AN EXEMPLARY CONSORT: ANTONIS MOR'S PORTRAIT OF MARY TUDOR JOANNA WOODALL If the name Antonis Mor evokes any image in an English reader's mind, it will probably be his portrait of Queen Mary Tudor. Three full-sized versions exist, the best preserved of which is in the Prado (plate 23). This and the example at Compton Wynyates are signed and dated 1554, the year in which the English queen married the Habsburg prince Philip of Spain, the future King Philip II. I Mary Tudor differs in a number of respects from Mor's other portraits of royal and aristocratic sitters, and this article originated as an attempt to explain why. I hope that it might also serve as a case study of ways in which ruler and court portraits produced in mid-sixteenth-century Europe held significance for their viewers. My arguments assume that the significance of elite portraits depended in good part upon the kinds of knowledge and experience brought to them by different viewers and that a degree of semantic openness was tacitly acknowledged by the people involved in the production of such images. I argue, for instance, that for some viewers Mary Tudor articulated quite precisely the historical circumstances which engendered it, but the image was also regarded as a timeless, definitive statement about the sitter's identity. My analysis is also concerned to expose the way in which reference to visual precedents in elite portraiture served to naturalize the power and elevated status of members of the ruling elite such as Mary Tudor and Philip, and set them up as exemplars for the rest of the population. In my view, Mary Tudor is also coloured throughout by the fact that the sitter was a woman. Most obviously, the image appears to subsume Mary's position as the queen of England into her role as Habsburg consort. Beyond this, the tensions between the portrait's convincing illusionism, its appeal to an iconographic convention of feminine beauty and its employment of both Habsburg and Tudor iconography can be seen as articulating contradictions between Mary's roles as ruler, consort and sexual partner. * Antonis Mor was the painter who succeeded Titian and Jan Vermeyen as a Art History Vol. 14 No.2 June 1991 ISSN 0141-6790