The Elizabethan age, big with luxury, vanity, conquest and high emprise, also produced the English miniature. It was the Century of the Uncommon Man. The art of the miniaturist, wrote Miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard in 1600, is "a thing apart from all other painting or drawing, and tendeth not to common men's use . . . and is for the service of noble persons, very meet in small volumes in private manner for them to have portraits and pictures of themselves, their peers and any other."
Nicholas Hilliard was the first, and greatest, of English miniaturists....
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