Imagine standing before a grand portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, resplendent in a gown adorned with pearls, her hand resting confidently on a globe. Behind her, two seascapes depict the English navy’s triumph over the Spanish Armada. This is the Armada Portrait, painted around 1588 to commemorate England’s naval victory and to project the queen’s power and divine right to rule. Pearls play a central role in shaping the image of Queen Elizabeth I. They circle her head, line her sleeves, and follow the shape of her gown in careful, patterned arrangements.

Pearls carried many meanings in the early modern period. They were linked to purity and virginity, but also to the sea and its dangers. Found in oysters from places like the Persian Gulf, the Americas, and Southeast Asia, pearls signaled England’s growing presence in global trade. In Elizabeth’s portraits, they suggest both spiritual authority and imperial ambition, tying her image to wider networks of extraction and belief.

Early modern interpretations of pearls drew on a range of symbolic associations: purity, virginity, divine favour, and dominion over the sea. Unlike rubies or diamonds extracted from terrestrial depths, pearls were harvested from the bodies of marine animals, often in regions where English imperial interests were beginning to take form.¹ Their inclusion in royal portraiture thus signaled not only chastity, as befitted the image of the “Virgin Queen,” but also access to and control over a cosmopolitan network of maritime extraction.²

This dual valence—spiritual and geopolitical—gave the pearl a privileged place in Elizabethan iconography. Its iridescence, both alluring and elusive, rendered it a fitting material through which the queen’s authority could be materialized. As Stephen Greenblatt has argued, objects in the early modern period were charged with “social energy,” capable of absorbing and transmitting ideological meaning.³ The pearl, in this sense, may be understood not only as decorative material but as what Alfred Gell has termed a “distributed person,”⁴ an agentive object whose presence activates a field of affective and political relations.

The talismanic potential of pearls gains further dimension when read alongside the esoteric worldview of John Dee, Elizabeth’s advisor and court philosopher. Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) posited the existence of symbolic forms that could condense cosmic truths into visual diagrams.⁵ His system of thought—rooted in Hermeticism, alchemy, and Christian Cabala—lent itself to a worldview in which select materials, signs, and arrangements could mediate between the human and the divine. In such a framework, pearls emerged not only as adornment but as sigils: compressed nodes of cosmological power. This was not mere analogy. Dee’s influence extended to matters of navigation, geography, and imperial planning, suggesting that the pearl’s function as talisman was as much geopolitical as it was metaphysical.⁶

The Rainbow Portrait (c. 1600–1602) exemplifies this iconographic evolution. Painted near the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the portrait depicts the queen in a gown embroidered with eyes and ears, symbols of omniscience, while a serpent bearing a pearl in its mouth coils at her arm. Here, the pearl becomes an emblem of wisdom entwined with cunning—an esoteric device embedded within a broader apparatus of sovereign surveillance and symbolic control.⁷ Read in conjunction with Dee’s writings and the visual rhetoric of statecraft, the image suggests that pearls were not merely signs of personal virtue or taste, but cosmopolitical objects: crystallizations of early modern empire’s entanglement with the occult, the oceanic, and the ornamental.

This essay argues that such materials—pearls, nacre, coral—occupy a crucial position in the development of imperial aesthetics. Extracted from submarine geographies and exchanged through expanding colonial networks, these substances accrued layers of meaning as they moved across courts and collections. Their inclusion in European portraiture indexes a broader shift: the conscription of marginal materials into the central machinery of dynastic representation.⁸ In Elizabeth’s portraits, the pearl thus becomes a floating signifier—an object through which purity, sovereignty, oceanic expansion, and esoteric knowledge converge. As talisman, commodity, and cosmogram, it reveals the deep imbrication of matter and meaning in the visual culture of early modern empire.

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Notes

Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng, eds., Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 5–7.Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Macmillan, 1995), 21.
⁵ Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 6–7.

Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 119–125.

Kim Sloan, “Science and the Sea: The Role of Natural Specimens in Early Collections,” in Oceanic Histories, eds. David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 45–69.

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1–9.

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 6–7.

John Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1564).

Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 51–76.

Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Macmillan, 1995), 21.

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