RENAISSANCE forum Volume 1 Number 2, September 1996: Graham Parry

Lucy Gent, editor. 1995. Albion's Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain 1550-1660, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Illus. ISBN 0-300-06381-4. Ł45

This is an exceptionally stimulating collection of essays derived from a conference in 1992 on that complex topic of enduring interest: how, when and in what circumstances did the forms of the Italian Renaissance infiltrate in Britain, and what kind of responses did these new forms provoke? The Albion of the title stands for the land of romance, northern, cloud-covered, insular, with distinctive traditions of craftsmanship. It was, most significantly, newly Protestant. The encounters between Albion and the revived classicism of Italy provide a subject suitable for adventurous research, the reports of which make up a book that should not be missed by those who are curious about this intriguing period of cultural assimilation.
All the contributors are agreed about one central article of belief: that classicism should not be regarded as an admirable ideal towards which artists in Britain, largely ignorant of the decorum of style, made a slow and provincial approach. The confidence and inventiveness of Albion's artists and craftsmen are given full recognition in this volume. Attention is, however, principally given to works in which classical motifs make an appearance, in an attempt to gain some insights into the mentality of artists and patrons, viewers and readers, users and consumers, as they encountered the flotsam of classicism that reached these shores. We are reminded on several occasions that architects and painters in particular did not have any body of theory behind their work, which has sometimes seemed undervalued in comparison with Italian achievements, backed by numerous volumes of theory and codified practice. It has been much easier to talk about Italian Renaissance art as a result of these clearly articulated statements of intent.
But to paint the world according to the geometrical rules of perspective, to raise the proportionable arch or design a symmetrical villa may not be the fulfillment of perfection; there are other ways of being complete. Lucy Gent calls attention to the contrast Marvell makes in 'Appleton House' between Fairfax's small comfortable house and the classical mansion that some might think appropriate for such a great man. Marvell resists the mathematically proportioned scheme in favour of the native design, the closely-fitting shell, more mould or cell than airy ideal measured space. The values that cluster round 'the bee-like cell' are quite different from the values of the classical tradition. They relate to comfort and use, to natural needs, to tactile pleasures and sensuous delights. There is an order, too, Marvell insists, in the English house that is beyond the imposed orders of the foreign architect. Part of the attractiveness of the essays in Albion's Classicism is that they succeed in identifying a whole range of values and virtues in the arts and crafts of Tudor England that contribute to the integrity of a non-classical culture.
The range of subjects considered here is remarkably broad: miniature painting, armour, emblems. funerary monument, wood-carving, as well as architecture and portrait painting. The central chapter, in my reading of the book, is the one by Margaret Aston, who is 1993 published the book The King's Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait. Writing in the same area in the present volume, her essay on portraiture and Protestant England emphasises the diverse and contradictory responses of Englishmen to classical and Italianate subjects and motifs. Spreading out a large array of examples for the readers, she shows how difficult it is to generalise about Albion's reception of classicism, for one trend can immediately be counterposed by another. Some reformers were totally iconoclastic, others were tolerant of images; some collected portraits of the spiritual heroes of the age, others shunned them as snares of idolatry. Attitudes towards classical figures ranged from denunciations ciations of pagan depravity to acceptance of them as illustrations of virtues and sympathies.
Bishop Parker's bible of 1572 included woodcut capitals that cause Neptune to rub shoulders with St. Matthew in the letter T 'while Leda and the Swan graced the opening of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the letter G for God'. Portraits of Leicester and Cecil somehow got into Joshua and the Psalms. To some people these juxtapositions were offensive, to others not. They disappeared in the second edition, but anyone who looks closely at Elizabethan and Jacobean furnishings in English churches will know that these odd combinations turn up indiscriminately all the time: caryatids on pulpits, satyrs and harpies and nude goddesses on tombs.
Did many people bother their heads about all this? Tudor art forms were very accommodating, and readily incorporated new motifs, whether they came from the Low Countries or Italy. These new combinations reinforced the vigour and expressiveness of decoration, and seem only occasionally to have provoked outrage. There were no oppressive criteria for correctness of style, or segregation of Christian or pagan, religious or secular images and forms. Inigo Jones was virtually alone in his concern for purity of style, until the Restoration brought in a conscious commitment to neo-classical forms.
Aston's essay makes it clear that there was no broad and growing consensus about the merits of classicism in Tudor or early Stuart times. Her contribution is nicely complemented by Keith Thomas's essay on Protestant responses to classical art which also points up contradictory tendencies. He brings forward examples of resistance to architectural classicism on the grounds of its pagan origins and association with Rome, imperial and papal, but he can also show that some Protestants regarded the Gothic style as so compromised through its use by the corrupt medieval Church that they welcomed the classical manner for its relative freedom from popish connections. To complicate matter, he reminds us of that strain of theorising, initiated by the Spanish Jesuit Villalpando and certainly known in England, that claimed that the classical orders had their origin in the Temple of Solomon, and so had divine authority for their use in churches.
Although there were inhibitions, based on ignorance, about trying to construct a complete classical building until Inigo Jones designed the Queen's House at Greenwich, some components of classicism did get taken up in Elizabethan England. Paula Henderson devotes a well-documented essay to the vogue for the loggia, which extended from the 1520s (in the form of a modest gallery at Horton Court in Gloucestershire) to the Restoration, the most spectacular of these arcaded galleries surely being Jones's monumental portico for St. Paul's in the 1630s. English architects were able to adapt the loggia most remarkably to all manner of buildings, from the profoundly vernacular to the semi-classical, and certainly here was a form with its origins in the Greek stoa and the Roman villa, revitalised in the Quattrocentro, that fitted in most obligingly to English domestic requirements.
The essay by Maurice Howard on the application of classical details to civic architecture is not so effective in establishing its case, largely because of the paucity of surviving examples of civic buildings from the early modern period. One comes to regret in particular the loss of Gresham's Royal Exchange with its pleasing mixture of Flemish and Italianate styles (with the interior courtyard formed by four spacious loggias, no less).
Nigel Llewellyn's piece on classical references in post-Reformation funeral monuments is really too short for its ambitious subject (which deserves a book in itself) and gets distracted by the mystery of the Amazon Indians on the Harman tomb at Burford, but it has some valuable observations to make about the social function of the classically dressed tomb.
Classical detail in Tudor portraiture is addressed by Susan Foister, who again illustrates the intermittent and often inconsequential inclusion of classical references in portraits. She raise the difficult question of what an educated Englishman, whose access to the ancient world was textual rather than visual, would have envisaged when reading Pliny, for example, on the role of portraits, sculpture and memorials in Roman society.
Albion includes Scotland, of course, which merits two essays in the collection. Scottish architecture, as one might imagine, was fairly resistant to Mediterranean influences, and Deborah Howard observes that neither the court nor the nobility nor the burghs nor the kirk showed any eagerness to adopt classical motifs for their own purposes. There are isolated specimens of archways and arcading, but the strength of native traditions, coupled with the force of French and Flemish influences and the need to build defensively rather than for pleasure acted as a powerful restraint on the adoption of classical forms.
Michael Bath throws light on the humanist culture that had begun to flourish in Scotland in the late sixteenth century by examining the series of large emblematic pictures painted on the ceiling at Pinkie Castle near Edinburgh. They were commissioned by Alexander Seton, a significant officer of the real, and form a gallery of neo-Stoic devices that were modelled on antique example and were appropriate to the residence of a grave man of state. We know too little about the emergence of a Renaissance culture in Scotland, and Bath's article offers a valuable picture of the humanist lifestyle of a leading courtier. One only has to think about the semi-classical pageants at Stirling in honour of Prince Henry's birth to recognise that the Scottish court was trying hard to match European standards of taste.
There is much else in this large volume to stir one's thoughts about the flux and reflux of classicism in Albion, from Lisa Jardine's opening essay on the growth of the classical notion of amictia in early Tudor England, based on the habit of the giving of books, to Catherine Belsey's afterword that attempts to draw the different strands of the book together, a near impossible task because the overall effect of the book is to increase the reader's sense of the immense diversity of Albion's culture. Although classicism impinged on it in innumerable ways, there was no consistent or predictable way of responding to Roman or Italian stimuli, rather there was a multiplication of hybrid forms that contributed to the confident idiosyncrasy and creative vitality ofd Tudor and early Stuart Britain. Albion's Classicism is handsomely produced by Yale, and exceptionally well illustrated. To end on a utilitarian note, the combined footnotes of this volume make up an invaluable guide to recent writing on the visual arts in this period.

GRAHAM PARRY
UNIVERSITY OF YORK