This most recent contribution to the study of the visual arts in Elizabeth I's England is a learned series of observations by the most prominent voice on this subject, Sir Roy Strong. The book expands upon his earlier writings on the portraits of Elizabeth I, now drawing on significant recent biographies, exhibitions, analyses of specific works of art, and the results of the important Making Art in Tudor Britain project at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The chapters in this new, handsomely produced book range in topic from narrowly focused case studies to thematic clusterings of paintings and people. The first chapter is a who's who in the so-called Procession Picture (ca. 1601–03), in which Strong identifies individuals close to the queen, literally and figuratively, depicted in this well-known work. The aim here is not to assess this painting as a document of an actual moment, but to argue that it is a quintessential example of Elizabethan neo-medievalism that stands outside Continental norms of perspectival illusionism. This seems an outdated approach for a book that otherwise takes into account many recent advances in scholarship.

The second chapter is concerned with patrons and the portraits they commissioned of Elizabeth, updating the author's own iconographic readings of Elizabeth's portraits in his Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (1963), Tudor and Jacobean Portraits (1969), The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (1977), and Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (1987), here focusing as much on the men who commissioned the portraits and where the portraits may have originally been viewed, as on the paintings themselves. In this chapter, in particular, we do not find an introduction to the subject—as promised in the subtitle of the book—but rather a series of observations that presuppose the reader's knowledge of the theses in Strong's earlier books and that therefore read as allusive shorthand for the analyses.

Chapter 3, “Works of Armorie,” is a series of observations on portraits of the gentle class and the coats of arms that feature prominently in their portraits; here, as in the two previous chapters, a bewildering number of people and their aristocratic networks are introduced in an attempt to explain why these men and women required portraits and why their portraits look the way they do. This chapter extends into a discussion of portrait miniatures, again updating Strong's own earlier work by building on recent scholarship by other historians and art historians. In chapter 4, “A Choice of Emblems,” Strong's reading of what he refers to as “emblematic portraits” (88) offers the reader the same methodological approach to deciphering Elizabethan portraits that has long been the author's strong suit. That said, and as others have pointed out, at times Strong's decoding of such arcane content would seemingly have required of the contemporary viewer the encyclopedic knowledge of classical texts, easy familiarity with emblem books, and confident facility in multiple languages that Strong himself is able to deploy in our age of readily available sources.

Chapter 5 is an overview of portraits of men depicted as Elizabeth's courtly knights, especially related to their participation in her Accession Day tilts; the focus here is more on biography and less on the portraits. As a result, Strong is in danger of doing precisely what he claims to object to: not taking the object itself as the principal element in the analysis. Strong's iconographic emphasis returns in a compelling chapter on the representation of melancholy men: lovesick men, grief-stricken men, and thoughtful men are treated together to demonstrate the repetitions of pose and symbolic referents used by a variety of artists to communicate messages about the melancholy state of mind of the numerous sitters. A seventh chapter, on four Elizabethan collectors, is heavily reliant on the scholarship of others. Strong brings this material together, admittedly, but it is here that the reader is most directly confronted with what feels like an ambition that runs through all the earlier chapters—that this book is principally intended to give Strong the last word on art in Elizabeth's reign.

Throughout, Strong's main interest continues to be the complexity of iconographic content embedded in Elizabethan imagery. He refers to what he believes is a deliberate ambiguity in these works. But in cases such as his reading of the Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth (ca. 1603), in the final chapter, perhaps he would have been on firmer ground thinking about the polyvalence or hybridity of Elizabethan images: while not all the symbolic content will have been legible to every viewer to the same degree, there was surely something for everyone in the communication of Elizabeth's complex visual depictions.