Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts

Spanning from the innauguration of James I in 1603 to the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Stuart court saw the emergence of a full expression of Renaissance culture in Britain. In "Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts," Vaughan Hart examines the influence of magic on Renaissance art and how in its role as an element of royal propaganda, art was used to represent the power of the monarch and reflect his apparent command over the hidden forces of nature.Court artists sought to represent magic as an expression of the Stuart Kings' divine right, and later of their policy of Absolutism, through masques, sermons, heraldy, gardens, architecture and processions. As such, magic of the kind enshrined in Neoplatonic philosophy and the court art which expressed its cosmology, played their part in the complex causes of the Civil War and the destruction of the Stuart image which followed in its wake.

Spanning from the inauguration of James I in 1603 to the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Stuart court saw the emergence of a full expression of Renaissance culture in Britain. Hart examines the influence of magic on Renaissance art and how in its role as an element of royal propaganda, art was used to represent the power of the monarch and reflect his apparent command over the hidden forces of nature. Court artists sought to represent magic as an expression of the Stuart Kings' divine right, and later of their policy of Absolutism, through masques, sermons, heraldry, gardens, architecture and processions. As such, magic of the kind enshrined in Neoplatonic philosophy and the court art which expressed its cosmology, played their part in the complex causes of the Civil War and the destruction of the Stuart image which followed in its wake.

Introduction ‘The Invisible Lady styled the Magical Sister of the Rosicross’ STUART MAGIC AND THE FAIRY QUEEN, I ‘That triplicity which in great veneration was ascribed to ancient Hermes’ STUART COURT ART AND THE MAGIC OF KINGSHIP II ‘By the might, And magic of his arm’ MASQUES, SERMONS, AND THE PROPHETIC ‘ALBION AND JERUSALEM’ III ‘A peece rather of good Heraldry, than of Architecture’, HERALDRY AND THE ARCHITECTURAL ORDERS AS JOINT EMBLEMS OF THE ‘HOUSE OF BRITISH CHIVALRY’ IV ‘A piece not of Nature, but of Arte’ GARDENS AND THE ILLUSION OF NATURAL MAGIC V ‘Dee in his Mathematicall Preface…the West end of S.Pauls’ ARCHITECTURE AND THE GEOMETRY OF SOLOMON’S TEMPLE VI ‘The lofty tunes of the Diapenthes, Diatessarons, and Diapasons of our Royall Harpe’ MUSICAL HARMONY AND PYTHAGOREAN PALACES VII ‘The body of the King…that glorious Sun’ PROCESSIONS AND STUART LONDON AS THE NEOPLATONIC ‘CITY OF THE SUN’ Epilogue- ‘The heav’n of earth shall have no oddes’, APOCALYPTIC COURT ART AND ALBION’S SECOND RUIN

Vaughan Hart