Fischlin comments on the well-known "Rainbow Portrait" of Queen Elizabeth I. He argues that there is strong evidence to support a reading of the portrait as primarily a political allegory, one whose religious dimensions underpin an iconographic representation of sovereign self-investiture.

Copyright Renaissance Society of America Spring 1997

IT IS SOMEWHAT SURPRISING, given the nature of royal investment in various forms of political and religious iconography associated with Renaissance portraiture, that the well-known "Rainbow Portrait" (c.1600-03; fig. 1) of Queen Elizabeth I, held by Robert Cecil, Lord of Salisbury at Hatfield House, but of unknown provenance,l has not received sufficient attention to its political allegories. Much has been made of the religious symbolism associated with the portrait, especially by Rene Graziani, who argues, for example, that "Elizabeth wears the gauntlet on her ruff in right of her title, Fidei Defensor, official champion of the Christian religion" (255),2 and that the hair style of the Queen with its "Thessalonian bride allusion. . . [contributes] to the sponsa Dei theme" (259).3 No doubt conventional religious symbols are at work in the portrait, but I would argue that there is strong evidence to support a reading of the portrait as primarily a political allegory, one whose religious dimensions underpin an iconographic representation of sovereign self-investiture. Graziani's conclusion that the "'Rainbow' portrait keeps a fine balance between what belongs to the queen as a great Christian sovereign on the one hand and on the other the confession of utter dependence on God" (259) needs reevaluation, especially in terms of the so called "utter dependence on God" that the portrait putatively manifests.

Roy Strong's suggestion that the portrait is "above all a composite portrait which has, like the 'Sieve' portraits, to be read as a series of separate emblems as well as collectively" (1987, 158) emphasizes less the religious aspects while underscoring the disparate elements of the symbolism. This despite his general assertion that Renaissance state portraits are meant "not to portray an individual as such, but to invoke through that person's image the abstract principles of their rule" (1987, 36). Strong hints at possible political readings of Elizabethan portraiture when he suggests that images of Elizabeth "produced after 1580 must have reinforced the concept of the monarch as a being sacred and set apart, whose very jewels embodied the glory and riches of the kingdom" (1987, 36). After a brief summary of Mannerist treatises on painting by Ludovico Dolce and Paolo Lomazzo, Strong concludes that "for the Renaissance neo-platonist the portrait painter was concerned with the ruler . . . as the embodiment of the 'Idea' of kingship" (1987, 37). Surprisingly, Strong does not elaborate on these views in his reading of the "Rainbow" portrait. Instead, he focuses on the diverse elements of its symbolism, ranging from representations of the Pax Elizabethae, to conventional representations of the Queen's virtues of wisdom and prudence, to symbolism associated with the "springtime renovatio of the golden age" (1987, 160), all of which suggest a diffuse and rather cliched political symbolism at work.

A via media exists between Graziani's and Strong's authoritative readings, which I wish to develop in this essay. A number of features in the portrait combine to form a forceful, political allegory that is presented within a complex skein of allusions, not all to be read in terms of traditional iconography. Strong in fact notes that if the portrait is attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts, "it would have to be placed among his most adventurous compositions" (1987, 161), suggesting that the resonances of the portrait, whoever drew up its program,4 may not have been wholly within the interpretive traditions of Elizabethan portraiture.

The portrait, no doubt, is a hybrid-aesthetic, religious, literary, and so forth-but it is a hybrid designed in such a way as to occlude the overt political significations that would have undermined it as political representation. The very fact that commentators have missed or ignored the political symbolism at work in the portrait indicates either that it is so obvious as not to warrant mention, or that it is so cleverly concealed as to be virtually unnoticeable. If the latter option is indeed correct, then the highly accomplished technical features of the painting may well serve to distract viewers from the cryptic and dissimulative artifices that are the keys to the portrait's allegorical dimensions. Those dimensions include the political insofar as the portrait comments on monarchic governance in the anxious, historical contexts of a sovereign who, without direct heirs, was near the end of a reign in which some measure of political stability, however illusory, had been achieved. Though commentators have averted their eyes from the political dimension, preferring instead to reflect on the general structure of the portrait,5 it seems clear that the portrait intends a political allegory, however concealed, that comments on the dimensions of the absolute ideology it enacts. But what evidence can be brought to bear on such an argument?

First is the obvious misrepresentation and distortion of the aged Queen's body and face that the portrait constructs. Strong has noted the "use of the established Mask of Youth image of the Queen" (1987, 161), an allegorical representation of dissimulation in which the monarchic presence is invested with supranatural powers over corporeal disintegration, thus confirming her association with an ex illo tempore world. Susan Frye observes, in this last regard, that

Although Elizabeth frequently admitted the consequences of her aging, her iconographic response to the fear of premature burial was to claim herself ageless. The inherent claim was that her active virtue, so often particularized as her virginity or chastity, protected Elizabeth from the aging process, helping preserve her metaphoric fertility in the guise of a continuing physical fertility. Her represented denial of old age was an assertion of her political viability, an attempt to transcend her society's tendency to disparage and ignore any woman past childbearing age - without, however, challenging that prejudice. As usual, Elizabeth's selfrepresentation made no claim for women as a whole, but, rather, sought to distance her from normative constructions of the feminine. (100-01)6

Hence, political viability, the capacity to sustain the illusion of sovereignty, entails for Elizabeth the assertion of a position outside orthodoxies relating to the representation of feminine aging. Sovereignty, in the curious logic of iconic representations of the Mask of Youth, denies the norm even as it seeks to perpetuate the norm against which the sovereign is defined and without which he or she would not have hierarchical place. Mary E. Hazard writes that "the appearance of the Queen under the Mask of Youth or Beauty [in the Rainbow portrait] constitutes an iconic representation of the legal fiction of the monarch's two bodies .... If the king never dies, by the same logic, the queen never ages: the body of the monarch lives in a perpetual present" (79). The fiction of a "perpetual present," outside the normative conception of time, was a significant dimension of iconic representations of absolute power, the icon itself having extra-temporal resonances that were useful in the construction of illusory images of absolute power. To subject the sovereign to time was to undermine the symbolic fiction of absolutist practice as occurring in an ex illo tempore, divine dimension from which it gained its putative authority.

But such an ex illo tempore world is not wholly spiritual or Godly. Rather, such a world revokes the viewer of the portrait to the powers of mimesis itself, the mimetic achievement of the portrait being its capacity to rewrite the realities of corporeal function. Such a rewriting, by way of what is in effect a form of anti-mimesis, has political consequences. The "reader" of the portrait is thereby ensnared in the following knot: on the one hand, the portrait is obviously a distorted version of an elderly woman in her late sixties; on the other hand, the willful distortion enhances the force of mimesis in its ability to rescript reality. The latter is clearly what underlies the metaphysical dimensions of the absolute monarch, who is absolute only insofar as he or she is capable of sustaining the fiction of that absoluteness through the distortive, anti-mimetic techniques of literary, iconographical, and public representations of his or her body, his or her will. Thus, the very premises of the portrait ensure that the covert political foundations of absolutist ideology engage the viewer much in the same way that the words Elizabeth is said to have spoken to her troops prior to the Armada enable the potent association between the literal and figural body of the monarch: "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too" (cited in Montrose, 315).7

The ineluctable political logic underlying the portrait is that the Queen possesses unseen powers over all acts of representation, powers that fly in the face of even the most egregious distortions of reality relating to her body and what it represents.

A second element of the portrait that has not received much commentary is the Queen's cloak, with its eerie depiction of eyes and ears facing out toward the viewer. Strong associates these with verses from Henry Peacham's Minerva Britanna (1612), in which a similar cloak is worn by Ragione di Stato (Reason of State) in imitation of an emblem from Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (Rome, 1593): "Be seru'd with eies, and listening eares of those / Who can from all partes giue intelligence / To gall his foe, or timely to prevent / At home his malice, and intendiment." Strong continues on to say that "Peacham is using the ears and eyes in the same way that John Davies refers to the Queen's use of her servants . . . in his first entertainment in 1600: `many things she sees and hears through them, but the Judgement and Election are her own" (1987, 159). The point is well-taken, especially in the context of James VI and I's similar comments in the second book of Basilikon Doron (1597): "And shortly, follow good king Davids counsell in the choice of your seruants, by setting your eyes vpon the faithfull and vpright of the land to dwell with you" (168). Even more relevant, however, are comments James makes at the conclusion of book two of the Basilikon Doron, where he effectively states to Henry that his subjects, "by their hearing of your Lawes . . . [and] by their sight of your person, both their eyes and their eares, may leade and allure them to the loue of venue, and hatred of vice" (179). The political implications of love of virtue and hatred of vice are noteworthy, for it is precisely by encouraging such emotions that the monarch defines his or her subjects' subservient relations to the absolutist state, the moral standard against which all ideology is to be measured and regulated. James's advice, then, has not so much moral or didactic implications relating to the religious conduct of his subjects but rather to their political conduct. The king or queen signifies quite literally the embodiment of the laws and virtuous attributes that ensure the State's survival.

The eyes and ears evident in the "Rainbow" portrait, when read in such a context, do not signify fame, as Frances Yates has suggested in a reading discounted by Strong.8 Nor do they simply and univocally signify the Christian imagery that Graziani gives them by way of Matthew 13:16-17 ("Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear"). "In the portrait," Graziani argues, "we are to understand that the Queen wears this blessing like a cloak or mantle. She is one who has seen and heard, an exemplary Christian and someone specially favoured" (256). Though this may very well be the case it hardly tells the whole story, for it assumes that the pose of the exemplary Christian occurs only within a religious context, not the larger context in which such a pose had its obvious political uses.9 Elizabeth was a pragmatist, both political and religious, and kept her eye firmly on the secular dimensions of religious squabbling, going so far as to state in a letter to James that "I am of this religion, qui vadit plane, vadit sane" (168). Christian rhetoric was a conventional tool of political artifice for Elizabeth and the purely religious reading is too narrow an explanation of what the eyes and ears in the "Rainbow" portrait signify, especially within the context of Strong's argument regarding the portrait's composite symbolism. Instead the eyes and ears echo the watchful gaze of the Queen, proliferating that gaze and twinning it with the attentive ears that attend to the viewer's relation to the portrait. The symbolism, then, is closer to the Benthamian or Foucauldian panopticon10 than it is to the religious zealot blessed by divine intervention. The Queen watches and listens vigilantly, seeing from all perspectives, hearing in all directions, the image perhaps distantly echoing the motto seen on the globe that appears in Quentin Massys the Younger's Sieve Portrait: "Tutto vedo e molto mancha" [I see all and much is lacking]. Surprisingly Strong, who is an adept and sensitive reader, misses precisely this point in the emblematic poetry he cites from Peacham.ll The function of the eyes and ears is political service that gives "intelligence" that galls foes, preventing their malice and the achievement of their "intendiment." That Ragione di Stato is wearing such a garment in Peacham's emblem merely reinforces the garment's political context, one that is refracted in the portrait's political allegory.12

The closest readers of this portrait have gotten to such an observation is Francis M. Kelley's comment, cited by Graziani in a footnote, that "the coiled snake and ears and eyes suggest her ceaseless vigilance" (247, n. 4), and Frye's observation that the portrait "depicts an assemblage of iconographic elements that claim the queen's chaste body as the center of the Ptolemaic universe while wrapping her in a mantle whose open mouths, ears, and eyes form a disquieting suggestion of vaginal openings combined with a sense of governmental surveillance" (102-03).13 Frye does not develop her "suggestion of vaginal openings" nor their relation to government surveillance, if any at all. Reading the folds in the mantle as mouths - themselves a visual metonymy for the vagina - is extremely problematic with regard to the apparent logic of the portrait's representation of the "queen's chaste body." This problematic is further heightened by Strong's outright declaration that "the golden cloak is adorned with eyes and ears but not with mouths (eliminating the usual misreading of it as Fame)" (1985, 122).

Nonetheless, if the erotics of the portrait entail a contemporary reading of the mantle's folds as mouths or vaginas, the political dimension of the queen's erotic allure cannot be ignored. Joel Fineman, in a brief discussion of the Rainbow portrait's "fetishistic erotics," aligns those erotics with "an equally fetishistic principle of sovereign power" (228). Fineman is transfixed by the portrait, commenting that

what is genuinely mysterious and surprising about the Rainbow Portrait, especially if we assume this large picture was originally displayed at court, is the way the painting places an exceptionally pornographic ear over Queen Elizabeth's genitals, in the crease formed where the two folds of her dress fold over on each other, at the wrinkled conclusion of the arc projected by the dildo-like rainbow clasped so imperially by the Virgin Queen .... In reproduction, the vulva-like quality of the ear is perhaps not so readily apparent, but, enlarged and in florid color, the erotic quality of the image is really quite striking, as is the oddly colorless quality of the rainbow, a kind of dead rainbow. (228)

John M. Archer reads the folds as "tongues" (4), the shift from Frye's to Strong's to Fineman's to Archer's interpretation of the folds indicating the difficulty critics have had in attributing meaning to the fold, itself a particularly canny iconic representation of a sliding signifier.t4 The painting clearly eroticizes Elizabeth's body, whether or not one sees the portrait in the same way as Fineman, Frye, Archer, and Strong. The ambiguous folds, in combination with the vaguely phallic rainbow and the string of pearls looped suggestively round Elizabeth's genital area, image an erotic potential complicit with the sovereign vitality the portrait projects. Moreover, the capacity to transfix with both an erotics of ambiguity and an ambiguous erotics fortifies the absolutist dimensions of the portrait, for Elizabethan absolutism depended on precisely such an effect both to create its allure and veil its weaknesses. The power of erotic display is not easily separated from the representation of absolute power, as is demonstrated in, to cite but one of many examples, Holbein's depiction of Henry VIII sporting a prominent codpiece - a painting, incidentally, that was hung in the Privy Chamber at Whitehall, a place not without its potent political resonances.15 Furthermore, if the queen's left hand, with its index finger inserted in one of the mantle's folds has some sort of masturbatory significance, again if one accepts Frye's sexualized reading of the mantle's folds, then the painting seems to be asserting, however cunningly or ambiguously, the Queen's sexual aloofness, itself a metonymy for her political uniqueness.16 The portrait may slyly hint, however shocking such a suggestion may be, at the nature of the unmarried queen's autonomous sexual practices while also affirming the queen's political authority by virtue of the gaze she maintains and the intelligence she receives while touching herself. She is, quite literally, the "unmoved mover" (Belsey, 20) and the embodiment of her motto, semper eadem, the "always she" around whom political and sexual autonomy are gathered like the folds of her mantle. The effect is similar to what Mary E. Hazard describes in her analysis of the Hampton court portrait of Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses (monogrammist "HE"):

The objects of her gaze become subject to the queen even as her portrait is subject to the gaze of the viewer, and with similar paradoxical effect. Fixed as iconic subject, the image of the queen reciprocally acts upon a community of viewers, reminding them in turn of their status as political subjects, for dominance over the viewer is an implicit effect of icon, a conventional genre designed to evoke uncritical submission. In a very real sense, both the figures in the painting and the viewers without are objects beneath her regard. (64)

Furthermore, if the supposed rainbow that Elizabeth grasps in her right hand has any erotic significance related to masculine, or phallic, sexuality, the portrait further complicates its representation of the queen's sexuality. On the (literally) one hand, the queen holds the unusually shaped cylinder (as opposed to the more common, one-dimensional, flat representation) of the colorless rainbow. On the other hand, the queen fingers a fold whose visual ambiguousness parallels that of the rainbow's. Phallic representation is undercut by the more subtle visual and figurative resonances of the fold, which refuses to be read except in terms of its ambiguities as mediated by the centrality of Elizabeth as an emblem of empowered femininity.

The portrait's compositional balance entails an erotics in which the queen exerts control over the masculine, a control that may in fact be further heightened by the sexual autonomy suggested in the positioning of her left hand. A further possibility is that the Rainbow emblematically endows her with masculine attributes and that, in a sense, she becomes male by virtue of her grasp of its cylindrical shape as it descends into and merges with her anatomy.17 The rainbow is visually preeminent in the portrait while the left hand's relation to the fold is subordinate, functioning more as a Barthesian punctum than anything else.ls Thus the symbolic logic of masculine hierarchy is maintained even as it is subverted by the portrait's obvious depiction of female empowerment, or even, to use Constance Jordan's term, "political androgyny" (157). In effect, if one accepts such a reading, the portrait rescripts the sovereign's potency in terms of both masculine and feminine agency. Such a rescripting fulfills the symbolic logic of absolutist hierarchies whose traditionally patriarchal assumptions had to assimilate the gender displacement caused by Elizabeth's accession to the throne. The autoerotic valences the portrait may generate reflect what Philippa Berry calls the "gynocentric cult of an unmarried queen," in which the "emphasis of the love discourses [of Petrarchism and Renaissance Neoplatonism] upon masculine subjectivity was to be seriously undermined" (38). The portrait inverts and re-tropes the traditional dynamics of sexual representation, which, as Archer states, involved making women the subjects of sexual surveillance by men" (53), while sustaining the illusion of that traditional dynamic. Thus, Elizabeth as icon becomes subject to the gaze of the observer. But at the same time the symbolics of the portrait reshape the observer's gaze, subjecting it to the density of allegorical conceit, political allusion, and erotic ambiguity that Elizabeth as representation instantiates."

The fraught politics of Elizabethan female self-representation required a substantial shift in iconic representations of what had traditionally been the domain of "masculine subjectivity," especially if one accepts Mark Breitenberg's suggestion about the "essentially iconic nature of Renaissance interpretive codes" (4). The shift necessarily generated visual and verbal ambiguities burdened with interpretive possibilities that remain difficult to reclaim with even the most informed historical hindsight. The obscure erotics of the Rainbow portrait, its visual representation of what Berry refers to in a discussion of Spenser's Cantos of Mutability as "an indecipherable feminine figure" (165), attest to the power, political and otherwise, framed in the very elusiveness of its mise en scene.20

A further symbolic dimension to the eyes and ears, missed by previous commentators on the portrait, is its relation to Ripa's emblem for "Gelosia" in the 1603 version of Iconologia. The emblem depicts a "Donna con vna veste di torchino a onde, dipinta tutta d'occhi, e d'orecchie, con l'ali alle spalle, con vn gallo nel braccio sinistro, & nella destra mano con vn mazzo di spine" (194; see fig. 2). Ripa explains that *Gli occhi, & orecchie dipinte nella veste signifi cano l'assidua cura del geloso di uedere, & intendere sottilmente ogni minimo atto, & cenno della persona amata da lui" (194). The eyes and ears on Elizabeth's cloak, when seen in such an emblematic context, signify her jealous relation, what Archer calls her "scopic anxiety" (42), to the body of the commonwealth that is her beloved (the "persona amata"). They demonstrate the assiduous care she takes in subtly hearing and seeing the smallest acts and signs shown her by the body of the commonwealth. In addition, the eyes and ears give emblematic context to another Elizabethan motto, video et taceo, 'I see and remain silent," suggesting that the inscrutability of her gaze and the ambiguous potency of her silence are key features of her public representation of monarchic authority. Ripa's comment that "Gelosia e vna passione, & vn timore" (194), that jealousythe ambiguous significance of the eyes and ears, for they embody both Elizabeth's love of the commonwealth and her anxiety with regard to the potential threat it poses against her reign. Thus, the eyes and ears symbolize the crucial dimensions of absolutism, torn between jealous love and fear of loss, both of which can only be insured through the perpetual vigilance that figuratively covers and protects Elizabeth's sovereign body.21

The third notable element in the political allegory, and one that has similarly been overlooked by major interpretations of the portrait, has to do with the so-called rainbow that the Queen grasps with her right hand, above which is appended the Latin tag, Non Sine Sole Iris, or "No rainbow without the sun." The tag confirms the emblematic context of the portrait, providing an obscure gloss on the portrait's meaning. For Graziani, the rainbow fits its sixteenth-century context as a religious icon, "notwithstanding the fact that Italian artists were tending to discard it in its traditional contexts [related to the Sacrifices of Noah]" (251). Graziani continues on to argue that "the Queen grasps the rainbow as a token of protection and assurance, very much in the spirit of a later Protestant expression, `taking hold of God's promises" (252). Strong suggests the rainbow as a "traditional symbol of peace" (1987, 158), allying it with notions of the covenant made between God and Noah after the Flood: "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth" (Genesis 9:13). For Graziani, as for Strong, the Biblical symbolism is dominant, and there is no question that readings which fail to note such associations are seriously flawed.

Again, however, such a reading is far from complete within the context of the political allegory at work in the portrait. Elizabeth's grasp of the rainbow extends notions of Biblical covenant in a manner hitherto unnoted, for unlike Noah, who does not touch the rainbow, Elizabeth does. Furthermore, the rainbow is primarily a symbol of divinity, set in place by God, as a reminder to God, of the covenant made: "and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth" (Genesis 9:16). Thus the rainbow becomes in such a context a highly charged covenantal symbol that is grasped by Elizabeth as an emblem of her proximity to divine authority as well as of her capacity to mediate between the divine and the earthly. Her ability to grasp the covenant signifies the alignment of her power with divine power, the alignment of her perspective in remembering her covenant with her subjects with that of God's, who, we must not forget, sets the rainbow in place more for divine than for human benefit. In other words, the rainbow establishes the covenant from the perspective of the top of the hierarchy, whether divine or monarchic, suggesting a cosmic alliance between the two that is enabled by Elizabeth's potent capacity to grasp the nature of the covenant.

The political implications, though highly conventional, are profound, for the suggestion is that Elizabeth is empowered by her proximity to the divine and that she is in some senses a simulacrum of that divinity. The Latin tag may thus be read, within quite a different context, as referring to the Queen's presence as a marker for divine presence. The Queen holds forth the rainbow by virtue of the divine light she emits, not the rainbow without the sun coming to emblematize the power that radiates from the Queen as a function of her proximity to the divine. "[T]he Queen is lit," as Strong observes, "neither from the left nor from the right but actually seems to radiate light as she moves before the arch that encompasses her figure" (1987, 160). Elizabeth's radiation of light coincides with the type of the Tudor Godly Woman as emblematized in the biblical type of the "Woman Clothed with the Sun (Rev. 12)," a figure that characterized, according to John N. King, "representations of Queen Elizabeth as. . . wise and faithful" (1985, 50).

But the rainbow as a symbol, however oblique, of the "Woman Clothed with the Sun" is not the only divine woman with whom it may be linked. Images from Henry Hawkins's emblem book structured around a series of Marian devotions, Partheneia Sacra, or, the Mysteriovs and Deliciovs Garden of the Sacred Parthenes (1633), use "The Iris" to reinforce the devotional importance of the "Virgin of Virgins" (Hawkins, 94; see figs. 3 and 4). "The Devise" of the "Iris" functions for Hawkins as "the Triumphal Arch of the heauenlie Numens, set-vp in triumph as a Trophey of Beautie, to allure the eyes of al, to stare and gaze vpon it" (92). Hawkins argues that "this heauenlie Bow deciphers the Queen of Heauen, this mirrour of Nature, and the astonishment of man-kind" (96), and goes on to suggest that "the grace of GOD being a ray, as it were, of the Diuine Essence, reflecting on the purest Virgin, a lucid clowd, concaue and waterish, produced the Iris or Rainebow in the Hierarchie of the Church, as in the firmament of the Heavens; and therefore called the Iris or Celestial Bow, a signe of the Reconciliation of GOD with al mankind" (97). In his concluding apostrophe to the "Iris," Hawkins invokes "my most deer Diuine Mother" to guard me with the bow of thy safeguard and protection" (102; mispaginated as 122), again confirming the sacred associations of the rainbow with the Virgin Mary.22 The rainbow emblematizes Mary's virginity, allure, and beauty, her ability to mirror and astonish, her queenliness and capacity to reconcile and protect, all virtues that had political resonances during Elizabeth's reign. These virtues, at once sacred and profane, may well be encapsulated in the Rainbow portrait's symbology.

Even though the Partheneia Sacra appeared well after the presumed dating for the conception and execution of the Rainbow portrait, its symbology nonetheless allows for the rainbow as a potential signifier of divine virginity, let alone as a "token of protection and assurance" (Graziani, 252) or as a "traditional symbol of peace" (Strong, 1987, 158). Frances Yates, tracing some of the symbolic links between the Virgin Mary and Queen Elizabeth, suggests that many of Queen Elizabeth's virginal symbols - including the Rose, the Star, the Moon, the Phoenix, and the Pearl, all of which, incidentally, are to be found as emblems in Hawkins's Partheneia Sacra - "were also symbols of the Virgin Mary" (78). Yates proposes the possibility, however "daring" or "startling" (78), that "the cult of the virgin queen, was, perhaps half-unconsciously, intended to take the place of the cult of the Virgin" (78), and uses as her evidence a Dowland lute song that links the phrases "Vivat Eliza" with "Ave Mari," an engraving of Elizabeth that notes Elizabeth's birth on the "Eve of the Nativity of the blessed virgin Mary" and her death on the "eve of the Annunciation of the virgin Mary" (78), and some of the "chants of the university poets" at Elizabeth's death, in which "one of the names used of Elizabeth by her poets, namely `Beta,' is assimilated to `Beata Maria" (79). For Yates, the "mysterious" symbolism used to represent Queen Elizabeth also had ties with Astraea-Virgo, who symbolically echoes the Virgin Mary (80). Read in this polysemous context, the rainbow redoubles Elizabeth's divine associations, connecting her allegorically with both the Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Virgin Mary, thus adding to her iconic stature as an incarnation of divine (and virginal) empowerment.

The secular symbolism of the rainbow, though difficult to dissociate from its sacred symbolism, also has significance in political terms. Janet Arnold, for instance, notes that the rainbow "appears in [Claude] Paradin's Heroicall Deuises [1591] with the motto `The raine bow [sic] doth bring faire weather,' and this text: `The most faire and bountifull queene of France Katherine used the signe of the rainebow for her armes, which is an infallible signe of peaceable calmenes and tranquillitie" (84). Paradin's symbolic sense of the rainbow is echoed in George Wither's A collection of emblemes, ancient and modern (1635), which figures a rainbow and sun appearing over storm clouds, with the epigrammatic commentary that "the rainbow brings promise of the sun after a storm; so man should have hope that God will relieve his sorrows" (cited in Diehl, 172). Though impossible to determine the extent of the intertextual associations among Paradin's, Withers's and the Rainbow portraitist's use of the rainbow, the association of the rainbow with monarchic virtues of "peaceable calmenes and tranquillitie" made it an appropriate device in Elizabeth's iconographic repertoire. And, in fact, the rainbow portrait is not the only instance in which Elizabeth made use of its symbolism; Arnold states that "The rainbow is used as an embroidery motif on many of Elizabeth's gowns and may be seen on one surviving fragment of a smock" (84). Ultimately, the secular symbolism of the rainbow as an emblem of hope, tranquillity, wisdom, and faith cannot be separated from its sacred symbolism as emblematic of the divine presence that empowers the absolute monarch.

But the Rainbow portrait, while seeming to point to the convergence of these sacred and secular symbolic values in the image of the rainbow, also leaves room for considerable ambiguity in how that image is to be interpreted. A rather puzzling detail of the painting, already noted in comments made by Joel Fineman, has a direct bearing on how one reads the rainbow symbolism. The rainbow's obvious lack of discernible rainbow colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet - in a painting that is "rich in coppery hues" (Pomeroy, 64) and in other forms of chiaroscuro light, would seem to suggest two somewhat contradictory possibilities.24

On the one hand, the lack of rainbow colors may well be a subversive undercutting of Elizabeth's symbolic magnificence, the anonymous painter figuratively undermining Elizabeth by showing her in a situation where no rainbow shines because there is no sun - that is, because Elizabeth's magnificence is false or in decline. Such a strategy would be in direct violation of an account Nicholas Hilliard gives in A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning (c. 1598-99) of Elizabeth as portait-subject carefully choosing "her place to sit . . . in the open ally of a goodly garden, where no tree was neere, nor anye shadowe at all, save that as the heaven is lighter then the earthe, soe must that littel shadowe that was from the earthe" (29). Hilliard characterizes Elizabeth's request as "curiouse" before going on to admit that Elizabeth's demand had "greatly bettered my Judgment besids divers other like questions in Art by her most excelent Majestie which to speake or writ of, weare fitter for some better clarke, this matter only of the light, let me perfect, that noe wisse man longer remaine in error of praysing much shadowes in pictures" (29). Elizabeth clearly had little sympathy for the use of shadow in limned work if only because, as Hilliard puts it, to best "showe ones selfe, nedeth no shadow of place but rather the oppen light" (28-29). The Rainbow portrait obviously and perhaps subversively contradicts the philosophy of representation implicit in such an observation - a philosophy that is at pains to empower the object of the painter's scrutiny - by framing Elizabeth's presence in shadow. The symbolics of the Rainbow portrait, when read in the context of Hilliard's anecdote, may be seen as inflected with resistance to Elizabeth's efforts to control the aesthetics of her public representation. Thus, the shadows engulfing her image may portend the twilight of her reign, and the fact that rainbows are impossible in the crepuscular light she emits. No rainbow shines, literally, because there is no sun to illuminate it.25

On the other hand, the lack of color in the rainbow - of which Elizabeth Pomeroy says, "but, strangely, the little arc she holds is not nearly as colorful as her own hair and cloak" (65) - may well indicate Elizabeth's surpassing relative significance in relation to the natural world, her place near the top of the hierarchy being confirmed by her luminescence, which contrasts so vividly with the pale arc she holds in her hand. Her grasp of the rainbow emblematizes the symbolic union of Elizabeth's physical body with the divinity that authorizes it to represent the body politic, the portrait echoing Francis Bacon's notion that "there is in the king not a Body natural alone, nor a Body politic alone, but a body natural and politic together: corpus corporatum in corpore naturali, et corpus naturale in corpore corporato."26 No rainbow shines because it is outshone by the Queen's own brilliance, her own surpassing light, her incarnation of political will authorized by the divine. Thus, though it is tempting to say that no rainbow really exists in the portrait, the politics of its representation as absence or presence have a great deal to do with how one reads its significance, either as a referent for the decline of the absolute power invested in the monarch, or as a mark of her overshadowing presence that obscures or transforms the many colors of the rainbow into the uniform light generated by Elizabeth's sovereign powers.27

Furthermore, the rainbow and its tag cannot be separated from the political contexts established in Michael Neill's reading of the portrait as emblematic of Elizabethan imperial ambitions in Ireland. For Neill, the Rainbow portrait is "the last of the series of great royal icons in which the queen identified the idea of the nation with the display of her own royal body," and is a "frightening assertion of a royal power so absolute that it can absorb the very signs of barbarism [the Irish mantle with which Elizabeth is clad]28 into its scheme of civilizing control" (29). Neill suggests that the portrait boldly appropriates "the most threatening of all images of degeneration . . . the Irish cloak of inscrutability, here emblazoned, however, with the signs of her all-seeing power" (29). Moreover, Neill's reading proposes that Elizabeth's "bridal locks present her as the spouse of her kingdom" and that the "punning motto displayed above the rainbow of peace in her right hand identifies her symbolic nuptials quite specifically with the conquest of Ireland: Non sine sole Iris - `there is no Rainbow without the Sun,' but also (since Iris was one of the ancient names for Ireland, cited by Camden from Diodorus Siculus) `there is no Ireland without her queen"'" (29-31). For Neill, the portrait's "political agenda" anticipates "Mountjoy's imminent defeat of the most powerful and obstinate of the Irish rebels, Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and hence the final subjugation of Ireland" (31). The painting's appropriation of the Irish mantle, "one of the great symbols of cultural difference" emblematizes "the incorporation of a conquered people into the body of the English nation-state" and is "a chilling reminder of what it meant to be subjected to the inquisitorial `perspective' of monarchical power" (31). The flip side of Neill's reading, however, is that such an inquisitorial perspective subjects the sovereign as well, her putative inscrutability and panoptic power being dependent on the demonized Irish "other" who literally and figuratively clothes her and gives her political and military substance, while also symbolically embodying the spouse she never took. The subversive potential of such a reading cannot be separated from the admittedly more likely reading of absolutist self-affirmation proposed by Neill. Nonetheless the potential for such an ambiguity remains encoded in the portrait's images, just as the potential for challenge to the sovereign's power is ever-present regardless of the panoptic control exerted by the portrait "in the minds of potentially dissident subjects" (Neill, 31). The polysemous coding at work in the image articulates the symbolic contradictions embodied in the absolute sovereign.

Whatever one's reading, then, whatever the intention of the artist, the symbolism is acutely political, acutely ambivalent. The religious connotations that cannot be detached from the rainbow's iconography are no doubt in place, though not in an uncomplicated manner. The canny manipulation of such imagery has as much to do with political uses of religious symbolism as it has to do with the monarch's control over her representation in portraits, that very control being itself an exemplum of the monarch's power. The possibility, discussed earlier, that such control has been supplanted or challenged by the artist's manipulations indicates that the visual resonances of the portrait have as much to do with the contestations, mimetic and otherwise, to which power and its exercise are always subjected as it has to do with the direct representation of an unobstructed, unchallenged absolute monarch. Furthermore the painting problematizes the relations between its visual and written texts, as if to suggest that the contestatory interpretive possibilities generated by the agglomeration of those texts parallel the contestatory political contexts that surround the absolute monarch.29

It is not unreasonable to suppose that Elizabeth, near the end of an extended, unparalleled reign, would have had the temerity let alone the force of personality to rescript traditional symbols in an autonomous manner suited to her political purposes. This was the woman, after all, who in an earlier time (January 1586-87) had written to James about his mother, Mary Queen of Scotland, saying "let all men knowe, that princes knowe best their owne lawes, and misiuge not that you know not" (Bruce, 43). The same letter refers to Mary as "the serpent that poisons me" (42), and begs James to "[t]ransfigure yourself into my state . . . and therafter way my life" (43). Though I do not mean to suggest a direct linkage between Mary, the serpent, and the serpent found on Elizabeth's left sleeve in the Rainbow portrait - the latter described by Strong as an "attribute of Prudence and of the goddess Minerva" (1987, 159) - the serpent image does have powerful connotations relating to the ever-present threat of evil that calls for prudence, wisdom, and perpetual vigilance on the part of the sovereign. Moreover, the serpent has emblematic associations with "Intelligenza" in Ripa's iconographical vocabulary, thus reinforcing the connections with the earlier cited verses from Peacham's Minerva Britanna. The serpent, in Ripa's emblem for "Intelligenza," "mostra che per intendere le cose alte, e sublimi, bisogna prima andar per terra come fa il serpe" (260), showing that to understand the sublime, one must first pass like the serpent by way of the earth. Thus, the serpent emblematizes not only knowledge of the sublime but also the ever-present physical realities of earthly existence to which the sovereign is subject. The absolute monarch links the exalted with the terrestrial and must negotiate the symbolic space of each if she is to survive. The mediation of this dual reality that informs the symbolic dimensions of the monarch's political power is rendered in the image of the serpent.

Nor is the serpent's appearance on Elizabeth's left sleeve accidental,30 the sinister side having in Roman and Greek augury conflicting meanings, both favorable and unfavorable. Thus, whether directly or indirectly, whether intentional or unintentional, the portrait brings into play a further symbol of ambiguity, one that poses in the manner of the pharmakon both the threat of poisoning and the means by which that threat can be avoided. The ambivalence has a notable political function, especially poignant in light of Elizabeth's earlier cited comments to James about Mary, and symbolizes both the threat to the State with Elizabeth's sovereign body as target - and the means by which that threat will be averted through the exercise of wisdom and prudence. Visually balanced in the portrait's composition between good and bad fortune, between the divine rainbow and the potentially evil Edenic snake, the sovereign negotiates her way forward by virtue of her capacity to shape representation, which at the same time poses an ongoing challenge to her by virtue of its ambiguities or deliberate falsehoods, symbolized in the snake, the colorless rainbow, the mask of youth, and the cloak that not only masks Elizabeth's aged body but also signifies her awareness of the duplicities by which she is surrounded (thus necessitating the eyes and ears that serve her with "intelligence"). The portrait, seen in such a light, takes on very particular political resonances that play into both the fin-desiecle and retrospective tones that may be discerned in it. Its conflation of conflicting and ambiguous images represents the struggle to maintain the illusion of autonomy in the face of an approaching personal apocalypse beyond Elizabeth's control.

The capacity to shape images - whether literary, visual, or musical, whether public or private - has a great deal to do with the creation of an intelligible mythography associated with the iconic display of power so crucial to early modern absolutist ideologies. In the uncertain political contexts prior to James's ascension to the throne of England in 1603 heightened by the troubles in Ireland, the Scottish border problem, worries about dynastic continuity, not to mention the failed Essex rebellion in February 160131- the portrait served a powerful emblematic purpose in reinforcing Elizabeth's political authority by way of her control over imagery and her ability to make mimesis do her bidding, even at the risk of exposing the ambiguities entailed by way of such a strategy. Nonetheless, the portrait clearly visualizes the body of the Queen in a manner that acknowledges her two bodies, one symbolic the other corporeal, a concept that Ernst Kantorowicz calls "a landmark of Christian political theology" (506). To deny or ignore the political dimension of such a representation while affirming only the theological is to evade crucial issues relating to how theology and politics were inseparable constituents of absolutist ideology in early modern England. The silent pageant of the portrait's personal and public symbols, carefully watching and listening to its viewers, evinces political will embodied in the interplay of its historical context and its allegorical structures, all of which are profoundly intertwined with the ideology of absolutist self-representation and self-affirmation.

THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH