The Cloak and the Clog: Tudor Portraiture and Sir Thomas Wyatt's "Myne owne John Poyntz"

Abstract:

This essay explores how the visual culture of the portrait in the early Tudor period, epitomized by Hans Holbein's work, informed and intensified the self-examination, pictorialism, and textual play of Sir Thomas Wyatt's "epistolary satire" to John Pointz, a fellow courtier. Specifically, I argue that Wyatt's ambivalent self-description in this overtly self-righteous poem reimagines the memento mori—a visual reminder of vulnerability and death, often incorporated in portraiture—to deliberately undermine his Stoic self-assertion and to rebuke the reader's credulity.