NICHOLAS Hilliard's portrait of Queen Elizabeth I playing the lute presents an enigma (Figure 1.1). As a portrait miniature it is highly unusual; whereas a miniature typically depicts just the head and shoulders, this portrait extends to the waist. Moreover, Elizabeth is not only sitting, but actively playing a lute, a rarity among portraiture of upper-class women. In the few exceptions (seventeenthcentury portraits of Lady Mary Wroth, Lady Isabella Rich and Lady Anne Clifford) the instrument is held symbolically rather than played, as an emblem of sensibility or marriageability. By contrast, the iconography of women playing lutes invited erotic interpretations, particularly on the Continent, as Venetian courtesans used the lute as the badge for their trade. The European travels undertaken by young noblemen, the services undertaken abroad by Elizabeth's ambassadors, and the cosmopolitan nature of the Elizabethan court made such imagery familiar in English culture too. Such connotations of lust were hardly appropriate for an image of the Virgin Queen.

Yet Hilliard makes a conscious effort to distance Elizabeth from such negative associations. She is not pictured in one of the open-breasted dresses that were the fashion for young, unmarried women, although other paintings and descriptions by ambassadors and travellers suggest she wore these throughout her life, even in old age. The high-necked dress – splendid and regal with its silver trim, but also dark, a colour associated with chastity and modesty – is designed to lessen such connotations. Moreover, the elaborate throne with crowned globes that forms the backdrop to the performance thrusts political resonances to the fore, suggesting that the lute functions symbolically, as in Holbein's The Ambassadors (see p. 9), representing political harmony or discord. While Holbein's lute was a symbolic object displayed on a shelf, in Hilliard's miniature it is a functioning musical instrument in the hands of an admired player. The imagined sensuous sound of music-making is not subdued: rather speculative and practical music, monarch and musician, are fused.

In combining the symbolic representation of political harmony with an evocation of her practical performances in life, Hilliard's miniature alludes to the blend of personal music-making and literary or artistic representations that formed the Queen's musical image.