Thomas Campbell’s Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court is a must read for anyone interested in tapestry, patronage studies, and cultural history. It is the latest addition to an important group of books mapping the tapestry patronage and collections of early modern royalty and nobility: Clifford Brown and Guy Delmarcel examined the Gonzaga collection (Tapestries for the Courts of Federico Ii, Ercole, and Ferrante Gonzaga, 1522–1563, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996); Lucia Meoni has already published two out of four volumes that focus on the Medici tapestries (Gli arazzi nei musei fiorentini. La collezione medicea: catalogo completo. I: La manifattura da Cosimo I a Cosimo II (1545–1621) [Livorno: Sillabe, 1998]; and Gli arazzi nei musei fiorentini. La collezione medicea: catalogo completo. II: La manifattura all’epoca della reggenza delle granduchesse Cristina di Lorena e Maria Maddalena d’Austria. La direzione di Jacopo Ebert van Asselt (1621–1629) [Livorno: Sillabe, 2007]); Pascal-François Bertrand analysed the Barberini tapestry patronage (Les tapisseries des Barberini et la décoration d’intérieur dans la Rome baroque, Turnhout: Brepols, 2005); Hanns Hubach is re-creating the tapestry collection of the Electors Palatine; and Iain Buchanan will present in the near future his eagerly awaited study of the tapestries amassed by the Habsburgs.

While these and other royal and noble persons surely had awe-inspiring collections, they were surpassed by King Henry VIII of England. In 1539, Jan Mostinck, the officer responsible for Henry’s tapestries, claimed that his patron had, “More tapestries, or at least as many, as any Christian king.” The inventory of royal possessions taken after the king’s death in 1547 corroborates Mostinck’s assertion, as it lists a dazzling total of circa 2,450 tapestry wall hangings. The Tudor tapestry collection thus was the largest ever amassed, with the exception of that formed by Louis XIV of France at the end of the seventeenth century.

However, between 1547 and the early nineteenth century more than ninety-five percent of the English royal tapestry collection was destroyed or dispersed. Unnerved by the sheer size of a collection that is no longer existent, tapestry scholars bypassed the subject prior to the 1970s. This lack of interest gave scholars focusing on art and culture at the Tudor court the perfect alibi to neglect the royal tapestries altogether, which led to the impression that figurative art at the English court was confined to portraits, miniatures, and fresco decoration. From about 1970, however, art historians started to incorporate tapestry in studies of Tudor art patronage and courtly culture. Campbell’s Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty now provides not only a stunning presentation of Europe’s greatest tapestry collection, but also a compelling manifesto for a contextual and inclusive history of art that completely dissolves the anachronistic boundary between the fine and decorative arts.

In fact, the larger accomplishment of Campbell’s Henry VIII is that it urges university-based art history in Europe and the United States to reconsider and upgrade fundamentally the status of tapestry studies in teaching and research programs. It never ceases to amaze this reviewer how both young and established art historians frequently disregard tapestry completely, or how their image of the medium is distorted by misconceptions and ignorance. Campbell, curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts and supervising curator of the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has already contributed prolifically to the reevaluation of tapestry. Everybody who had the chance to visit his breathtaking 2002 and 2007 exhibitions, Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence and Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, will surely agree. In clearly revealing that tapestry was the preeminent art form of the Tudor court, Campbell firmly anchors the medium to any discussion of art and culture at the courts of early modern Europe.

The first part of the book (chapters 1–3) surveys the formation and use of the tapestry collection before the Tudor accession to the English throne in 1485. By scrutinizing archival documents and relating these records to existent tapestries, Campbell establishes a lavish musée imaginaire and presents a concise history of late medieval tapestry in which stylistic developments and the organization of tapestry production and trade are set against the background of European politics. He demonstrates that from the end of the fourteenth century onward the French kings and the dukes of Burgundy cultivated tapestry as the perfect medium for ostentation, and thus developed impressive collections of figurative wall hangings, an example that was rapidly followed by the English court.

The continental connection indeed fueled the patronage of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, as is demonstrated in the second part. Chapter 4 surveys Henry’s acquisitions, such as the magnificent eleven-piece Trojan War set delivered by the omnipresent Tournai merchant and producer Pasquier Grenier in 1488. Chapter 5 focuses on the use and perception of tapestry at Henry’s court. Campbell convincingly argues that from the early 1500s a heightened sensitivity to location, material quality, subject matter, and style of tapestries emerged, and that Henry VII keenly made use of his inherited and newly acquired tapestries “to lend an atmosphere of antique grandeur, heritage, and authority to his public appearances” (100).

Part 3 (chapters 6–10) analyzes the purchases and use of tapestry between Henry VIII’s accession and the late 1520s as well as the tapestry patronage of Cardinal Wolsey, the minister closest to the young king, who developed a sizeable collection that was appropriated by the Crown following his disgrace in 1529. Chapter 10 plays a key role in Campbell’s engaging narrative as it focuses on a turning point in Henry’s tapestry patronage around 1525–1530. During this period he made the first of a sequence of purchases whose Old Testament subject matter (Story of David) seems to have been chosen expressly to promote a particular idea about the king himself. Meanwhile, Henry VIII also acquired the first sets designed by Brussels Romanist artists such as Bernaert van Orley (Passion) and Pieter Coecke van Aelst (Story of Romulus and Remus). Henry VIII thus put England in dialogue and competition with his continental peers, Francis I, king of France, and Charles, king of Spain and, as of 1519, Holy Roman Emperor, both of whom also developed important tapestry collections.

Part 4 (chapters 11 and 12) considers the development of the collection during the turbulent years of the English Reformation up to 1538. Appropriations from disgraced courtiers and dissolved religious institutions yielded large numbers of tapestries to the royal collection, but Henry also commissioned new sets in Brussels that projected the religious, historical, and mythological role models (in particular Old Testament patriarchs) that were important to Henry, as they promoted his own religious and political agendas in England and Europe.

Part 5 (chapters 13–15) focuses on the acquisitions in the last decade of Henry’s reign (1538–1547). This period was marked by purchases of unprecedented scale and magnificence, as is exemplified by the Story of Caesar and the Story of Abraham sets acquired during this period. This impetus was based on new funding through the dissolution of monasteries. Part 6 (chapters 16 and 17) provides an analysis of the character and disposition of the royal tapestry collection as it was documented by the inventory taken after Henry’s death in 1547, and sheds new light on the crucial significance of tapestry as a medium of art, magnificence, and propaganda at the Tudor court. Finally, Part 7 (chapters 18 and 19) surveys the use and dispersal of the collection from 1547 to the present.

Monumental in its scope and methodology, Campbell’s erudite and sumptuously illustrated book must be regarded as a cornerstone in the debate on European courtly art and culture of the late medieval and Renaissance periods. Well aware of the potential pitfalls and rigidity of patronage studies, Campbell is cautious not to overestimate Henry VIII’s share in the development of Brussels tapestry; instead, he scrupulously defines the complex interplay between the king, court, merchants, and producers who shaped these developments. This fresh perspective triggers not only new insights but also new starting points for additional research. Indeed, it is safe to assume that Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty will play a seminal role in any further discussion of the following topics: Flemish Romanist painters and tapestry designers, in particular Pieter Coecke van Aelst; the activities of English, Flemish, and Italian tapestry merchants and tapestry producers as cultural agents; the configuration of European markets for tapestry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and, of course, the use and perception of art at the courts of early modern Europe.