This painting illustrates the schematic power of Elizabethan portraiture. Rigid and expressionless, the sitter acts as a two-dimensional counterpart of tomb effigies. In the second half of the sixteenth century, English portraits commonly showed a stiff figure turned three-quarters to the left or right. Such representations were firmly rooted in the traditions of medieval craftsmanship. They were relatively unrefined; and the artists and sitters involved have remained almost entirely anonymous to modern scholarship.