I don’t know if anyone is waiting for me to drop some thoughts on recent Anne of Cleves news or not, but make no mistake I have Thoughts(tm). I just want to be careful because… well. Anne herself has had a hard time in fiction and non-fiction alike. And as per the mix of historical and interpretive costuming I do- and my own background in acting- I do happen to have a really good understanding on how costuming/script writing for a wide audience works.

But this also all folds into several papers and yes my health and tech issues this year has really meant dropping all of this into my “to sort later” folders and they’ve really got out of hand.

You see I used to have a very neat demarcation between fiction and non fiction. But when it comes to Anna nearly everything is fiction. And that includes in her own lifetime. It’s so pervasive that when the Louvre unveiled their Holbein portrait- after a very careful but very thorough cleaning- the overwhelming response was “she’s so pretty” or how amazing her dress was.

Which.

The most obvious change was to remove the tarnished varnish which skewed all colours towards yellow. And that’s not even uncommon be it in painting or plastics or photography. Heck I’m used to it from my own photographs be they analog or digital under different lighting conditions.

These two photos of my c1880 POAL dress for example.

When you look at all my photos from under natural light? It’s really obvious that is what’s going on. Though you can just look at the door/walls/carpet to spot there is something going on to cause that shift.

In fact my folder of different digital copies of the Louvre portrait includes images where people tried to reverse the tarnish and some were very good indeed. One managed to fix nearly every issue except the background.

Heck my favourite version of the Elissa gown from Phantom is from how incredible it looks at all levels of resolution and under old school theatre lights and newer lighting.

This is what we were working with back in the day. I haven’t even resized the file it really is that tiny- sure the digital file is tiny but so where photos in our programmes/souvenier brochures. But as fans we knew the gown was mostly red and green with a lot of gold. Further we knew the bodice was velvet and the skirt shot taffeta.

I have been to the Louvre as well as the V&A but only have photos from my V&A visit. And yes, I’m working on digitising the photos I managed to get. So let’s see if I have my own potato quality image of the miniature already. Darn I don’t. But I do have other potato quality images so here are some from the costume wing.

I did try to warn you, we got through this era by mentally recalibrating colour and fuzzy edges. Now that I have every copy (up to 23 of them- I know) of every digital photo safely backed up I can get scanning. these properly.

So yes I have a lot of thoughts but they include how we’re in an era not just of digitisation but of really high resolution images in which we all gain access to resources that otherwise really relied on us extrapolating much more from the written record. Or relying more on the curation of people who did have access.