Art and magic in the court of the Stuarts

Hart examines the influence of magic on Renaissance art, in the context of the first Stuart Court. Court artists sought to represent magic as an expression of the Stuart Kings' Divine Right, and later of their policy of Absolutism, through masques, sermons, heraldry, gardens, architecture and processions. As such, magic of the kind enshrined in Neoplatonic philosophy and the court art which expressed its cosmology, played their part in the complex causes of the Civil War and the destruction of the Stuart image which ensued.