Portrait reality may be less romantic

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/04/portrait-reality-less-romantic

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We were not convinced by the interpretation of the Walsingham portrait, recently discovered to have been painted over a devotional Catholic image, offered in your article (In the frame: do x-rays reveal plot a Tudor spymaster missed?, 4 January). You suggest it was a Catholic gesture of surreptitious defiance against the staunchly Protestant secretary of state.

There are two other interpretations, neither of them as romantic as that reported in your article. The first is that there must have been many Catholic pictures taken down and disposed of by their nervous owners and available to artists of whatever denomination for over-painting.

The second, which like the interpretation described in your article implies purpose, is that obliterating a Catholic image, especially to paint a portrait of the redoubtable Sir Francis, is exactly the sort of action to be expected from Protestants in those troubled times. Pippa and John Stilwell Penzance, Cornwall

• Surely Sir Francis Walsingham couldn't have been unaware that his portrait was being painted on a reused panel? It's hardly as if the artist could have worked from a photograph, so Walsingham didn't need to sit. And surely the artist would have feared for his life if he thought it would incur the spymaster's displeasure. More likely is that it was the pictorial equivalent of biting your thumb: a huge insult to the papists and a triumphal bit of iconoclasm, to destroy a religious work from the opposition and to put yourself (and thus your queen and head of church) in its place. Judith Martin Winchester, Hampshire