Chaste Painting: Elizabeth Russell's Theatres of Memory

Abstract

Patricia Phillippy far as my self doth, she shall see here no bad example of life but with me may learn to know God" (297). 4 We might expect that Russell' s refusal of all things Catholic, her advocacy of reformist doctrine, and her selffashioning as a humanist would lead her to condemn both the decorative art of painting and the cosmetic adornment of the body -the twin senses current in the term "painting" in Elizabethan England 5 -as equivalent practices, equally vain and deceptive. She seems unlikely to paint or to be painted.Yet around the time that she sought to publish her religious beliefs and linguistic accomplishments by bringing her translation to press (and by means of her tutelage of a third generation of Cooke women), Russell commissioned a portrait that still hangs in her former home, Bisham Abbey, Berkshire (figure 1). Portrayed in the widow' s weeds that she wore for the last twenty-five years of her life, holding a small devotional text and standing beside a folio Bible with an embroidered cover, Russell is the picture of feminine piety and a formidable woman of property. The Turkish carpet on which she stands and the velvet tablecloth where she rests her hand affirm her material wealth, but Russell emphasizes her intellectual property. She presents herself as a reader and implicitly a writer, by associating needlework with writing, 6 while a Greek verse from Psalm 55 inscribed on the background asserts her humanist credentials. 7 Amid these emblematic objects, Russell' s painted face is an emblem as well. As is often true in Elizabethan portraiture, the female subject' s face is an ideal. Conforming to 4 Although Frances' aunt was a suspected convert to Catholicism, Cecil nonetheless placed his daughter with her.