Strokes Writ Small: Remembering Nicholas Hilliard

These days the art of miniature thrives especially in the realm of technology, where cell phones, music players, and computers get increasingly smaller, faster, and (we hope) better. Granted, this is a pretty loose way to think about the “art of miniature”—even when there are exhibitions devoted solely to art made on the iPhone’s paint applications. One show, opening tomorrow, is unsubtly named “iPhone, Therefore I Am.”

That these small gadgets are the products of smaller, myriad connections and bits reminds me of the various other miniatures, including those in art history, such as illuminated letters (from where “miniature” gets its name) and even painted miniature portraits, such as this one by the most famous of English miniaturists, or limnists, Nicholas Hilliard. While yesterday was for welcoming the Nexus One Google phone into the pantheon of tiny technological wonders, today we might remember Hilliard, who died on this day in 1619 after an illustrious career as the goldsmith, limnist, and occasional full-size portraitist of Elizabeth I and James I. He described his craft in The Art of Limning as gentlemanly and civil, and as “a thing apart …which excelleth all other painting.”

Of course, in the pre-Photoshop age, people’s images were still doctored to make them look lovelier. Good Queen Bess, for instance, insisted that when Hilliard rendered her face he should make it shadowless and therefore perpetually youthful like this or this; her countenance would be all pale light instead, with her eyes and lips standing out severely. And around her face he would place various rich, intricate details: the iconic fox-red hair, ruff, long pearls, and mutton-shaped sleeves. It's a delight to behold so much fine work in so small a space.

You can read more about the man and his work here and here, at the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which in 1910 acquired what is arguably his best known miniature, “Young Man among Roses" (pictured left), perhaps a portrait of Robert Deveraux, second Earl of Essex. And just three years ago the same museum re-opened its extensive British miniatures collection, which had been in storage.

The art of miniature portrait painting faded with the advent of photography in the 1850s, but today we can summon up a photograph of a Hilliard painting on a Blackberry or iPhone or any other smart phone and see it, the old miniature, glittering in the pixels of the new (albeit mass-produced) miniature. Who would have guessed?