The Queen knew how to let her myth work through her, exalting her station and her presence
She hovers there in the halfway world of dream. A long constant presence in the life of a people has that effect. Her iconography has penetrated the subconscious of the land and many lands. It is perhaps why she felt at once so forbidding, so familiar and so intimate, as if in beholding her you encounter something more than a person or a monarch. It may be one of the greatest secrets of royalty, that they have made themselves, through the intimate art of portraiture, into figures so familiar that they seem to be a part of the furniture of your psyche. And yet they are so remote.
This is not true of all royalty. But it is true of the queen. The technique of portraiture made natural by Leonardo Da Vinci has been used with her to great effect. But nearly 60 years of casually encountering that face on coinage, on pound notes, in newspapers, on commemorative posters, on schoolwork or on television, slowly turns a face into a tradition. It was why she had a magical effect on people.
