Tudor Mystery review – who could have painted such medieval strangeness?

Compton Verney, Warwickshire
A new exhibition brings together portraits of weird children and nobility by an artist with an eye for human uniqueness. It also reveals their true identity …

Four weird kids in black clothes turn their big eyes in unison as they sing what you imagine is a melancholy song about death. The great, great (and a few more greats) grandmother of Wednesday Addams is on keyboards, playing the virginals, the leader of the group. Her clothes are grave but more decorated than her brothers’ dark jerkins. She looks at you in a charged, even angry, way.

This psychologically acute study of Renaissance adolescence was painted in about 1565. Elizabeth I had been Queen of England for less than a decade. William Shakespeare had just been born. Yet in front of this painting by an artist known as the Master of the Countess of Warwick all that time collapses and you seem to be confronted by real young people, a bunch of severe teens whose turbulent emotions are squeezed into their stiff silken costumes and released in music. Their songbooks reveal they are performing the introspective Sixth Psalm of King David, set to music by Josquin des Prez: “I am weary with my groaning: all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.”

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