Grifting Grifters Gonna Grift

Ain't nuthin' new. Everything has its origin in something that's gone before.

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Learning an old lesson from the Tudors: Grifters gonna grift

The Met’s fascinating exhibition of Tudor splendor explores the construction of power

NEW YORK — As I was processing the rich display of tapestries, paintings, armor and metalwork on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tudors exhibition, the world was buzzing over a photograph taken at the World Cup in Qatar. It showed Jared Kushner, son-in-law to Donald Trump, standing in a stadium with Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, and Mansoor Bin Ebrahim Al-Mahmoud, head of the Qatar Investment Authority.

The image seemed to capture the essence of 21st-century power, a nexus of fossil-fuel wealth, control of digital resources, old-fashioned illiberal politics and ruthless self-promotion. Kushner’s stance was revealing: The immaculately coifed young man looks down his nose at the viewer, and it’s a cold, hard, suspicious look. You wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of this supercilious glance.

Courtier Robert Cheseman, Henry VIII’s falconer, gives the same look in a 1533 portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, one of several magnificent Holbeins on view in “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England.” The exhibition documents the Tudor dynasty’s efforts to create a royal court, which is not just a household with servants, or a political power center, but an idea and an image that consolidates authority at the cultural and emotional level. Courtiers sound like respectable people, basking in the reflected glory of the kings and queens they serve. But they were also politicians, self-serving and ambitious, often well-born mediocrities flying high above their general level of talent.

Robert Cheseman

Kushner is a courtier just as much as Cheseman was, and the look he gives the camera is exactly what you would expect from an ambitious modern-day courtier. His eyes register annoyance — a person of enormous privilege being inconvenienced by the intrusive gaze of curious onlookers — with the same intensity that the king stares down the unwanted presence of the artist or the audience in another, chilling Holbein portrait on view in the exhibition.

“The Tudors” is a smart and fascinating exhibit that will also be seen at the Cleveland Museum of Art (beginning Feb. 26) and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco (beginning June 24) after it closes in New York on Jan. 8. It raises a question that haunts other blockbuster museum displays of human treasure: Why is power in the past tense so interesting and alluring, while the powers that govern us today are so repellent? Put another way, why is art so effective at washing away the gritty, noxious reality of human ambition, despite the obvious fact that the pharaohs, kings and courtiers of the past were no more substantial than the posers and parvenues of today?

The same questions arose with other recent shows about the construction of power, including an exhibition of Holbein portraits at the Getty and the Met’s survey of Medici portraits, both in 2021. All of these exhibitions leave one feeling slightly guilty: The curators try to anatomize how power works, the strategies of mythmaking and image management, but the material on view is so seductive one forgets the larger intellectual construct. The Tudors are a classic case, deeply fascinating to audiences despite their excesses and cruelty. They ruled England for only three generations, but have cast an enormously long shadow, with their two most important figures — Henry VIII and Elizabeth I — among the most romanticized figures in history.

I am as susceptible to their surreal charisma as anyone. I felt slightly giddy to see Henry VIII’s own psalter — a 1540 illustrated Book of Psalms — in which the king’s distinctly porcine features have been transposed onto the biblical King David. Henry’s ego was capacious: He imagined himself as both a new Hercules (in classical contexts) and a new David, slayer of Goliath, in Old Testament settings.

When he wanted a New Testament alter ego, he compared himself to Saint Paul, a foil to Saint Peter, the founder of the Catholic Church, from which Henry broke England’s allegiance when he divorced the first of his six wives. In one enormous tapestry, “Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books,” we see Henry’s preferred apostle engaged in a favorite Tudor pastime, religious persecution. It’s a jarring image. Men heap basketfuls of human knowledge and spiritual endeavor onto a smoking fire, while in the background classical columns, arches and pediments define the surrounding architecture as distinctly of the Renaissance.

The exhibition is as disillusioning about any reflexive association of the Renaissance with pervasive humanism as it is about the Tudors themselves. But the extravagance of Tudor self-aggrandizement is almost comical, and it wasn’t limited to the orotund Henry plastering his face onto biblical kings.

At the Met, powerful portraits of the Medicis

Images of Elizabeth have intrigued us for centuries, as canny studies in self-fashioning or proto-feminist image curation. But royal portraiture takes a serious, regressive turn when Elizabeth comes to power. The Renaissance naturalism of Holbein is thrown out the window, and instead we get naked exercises in stylized flattery. With the National Portrait Gallery in London closed until June 22 for renovation, some of its greatest icons are on the road, including the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth, in which the magnificently accoutered queen stands on a map of Southern England as if it’s her personal bathmat.

Is there any difference between these strategies of self-promotion and images that recast Trump as muscular prizefighter or Photoshop his face onto the body of a superhero? There is contemporary evidence that foreigners who encountered the Tudors in their preening glory found it vulgar, impressive and perhaps a bit ridiculous. But what must the Tudor courtiers have thought, to see the strength and beauty of their all-too-human monarchs so shamelessly inflated?

And why does it enrage us to see these kinds of lies played out in real time today, while it merely amuses us to see the relics and artifacts of power’s dishonesty from half a millennium ago?

It’s dangerous, of course, to be moralistic about history. One key strength of this exhibition, curated by Elizabeth Cleland and Adam Eaker, is that it disillusions Tudor hagiography without making them seem uniquely brutal or awful. They came to power after a long period of civil war and brought with them a kind of peace — albeit at a terrible cost for anyone who crossed or opposed them. The Renaissance in Tudor England was no golden age, but it did bring the insular realm into greater contact with Italy and Europe. When Holbein came to England, he bore powerful letters of recommendation from Erasmus, the greatest intellectual of the age.

It also gave us Shakespeare, who effectively rewrote English history to make the Tudors seem inevitable, necessary and legitimate. When we say that something in our contemporary politics — say, a minor thane with murderous aspiration to absolute power — is Shakespearean, we are essentially saying it has the character of something from the Tudor age.

There is, of course, one fundamental difference between Tudor power and the power of men like Kushner and Musk. And that is, Tudor power is spent. It is in the past and can no longer harm us directly. The power that matters to us, the power that can corrupt democracy and poison our public square, is the power on view in photographs like that one from the World Cup.

And that is power that requires vigilance and resistance, two skills sharpened by close study of exhibitions such as the Tudors. It isn’t just a matter of becoming alert to the techniques of constructing power. It demands self-discipline, actively resisting the ensorcelling power of luxury goods bought with riches that should have belonged to everyone, not just the king and queen and their courtiers. It requires us to be not just amused but angry at Robert Pyte’s 1546 drawing “The Apotheosis of Henry VIII,” an architectural fantasy which presents Henry as a saintly savior figure, his form carved into an enormous classical arcade with columns and a coffered ceiling.

It’s worth remembering that there was nothing special about the Tudor’s need for legitimacy. Yes, they must have seemed like arrivistes when they came out on top after a long period of civil war. But all royal dynasties are illegitimate. And that includes the Plantagenets and the Windsors. Time absolves nothing. It is our duty to resist the allure of the “big lie,” no matter when it happened.