In anticipation and celebration of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new British Galleries, today’s picture is one of the most exquisite objects destined to be displayed there: an Elizabethan miniature of A Man Against a Background of Flames, painted in about 1600. Although the V&A’s catalogue tentatively attributes this picture to the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, many experts now believe that only Isaac Oliver could have painted it. I agree with them.

The identity of the sitter remains unknown, but he was almost certainly an Elizabethan nobleman. Only someone very wealthy and well-connected could hope to acquire a portrait of such quality. The picture is tiny, painted on a piece of vellum the size of a small child’s hand, which makes the fineness of the artist’s technique all the more impressive. Working in watercolour and using the finest squirrel-hair brushes, he has “limned” the features and captured the character of this passionate, milk-skinned young man with breathtaking delicacy. Hold the image in your hand and tilt it from side to side so that it catches a raking light – as I had the privilege of doing a few years ago, while making a television programme about Elizabethan art – and you will see glinting touches of gold leaf laid into the orange and red brushstrokes in the background, as if to duplicate the heat and light of a real fire.

Conservation work on the picture has revealed that the backing to which it is pasted is a playing card. This was common practice among miniaturists, although it may well be significant – given the Elizabethan fondness for hidden layers of meaning – that in this case the playing card was the ace of hearts. It has been suggested that the painting commemorates a man who died in a fire, which...

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