Miniature treasures at National Portrait Gallery confirm history can still pull crowds

The National Portrait Gallery has been pushing hard lately for street cred, with some recent exhibitions and a passion for celebrity photography seemingly laying the foundations for Hello magazine to take over sponsorship of the whole place. While I can happily binge on pop culture, I'm frustrated to see it taking over a national institution that supposedly exists (and uses my tax money) to illuminate the personalities of history and connect us to the people who made it.

Perhaps all of the faces in these modern exhibitions will indeed transition from celebrity mag to history book ... but I'm skeptical. Sadly, government-mandated free entry demands exhibitions that bring in a paying crowd to fill the coffers, and museum management has assumed they need Michael Jackson or Vogue to do the trick. Thankfully, Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver is a glorious return to form that shows the Gallery it can stick to its historical strengths and still pull in the punters.

This fact seems to have surprised management, however, who certainly didn't design the displays in anticipation of crowds and who seem to have set the pricing as if they thought this was a loss leader to bring in the blue hairs. At £10, Elizabethan Treasures is a bargain in a town where special exhibits are now typically £15 to £18. The show's been celebrated by reviewers, sold out on weekends and subject to long queues. There aren't many tickets left until the exhibit closes on 19 May; if you're interested, book in advance.

Here's a fun fact: "miniature" doesn't actually refer to size but to a way of painting. It comes from the Latin "miniare", which described the act of colouring a foundation with red lead. That was the secret to getting glowing, jewel-tone colours in illuminated manuscripts. When technology (printing) and current events (the Reformation) combined to kill the market for that ancient craft, artistic skills found their outlet in a new channel: the portrait miniature. You can see the direct line of descent early in the show by lingering over the founding charter of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, a gorgeous thing illuminated with a profusion of flowers and Italian "grotesquerie" by Nicholas Hilliard.

Though you can find miniature portraits across Europe, nobody embraced them like the English and the French, and in England nobody could match Hilliard (self portrait above left) and Issac Oliver (above right). Considered as great as Michaelangelo and Raphael in their lifetimes, the two men moved in the highest circles and painted just about everyone significant in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean courts.

Playing "compare and contrast" with the two artists is one of the more obvious ways to approach the exhibition. Hilliard was the teacher, Oliver the pupil. Hilliard a better politician; he was Elizabeth's favourite because he flattered her and managed to paint realistic-looking scenes without problematic shadows. Oliver, however, was thought to be more artistically daring ... thus prized by the trend-setting Queen Anne of Denmark. To my uninformed eye, however, it's hard to tell the two of them apart. They both produce works of lush detail and penetrating personality, most so small they fit in the palm of your hand.

You can also enjoy this show as a window to history. All of the most famous faces are here. There are multiple versions of the British royals and a striking, never-before-exhibited miniature of French King Henry III. There's swashbuckling circumnavigator Sir Walter Raleigh; Shakespearean patron the Earl of Southampton; a 17-year old Francis Bacon, already en route to becoming a philosopher and statesman; the two artists in self-portrait.

Because of their specific use ... typically as highly-personal mementos for loved ones, sometimes as intimate diplomatic introductions ... miniatures deliver personality and emotion in a way other forms of portraiture rarely manage. If you're a fan of this time period, you'll love this show. Without a time machine, this is as close as you'll get to meeting these people in the flesh.

While I appreciated both the historical context and the artist comparison, however, I mostly just enjoyed sinking in to the lush beauty of these tiny masterpieces. Many have startling blue backgrounds made of crushed lapis. Lace collars are picked out in spidery complexity. Velvets gleam.  Eyes sparkle. Curls bounce. Gold and gems glitter. (Literally. Rubies, for example, were created by applying a pinhead-sized spot of pure silver, topped with a dot of resin, then a pinprick of red colour.) If these portraits are to be believed, early 17th-century Brits were some of the sexiest, most beautiful people in history.

Perhaps the ultimate example is a portrait of an unknown man wearing nothing but his lawn undershirt (a shocking state of undress at the time), standing in front of a curtain of flames, giving us a smouldering look as he caresses a locket that, presumably, holds a miniature of whoever was the intended audience. There's so much intimate sexuality radiating from this little painting you're almost embarrassed by your act of voyeurism as you enjoy it. Whoever the intended audience was, she (or he?) was clearly adored.

The only problem with this exhibition is a design that didn't seem to consider crowds. The only way to appreciate these pieces is to get nose-to-nose with them, which visitors can only do one at a time. You inevitably spend a lot of time queueing, and crowding up around cases that have multiple pieces in them. I had the good fortune to be able to slip in mid-afternoon on a weekday; weekends at full capacity must be rough.

 The exhibition would have been better in a larger space, with more of the miniatures suspended individually at eye level, and enlarged reproductions hanging above to give visitors something to study as they were queuing up. The excellent video providing background to the whole show could have been more prominently signposted at the start, and given more room than a narrow alcove with a single bench for four people.

That, of course, would have required the NPG to believe that Elizabethan and Jacobean history was going to pull the crowds. Let's hope they've learned their lesson.