Just a quick post to link to Andrew Dickson's interesting piece on the search for images of Shakespeare, and my own piece in which Dr Tarnya Cooper, the most respected British expert on Tudor and early Stuart portraiture, pours a generous bucketful of icy water over the idea that the Cobbe portrait is a lifetime portrait of Shakespeare.
And for those who were debating the significance of the Horace inscription on the painting, another specialist in paintings of the period emailed me with the following thoughts.
"Principum amicitias" is Horace (2 1. 4) addressing Pollio and warning him off from writing about recent history and advising him to concentrate on writing Greek tragedies because of the danger of causing offence to participants in the (civil) war. This is certainly appropriate to a writer, but surely not necessarily WS. I gather that the picture had long been thought of (equally dottily, I suppose) as Sir Walter Raleigh, who at the date of the picture (1610-15) was languishing in the Tower writing his History of the World. Such a history might well have been seen as dangerous for someone found guilty of treason. The sitter is too young for Raleigh himself in 1610-15, but why not his son Walter Jnr trying to persuade dad to concentrate on his poems and not modern history? I am certainly not suggesting this as an identification, but simply pointing out that
the Latin tag could just as easily apply to someone else.
