Ritual and Image: the Mortlake Acts of the Apostles

In this paper I will show that the Mortlake Acts of the Apostles, woven for Charles I in the 1630s, were the most developed articulation of the guiding idea of his reign: Divine Right monarchy. A revival of designs created by Raphael for Pope Leo X over a century earlier, the Mortlake Acts are usually viewed in the context of Charles I's collecting of Italian painting, and his interest in 16th century tapestry design. As the most costly artistic project of Charles's reign, the tapestries in fact demonstrate the importance of ritual in the enactment of sacred kingship - a representational mode that has been ignored in the overwhelming focus on Charles's patronage of the visual arts. As such, I am to reaffirm ritual as central to the embodied meaning of European tapestry, present since its emergence as a large-scale medium of state in the Burgundian Low countries in the 14th century, but often underplayed in modern scholarship.