriding ambition of both.

Read the rest at HistoryToday.com.

Brett Dolman is Curator (Collections) at Hampton Court Palace.