The allegorical portraits of sir john luttrell 1

ONE OF THE most puzzling of sixteenth-century English portraits is the picture at Dunster Castle, the seat of the Luttrell family, of a naked man wadingin an angry sea (Plate 1). ¹ Behind him is a sinking ship from which boatloads of people are escaping; the face of a drowned corpse floats near him.He raises his right arm with clenched fist into a world of allegory, sharply separated from the scene of storm and desolation by the dark rim of the cloud within which it is set. A female figurebearing an olive branch of peace and surrounded by groups of other allegories bends down to caress the arm of the determined character in the sea. The allegory in the sky seems to form a picture initself which is only very clumsily linked by the incongruous gesture of the man in the sea with the picture of shipwreck and storm of which he forms a part.