Like everyone else that goes apeshit about stuff on PBS, I've been devouring Wolf Hall. Everything that's been said about it is true. It's beautifully put together, astonishingly faithful in its details, beautifully acted, all of it. It's lush and alien and fascinating and the final episode is brutally riveting.
But on another level, as a history nerd, the show is a candy store of references. It's like Wreck-it-Ralph for people that own copies of 'The Tudor Tailor' and obsess over Renaissance music and Holbein paintings.
About those paintings. It's been said that the shots are composed like paintings. And one of the main reasons for this is a number of the shots -are- paintings. A lot of the costumes for characters are just whatever that character is wearing in their portrait. What follows is me gushing about the details for several paragraphs, with a focus on costumes. In the next post I'll talk about set design.
