The discovery of a previously unknown portrait miniature by one of Elizabethan England’s greatest artists would be significant enough. But a new work by Nicholas Hilliard that has come to light is all the more exciting because it has a possible link to William Shakespeare and a 400-year-old enigma of a defaced red heart on its reverse, suggesting a love scorned.
Hilliard was Queen Elizabeth I’s official limner, or miniature painter. His exquisite portraits, small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, are among the most revered masterpieces of 16th-century British and European art.
This example depicts an androgynous, bejewelled young sitter with long ringlets, thought to be the earliest known likeness of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s friend and patron – and possibly the “fair youth” of the sonnets, as some have speculated.
Shakespeare dedicated his two erotic poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, to Southampton, declaring: “The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end.”
Such miniatures were painted on onion skin-thin vellum that were pasted on to playing cards, as a stiff support. This portrait’s reverse reveals a card whose red heart had been painted over with a black spear or spade, seemingly indicating a broken heart.
The portrait has been identified by leading art historians Dr Elizabeth Goldring and Emma Rutherford, who were taken aback by the defacement.
Goldring, honorary reader at the University of Warwick and author of an award-winning Hilliard biography, told the Guardian: “You always know that there’s a chance that there could be a clue on the back or tucked inside the frame, but there almost never is. On this occasion, there was – and it was absolutely thrilling. Shivers down the spine. Someone had gone to great effort to spoil the back of this work.”
Rutherford, the founder of consultancy and dealership the Limner Company in London, said: “I can’t find any other evidence of this sort of vandalism. Everybody would have known that a miniature would be backed by a playing card, but the playing card back was never visible. Originally, this would have been encased in a very expensive, possibly jewelled locket. You’d have to get the miniature out of the locket in order to vandalise the back like this. So it is an extraordinary discovery, a 400-year-old mystery.”
Their research, jointly written with Prof Sir Jonathan Bate, a leading Shakespeare scholar, is published in the Times Literary Supplement on 5 September.
They write: “The fact that the heart has been painted over with a spade, or spear, inevitably calls to … mind thoughts of Shakespeare, whose coat of arms, drawn up c 1602, incorporated a spear as a pun on his surname – though virtually nothing is known, with certainty, of Shakespeare’s interactions with Southampton.”
Goldring said: “The discovery of this miniature will, I suspect, reignite debate about the nature of the relationship between Shakespeare and his patron Southampton, including the possibility that Southampton may have been an inspiration for some of the sonnets.”
There is, the historians suggest, the possibility that this portrait was a gift from Southampton to Shakespeare, who returned it, perhaps in 1598, the year that he married.
Within the late Elizabethan court, Southampton was known for his androgynous beauty, his vanity and his love of poetry.
In the 1590s, John Clapham’s Narcissus – a retelling of the Ovidian tale of a beautiful youth who falls in love with his own image – was dedicated to him, and in the dedication to The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Nashe praised Southampton: “A dere lover and cherisher you are, as well of the lovers of Poets, as of Poets themselves.”
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The portrait’s owners have a family connection to Southampton, but they were unaware of Hilliard’s hand or its significance, having long kept it in a box. They contacted Goldring and Rutherford after reading of their discovery of another Hilliard miniature.
Rutherford said: “This has never been published. It’s never been seen in public.”
They believe that it depicts Southampton in the early 1590s, when he was in his late teens, shortly before he attracted the patronage of Shakespeare.
Addressing the “endlessly debated” identity of the addressee of Shakespeare’s sonnets, they write: “Again and again, the sonnets return to the fair youth’s androgynous beauty. So, for example, in sonnet 99 his hair is compared to ‘marjoram’, the tendrils of which are long and curly: could this be an allusion to Southampton’s distinctive long ringlets?”
They argue that everything about this miniature – including the sitter’s gesture of clasping his cascading ringlets of auburn hair to his heart – suggests an intimate image.
Long hair was unusual at the late Elizabethan court, Rutherford said: “We know there was some criticism of how long hair made men ‘womanish’.”
Two pearl bracelets adorn the sitter’s wrist. Rutherford said that bracelets, though frequently encountered in portraits of women in this period, are rarely seen in portraits of men.
She added that, when someone first looks at the portrait, they struggle initially to determine whether it represents a man or a woman: “It’s just extraordinary. It has to be one of the earliest English homoerotic images.”