Eleanor of Aquitaine?

Angela

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If it's a true likeness she had a very Med look to her, imo.

See:
https://www.archaeology.org/news/8008-190916-england-eleanor-of-aquitaine


Aquitaine-Carving.jpg


"MILTON KEYNES, ENGLAND—According to a report in the MK Citizen, a stone carving that may depict the head of Eleanor of Aquitaine was discovered in southeast England’s Bradwell Abbey during conservation work. Eleanor was Duchess of Aquitaine when she married King Louis VII of France and participated in the Second Crusade. After her marriage to Louis VII was annulled, she married the Duke of Normandy, who became King Henry II of England in A.D. 1154. Three of her sons from this marriage, including Richard the Lionheart, became kings of England. The carving is thought to be original to the twelfth-century abbey, where traces of medieval paint were also uncovered."


She was an extraordinary woman, not just for her time, but for any time.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_of_Aquitaine

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/18/day-1152eleanor-aquitaine-marries-henry-ii/

Anyone who hasn't seen the movie "Lion in Winter" with Katherine Hepburn playing Eleanor, Peter O'Toole as Henry II and Anthony Hopkins as the future Richard I, you've missed a real treat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cVwBjwRGgg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5Tmr3Fwer4





 
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I love the story of Eleanor, but I would be careful assuming this was anything like a true likeness. What are the odds the sculptor actually saw the queen? Do we think there was any chance she sat for him? Note how her features are repeated curves. That seems like more of a style than a likeness; think of the Egyptian style that made everyone look identical. Note too the features of innumerable kings on the facades of medieval churches in England and France. They all look alike.
 
One of my favorites plays/movies is The Lion in Winter. I saw it recently in a small, local theater production. Even without Katherine Hepburn, it's extremely powerful. How true it is, I don't know.
 
It's a great play with brilliant, witty dialogue. Whether it's true in terms of the relationships we can't know. However, there's more than enough documentary evidence showing that the broad strokes are accurate. She wasn't happy married to the saintly Louis, she did insist on going on Crusade, when she was thirty, already middle aged by the standards of her day, she married a very young man eleven or so years her junior with unseemly haste, and proceeded to bear him lots of children, not that it ever appears to have slowed her down. Their sons rebelled against their father, and she joined them in their rebellions, for which Henry imprisoned her for fifteen years. He also was notoriously and flagrantly unfaithful, and not just with Rosamund, and, at the end, probably with the King of France's daughter, who was promised to his son.

The chroniclers point to her anger at Henry taking control of her lands and his treatment of their sons as the reasons for her treason, but I doubt women were any different then, and his constant breaking of their marriage vows can't have pleased her.

As to whether it's a good likeness, I don't know. I used to think her effigy might be close, but that isn't the face of an 82 year old woman. It's also suspiciously similar to the "canon" as to beauty in the Middle Ages, and you can see the same face in the art of the time.

55c8eb2a63ccb5d3002d51d13de95d06.jpg



"Generally, the fashionable lady's look for the bulk of the medieval period was as follows- high forehead, plucked eyebrows, small even teeth, a fair complexion, long neck, narrow chest, low sloping shoulders, high small waist and in some cases, a prominent stomach.

Women were often described as fair regardless of their natural colouring because fair was the idealised idea of beauty."

5af00d967fa9eb7999107ab500d73ede.jpg
 

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