5/28/2023 0 Comments Blood sisters by sarah gristwoodVergil too wrote that Marguerite exceeded others of her time ‘as well in beauty as wisdom’ and though it is not easy to guess real looks from the conventions of medieval portraiture, it is hard not to read determination and self-will in the swelling brow and prominent nose that are evident in images of Marguerite of Anjou – in particular the medallion by Pietro di Milano. The beauty conventionally attributed to queens features in the scene where Shakespeare’s Marguerite first meets Henry VI: it was the lofty spirit that, in the years ahead, was to prove the difficulty. At the French court Marguerite had already acquitted herself well enough to win an admirer in the courtly tradition, Pierre de Brezé, to carry her colours at the joust and to allow the Burgundian chronicler Barante to write that she ‘was already renowned in France for her beauty and wit and her lofty spirit of courage’. Henry VI, if the Milanese correspondent is to be believed, saw ‘a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark’ – and not, the Milanese tactfully assured his duchess, ‘so beautiful as your Serenity’.
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