How to express yourself in Tudor England

‘Baptism of Fire’, the current exhibition at Colnaghi gallery in London, brings together artworks spanning three millennia, from a head of a panther dating to late 5th-century BC Italy, to a plaque by Picasso from 1964 after Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe. These disparate works are linked by their material, terracotta, which, being easy to get hold of, to work with and to fire, has long been popular with artists across the globe. In Europe, however, terracotta sculpture was rare after the decline of the Roman Empire and underwent a revival only during the Renaissance. From the 15th century onwards, Italian artists such as Luca della Robbia and Pietro Torrigiano mastered the material’s plasticity and versatility, creating expressive and lively sculptures, including lifelike portraits. By the end of that century they were exporting their expertise to royal courts abroad.

One place where terracotta was embraced was Tudor England, and two of the most interesting exhibits in the Colnaghi show seem to have a connection with the court of Henry VII. These are the painted busts of ‘princely children’, which were recently discovered and attributed to the Modenese artist Guido Mazzoni (c. 1445–1518), also known as Paganino or Pageny. Mazzoni is best known for his painted terracotta tableaux depicting the Lamentation, now in churches in Ferrara and Naples, notable for their intense representation of grief. Mazzoni’s talents attracted the attention of Charles VIII of France; in 1496 the artist moved to the French court, where he was subsequently employed to work on the decoration of the king’s tomb. It was probably this that prompted Henry VII of England to commission Mazzoni to design his own royal tomb. Although never executed – Mazzoni’s countryman Pietro Torrigiano got the job instead – two payments from the royal court to Mazzoni in 1506 indicate that the plans reached an advanced stage and suggest that the artist was probably present in England for a few years.

The two busts in the Colnaghi exhibition, currently on loan from a private collection in Brussels, have been convincingly attributed to Mazzoni, partly because of their compelling depiction of emotion. One child is laughing, turning its head to the right in appreciation of some joke we cannot share, mouth drawn back in a grin, revealing a neat row of tiny teeth. The other child’s brow is furrowed in misery; baring its teeth in distress, fat white tears stream down its cheeks. Both children are dressed in clothing associated with the highest ranks of society, in carefully modelled lace caps and fur-lined doublets. If their current colouring relates at all to their original appearance, the textiles can be identified as cloth of gold, which was generally reserved for royalty.

The strongest plank in the attribution to Mazzoni is the comparison with another work by the artist: a bust of a boy (c. 1498), which is in the British Royal Collection. As the catalogue accompanying the Colnaghi exhibition explains, the Brussels busts are very similar in size, handling and manufacture to that in the Royal Collection, which was first attributed to Mazzoni by Lionel Cust in 1925. Like the first of the Brussels busts, the child in the Royal Collection is laughing, and the original polychromy uncovered in 1985 included gilding, indicating a regal costume of cloth of gold. A painting of c. 1640 based on the bust and a reference in the royal inventories of James II to a sculpture of ‘a laughing boy’ suggest that it may have been in the Royal Collection since at least the 17th century. The similarity of the bust to Mazzoni’s other works and the fact that the artist was known to have worked for the English monarch gave rise to the claim that the bust was by him, as well as the more uncertain suggestion that it depicts a young Henry VIII – the only surviving royal child of the appropriate age in England at the time.

Bust of a boy (c. 1498), Guido Mazzoni. Photo: © Royal Collection Trust/His Majesty King Charles III, 2024

The Colnaghi catalogue goes further, suggesting that the Brussels sculptures represent Henry VIII and his sister Margaret, the future queen of Scotland, but this seems something of a stretch. On its own, the Royal Collection bust could feasibly have been modelled on a young Henry VIII but, joined by two more extremely similar works, it seems just as probable that the sculptures represent generic emotive types, albeit dressed up in princely clothing. Even the evidence marshalled in the catalogue seems to point in this direction: it tentatively connects them with entries in Henry VIII’s royal inventories of 1542 and 1547 concerning three pictures ‘made of erth’ showing ‘Morian boye[s]’. Morian suggests ‘Moorish’, but may also refer to generic emotional intensity. If this entry does indeed refer to these three busts by Mazzoni, it seems highly unlikely that their identities would have been forgotten during the king’s reign.

Exuberant identification of the works aside, the busts may well have been created at – or for – the English court by Mazzoni in the early 16th century, and their discovery sheds further light on a fascinating period of English history. Henry VII’s demonstrable interest in European, especially Italian, artists challenges the popular image of him as old-fashioned and parsimonious. The fact that he commissioned art from renowned Renaissance artists, even attempting to poach them from foreign courts, paints an altogether different picture of his tastes and puts the Italianate developments of his son’s reign into broader perspective. Meanwhile, terracotta found surprising popularity at the English court, from the arresting polychrome bust of Henry VII by Pietro Torrigiano (c. 1509–11) to the Bedingfield tombs in Oxborough Church, Norfolk (c. 1513). Together, the three busts provide yet further evidence that English patrons were not only aware of artistic currents on the continent, but actively embracing them too.

‘Baptism of Fire: Terracotta Masterpieces Spanning Three Millenia’ is at Colnaghi London, until 24 Jan.