Portrait Miniatures on Vellum: Reading Skin

Research on the history, materials and conservation of early English portrait miniatures has seen a wide range of new and exciting developments over the past decades in the UK and beyond. Most of these technical and analytical approaches have focused on the paint media and pigments rather than the supports of these artworks.

I will thus be offering an analysis of the use of vellum in Elizabethan and Jacobean English portrait miniatures. Following in the footsteps of scholars who have worked on the materiality of medieval manuscripts - and most recently among them Sarah Kay in Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017) - I will inquire into the meaning of early modern limners’ predilection for vellum. This will lead me to look into the technical literature produced at the time, thereby probing into the limner’s way of handling animal skin in the rendering of human skin.

Anne-Valérie Dulac is senior lecturer in Elizabethan studies at Sorbonne Université and currently holds a fellowship with LARCA (https://larca.u-paris.fr/en/home/) and the Maison Française d’Oxford (https://www.mfo.ac.uk). Her research interests include the circulation of artistic terminology in early modern Europe, animal-made objects used by limners, the portraiture of all living things in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and the rendering of lustre in watercolour. She is finishing a monograph on limning in English early modern drama as well as translating (with Céline Cachaud) Nicholas Hilliard’s Art of Limning into French.