The Tudors at the Legion

I've never been able to keep track of the six different wives of King Henry VIII, let alone all the royal figures in the century-long reign of the Tudor dynasty in England. So The Tudors exhibit which recently opened at the Legion of Honor, turned out to be a concise history refresher, illustrated with treasured objects from the period. (Pictured is Portrait of Henry VIII of England, 1540, by Hans Holbein the Younger.)

The first Tudor king was Henry VII, followed by his son Henry VIII whose serial marriage spree spawned a son (Edward VI) and two daughters (Mary I and Elizabeth I). After Henry VIII's death the 9-year-old Edward VI was installed with violent, dogmatic Protestants as the powers behind the throne, and when he died six years later at age 15, the Catholic Mary I was installed and Protestants started being burned at the stake. (Pictured is Edward VI as a Child, 1538, by Hans Holbein the Younger.)

Mary died at the age of 42, making way for the long reign of her Protestant sister. And thousands of plays, operas, movies, and TV series were spawned for the next five centuries. (Pictured is Elizabeth I, 1599, from the workshop of Nicholas Hilliard)

When this exhibit opened at New York's Metropolitan Museum earlier this year, there was a fascinating article by Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Review of Books detailing just how bizarre and punitive England was in the 16th century: "To an Italian who traveled to England in the late sixteenth century—say, one of the artists commissioned to paint portraits of the Elizabethan elite—the island might not have appeared, as it had to the ancient Roman poet Virgil, “wholly separated from all the world,” but it would certainly have seemed strange."

Having separated their Protestant island from the mostly Catholic European continent, they looked for more far-flung allies and trading partners, such as Morocco. The painting above is a 1600 portrait of a diplomatic ambasador from that country, 'Abd al-Wahid bin Mas'ood bin Mohammed 'Annouri.

The real showstopper of the exhibit is a display of huge tapestries on the main floor of the museum, which you can check out without having to pay the hefty special exhibit admission fee.

Henry XVIII commissioned a huge number of tapestries for his many royal castles, all of which were created by foreigners, continental tapestry weavers in Brussels and painters from Germany and Italy. (Pictured is Creation and Fall of Man, part of a 10-piece set of Story of the Redemption of Man, probably Brussels, 1502, for Henry VIII.)

Contemporary political resonances abounded in the exhibit, including a detail from the tapestry above, which could be set in present-day Florida. (Pictured is a detail from Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books from a nine-set piece, Life of St. Paul, Brussels 1497-1502.)