Helen Castor: belief

Transcript context

…Now, Richard II was pretty successful as a patron of the arts. The Wilton Diptych is commissioned. He supports Chaucer. Did he have good taste? Did he just get lucky? Did he do this all for cynical reasons? How do you understand the record? He had superb tastes artistically, I think, in terms of the visual arts. There, again, he makes an interesting comparison with Charles I, who’s our other great commissioner of art as king — two men who understood the power of image but didn’t really understand the structures and the realities behind that. Richard really was a superb commissioner of art if we put it together. There’s a life-size coronation portrait in Westminster Abbey, which is an extraordinary painting. It’s currently at the west door of Westminster Abbey, but it used to, we think, be in the choir near the high altar. The tomb he commissioned for himself and his first wife, Anne of Bohemia — the first-ever double tomb for a King of England — is a superb piece of metalwork, gilded bronze effigies lying on a gilded tabletop. And then, the crowning achievement, the Wilton Diptych, which is one of the most exquisite pieces of art I’ve ever seen. Interestingly, though, Chaucer served Richard II. He held office in his government. One of Chaucer’s trips to Italy was to attempt to arrange a marriage for the young Richard in the late 1370s. But I’m not sure Richard was a great reader. Another biographer of Richard says that his interest in written literature was polite, and I think that’s quite a polite way of putting it. I’m not sure Richard really did take an interest, despite having Chaucer at his court. I think Henry of Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, clearly was a reader, and he was much more interested in the written word and in music, much less interested in the visual arts. I think Richard was all about his kingship, the image of his kingship, the iconography of his kingship. It’s no accident that the three great pieces of visual art he commissioned all have stunning portraits of himself at the center. With Henry IV, there were few visual remnants of his rule that we care about. Are there any?…

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