Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England

5. THE DISCOVERY OF EUROPEAN ART: COLLECTING AND PATRONAGE

5 THE DISCOVERY OF EUROPEAN ART: COLLECTING AND PATRONAGE The classical influences we have been tracing were one major stimulus to the development of early Stuart court culture. Another, of at least equal importance, was a growing admiration for continental painting and sculpture, which the English court first fully discovered in this pe... riod. I At the beginning of James's reign England had assimilated less of the artistic culture of the Renaissance than virtually any kingdom in western Europe. 2 By the 1630S the situation was completely trans ... formed: Van Dyck was among the two or three most fashionable por... traitists in all Europe, and London's art collections could rival those of any continental city. This transformation was foreshadowed in the 1590Sand early 1600s by the painting of Peter Oliver and Marcus Gheeraerts and the interest in continental styles taken by a few peers and leading courtiers. But it began in earnest only in the 1610S, among a handful of royal and aristo ... cratic patrons who laid the foundations for the artistic brilliance of Charles's court. In examining court art, we will therefore be dealing with trends rooted in a much narrower and more elevated social milieu than were the literary fashions traced in previous chapters. Jonson was a product of the city as much as the court who, for all his originality, built upon well.. established, native traditions. By contrast, Jones's ma... ture style had no discernible roots in Elizabethan architecture, while Van Dvck, Orazio Gentileschi, and most of Charles's other artists were 118 FORMATION OF A NEW COURT CULTURE trained abroad. 3 They were essentially practitioners of foreign traditions transplanted into England by the efforts of a small but extraordinarily wealthy and prominent group. THE GREAT ARISTOCRATIC COLLECTIONS That group, in turn, consisted mostly of younger men whose cosmo... politan aesthetic tastes were largely a by... product of the regime's policy of detente with Spain and her satellites. The Anglo ... Spanish peace not only created a climate more favorable to sympathetic contact with for... eign cultures than had prevailed during the religious wars of the previ... ous reign. It also opened Flanders, Spain, and Italy to relatively large numbers of English aristocratic tourists." Before 1603 few of the queen's subjects braved the risks posed by the Spanish and Roman inquisitions to travel to Mediterranean countries, and those who did had more se... rious goals than attaining a knowledge of Renaissance art. In the seven... teenth century, however, several developments encouraged leisurely foreign travel by English lords and wealthy gentry. The momentary ces... sation of warfare helped, but so did a more flexible attitude on the part of the Vatican, which began to welcome visits to Italy by wealthy English heretics in the hope that it might convert them, or at least soften their hostility toward Catholicism. English peers and gentlemen could therefore venture south of the Alps without fear of persecution and mingle openly with the aristocracies of Venice, Florence, and Rome itself.5 Relatively few actually did so, but this minority included a number of future courtiers, such as Sir Kenelm Digby and the Earl of Arundel. 6 In addition to facilitating travel abroad, the Jacobean peace allowed England to reestablish embassies in Brussels, Madrid, Venice, and Flor... ence after a hiatus of nearly four decades. 7 Several royal servants spent years in these embassies, and, as one might expect, a few developed into knowledgeable connoisseurs of Renaissance art. Wotton returned from more than a decade of service in Venice to write the first book on architecture produced by an Englishman since 1553. 8 Sir Dudley Carle ... ton, who represented James in Brussels and Venice, amassed a collec ... tion of ancient statues sufficiently distinguished to exchange, in 1620, for a large number of pictures from the personal collection of Rubens. EuropeanArt: Collectionand Patronage I 19 By that date, a number of-much greater collections had been as.. sembled in England. A few of these were started much earlier. Leicester is known to have acquired several Italian paintings as early as the 1580s, while the Earl of Shrewsbury and Queen Anne were both col.. lecting in the first years of James's reign." Only after 1610, however, did a small coterie of great courtiers begin to purchase foreign art on a grand scale. The earliest leader of this group was Prince Henry, who procured Venetian masterpieces, assembled a fine...