Secret Skulls Found in a Victorian Painting of a 16th-Century Magician..
Detail of skulls revealed in an X-ray of Henry Gillard Glindoni’s “John Dee performing an experiment before Queen Elizabeth I” (late 19th century) (courtesy Royal College of Physicians)
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A ring of human skulls originally circled 16th-century magician John Dee in a painting by the English artist Henry Gillard Glindoni. New X-ray imaging has revealed the macabre secret, which a patron likely asked Glindoni to hide in his late-19th-century re-creation of Dee’s performance for Queen Elizabeth I.
The discovery was made in research for Scholar, Courtier, Magician: The Lost Library of John Dee, opened this week at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London. In our previous coverage of the exhibition, curator Katie Birkwood explained that in Tudor England, “the distinctions between magic and natural philosophy — as the subject we now think of science would have been termed then — were not nearly so clear-cut” as they are today. The alteration of the painting, from a vivid black magic ritual to a scene more suggestive of a scientific demonstration, likewise represents the tension in Dee’s identity between being a man of science and one of the occult. As in Joseph Wright of Derby’s“The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus” (1771), where the bright light of the chemical reaction of phosphorus is framed as a supernatural act, the division between the two is blurred in Glindoni’s painting.