RT Article
T1 Oedipus's Riddle: Elizabethan transformation of the family portrait of Thomas More, an Appendix to "Non sum Oedipus sed Morus"
JF Moreana
VO 56
IS 2
SP 133
OP 159
A1 Mitjans, Frank
LA English
PB Edinburgh University Press
YR 2019
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1687848041
AB Holbein produced a drawing of Sir Thomas More and his Family which was a preparatory sketch for a larger painting. The painting was acquired by Karl von Liechtenstein-Kastelkron (1623-95), Archbishop of Olomouc, Moravia, and was last recorded in 1691 as being kept in the episcopal residence in Olomouc; it is generally assumed that the painting was lost in the 1752 fire at the Archbishop's château in Kromeriž. There are, however, five extant versions of the Family Group. The three main versions are the full-sized oil on canvas, The Family of Sir Thomas More (1592), now at Nostell Priory, and two paintings of Sir Thomas More, his Household, and Descendants: one kept at the National Portrait Gallery, the other at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. There has been much discussion about the transformation from a family at prayer—as portrayed in the original drawing—to a conversation on Seneca. Based on editions of Oedipus prior to the Nostell painting, the history of More's descendants, and a cameo that belonged to More's family, this paper argues that the Elizabethan transformation is a story of conformity and non-conformity.
K1 Cresacre More
K1 Editions of Seneca's Oedipus
K1 Jasper Heywood
K1 Thomas More II
K1 Thomas Roper
K1 William Roper II
K1 Éditions de l'Œdipe de Sénèque
DO 10.3366/more.2019.0058