When Renaissance portraits were medieval Tinder
How a XVI century portrait was made 'Insta-fabulous'
In today's app-happy dating world, the pursuit of the perfect match is a mere thumb swipe away. But rewind a few centuries, and scoring a suitable partner involved a much more artistic - and at times, deviously deceptive - mating dance. And in XVI century, the Tinder pics of the time were the portraits, which only aristocrats could afford obviously.
As the premier society painter in the merchant city of Cologne, Barthel de Bruyn (1493–1555) was essentially the Henry Cavill of his time - capturing all the city's fresh aristocratic meat in their most flattering, moisture-wicking light. His artistic painting got to capture the person’s personality details.
Barthel de Bruyn played a little known part in the most famous story of Tinder-style matchmaking in the sixteenth century: the marriage of Anne of Cleves to notorious wife-collector Henry VIII. With the king's third wife newly deceased and a male heir urgently needed, European ambassadors were dispatched to scope out the most genetically blessed prospective brides among continental princesses. The three choices on the international marriage market for a king considered a heretic in Catholic Europe were:
the sixteen-year old, Danish-born and recently widowed Christina, Duchess of Milan,
or one of the daughters of the Duke of Cleves: Anne (24) or Amelia (22).
Christina had no interest on getting married to Henry. But Anne and Amelia could.
Henry’s ambassador, Christopher Mont, traveled to Düsseldorf, Germany to meet them. He reported back that Lady Anne was a kind of a supermodel and that it would be a better option for the King. He returned to London with recent portraits of the two sisters by none other than Barthel de Bruyn. That of Amelia no longer survives, and that of Anne may be the panel painting preserved at St. John’s College, Oxford.
Fearing the portrait perhaps overcaked Anne's makeup situation, Henry enlisted court painter Hans Holbein to capture the German princess' likeness as well. And in a move that would make any modern Facetune expert proud, Holbein went full trickery - using artful shading to downplay Anne's larger nose and even editing out her pockmarks from a previous brush with smallpox. It was the original Instagram Beauty filter!
Henry instantly fell for the deception - Holbein's manipulated canvas portrayed Anne as the soft-featured, regal-looking wife material of his late 40s dreams. But when the real woman arrived, it was a romance massacre. Henry took one look at the unfiltered Anne and promptly died a thousand deaths inside, describing her as a "great defect" to her beautified portrait.
But the damage was done. When Henry could not evade the wedding, he became determined to divorce Anne as soon as he could and wasted no time in having the marriage unceremoniously annulled just months later, though he and Anne ultimately stayed friends in one of history's most awkward happy endings.
So if the saga of Henry's unflattering Renaissance selfie teaches us anything, it's that even history's most notorious men weren't immune to getting catfished by a skilled artist's trickery. From the court portraitists to the modern-day Instagrammer's filters, deception and dating have forever been intertwined in humanity's desperate quest for companionship.