Theatres of Power

Adapted from an article published as Exhibition Review | STAGES AND SCENES on Rogues and Vagabonds Theatre Website in 2008.

SCRATCH POST

It was not the artist’s fault that the real king rode into the picture of himself and never came out.

Charles I with M. de St Antoine by Van Dyck, 1633, Royal Collection.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Baroque imagery, even when superbly executed by artistic geniuses, did not always succeed as political message in the patron’s favour or keep the King or Queen’s head on during a revolution, but it still works as art. Over three and a half centuries later, the first impression of Charles I that grabs most of us is Van Dyck’s interpretation of a refined and chivalric paternalistic figure, not “that man of blood”, the “tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good of this nation” called to account for all the lives that had been lost in civil war…..

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