Picturing Courtiers and Nobles from Castiglione to Van Dyck: Self Representation by Early Modern Elites (Routledge Research in Art History) [1 ed.] 0367439085, 9780367439088

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations used in the Notes
Quotations, Translations and Nomenclature
Introduction
Notes
Chapter 1 Courtiers, Nobles and Visual Representation
The Courtier as a Work of Art
The Sculpture and Architecture of Conduct
Portraying the Court and the Courtier
Nobility and Representation
The Image of Nobility
Nobility Reproduced or Created?
The Visual Art of Virtuous Nobility
Nobility as Self-Picturing
Notes
Chapter 2 Sprezzatura and its Afterlife: From Castiglione to Faret
The Art of Sprezzatura
Sprezzatura Revised: Writer and Narrator in the Galateo
Guazzo and Sprezzamento
Tasso: Sprezzatura, Prudence and Feigning
De Refuge: The Art of Courtly Dissimulation
Faret: How to Impersonate Oneself Honestly
Notes
Chapter 3 Nobility and the Art of Painting
Elyot: Visual Art, Knowledge and Virtue
Peacham: Picturing Complete Gentility
Peacham: ‘Scientia’ and Pictorial Art
Aristotle and Castiglione: The Nobility of Pictorial Art
Peacham: Pictorial Art and Gentlemanly Moderation
Junius on Grace and Facility
Notes
Chapter 4 The Nobly Negligent Painter
From the ‘Courtesy’ Literature to Art Theory
The Virtue and Nobility of Painting
Bellori on the Wisdom and Nobility of Van Dyck
Van Dyck’s ‘Heureuse Négligence’
Notes
Chapter 5 Van Dyck’s Almost Complete Gentleman
The Courtly Connoisseur
Heraldry and Antiquity in Early Baroque Rome
Narrative and Subplot
Courtier, Gentleman, Virtuoso
Notes
Chapter 6 Nobles and Nobilities: English Double Portraits
Portrayal and Enlightenment
Le Rouge et le Noir
Nobility by Halves
Courtiers, Gentlemen and Friends: Sir Anthony and Mr Porter
Notes
Conclusion: Nobles and Courtiers
Depicting Noble Lineage
Sprezzatura and Nobility: Tensions and Transformations
Nobility and Its Images, Old and New
The Noble Self as a Work of Art
Notes
Bibliography
Primary sources
Secondary sources
Index

Citation preview

Picturing Courtiers and Nobles from Castiglione to Van Dyck

This interdisciplinary study examines painted portraiture as a defning metaphor of élite self-representation in early modern culture. Beginning with Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), the most infuential early modern account of the formation of élite identity, the argument traces a path across the ensuing century towards the images of courtiers and nobles by the most persuasive of European portrait painters, Van Dyck, especially those produced in London during the 1630s. It investigates two related kinds of texts: those which, following Castiglione, model the conduct of the ideal courtier or élite social conduct more generally; and those belonging to the established tradition of debates about the condition of nobility – how far it is genetically inherited and how far a function of excelling moral and social behaviour. Van Dyck is seen as contributing to these discussions through the language of pictorial art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural history, early modern history and Renaissance studies. John Peacock was Reader in English at the University of Southampton UK, where he is now a Visiting Fellow. Cover image: Van Dyck, Self-portrait with Endymion Porter, c.1633, Madrid, Prado. UK/Bridgeman Images.

Routledge Research in Art History

Routledge Research in Art History is our home for the latest scholarship in the feld of art history. The series publishes research monographs and edited collections, covering areas including art history, theory, and visual culture. These high-level books focus on art and artists from around the world and from a multitude of time periods. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality art history research. Lower Niger Bronzes Philip M. Peek Art, Mobility, and Exchange in Early Modern Tuscany and Eurasia Edited by Francesco Freddolini and Marco Musillo The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe Reanimating Art Karen Kurczynski Emilio Sanchez in New York and Latin America Victor Deupi Henri Bertin and the Representation of China in Eighteenth-Century France John Finlay Picturing Courtiers and Nobles from Castiglione to Van Dyck Self Representation by Early Modern Elites John Peacock The Reception of the Printed Image in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries Multiplied and Modifed Edited by Grażyna Jurkowlaniec and Magdalena Herman Iconology, Neoplatonism, and the Arts in the Renaissance Edited by Berthold Hub and Sergius Kodera For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Routledge -Research-in-Art-History/book-series/RRAH

Picturing Courtiers and Nobles from Castiglione to Van Dyck Self Representation by Early Modern Elites

John Peacock

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of John Peacock to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Peacock, John, 1941- author. Title: Picturing courtiers and nobles from Castiglione to Van Dyck: self representation by early modern elites / John Peacock. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020012507 (print) | LCCN 2020012508 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367439088 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003009993 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Courts and courtiers in art. | Nobility in art. | Portrait painting, European. | Castiglione, Baldassarre, conte, 1478-1529. Libro del cortegiano. | Castiglione, Baldassarre, conte, 1478-1529–Infuence. | Van Dyck, Anthony, 1599-1641–Criticism and interpretation. Classifcation: LCC ND1329.3.A74 P43 2020 (print) | LCC ND1329.3.A74 (ebook) | DDC 757.094–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012507 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012508 ISBN: 978-0-367-43908-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00999-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To my family in the south and my friends in the north and vice versa

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations used in the Notes Quotations, Translations and Nomenclature Introduction

viii x xi xii xiii

1

Courtiers, Nobles and Visual Representation

1

2

Sprezzatura and its Afterlife: From Castiglione to Faret

40

3

Nobility and the Art of Painting

75

4

The Nobly Negligent Painter

114

5

Van Dyck’s Almost Complete Gentleman

133

6

Nobles and Nobilities: English Double Portraits

164

7

Conclusion: Nobles and Courtiers

184

Bibliography Index

195 204

Illustrations

Colour Plates The colour plate section is located between page 113 and 114 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Anthony van Dyck, Self-portrait, c.1620–21, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Van Dyck, Self-portrait, c.1640–41. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London Van Dyck, Portrait of Two Young Men, c.1638. Copyright National Gallery, London Van Dyck, Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart, c.1638, National Gallery, London. Copyright Bridgeman Images Van Dyck, Sir Thomas Hanmer, c.1638, The Weston Park Foundation, Staffordshire. Copyright Bridgeman Images Titian, Young Man with a Glove, c.1620, Louvre, Paris. Copyright Bridgeman Images Van Dyck, George Gage with Two Attendants, c.1621–22, National Gallery, London. Copyright Bridgeman Images Van Dyck, Self-portrait with a Sunfower, c.1633, private collection. Copyright Bridgeman Images Van Dyck, George Lord Digby and William Lord Russell, c.1635, from the Collection at Althorp Van Dyck, Self-portrait with Endymion Porter, c.1633, Prado, Madrid. Copyright Bridgeman Images William Dobson, Endymion Porter, c.1642–45, Tate Britain. Copyright Tate, London Van Dyck, Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel, c.1620–21, J. Paul Getty Museum

Figures 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, London, 1622, title-page, engraved Francis Delaram. Copyright The British Library Board. G.16576 Nobiltà from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1611. Photo: Warburg Institute Doctrina from Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna, London, 1612. Copyright The British Library Board. C.38.f.28, p.26 Dottrina from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1611. Photo: Warburg Institute

80 81 82 83

Illustrations 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15 7.1

Chiarezza from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1611. Photo: Warburg Institute Sea mark emblem from Roemer Visscher, Sinnepoppen, Amsterdam, 1614. Copyright The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Douce V 15, p.32 Misura from Cesare Ripa, Della Novissima Iconologia, Padua, 1624–25 (previous edition 1618). Photo: Warburg Institute Imitatio Sapiens from Antonio Vandyck in G. P. Bellori, Le Vite De’Pittori, Scultori Et Architetti Moderni, Rome, 1672. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Douce BB 448, p.253 Van Dyck, pen drawing of Raphael’s Disputa (detail), Italian Sketchbook. Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum Egidio Moretti, Roman military offcer, c.1614. Copyright Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. AN1896-1908.G.1151 Francesco Villamena, Inigo Jones, engraving c.1614. Photo: Edward Chaney Battista da Sangallo, Funeral monument of Lodovico Grati Margani, 1532, S. Maria in Aracoeli. Rome. Photo: Conway Library. Copyright The Courtauld Institute of Art, London Giacomo della Porta, Palazzo Senatorio (detail), engraving, from G. B. Falda, Nuovi Disegni Dell’ Architetture, E Piante De’ Palazzi Di Roma…Libro Secondo, Rome, n.d. Copyright The British Library Board. Maps 7 Tab.48 Onorio Longhi, Portal of Vigna Altemps (reconstructed on the Campidoglio), Rome, late 16th century. Photo: author Detail of preceding. Photo: author Carlo Maderno, cortile of Palazzo Mattei di Giove, Rome, 1616. Photo: author Heraldic plinth, Palazzo Mattei di Giove. Photo: author Antique Roman funerary altar, Palazzo Mattei di Giove. Photo: author Francesco Villamena, Victory creating the Borghese arms in the presence of the Emperor Trajan, engraved thesis print of Sebastiano Venturelli, Rome, 1618. Photo: Louise Rice Matthaeus Greuter after Antonio Pomarancio, Iris modelling the Ludovisi arms on three distant rainbows, engraved thesis print of Azzone Ariosto, 1621. Photo: Louise Rice Giambattista Della Porta, De Humana Physiognomonia, Vico Equense, 1586, title-page. Copyright The British Library Board. G.2200 Daniel Mytens, Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel, c.1618. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London Mytens, Aletheia Talbot Countess of Arundel, c.1618. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London George Vertue after Philip Fruytiers, Earl and Countess of Arundel with grandchildren, etching and engraving, 1745 (after an original painting of 1645). Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum

ix 84 85 87

123 134 139 140 141

143 144 145 145 147 148 149 150 153 157 158 189

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for research fellowships which, although awarded (and enjoyed) quite a number of years ago, have given a continuing impetus to the work represented in this book. Peter Burke’s study The Fortunes of ‘The Courtier’ (1995) has been an invaluable aid and stimulus to thinking about Castiglione and his legacy; and like all recent students of Van Dyck, I have thankfully relied on the catalogue raisonné of his paintings by Susan J. Barnes, Nora De Poorter, Oliver Millar and Horst Vey, and the perspicuously informed account of his life by Jeremy Wood in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Various people have given indispensable and welcome support to my research, above all Elizabeth McGrath and Jeremy Wood. I have benefted from exchanges about Van Dyck with Edward Chaney, who has also kindly supplied me with a needed portrait of Inigo Jones. Conversation with Dorigen Caldwell has stimulated ideas about works of art as implicit contributions to cultural debates. Ian Haines, with equable expertise, has sorted out my ever anxious relationship to my computer and, during an interlude of temporary disability, together with Matthew Caldwell under the captaincy of Alan Ware, helped to rearrange my living and working space. Over a number of years, Franco Moretti’s fat in San Saba has been a sympathetic starting place for many journeys into the heart of Rome, and a haven of repose after benignly footsore days of exploration. In London, I am immeasurably grateful for Lesley Caldwell’s hospitality in Stoke Newington. A more metaphorical but appreciable home from home has been the Warburg Institute, and I must thank the staff of the Library and the Photographic Collection for all their cheerfully proffered assistance, as also the staff of the British Library. Parts of the frst three chapters of this book made up a paper delivered at the conference ‘Livelier than Life’: The Life of Art in Early Modern Europe convened at Trinity Hall, Cambridge in September 2018 by Ted Tregear, Tessa Peres and Sam Geddes, who took a suggestive cue from the recent work of Caroline van Eck. My editor and assistant editor, Isabella Vitti and Katie Armstrong, have been enormously helpful and encouraging in equal measure. With spontaneous generosity, Louise Rice has provided me with two crucial images which otherwise would have been diffcult, if not impossible, to obtain. Jayanthi Chander has supervised the production of the book with unfailing care and patience.

Abbreviations used in the Notes

Bull

The Book of the Courtier, trans. and intro. George Bull, Harmondsworth, 1976 Cian Baldesar Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. Vittorio Cian, 4th edn., Florence, 1947 Complete Paintings Susan J. Barnes, Nora De Poorter, Oliver Millar and Horst Vey, Van Dyck. A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London, 2004 Vasari/Milanesi Giorgio Vasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols., Florence, 1906

Quotations, Translations and Nomenclature

Quotations of passages in Italian and French are accompanied by English translations, duly credited. Whether the passage in a foreign language comes frst, or the translation, varies, depending on the context and the process of the argument, and this has been considered in every case. The Italian name Giovanni, when (as so often) it is the frst of two forenames, has been shortened to Giovan in the interests of suavity, except when the person concerned is well known by some variant, as in the case of Gian Vincenzo Imperiale or Giambattista Della Porta.

Introduction

The following chapters attempt to investigate what connexions might be traced between Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, frst published in 1528 but reissued well over a hundred times (in reprints, new editions and translations) during the succeeding century, and Van Dyck’s portraits, after that century had run its course, of the British nobility and gentry who were courtiers of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria – that is, between the most famous and infuential account in the early modern period of élite social identity and later, in the same era, the persuasive representations of élite sitters by the most prestigious and glamorous of European portraitists. It is tempting to map Castiglione’s key concept of sprezzatura – the unself-conscious exercise of one’s best and most strenuously cultivated accomplishments as if they came naturally and with ease – onto a range of Van Dyck’s pictures, especially those in which he represents himself. The early but stylish Self-portrait in the Metropolitan Museum1 (Plate 1), for example, shows him gazing equably at the viewer, while the tapering fngers of his right hand trife with the top of his shirt. With the thumb, essential to holding the brush, nowhere in sight, his index fnger dabbles in the impressionistically streaked and scumbled paint used to depict the white fabric. The frontal gaze denies the shifts and contrivances with mirrors required to capture the painter’s image of himself, and the relaxed gesture at the virtuosic facture or ‘handling’, as we would call it, appears to disclaim any manual effort in its realisation, suggesting a thorough detachment between the processes of art and their fnished product. We seem to witness the consummate nonchalance, the sprezzatura, recommended to his perfect courtier by Castiglione. At the same time we need to observe that the original exposition of this concept in the First Book of The Courtier had, by the time of Van Dyck’s maturity, undergone almost a hundred years of not only repetition and dissemination but also debate, critique and revision, so that its status as a classic doctrine of self-formation had been subjected to the disturbances of historical change. One sign of this change was the way in which Castiglione’s discussion of courtiership, or cortegianía, to use the more euphonious Italian term, became in part associated with the long-standing debates about the nature of nobility which, resumed from antiquity and continuing on from the late medieval period, grew to be more voluble and combative in numerous printed treatises, polemics and dialogues of the early modern era. Two leading speakers in Castiglione’s own dialogue, Count Lodovico of Canossa and Gaspare Pallavicino, have an unresolved disagreement about whether the courtier needs to be of noble birth, leaving open the possibility that the perfect practice of cortegianía could render someone of undistinguished lineage de facto noble, and inviting a rapprochement with established debates about nobility and their fxation

xiv Introduction on the question of whether it was attainable by meritorious individuals or exclusively transmitted by inheritance. Of course one strand of these debates concerned the question of whether visual art, as a kind of craft or handiwork, was a socially demeaning pursuit or compatible with élite status, a problem pertinent to favoured court artists from the time of Castiglione and his celebrated friend Raphael to that of Van Dyck and beyond. As discussions of cortegianía mingled with those of nobility during the sixteenth and on into the seventeenth century, the role of such artists was gaining in prestige; for example, the painter tasked to portray the denizens of one princely court or another might, given suffcient talent and success in producing distinguished images of the ruling family and the personnel attendant upon the ruler and the regime, attain a kind of social distinction comparable to that of his privileged sitters. Part of Van Dyck’s success in rising to this eminence was his portrayal of an extensive, one might almost say exhaustive, range of exalted fgures; beginning with the rich bourgeoisie of Antwerp, he progressed to the cosmopolitan élite of 1620s Rome, the patricians of the Genoese Republic, the viceregal establishment in Palermo, the feudal nobility of the southern Netherlands and the refugees from the courts of France and Lorraine who had joined their number, the household of the Prince of Orange at The Hague, and (long after a brief preliminary visit in 1620–21) the English court during the years of King Charles’s personal rule. Two major series of portraits demonstrate the range of his response to contrasting political and social cultures: that of the Caroline nobility and gentry associated with the royal court at Whitehall, and previously that of the Genoese aristocracy who, while nobles, were certainly not courtiers but the corporate governing class of an oligarchic republic. Van Dyck’s developing capacity to discriminate and represent different instances, shades and blendings of cortegianía and nobility made him a connoisseur of those qualities to the extent that his art – and, according to early biographers, his life – took them on with seemingly effortless confdence. Most notably in the culminating series of English portraits, a kind of expert fellow feeling helped him identify with his privileged clients, the expertise camoufaged in courtly guise by a pictorial style which could appear, in certain aspects, dazzlingly unstudied. This book deals with both texts and images, and attempts to relate them to each other, sometimes within the same discussion, as in the case of Van Dyck’s portrayal of his friend Endymion Porter, but largely in distinct, gradual stages. As the overall direction of travel is (via the painter’s frst, brief stay in London during the winter of 1620–21 and his subsequent sojourn in Rome in 1622–23) towards his work at the court of Charles I in the 1630s, Italian and French texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are quoted alongside near-contemporary English translations where these exist, with one seemingly perverse exception. I have not used Thomas Hoby’s famous version of Castiglione, The Courtyer Of Count Baldessar Castilio (1561),2 because the necessity of explaining Hoby’s (to modern eyes) sometimes idiosyncratic or archaic English would interpose an extra layer of laborious clarifcation between the reader and my many quotations from Il libro del cortegiano; instead, I have used a modern translation, slightly altered in a few instances to bring it closer to the original. The destination of my enquiry also means that the selection of texts discussing concepts of gentility and nobility concentrates largely on those published in England or translated for English readers (such as the works by Giovan Battista Nenna and Annibale Romei).

Introduction

xv

My frst three chapters focus on texts alone. Chapter One traces metaphors of visual representation used in The Courtier and in what have come to be called ‘courtesy books’, the literature on cortegianía or more broadly on élite social conduct which succeeded it, and also in some relevant texts on the question of nobility appearing in the century after Castiglione’s dialogue was frst published. He had described himself at the start as producing a portrait (ritratto) of the by then vanished Montefeltro court of Urbino, and went on to make his two chief opening speakers use the feld of pictorial art to fgure the perfect courtier’s social identity. The succeeding ‘courtesy’ literature, especially in its two most famous texts, the Galateo of Giovanni Della Casa and the Civil conversazione of Stefano Guazzo, accommodated, and essayed variations on, this suggestive theme, while writers on nobility were more wary of using the notion of visual representation to expound a condition which they tended to regard, for whatever reasons, as intrinsic and self-authenticated, not reliant on an art of social imaging. Chapter Two proceeds to focus on Castiglione’s perfect courtier as an artist of the self, aiming to be his own ideal self-portrait in action, both agent and outcome of the fnest social and moral self-representation through the exercise of sprezzatura. The argument follows the history of the concept of sprezzatura, an afterlife which involves sometimes destabilising revisions up as far as Nicolas Faret’s rewriting of The Courtier, published in 1630 as L’Honneste-Homme Ou, L’Art de Plaire A La Court. Chapter Three turns again to writings on what Henry Peacham calls the ‘noble gentleman’, especially two prime English examples, The Governour of Sir Thomas Elyot and Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman, considering how each author sees the function of visual art in the formation of a ruling élite. A fnal section examines how Franciscus Junius (the librarian of Peacham’s ideal aristocrat, the art collector Earl of Arundel) in his treatise on The Painting of the Ancients, pays tribute to his patron’s ‘noble and art-cherishing mind’ by assimilating the process of élite self-fashioning to the practice of an excellent painter. Chapter Four traces this association back to Italian art theory of the later sixteenth century, and goes on to analyse the part it plays in the two most informed early lives of Van Dyck, by Bellori and the anonymous eighteenth-century French biographer. With reference to the themes of this frst part of the book, the second part discusses a number of Van Dyck’s portraits of gentry and nobility belonging to the English court produced in Rome and London. Chapter Five explores, with detailed attention to its contemporary context, the picture of George Gage, English gentleman and Stuart courtier, with whom Van Dyck shared lodgings around 1622–23 in Rome, just as he was managing his own transformation (according to the anonymous eighteenthcentury French biographer) into the role of ‘gentleman painter’ (pittore cavalieresco). Chapter Six makes a broader survey of several pictures produced in London in the 1630s, concentrating on double portraits of courtiers, which may be seen as representing contrasted and related, but not necessarily resolved, ideas of noble identity. In dealing with the British upper classes of this period, I have assumed that there is not a rigid barrier between the gentry and the peerage. Edmund Spenser wrote that the didactic aim of his epic The Faerie Queene was ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person’; and Henry Peacham’s treatise details the formation of ‘a Noble Gentleman’. Thomas Wilson’s manuscript account of The State Of England, Anno Dom. 1600 both differentiates and associates nobilitas maior (peers and bishops) and minor (knights and untitled gentry),3 making clear that the gentry occupied the position of what modern historians would call the minor nobility of a European monarchic state.

xvi

Introduction

The view of Van Dyck which I hope emerges from the following discussion is that his portraits at their best are refective in an active and not just a passive sense, that they do not merely reproduce or illustrate familiar notions from early modern debates about cortegianía and nobility, but make their own contribution to those debates in the painter’s specifc medium, the language of pictorial art.

Notes 1 Complete Paintings, I.160, 138. 2 For a modern reprint see the Everyman’s Library edition: The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldassare Castiglione Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby Anno 1561, London, Toronto and New York, 1928. 3 F. J. Fisher ed., The State of England Anno Dom. 1600 by Thomas Wilson, Camden Miscellany Vol. XVI (Camden Third Series Vol. LII), London, 1936, 17.

1

Courtiers, Nobles and Visual Representation

The Courtier as a Work of Art In retrospect, Castiglione’s most signifcant relationship – to speak of cultural as well as purely personal ties – was with the painter Raphael. It produced Raphael’s outstanding portrait of him, copied a century later and subtly revised for a new era by Rubens, who as a courtier-diplomat matched himself with the sitter as well as the artist. It also produced the famous letter in which Raphael explained his notion of the ‘idea’, the mental or imaginative concept he used to guide his attempts at depicting (in this case) perfect feminine beauty.1 Castiglione’s parallel project, his verbal depiction of the ideal courtier, was to make notable reference to his friend’s métier, to the practice of pictorial art. The dedicatory letter to Don Miguel da Sylva which prefaces Il libro del cortegiano characterises the book as ‘a portrait (ritratto di pittura) of the court of Urbino’, a representation of a sizeable body of individuals in a distinguished setting, as if to offer an enlarged and updated reworking of Mantegna’s depiction of the court of Mantua, Castiglione’s home city, in the so-called Camera degli Sposi, or a scaled-down and domesticated version of Raphael’s grandly conversing assemblies in the Disputa or the School of Athens. However, Castiglione adds at once, this will be a work not indeed by the hand of Raphael or Michelangelo but by a lowly painter (pittor ignobile) who knows only how to draw the outlines (linee principali) and cannot adorn the truth with pretty colours or use perspective to deceive the eye. Non di mano di Rafaello o Michel Angelo, ma di pittor ignobile, e che solamente sappia tirar le linee principali, senza adornar la verità di vaghi colori, o far parer per arte di prospettiva quello che non è.2 He goes on to declare how incapable he is of representing the virtues of the principal fgure in his group portrait, the Duchess of Urbino, ‘because not only is my style incapable of expressing them but my mind of conceiving them (imaginarle)’.3 He lacks both the technical skill and the conceptual power, the access to the ‘idea’, which a master painter can command. Of course, readers of the subsequent dialogues would in hindsight recognise here the attitude of sprezzatura, the making light of his own abilities and achievements which is said to be the courtier’s essential quality. The more discerning would observe that those resources which the writer claims to lack, ‘pretty colours’ and ‘perspective’, would serve only to ‘adorn the truth’ (not to mention that perspective is said to ‘deceive’), and they would recall Aristotle’s insistence

2

Courtiers, Nobles, Visual Representation

in the Poetics that just as the ‘soul’ of tragedy is not character but plot, the animating principle of a picture comes not from beautiful colours but from knowing ‘how to draw the outlines’.4 Castiglione’s adroit confession of artlessness intimates his artistic ambition. Given that he is an ‘ignoble’ portraitist who cannot even formulate the ‘idea’ of his principal personage, let alone realise it, there do exist noble painters who can represent ideal conceptions, and he implicitly accepts that he will be judged by their standards as he attempts, however imperfectly, to emulate their methods of portrayal. His enterprise is of course more sophisticated than he initially suggests. The fgures in his group portrait are themselves engaged in portraying a more rarefed fgure, the perfect courtier. At the outset, Castiglione argues that ‘the Idea…of the perfect Courtier’ can be made real in literary terms, citing three classical precedents: the ideal republic described by Plato, the ideal monarch by Xenophon, and the ideal orator by Cicero.5 Implicitly following this tradition, in the dialogues which then get underway, Federico Fregoso suggests ‘that one of us should be chosen and given the task of fashioning in words (formar con parole) a perfect courtier, explaining the character and the particular qualities needed by anyone who deserves such a title’.6 However, although words are the medium to be used, Castiglione draws the formation of this fgure into the ambience of the visual arts. Count Lodovico, the speaker in Book One who sets out the courtier’s attributes, requires him not only to appreciate but also to have practical experience of the arts of drawing and painting; this leads to a discussion of the paragone between painting and sculpture, which adds a dimension to the earlier, more predictable discussion of the arts of speech and language. As well, pictorial art enters more intrinsically into the courtier’s make-up by providing metaphors for the way he presents himself to the world. The courtier fashioned through the words of Count Lodovico and his companions turns out to be a fgure who, however gifted and however promisingly formed by upbringing and education, must, to be completely effective, form himself. Through the exercise of sprezzatura, the calculatingly unself-conscious display of all his accomplishments to the best advantage, he becomes his own work of art. Castiglione’s speakers express this notion from two complementary points of view. In Book One, Count Lodovico illustrates the effect of sprezzatura in a succession of activities: handling weapons, dancing, singing and painting. The sequence is persuasively judged, as he leads his audience from a courtier’s conventional pursuits – military exercises and élite social pastimes – to those which he has required of his new and perfect model, such as music and visual art. So he praises the deft practitioner who falls effortlessly into the right posture for handling his sword, or executes a simple dance step with consummate grace, or sings a cadence with natural facility, all of which leads to the culminating example: Then again, in painting, a single line which is not laboured, a single brush stroke made with ease, in such a way that it seems that the hand is completing the line by itself without any effort or guidance, clearly reveals the excellence of the artist, about whose competence everyone will then make his own judgment. Spesso ancor nella pittura una linea sola non stentata, un sol colpo di pennello tirato facilmente, di modo che paia che la mano, senza esser guidata da studio o arte alcuna, vada per sé stessaal suo termine secondo la intention del pittore, scopre chiaramente la eccellenzia dell’artefce, circa la opinion della quale ognuno poi si estende secondo il suo giudicio….7

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With a quick scintillation of rhetorical dexterity which mimics its subject, this shows the act of painting as an aesthetic performance, and compares the courtier to the painter in that respect. In Book Two, the principal speaker, Federico Fregoso, comes at the comparison from a different angle. He requires the courtier to behave always in accord with the sum total of his fne qualities, which must be made into a unifed whole (un corpo solo). Following the doctrine of the Stoics, any action should express all the virtues, which are linked together, even though it will be led by one virtue in particular. This means that the courtier must know how to deploy the virtues, setting off one against another to make it manifest. Gentleness, for example, will be most striking in a man of fery courage, each quality enhancing the other. The same method is used in pictorial design: This is what a good painter does when by the use of shadow he distinguishes clearly the lights on his reliefs, and similarly by the use of light deepens the shadows of plane surfaces and brings different colours together in such a way that each one is brought out more sharply through the contrast; and the placing of fgures in opposition to each other assists the painter in his purpose. Come i boni pittori, i quali con l’ombra fanno apparere e mostrano i lumi de’rilevi; e così col lume profondano l’ombre dei piani, e compagnano i colori diversi insieme di modo, che per quella diversità l’uno e l’altro meglio si dimostra, e ‘l posar delle fgure contrario l’una all’altra aiuta a far quell’uffcio che è intenzion del pittore.8 Count Lodovico’s parallel of the courtier and the painter is taken further in this detailed analogy. By using his own kind of chiaroscuro and composition in representing himself as a moral agent, the courtier becomes both the painter and the painting. Federico’s analogy is derived from Cicero’s discussion of Stoic philosophy in the De Offciis. Cicero contrasts two kinds of virtuous action in the light of Stoic principles: the carrying out of ‘absolute’ duties by the wise man, and that of ‘medium’ or ordinary duties by the man of ordinary virtue. He also observes that the lesser kind of virtue is often mistaken for the greater and more perfect, and rated above its true worth. The reason is that most people do not understand enough about the nature of virtue to tell the difference. In the same way, most people misjudge ‘poems, paintings, and a great many other works of art’, because their fancy is caught by some good feature, but they lack the knowledge to recognise points of weakness.9 Castiglione has extracted this analogy between the supremely virtuous man and the wholly excellent work of art and revised it in an optimistic vein. To some sixteenth-century readers, he might seem to have gone too far, aestheticising the practice of virtue in a cultural climate where Christian humanism and, later, Tridentine Catholicism preferred to moralise the practice of art, and opening the door to aestheticising the very concept of virtue, so that the word virtuoso can come to designate an élite searcher after the beauties of art and the wonders of nature. More pertinent to note here is the way Castiglione’s ‘ritratto di pittura’ of the court of Urbino gives rise to further portrayals; the fashioning of the ideal courtier in all his social and moral virtuosity, which modulates into an account of his own self-formation, signifcantly associates him with the art of painting, in viewing him as both pictorial artist and pictorial subject.

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By using metaphors of visual art to present his courtiers, who then build up a picture of their ideal courtier, who in turn emerges as both an artist and his own work of art, Castiglione set a precedent for succeeding writers of ‘courtesy books’. This is recognised two generations after the frst appearance of The Book of the Courtier in Tasso’s dialogue Malpiglio, subtitled On the Court (De la corte), which pays tribute to Castiglione’s pre-eminence among ‘those who have described the ideal courtier’ (formata l’idea del cortigiano).10 The speaker, Giovan Lorenzo Malpiglio, after whom the dialogue is named, knows Castiglione’s book almost by heart, and wants Tasso (who fgures in Platonic guise as a ‘Neapolitan Stranger’) to rehearse some of his comments on it, made to other friends in the past. Tasso regrets that he may not be able to recall those comments clearly, ‘for my weakened memory is like a painting in which some form remains but which has lost its colour and which needs retouching’.11 He evokes the kind of pictorial metaphor found in The Courtier, but only in a momentary way, appropriately expressing the fragility of recollection; however, after the debate has developed and taken on more substance, the same strain of metaphor reappears in the foreground with complete confdence. Tasso has been arguing that the principal virtue for a courtier must be prudence, which embraces and leads all other virtues. Malpiglio wonders if, in consequence, prudence will subsume the other virtues and render them indiscernible. The reply harks back to a parallel context in The Courtier: Not all the virtues are equally visible. Just as some parts of the background of a painting are hinted at with shadows while others are represented in a more lively way with colours, so it is with the virtues that accompany prudence. For courage, magnanimity, and certain other virtues appear sketched in and distant, while magnifcence, liberality, courtesy itself, and modesty are done in the fnest colours of the courtier’s art – as though they were alive; and the same with the virtues of social intercourse, that is to say, truthfulness, affability and charm. Non tutte egualmente né sempre si manifestano, ma sì come le pitture con l’ombre s’accennano alcune parti lontane, alter sono da’colori più vivamente espresso, così avverrà parimente de le virtù che sono con la prudenza: percioché la fortezza e la magnanimità e alcun’altre si veggono adombrate e paiono quasi di lontano discoprirsi ; ma la magnifcenza, la liberalità e quella che si chiama cortesia con proprio nome e la modestia è dipinta con più fni colori ch’abbia l’artifcio del cortigiano, anzi viva più tosto: parimente le virtù del conversare, io dico la verità, l’affabilità e la piacevolezza.12 Tasso amplifes his tribute to Castiglione by making a literary imitatio of Federico Fregoso’s description, quoted above, of how the courtier should arrange and exhibit his virtues in the same way as a painter handles chiaroscuro, colour and composition. Malpiglio’s immediate response reinforces Tasso’s view of the signifcance of this notion in Castiglione’s text: I see not only the outline of the courtier but his complete picture, his portrait in colour. And if that other portrait, by Castiglione, was made for his time, the portrait you have made ought to be prized in these times…. Io veggo non solo il disegno, ma l’imagine del cortigiano e ‘l ritratto già colorito. E se l’altro del Castiglione fu per quella età ne la qual fu scritto, assai caro dovrà essere il vostro in questi tempi….13

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We are confrmed in our understanding that ‘the art of the courtier’ (l’artifcio del cortigiano) is a visual art, akin to that of the painter, which he deploys to form and to portray himself as masterfully as possible. The Malpiglio is comparatively brief, and it takes its retrospective view of Castiglione after the work of his most prominent successors in the sixteenth century, Giovanni Della Casa and Stefano Guazzo, had already been published. Guazzo in La civil conversazione (1574) matches Castiglione’s interest in language but less so his interest in visual art; nonetheless, he follows the tendency of The Courtier to characterise civilised social intercourse (civil conversazione) with pictorialising metaphors. Coming from north Italy like Castiglione, he is exercised about the questione della lingua, the debate about the primacy of the Tuscan dialect. Conceding that his ‘mother tongue is rude and unperfect’, he has the two principal speakers in his dialogue agree on a compromise position by sanctioning what, as educated people, they do in practice, which is to ‘mingle’ their native Lombard dialect with Tuscan in a form which achieves a certain consistency. This ‘mixed speeche’ is compared to a fabric like shot silk, where two colours combine seamlessly and are visible, while one of them may predominate.14 All this is explained by Annibale, the protagonist. When Guglielmo, his interlocutor, asks for advice in perfecting the seamless continuity which is desirable, Annibale replies that he has perfected it already: to fashion this mixed speeche, it is necessary that the natural language be chiefy set foorth, in such discrete sort as you doe. For you dippe somewhat the Pencill of your tongue in the freshe and cleere colour of the Tuscan tongue. Whereby you shadowe the stained spottes of our mother tongue, mary yet so lightly that your speech is always knowne for Lombard. nel formar la favella mista bisogna che si scuopra principalmente il segno della natia favella, e s’usi quella discreta maniera che fate voi, il quale tingendo alquanto il pennello della vostra lingua nel candido colore della toscana favella, andate coprendo l’oscure macchie della nostra materna, ma tanto leggiermente che si lascia conoscere per favella lombarda.15 The fashioning of a language which will make for ‘civil conversation’ on the widest front while affrming one’s ‘natural’ (personal and local) identity implies a fnely judged art, like the most careful touches of the painter. Here, Guazzo takes Castiglione’s practice of fguring the courtier’s self-formation in terms of pictorial art and gives it a broader reference, to all those of his readers who aspire to what his English contemporaries called ‘civility’. An adjacent instance of the use to which language can be put concerns conversation (in the modern sense) and knowledge. Guglielmo expresses his admiration for those who are so well informed that they can talk with ease on any subject. Annibale demurs; such people may strike others as good company, but they tend to be knowledgeable in an immature, superfcial way; they are ‘confused in themselves, and altogether without order, not unlike a painter’s aperne, which you shall see spotted by chaunce with al kinde of colours’ (sono in se stessi confuse e senza alcun ordine, non altrimenti che i grembiali de’ pittori, che si veggono tinti a caso d’ogni sorte di colori).16 Behind this image lies the same passage from the Poetics alluded to by Castiglione when he announced that his portrait of the court of Urbino would

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be a simple linear outline without colour.17 Aristotle’s insistence on the primacy of plot over character, reinforced by the comparison of an outline portrait to a random assemblage of colours (to suggest the effect if character were to exceed its subordinate position) had, by Guazzo’s time, been picked out by editors and translators for comment and paraphrase in the light of contemporary culture. Ludovico Castelvetro emphasised that Aristotle’s analogy gave pride of place to fgurative imagery (la fgura), recalling the prestige which the representation of the fgure had acquired in Renaissance art, especially with the authority of Michelangelo and the triumphalist historiography of Vasari.18 Alessandro Piccolomini paraphrased the text in modern terms: essendo in questo la cosa simile all’arte del dipingere, posciache s’alcuno tingesse il muro, ò tavola di bellissimi & vaghissimi colori, posti quivi, come se sparsi à caso; certamente non così diletterebbe, come farebbe colui, che con pure linee disegnasse imagini, & fgure in bianco. there is a similarity with the art of painting, given a situation where, if someone applies to a wall or a panel beautiful and appealing colours, placed thereon as if they were scattered at random, he would certainly not give as much pleasure as he who with clear contours were to draw images and fgures in outline.19 Aristotle’s hypothetical painter becomes an Italian artist of the sixteenth century, who may work with colour in fresco or on panel, and also produce monochrome drawings. A meaningless scatter of colours is contrasted with more economically designed imagery which makes clear sense, just as, in Guazzo’s comparison, the mess of pigments on the painter’s apron can be presumed the by-product of an intelligibly designed picture. By using the detritus of pictorial art to represent an incoherent social identity, Guazzo opens out further the possibilities of a metaphor learnt from Castiglione.

The Sculpture and Architecture of Conduct A striking variation on these possibilities had already been performed by Giovanni Della Casa, whose Galateo ovvero de’ costumi was frst published in 1558. Galateo is the fctional fgure said to have inspired the writing of the treatise and acted as adviser, an old courtier ‘very lerned, and, mervailous pleasant, welspoken, comely’ (molto scienzato e oltre ad ogni credenza piacevole e ben parlante e di grazioso aspetto)….20 The writer by comparison, a role impersonated by Della Casa, represents himself as unlearned, a stranger to humanist culture except at second hand, and takes occasion towards the end of the book to confess his own corresponding inadequacies as a model of the good manners which he describes and recommends, although he hopes that his teaching can still be benefcial. The crucial topic of a model or exemplar has come up in a sudden digression. This introduces, in vague fashion, an ancient sculptor from ‘Morea’ whose superior skill earned him the name of ‘Maestro Chiarissimo’. As the episode continues, it is meant to dawn on the educated reader that this is the famous Greek sculptor Polycleitus. We have an account of his project to create a sculptural canon, a set of measurements and proportions for the male body which would be a

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paradigm of physical perfection. The writer, in prosaic vernacular, refers to this as the ’Regolo’, and relates how it was frst formulated in a treatise and then embodied in a marble statue. This is the point where he voices his regrets that he cannot achieve the same union of theory and practice, but hopes that he may at least manage a ‘Regolo’ of the frst kind: I meane, that I could gather together in this treatise, after a sorte, the due measures of this Art that I take upon me to treat of. For, to perfourme the other, to make the second Regolo: I meane, to use and observe in my maners, the masures I speak of, framing and forming, as it were, A Visible Example, and a material Image of them: it were now, to muche for me to doe. cioè di raccozzare in questo volume quasi le debite misure dell’arte, dellaquale io tratto: percioche l’altra: di fare il secondo Regolo, cio è di tenere & osservare ne miei costumi le sopradette misure, componendone quasi visibile essempio, & materiale statua; non posso io guari hoggimai fare….21 At the end of this passage, the English translator smooths over and obscures a vital point. Where he puts ‘material Image’, the writer has ‘materiale statua’. True to the latter’s naive and practical character, the metaphor of a paradigm of perfect good manners is given as much physical reality as possible. Della Casa has taken Castiglione’s notion of the courtier as a self-created work of art and adapted it to his own ends, shifting it from the context of painting to that of sculpture. Given the continuous emphasis in the Galateo on bodily comportment, on doing nothing with one’s body which will disconcert or disgust one’s fellows in any social situation, this shift towards an art which emphasises the palpable substance of the human frame is altogether appropriate; and Castiglione’s assumption that an ‘idea’ described in a text might be enacted in practice is ingeniously transposed into the exemplar of Polycleitus, with his ‘Regolo’ embodied in a text and a statue. The fact that Castiglione was reputed to have realised his ‘idea’ in his own person, while Della Casa’s preceptor claims to have no parallel prospect of realising his own ‘Regolo’, subtly points up the transition. There is one hint in The Courtier which may have helped Della Casa to formulate his image of a perfectly civilised social agent as a living sculpture. This occurs in the introductory section of Book Three, which is concerned with the formation of the perfect court lady, the ‘perfetta Cortegiana’ or ‘Donna di Palazzo’. The Magnifco Giuliano, as the leading speaker in this instance, jokes to the Duchess that when he has described this paragon according to his own inclinations, he will take her for himself, as Pygmalion did with the ideal woman whom he fashioned as a statue and, falling in love with his creation, was rewarded by Venus who brought her to life. This Ovidian myth suggests itself as a neat bridge between the sculptural ‘Regolo’ of Polycleitus and the living, breathing readers whose social behaviour the Galateo aims to render impeccable.22 The ironically artful relationship between Della Casa and his narrator produces further nuances from the metaphor of the statue. As the narrator goes through his vernacularised account of Polycleitus (whom Della Casa and his informed readers would have read about in Pliny’s Natural History), rendering his name as ‘Chiarissimo’ and

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referring to the Peloponnese as ‘Morea’, the Greek concept of a ‘canon’ becomes, as we have seen, the Italian word ‘regolo’ (rule): Il qual suo volume egli chiamò Il regolo, volendo signifcare che secondo quello si dovessero dirizzare e regolare le statue che per lo innanzi si farebbono per gli altri maestri, come le travi e le pietre e le mura si misurano con esso il regolo…. He called his work the ‘Rule’, meaning by this name that the statues which other sculptors made from that time onwards should be shaped and designed according to it, in the same way as beams, masonry, and walls are gauged with a rule.23 A modern English translation is used here because the Elizabethan translator seems to have been confused by the way Della Casa’s information about Polycleitus from Pliny is mediated as hearsay by the unscholarly narrator. The latter’s word ‘regolo’ proximately renders the Greek ‘canon’ which (as he appears not to know) lies behind it, and which can mean literally a plain rod of a certain length or one marked out for mensuration, and metaphorically a rule or a model of excellence. But he is made to seem minimally aware of any metaphorical meaning, so that the word ‘regolo’ in the single sentence quoted above slips from meaning a system of measurements to denoting an instrument for measuring, a ruler, like one used to gauge the component parts of a building. Once again, the narrator’s simplicity adumbrates a more complex point implied by Della Casa. The naïve comparison of a regulatory system for the sculptor’s beneft with the ruler used by a carpenter, mason or builder would evoke for the knowing reader a central motif of Renaissance culture derived from Vitruvius: that architectural proportions should follow the proportions of the human body in its most perfect form. In the great edition of Vitruvius with commentary, frst published in 1556 by the Venetian churchman Daniele Barbaro, this doctrine was rehearsed and reinforced.24 As Della Casa was resident in Venice during the years when Barbaro’s work was in preparation, frst as papal nuncio and then in a period of retirement when Galateo was written, he must have been reminded of this emphasis on the Vitruvian connexion between architecture and the human form. It emerges in his own treatise as an intimation that the shaping or construction of the self for civilised society is a kind of architectural discipline. Soon after the Galateo was published, we can observe a version of this idea attached retrospectively to Castiglione. A commendatory poem by Thomas Sackville prefaced to Sir Thomas Hoby’s English translation (1561) of Il libro del cortegiano compares the construction of a royal palace to the formation of the perfect courtier. Sackville plays on the word ‘court’ in its political and architectural senses, apparently alluding to capacious Tudor palaces like Richmond and Nonsuch, to argue that Castiglione’s project has an equal but more subtle splendour: The prince he raiseth huge and mightie walles, Castilio frames a wight of noble fame: The king with gorgeous Tissue clads his halles, The Count with golden virtue deckes the same….25 Admittedly this is Vitruvian doctrine illustrated with a broad brush; its interest lies in the way that, from a perspective provided by Della Casa, it looks back at Castiglione’s courtier as an enterprise in social and moral architecture.

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A similar perspective informs a later chapter of the Galateo, on the necessity of ensuring that good behaviour is also attractive behaviour. It must be informed by ‘leggiadria’, a graceful elegance deriving from ‘misura’ (measure), from order and proportion.26 Della Casa adapts some advice from Cicero about how to comport oneself when walking in the street, and how to avoid postures which are slovenly and absurd. He compares the degrading effects of such clumsy habits to a good horse with a gaping mouth, or a commodious house which is not well designed: Now, if it stand so, that Comelines and Grace, be so much made of in beasts, and also in things without life or sense, as experience doth shewe, that, Two things of equall goodness & commodities, beare not for all that, a like price, if a man doe beholde a fner proportion & bewtie more in the one then he sees in the other: How much the more, should it be esteemed and commended in men, capable of Reason. E, se la leggiadria s’apprezza negli animali e anco nelle cose che anima non hanno né sentimenti, come noi veggiamo che due cose ugualmente buone e agiate non hanno perciò uguale prezzo, se l’una averà convenevoli misure e l’altra le abbia sconvenevoli; quanto si dee ella maggiormente procacciare e apprezzar negli uomini?27 Human conduct, like architecture, to be graceful and appealing must be well proportioned. This point, insofar as it involves the underlying association of sculpture and architecture, is made more overt by the English translator of Galateo, Robert Peterson, albeit as the result of a certain confusion. He seems not to have understood how Della Casa plays on the word ‘regolo’ between abstract and concrete denotations, as the supposedly simple-minded narrator explains one ‘rule’ in terms of another, comparing a canonical system of measurements for sculptured fgures to a measuring stick or tape used by craftsmen engaged in building; nor does he seem to have grasped the identity of ‘Chiarissimo’ as a famous fgure sculptor of antiquity. As a result, he translates the word ‘scultore’ as ‘workman in stone’, and assumes that the treatise titled the ‘Regolo’ was a set of rules for stonemasons in their dual role as carvers and builders; he is still thinking within a late medieval English frame of reference which, having yet to assimilate the concept of the ‘architect’, does not distinguish between these two functions. This confusion underlies the dedicatory preface of his text, addressed to the Earl of Leicester. Its theme is that Leicester is the ideal dedicatee of ‘this worke…as not only the patron to protect, but the patterne to expresse any courtesie therin conteined’; he embodies the rules and recommendations of the Galateo in practice: Mine Author reporteth one Maestro Chiarissimo a perfect Mason, when he had described the fnest precepts of his art, to have made his Regolo a pyller so exactly, as would beare the proofe of every demonstration, thinking it learned speedily, where the mind and the eye, precept and experience, joined hands together: whose steps I tread (though with better successe then mine Author, who could not fnd a Regolo)….28 It is Leicester who (in the same vein of imagery) is the ‘touchstone’, the paradigm of ‘civil’ and ‘courteous’ behaviour which Della Casa’s narrator feared was, in his own case, beyond attainment.

10 Courtiers, Nobles, Visual Representation In formulating this compliment, Peterson further reveals his imperfect understanding of the passage to which he refers; for him, the unrecognised Polycleitus is a stonemason who illustrates his schema of rules by carving a ‘pyller’ or column. The word works ambiguously, as a mistranslation and a not irrelevant metaphor, as it fudges this part of Della Casa’s text. Although Peterson must have received a schooling in classical literature (he was a member of Lincoln’s Inn) he seems uninformed about those authors who wrote on classical art. Nonetheless, his misreading of the ‘Regolo’ as a ‘pyller’ instead of a statue is a suggestive substitution, hinting that he may have had some notion of Renaissance Vitruvianism and its tendency to equate architectural elements, such as columns, with the human body, as illustrated in the architectural treatise of John Shute, who had worked for Leicester’s father.29 Peterson, even if only half aware of it, brings out the Vitruvian implication in Della Casa’s text, which associates sculpture and architecture as metaphors for perfecting oneself in the arts of social intercourse. This association was realised in contemporary Italian portraiture, in which élite fgures were often depicted in architectural settings. Della Casa, as a native of Tuscany who spent some signifcant years in Venice and the Veneto, would have been acquainted with distinct types of such portraits from those two regions: Florentine portraits where sitters in a state of austere composure are seen against backgrounds of equally austere late Renaissance architecture, often interiors in smooth grey pietra dura; and north Italian portraits in which fgures of similar eminence in more relaxed attitudes are matched with classical pilasters or columns. Della Casa’s own portrait by Pontormo is of the frst type; the second type spread to England via the Netherlands, and was already familiar by the time Peterson’s translation was published.30 While the narrator’s comparison of a ‘regolo’ for the human fgure to a ‘regolo’ for the basic elements of a building (beams, stones and walls) points towards the Florentine or Tuscan type of portrait, it was the north Italian type which became prevalent throughout Europe. In this respect, Peterson (probably unawares) updates the implications which Della Casa’s text contains for the possibilities of élite portraiture, and points the way ahead to the greater plasticity of classical architecture in baroque portrait compositions, such as those of Van Dyck.

Portraying the Court and the Courtier Castiglione’s idea that a description of the court and the perfect courtier will be a ‘ritratto di pittura’, just as the courtier’s formation of his own identity will be like a well composed work of pictorial art, continued to impress succeeding writers on into the seventeenth century. In his English translation of Eustache de Refuge’s Traicté De La Cour (frst edn. 1616), John Reynolds takes a practical manual which is by no means in the idealising tradition of The Courtier and uses Castiglione’s metaphors of painting to move it back towards that tradition. In a preface ‘To my Reader’, he praises the ‘Grace, Wit, and Fidelitie’ which are the marks of De Refuge’s hypothetical courtier, and praises the author for this characterisation: he hath delineated him in so lively a shape and depainted him in such rich Colours, that when we fnd a Common-wealth so governed and reformed, as that of Plato; an Orator so fuent and capable, as that of Cicero; or a Captaine so Valiant and

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Ingenious as that of Zenophon; then it is possible for us to meete with the Courtier of Monsieur de Refuges….31 These comparisons are of course copied from Castiglione’s own preface.32 They are quite unsuitable for De Refuge’s courtier, who turns out to be clever and worldly but at the same time wary, calculating, disingenuous and manipulative; Reynolds tries to glamourise this fgure by borrowing the metaphor of an ideal depiction. He reiterates it in a complimentary sonnet addressed to his author: In Modelling, in all and every part, So sweet and so complete a Courtier (clad so fne) Depainted in so faire and rare a Frame, Eternally makes thou in him to shine Right like thy selfe….33 These lines are badly written and inapposite, but they testify to the persuasive effect of Castiglione’s equation of the ideal courtier with a masterwork of painting. This effect reappears more appropriately in Nicolas Faret’s L’Honneste Homme Ou, L’Art de Plaire A La Court, frst published in 1630, with an English translation two years later.34 Overall, Faret borrows or adapts a great deal of material from Castiglione and from elsewhere, while at the same time showing his hand: in a gracefully contrived conclusion, he shrugs off the issue of how he has mixed imitation with invention, and allows the reader to assume that the best parts of his treatise are ‘outright thefts’ (purs larcins). The context of this gesture of literary insouciance or sprezzatura is the development of French discursive prose in the years leading to the foundation of the Académie Française (he was among the original members). Faret’s distinction is to embody the qualities of the courtier, redefned as the ‘honnête homme’ – the civilised, rational being who is both virtuous and honourable – in the process of writing. Castiglione had written well, but the prose in which he begins to represent himself gives way to a dialogue of many voices. Faret writes throughout as himself, in a language and a style which attempt to manifest the qualities of courtliness or honnêteté which he describes.35 What looks at frst like a purely derivative relationship to Castiglione offers tentatively to be seen as imitatio and revision. The small but distinguished court of Urbino which Castiglione describes had already dissolved when he was perfecting his text in the 1520s. Over a century later, Faret refers his readers to the actual court of Louis XIII, a much grander and more complicated establishment. At the same time, his treatise is on a small scale, compared to the complex and masterful literary textures of The Courtier. Brief and of modest proportions, it falls into economical sections designated by marginal headings. An introductory section titled ‘Tableau De La Cour’ obviously imitates Castiglione’s promise to depict the Urbino court in a ‘ritratto di pittura’. Faret anticipates this project in his initial dedication of the text to the foremost courtier of all, the king’s brother, Gaston duc d’Orléans, where he deferentially wishes that his book might be seen as ‘an image of those excellent qualities’ which are not only manifest but magnifed in such a ‘great prince’, and declares that in its representation of an ideal, it amounts to ‘a portrait of yourself’.36 He moves on

12 Courtiers, Nobles, Visual Representation to announce that he will describe, as if in a ‘picture’, the features of his would-be courtier: It is my designe to represent in this Discourse, as in a little table [i.e. painting], the most necessary qualities, bee it of minde or body, which hee ought to have, that desires to make himselfe pleasing in Court. c’est bien mon dessein de representer icy comme dans un petit tableau les qualitez les plus necessaires, soit de l’esprit, soit du corps, que doit posseder celuy qui se veut rendre agreable dans la Cour.37 This anticipates in plain, simplifed form Castiglione’s gradually developed metaphor of the courtier as a work of art, like a skilfully composed painting. Faret acknowledges the simplifcation by modestly offering only ‘un petit tableau’: instead of using the High Renaissance masters as a point of reference, as Castiglione had done with his friend Raphael and his contemporary Michelangelo while disparaging his own capacities, Faret from the start characterises himself as a minor artist, a specialist in miniatures or cabinet pictures. He relates himself to the master of courtly discourse not as a mere copyist but as a modest dependent who thriftily distils his legacy. This enables him to appropriate Castiglione’s organising metaphor of pictorial art and, working on a smaller scale, to renew its currency. Once introduced, the metaphor recurs at appropriate points in Faret’s text. In his conclusion, for example, he modestly admits to possessing himself only a fraction of the qualities which he has ‘depicted’ (dépeintes); rather his ‘design’ (dessein) has been to ‘represent for the reader to see’ (répresenter et faire voir) a possible ideal of conduct.38 A signifcant variant on this trope occurs when he revisits and revises its most memorable use by Castiglione, in the passage where the courtier is advised to organise all his virtues in the same way that a painter composes the elements of a picture. While he does not reproduce this analogy, Faret takes the section of text immediately preceding and translates it almost word for word: é necessario, che ‘l nostro Cortegiano in ogni sua operazione sia cauto, e ciò che dice o fa sempre accompagni con prudenzia; e non solamente ponga cura d’aver in sé parti e condizioni eccellenti, ma il tenor della vita sua ordini con tal disposizione, che ‘l tutto corrisponda a queste parti, e si vegga il medesimo esser sempre ed in ogni cosa tal che non discordi da sé stesso, ma faccia un corpo sol di tutte queste bone condizioni; di sorte che ogni suo atto risulti e sia composto di tutte le virtú….39 Il faut qu’il soit avisé, et adroit en tout ce qu’il fera, et qu’il ne mette pas seulement des soings à s’acquerir toutes les bonnes conditions que je lui ay representés, mais que la suitte et l’ordre de sa vie soit reiglé avec une telle disposition, que le tout responde à châque partie. Qu’il soit tousjours esgal en toutes choses, et que sans se contrarier jamais soy-mesme, il forme un corps solide et parfaict de toutes ces belles qualitez, de sorte que ses moindres actions soient comme animees d’un esprit de sagesse et de vertu. He must be advised and active in all his doings, and he must not only be carefull to attaine unto all the good conditions which I have propounded unto him, but the course and order of his life must be regulated with such a disposition as the

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whole may be answerable to every part. Let them [sc. his doings?] be equall in all things, and never contradicting himself; let him frame a perfect and solid body of these goodly qualities, so as his least actions, may seeme to bee quickened with a spirit of wisdom and virtue.40 Apart from some neutral touches of paraphrase, there is one small but striking change. Castiglione writes of the courtier composing all his fne qualities into ‘un corpo sol’, a unity, a self-consistent whole. Faret elaborates this into ‘un corps solide et parfaict’, a phrase which shifts the fgurative image of the body in a more concrete direction, in effect towards Della Casa’s notion of the perfected self as a work of social and moral sculpture. Throughout his treatise, as he confesses with ironic courtesy at the end, Faret is knowingly rewriting his predecessors. Here, by playing the two most infuential of them against each other, by momentarily swapping around the image of the sculpture and that of the picture, he acknowledges how persistent in the tradition which he has chosen to continue is the idea of the courtier as a work of art, of visual representation.

Nobility and Representation The literature on gentility and nobility, which during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ran alongside the early modern tradition of writing about the courtier, initiated by Castiglione, took a different approach to the relationship between identity and visual representation. A trace of Castiglione’s example may be found in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named The Governour, frst published in 1531, only three years after the publication of The Courtier in Venice. Elyot spends much of his time describing the virtues which he considers necessary for the new governing class of the Tudor state, and makes a special case for what he calls ‘Constance or Stabilitie’. His point is that however gifted, educated, and well schooled in virtue the potential ‘governour’ may be, if he lacks constancy, all his qualities will become ineffective. The argument is reinforced by two analogies. The frst is with a ‘fortresse or other honourable mantion’ (the kinds of residence familiar to the landowning classes in this period of transition from fortifed to unfortifed houses) which is built with low-grade mortar binding the masonry, and so becomes dilapidated. The second is with a beautiful painting executed with badly mixed colours lacking good size to bind them, which inevitably deteriorates. As a result the ‘craftes man’, who in the process of making himself omnicompetent in virtue has neglected the element of constancy, loses ‘the estimation of his persone…among perfecte workemen, that is to saye, wise men….’41 In spite of Elyot’s old-fashioned designations for the artist, the comparison of a thoroughly virtuous identity to a fne painting is reminiscent of The Courtier, and, whether the echo is intended or not, to a reader of both books would recall Castiglione. This parallel is not typical of the tradition of writing to which The Governour belongs, and which tends to see the relation between élite status and representation in a more ambivalent light. The ambivalence is discernible in Laurence Humphrey’s The Nobles of 1563; the original Latin version had already appeared in 1560 as Optimates, Sive De Nobilitate, published in Basel soon after the accession of Queen Elizabeth, which was to bring Humphrey and other Protestant exiles in Switzerland and elsewhere back to England.42 Both editions are dedicated to Elizabeth, ‘The noblest

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protectour and defendour of the true fayth’. Humphrey begs the Queen will ‘chiefely furnishe your court’ with men of ‘true Nobilitye’ who will displace ‘Mocke courtyers and counterfayt Nobles, if any such lurke’ there.43 It is the concept of the counterfeit, of what is deceptively fabricated instead of ‘true’ or authentic, which will cause trouble as his argument about the nature of nobility develops. By noting that the noble class will provide the principal members of Elizabeth’s court, Humphrey’s text, although it never refers or alludes to The Courtier, does implicitly acknowledge that it is engaged in a similar enterprise. He cites Cicero’s imagined orator, just as Castiglione does, as a precedent for the literary creation of an ideal human type;44 in this case, it is ‘our true and perfecte noble, whom in this booke (God helpynge) we will frame’, just as the courtiers of Urbino set themselves to ‘formar con parole un perfetto Cortegiano’.45 And just as they in turn emphasise that their ideal fgure must devote a great deal of effort to perfecting himself along the lines which they set out, Humphrey more programmatically urges his upper-class readers to make themselves into paragons, but of a rather different kind. The ideal model they are to follow is ‘not Nobility generally…but Christian noblesse….’46 This announcement comes in an extra dedicatory preface which he adds to the English edition, addressed ‘To The Ryghte honourable and worshipfull of the Inner Temple’.47 He dwells on the lawyers’ entitlement to gentry status and honour, which should earn courtiers’ respect, and solicits their support for the Christian view of nobility which he is about to present, comparing them favourably with the hereditary aristocrats who failed to protect true religion during the recent reign of the Catholic Queen Mary. He urges them to be ‘patrones’, that is, both promotors and patterns, of ‘christiane noblesse’: Whereto not least your zeale shal ye utter, in accepting and embracing, this cristall mirror thereof. By whose unpartial glasse, attiring your selves what seemely ye see continue, what shameful shone.48 He alludes here to a practice which Socrates was said to have recommended to his disciples (and one approved by Seneca and St Augustine): they should scrutinise their faces in a mirror, using it as a means of self-knowledge, so that those who were beautiful would avoid disfguring themselves with the ugliness of vice, and those who were not could nonetheless acquire fne souls through the practice of virtue.49 In his view, the self-formation of a noble requires nothing like the aesthetic dimension, the grace of appearance, so vital for Castiglione’s courtier; it is a sober ethical and intellectual discipline. This divergence is typical. The courtier who is formed through the words of Castiglione’s speakers – however well born, gifted and well educated – is, in his turn, self-made; he organises and displays his accomplishments with the skill of an artist so as to fashion his own social identity. He is perfect in two senses: he is an ‘Idea’ (la Idea …del perfetto Cortegiano) realised in literary terms, and the fnished product of his own labours, which have attained full success by effacing themselves (through the habitual exercise of sprezzatura). The ‘true and perfecte noble’ whom Humphrey undertakes to ‘frame’ is not an exactly parallel fgure. In the original Latin text, the phrase which describes him is ‘verus ac ingenuus nobilis’. The word ‘ingenuus’ means ‘innate’, and suggests that the perfect noble is to be described rather than consummately created (‘perfected’ in the literal sense). It appears that Humphrey is more interested in the truth of nobility than the literary construction of it, more interested in

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authenticity than representation. Even while citing Cicero’s Orator as a precedent, he denies that his own exemplary fgure of the true noble will be an ideal fction: This notwythstandynge shall be no newe institucion of Nobilitye, invented or Imagined by me, but confyrmed by the exaumple, Reason, and order of antiquitye.50 True nobility is not to be found in the literary or philosophical imagination but in the historical past. In his dedicatory address to the Queen, Humphrey freely acknowledges his debts to previous authors, the ‘best wryters’ on whose work he has drawn in order to discover ‘the true and auncient Image and institucion of Noblesse’.51 While the word ‘Image’ may seem at frst close to Castiglione’s ‘Idea’, it turns out, consulting the original Latin text, that ‘auncient Image’ is a translation of the term ‘praeceptio’,52 a prior notion or preconception; the search is for how nobility was conceived of in its pristine state. The authority of antiquity, as he invokes it here and elsewhere, has a double force. Humphrey associates pristine nobility not only with the classical past but with early Christianity: the subtitle of his treatise is ‘of Nobilitye. The Original, nature, dutyes, right, and Christian Institution thereof….’ The quest for origins, he tells the Queen in his preface, has taken its inspiration and its method from his study of the scriptures: What erst I supped oute of the sweet sprynges of the Holy Bibles, and others not despised ryvers of good wryters: that nowe I apply to the enquirye and searche, of the source and offspring of Nobilitye….53 Figuring human authors, however useful, as derivative from the Word of God, and playing on the words ‘sprynges’, ‘source’ and ‘offspring’, he links the truth of divine revelation with the truth of ‘original’ nobility. This is not merely rhetorical sleight of hand; for him, the link is a very practical one. The aim of his book is that under the new regime, the privileged and powerful noble class should be ‘seasoned wyth right & Christian opinions, & reformed by the uncorrupted spirit of antiquity….’54 While he will go on to talk in detail about the academic and moral education which will ft them to play an effective part in the Elizabethan polity, his concern is not just with the formation of the individual noble but with the reformation of the entire order of nobility, in line with the reformed religion now becoming established, or reestablished, in the Elizabethan church. It is as a Protestant humanist that Humphrey understands ‘the uncorrupted spirit of antiquity’, which combines the ethical values of classical historiography and moral philosophy with the religious values of the primitive Christian era. In the course of ‘framing’ his ‘true and perfecte noble’, he distinguishes three types of nobility: one which depends on family and ancestry, another which results from the sheer achievements of an individual without noble forbears, and a third in which eminent ancestry and individual achievements combine. Each is expounded with reference to classical antiquity. Nobles of the second type, Humphrey informs his readers, are those whom ‘the Romaines termed new men’.55 The frst, traditionally pre-eminent, type is put in the same historical context: This is…the frst branche of Nobilitie. Adourned with Images, welth, waxe pictures, petigrees & glorious titles, by their fathers & forefathers.56

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The attributes of ‘Images…waxe pictures, petigrees’ are taken from Pliny, who in his account of Greek and Roman art describes the traditional means by which aristocratic Roman families commemorated earlier generations. The ‘waxe pictures’ (cerae) were painted wax busts of ancestors, placed in the atrium of the family house (and paraded at funerals), with lines connecting them to form pedigrees (stemmata); the other ‘Images’ (imagines), displayed around doorways and exterior walls, were of those victorious in war.57 This archaising description is double-edged. By evoking the attributes of aristocratic status in antique Roman times, it refects Humphrey’s aim of seeking the ‘source’ of nobility in the venerable past (and Pliny had said that these kinds of ancestral portraiture were antique even from the viewpoint of his own day). At the same time, he is characterising a type of nobility which he goes on to judge insuffcient in itself, and his catalogue of ancestral trappings glances towards sixteenth-century English families with their portrait galleries, tomb sculpture, and sometimes manufactured pedigrees set out in illuminated documents.58 There is ironic awkwardness in the seeming duplication of the terms ‘Images’ and ‘waxe pictures’ which Humphrey does not clarify, leaving the reader to sense an odd emphasis on the relation between even pristine nobility and the concept of the image. The relation and the concept turn out to be problematic, and this awkward touch of over-emphasis is a hint towards understanding why. The matter appears to be clarifed later in the text, when Humphrey asserts that the proofs and tokens of a glorious lineage in themselves count for nothing: Cicero in scoffe rightly termed Pisos aged and ancient Images, smoakie. Vaine therefore is this vaunt of auncient Nobilitie, if nought els renowme hym, but his worme eaten stocke, or emptie remes of drawen descents.59 The reference is to In Pisonem, where Cicero accuses his adversary of having attained high offce merely on the strength of the aristocratic lineage attested by his ‘dingy family busts’ (commendatione fumosarum imaginum) begrimed by smoke from the domestic hearth. Humphrey’s Latin text makes his point more effectively by stressing the role of images (rather than that of the documents which fgure in his English paraphrase): Cicero…imagines…antiquas Pisonis, ridiculè fumosas appellavit. Inane est itaque hoc nomen antiquem nobilitatis, si nulla res alia nobilem faciat, praeter antiquam stirpem, & stultae stemmatum ac inanes imagines.60 Cicero laughingly called Piso’s ancestral busts ‘smoky’. And so this notion of ancient nobility is meaningless, if it is constituted by nothing other than ancient family stock and doltish pedigrees and vacuous images. As well as blending with the language of Cicero, this denunciation recalls Juvenal’s famous Satire VIII on the nature of nobility, which dismisses pedigrees (Stemmata quid faciunt?) and ‘smoky’ ancestral busts (fumosos equitum…magistros) which in the end guarantee nothing: tota licet veteres exornent undique cerae atria, nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus.61

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Though you deck your hall from end to end with ancient waxen images, virtue is the one and only true nobility. Without noble achievements in the present generation, the images of noble ancestors are meaningless. Coming from a Protestant cleric with iconoclastic sympathies, Humphrey’s attack on vain images, qualifed though it is, has an uneasy relationship with positive uses of the word ‘image’ elsewhere in the text. He had earlier declared his reverence for ‘the auncient Image of Nobilitye’ and his intention to ‘descrive the Image of Nobility’. In the frst case, he is translating from his Latin text the word ‘imago’, and in the second the word ‘simulacrum’.62 We have already noted that in announcing his theme as ‘the true and auncient Image…of Noblesse’, he is translating the more abstract term ‘praeceptio’.63 Three different Latin words become the reiterated ‘Image’. This may be for rhetorical effect, or it may be a matter of making himself clearer to a vernacular readership; at the same time, the word seems to exert an unconsciously felt attraction. The related word ‘counterfeit’ seems to have an even stronger gravitational pull. As Humphrey discusses the frst two of his types of nobility, the ancestral and the newly achieved, he stresses that in some cases both may be remote from ‘the true, & lively counterfaite of Nobilitie’. Here the word ‘counterfaite’ has the sense of a likeness or model (it translates the Latin ‘effgies’)64 and has positive associations. Elsewhere it can be negative, for example when describing social adventurers or upstarts who ‘counterfaite a maner Nobility’ (Latin ‘ementiuntur’), in a diatribe cued by the marginal heading ‘Counterfaite Nobilitie’ (Latin ‘Nobilitas simulatio’);65 and we recall that from the start Humphrey had warned the Queen against ‘counterfayt Nobles’ (Latin ‘falsò nobiles’).66 Of course in sixteenth-century English, ‘counterfeit’ can be versatile almost to the point of self-contradiction,67 but by crowding what had been, in his Latin text, distinct terms and concepts under the umbrella of this slippery word, he resorts to it so repeatedly as to blur his argument. Between the positive and negative usages of ‘counterfeit’ there are other ambiguous usages which point towards the source of confusion. Urging the nobility to have their children well educated, Humphrey compares a nobleman with an undeveloped mind to a ‘wel apparayled plaier…counterfaiting a kinge on the stage’ who gives a completely inept performance. This time, ‘counterfaiting’ translates the Latin ‘agens’,68 cognate with ‘actio’, a term from rhetoric denoting the use of voice and gesture, and here conventionally transposed to describe stage acting. But the comparison implicit in this instance, of a ‘perfecte noble’ to an actor who is not unconvincing, opens a possibility which Humphrey’s discussion began by attempting to close: that, far from an authentic mode of living which can be recovered through the example of antiquity, nobility is an impersonation, a kind of self-mimicry. The very claim that it needs to be recovered may allow for this unsettling thought, which Humphrey almost utters outright when he expresses a hope ‘That the former age may enstructe our Nobles, that they may…imitate the vertues of theyr owne estate….’69 Of course the concept of imitation here has a positive sense and a longlived cultural prestige behind it; at the same time it wavers oddly, as Humphrey’s language of resemblance and mimesis is made unstable by his persistent reliance on the chameleon term ‘counterfeit’.

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At the root of this instability lies religion. Discoursing on the virtue of liberality, he makes a classic Protestant attack on its perversion by Catholics, who lavish money on the externals of worship instead of relieving the poor. He accuses them of being Superstitiouslye Relygious in decking Images, Masses, Relikes, pardons, pilgrimages, clothinge Saincts counterfaites, prodigally, & wickedly liberall.70 In this assault, both the front-line terms in Humphrey’s constricted vocabulary of mimesis join together. ‘Images’ is from ‘imagines’ in the Latin text, while ‘Saincts counterfaites’ translates ‘divi’, meaning sacred fgures.71 The word ‘counterfaites’ compacts two logically opposite meanings, denoting that these are realistic images which at the same time are, in a spiritual sense, false – with the further contradiction that most of them would be imaginary likenesses. Warring concepts of reality and falsehood have been overlaid on each other; the tension expresses not only the Reformers’ aversion to religious images but also an unease (which not infrequently accompanied iconoclast polemics) about all forms of representation.72 The unease seems to take shape as Humphrey translates his Latin treatise into English. As he moves from a learned, international readership to addressing his compatriots in their own tongue, he makes his design of reforming the Elizabethan élite even clearer through newly trenchant language. His vocabulary of representation shrinks to become more striking, if not more pointed: a range of distinctions and nuances are compressed into the repeated terms ‘image’ and ‘counterfeit’, with the latter obsessively recurring throughout the discussion in contrary or ambivalent applications. That recurrence may suggest a further unease, the anxious suspicion that nobility is an image or counterfeit – not a pristine state of virtue which can be resuscitated from antiquity but a historically adaptable form of representation.

The Image of Nobility Succeeding writers similarly concerned themselves about the relationship between nobility and the image, using the ancestral images of the ancient Roman nobility as a point of reference and debate. The herald John Ferne in The Blazon of Gentrie (1586) cited the opinion of Guillaume Budé that these images had given rise to the modern symbols of nobility, coats of arms, while rejecting it as implausible.73 The frst part of Ferne’s book is a dialogue of six speakers who represent the views of different interest groups, social or professional, on gentry or gentility, the English category most closely approximating to that of nobility in many European states.74 The principal speakers are Paradinus, a herald, who represents the author; Bartholus, a lawyer, named after the famous legal theorist of nobility, Bartolo da Sassoferrato; and Torquatus, a knight, who voices a conservative position based on traditional upper-class prejudices. It is Paradinus who quotes Budé on the supposed development of Roman ancestral portraits into coats of arms: As Budaeus…noteth, Gentiles fuerunt hi, qui Imagines sui generis proferre poterant: & errant Insignia Gentilitium, quae hodie, Arma dicuntur. Gentlemen were those who could produce images of their forefathers: and those were the signs of gentility equivalent to what today are called arms.75

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In his legal commentaries, Budé had posited the connexion on Pliny’s account of these images, which were of two types; after describing the cerae or wax busts kept in the atrium of the aristocratic family house, Pliny went on: Outside the houses and round the doorways there were other images of those mighty spirits, with spoils taken from the enemy fastened to them….76 After quoting this, Budé comments: From these, I believe, later ages derived those signs of gentility commonly called ‘arms’, which very things also at frst…were the rewards of virtue, and the ornaments of glorious deeds.77 Paradinus in the end is dismissive: ‘to this opinion…I cannot agree….’78 But by bringing up Budé’s conjecture for discussion, Ferne is able to intimate a parallel between the ‘signs of gentility’ in early modern England and ancient Rome, and to place his own discipline of heraldry, the obsessively prized signifer of status for the English élite, in a prestigiously classicising perspective. Like Humphrey, Ferne stresses that in ancient Rome noble status was traditionally associated with ‘images’, that is, sculpted portraits of ancestors. Bartholus the lawyer points out that this was not just a practice but a privilege reserved to an élite: ‘to them only it was permitted to erect Images or Statuaes of their Auncestors, or of themselves….’79 Legally, these images participated in the honour of the person portrayed, so that if one were damaged, an action for personal injury could be brought. Paradinus speaks further about the social mystique of these likenesses: Amongst the Romaines, until the time of their Caesars, it was a common use, to erect Images or Statuaes, in token of Generositie [i.e. noble birth], so that, whoever he were, which could not produce some publike Image of some of his Auncestors, he was called by them Homo novus, terrae flius, a sese ortus, a newe fellow, a sonne of the dunghill, one without father, or parents.80 In this reading of Roman republican values, the disparaging notion that the ‘new man’ must be autochthonous or self-generated refects ironically on the privileged class which resists his entry, suggesting that images and ancestors are virtually one and the same. The proofs of ‘Generositie’ are to be seen in a lineage of fetishised ‘counterfeits’. Even more than Humphrey, Ferne is intolerant of defning nobility in terms of lineage alone. Like Humphrey, and Elyot before him, he regards the best type of nobleman or gentleman as one who combines good birth with active virtue ‘tending to the beneft of his country’. According to his spokesman, Paradinus the herald, although ‘the vulgare sort of men’ take ‘noblenes of bloud and auncetry…for the chiefest’ it would be erroneous to endorse this view: ‘we shall therein I say aproove our selves, neyther well taught Philosophers, ne yet well reformed Christians’.81 Once again, the values of Protestant humanism are invoked, to place a traditional equation of virtue with nobility in the contemporary English context, where a national church under a godly monarch associates the health of the body politic with the purifcation of religion. Paradinus sees the tokens of mere lineage as especially ineffective if the commonwealth is in danger; what

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use are ‘auncient statuaes, smoakie Images, autentique coate-armors, torne and rotten guidons, of the valiant and virtuous Auncestors…?’82 His scorn for coats of arms and disintegrating banners, alongside ‘auncient statuaes, smoakie Images’, recalls the classical denunciations of nobility by descent already invoked by Humphrey: Juvenal’s Eighth Satire and Cicero’s In Pisonem, with its scathing attack by a ‘new man’ on the pride of the Roman aristocracy, displayed in line-ups of fossilised forefathers.83 As a herald, Ferne was a specialist in one branch of the imagery of noble status, with a stake in the prosperity of his profession; he is nonetheless prepared to argue that ‘autentique coate-armors’ mean nothing without meritorious achievements to give them validity. A potential ambivalence here may have a professional basis, not unlike the ambivalence of Humphrey, as a radical Protestant cleric, towards the concept of the ‘counterfeit’. The heralds, incorporated in the College of Arms, were required to regulate the use of armorial bearings, so that no families without the necessary entitlement could lay claim to them and, therefore, to the accompanying rank; to this extent, the heralds regulated the social order by rebutting unwarranted claims to gentility. In practice, gentry status could be attained by more palpable means, such as wealth, landed property and social prepotence in a locality, and then confrmed by heraldic research; that is to say, a herald would discover – which usually meant surmise or manufacture – an acceptable genealogy which entitled the family to bear arms. Fees for these researches and grants of arms made up the heralds’ principal income. By acting as censors of a status quo which was tacitly allowed to change they practised conservation and innovation at the same time.84 The double-dealings of Ferne’s profession were compounded by the ambiguity of his own social position. Although he achieved knighthood, his grandfather had been a yeoman,85 and his readiness to mock the ‘torne and rotten guidons’ of some unworthy descendant of medieval warriors may refect a sense of his own aspiration to be what Elyot had called a ‘governor’, a member of the new administrative class of the Tudor state. He is certainly prepared to use heraldry, the heritage of medieval symbolism of which he was a custodian, as a metaphor for what he calls ‘base’ gentility. This is the ‘bare nobleness of blood’ which is transmitted by descent and therefore derived from the body and not the mind, the seat of reason and virtue which resembles the divine, according to the herald Paradinus, who concludes: In true speech, this gentry of stock only, shalbe said, but a shadow, or rather a painture of nobility…set forth in the signes of an auncient coat-armor.86 The word ‘painture’ denotes not just the material process of painting but a pictorial representation (cf. French ‘peinture’), one which is encoded in the ‘signes’ of the heraldic vocabulary and its spatial syntax. We are to understand that this representation is a mere simulacrum of the real thing. Ferne has already anticipated this point in his own voice. While the book carries a dedication to his patron, Lord Sheffeld, there is a secondary preface addressed to the Inns of Court ‘and in general, to all Nobles and Gentlemen, bearers of Armes, that shall peruse this worke….’87 Here he warns that he will displease those who think that their gentle birth on its own, unaccompanied by virtue, amounts to true nobility. This error is illustrated by two analogies, one from nature and one from art: as men are joyfull to behold a tree forishing with blossoms, and sorrowfull when they see it yeeldeth no fruite: or as a stately Image curiously [i.e. skilfully]

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portrayed, bringeth delight to the eye at frst sight, and afterwards sorrow to the heart when it is found dead and without any motive quallitie that such a one is gentlenesse of high bloud without good conditions [i.e. virtuous qualities], even fair trees without fruite, beautifull pictures without life….88 The image of the tree derives in a general sense from Aristotle, with more specifc Biblical overtones;89 its import is clear enough. That of the picture, which is presumably a portrait, is less familiar, and is more consciously elaborated. In a vein of rhetorical exaggeration, Ferne imagines a viewer who might think a picture could have life and motion before that hope is dashed. However, his implausible premise could be extenuated in two ways. He may be referring to the static splendour of much Elizabethan portraiture, its preference for the ‘stately Image’ over any appearance of liveliness. And he is certainly making a wider point about the ironic insuffciencies of representation: the more convincing and aesthetically pleasing it is, the more it shows its incapacity to become the reality which it imitates. On this basis, ‘gentlenesse of high bloud’ without the motivation of virtue can be called, to anticipate the phrase he uses subsequently, a mere ‘painture of nobility’. The analogy assumes that ‘gentlenesse’ is a condition which attracts the gaze of ‘men’, who may be ‘joyfull’ or ‘sorrowfull’ at its differing manifestations. It is a social spectacle which, if it turns out to lack the proper qualities – the virtues which animate and authenticate it – lapses into an ‘Image’ or mere representation of its true nature. Here Ferne’s argument seems to become interestingly confused. If motion or life is more complex than inertia, and if it can be granted that representation is a more complex concept than spectacle, he is using the more complex concept to express the less complex state. The shakiness of this procedure goes back to his premise that a spectator might, in the normal course of things, be deceived into thinking that a painted representation could be alive. It must also go further back to contemporary portraits he would have known – above all, those of the Queen (or replicas of them) – which in their stilted splendour aptly ft the formula of ‘beautifull pictures without life’. The phrase expressively sums up the prevalent Elizabethan portrait aesthetic, and assumes it to be normative. By using this aesthetic, in accord with which many members of the Elizabethan élite (however worthy or unworthy by his criteria) were bodied forth, to fgure his idea of inauthentic gentility, Ferne betrays highly ambiguous feelings about that élite and its approach to self-representation. While a critique of Elizabethan portraiture is not ostensibly part of Ferne’s programme, the terms in which he expounds pictorial art as a metaphor of inadequacy allow such a critique to be inferred: his words suggest that his contemporaries’ attachment to the ‘stately Image’ emphasises only the most superfcial aspects of gentility, family pride and social position, with a lack of the ‘motive quallitie’ which would indicate that the person portrayed is imbued with virtuous characteristics. By taking the portrait style familiar to him as a universal norm, while at the same time implying its lack of ‘life’, Ferne can make his point about representation never approaching reality with unwarranted ease. He does not have to consider a situation in which ‘motive quallitie’, the illusion of active life, could be a feature of pictorial art, producing a closer and more problematic (perhaps less separable) relationship between gentility and its images. This kind of situation was nearer in prospect when, twenty years later, James Cleland adapted Ferne’s analogy and his general argument in The Institution of a Young Noble Man, frst published in 1607. Cleland’s concern, as his title indicates, is

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with education, which for him (as for his predecessors in this kind of treatise) involves acquiring both knowledge and virtue. He makes the cautionary point that to know about virtue is not enough; it is not the study alone of moral philosophy which is able to make a man Vertuous, and civil in conversation [i.e. social intercourse]: but it is practising that doctrine in frequenting the world, as Aristotle himselfe teacheth verie wel.90 This combines the demands of the writers on nobility and those on the court, for active virtue and civilised conduct, and invokes the underlying demand of Aristotle’s Ethics for ‘well doing, and not…well knowing only’, to quote Sir Philip Sidney, the recently romanticised model of the ‘Young Noble Man’.91 Moral theory must be put into social practice, Cleland insists, as he addresses the reader implied in his title: I adde unto the Theoricke of your studie a particular practice of good manners; without the which al that you can learne, seems to be no better then a faire and beautiful Image without life and motion.92 By a ‘practise of good manners’ he means a discipline which, once more, combines virtue and civility. And by comparing the lack of this ‘practise’ to an ‘Image without life and motion’, he moves Ferne’s analogy a notch, as it were, up the thematic scale: whereas before, the beautiful but static image stood for gentle birth without virtue, now it connotes the knowledge of virtue without the actuality. Cleland’s stress, in the name of Aristotle, on ‘motion’ lays open to view the philosophical basis of Ferne’s original comparison; the ‘motive quallitie’ sought after was that of active virtue in the Aristotelian sense, operating in the world. Cleland’s word ‘Image’ is unspecifc, and could refer to a sculpture or a painting. Contemporary readers who referred the word to a painting would think of the élite portraits which, several years into the reign of King James (1603–25), still persisted with the icon-like conventions of the high Elizabethan manner. Some of these readers, however, would be aware of newer tendencies in painting, associated with the more naturalistic style of Marcus Gheeraerts the younger in the fnal years of Elizabeth’s reign, or the work of Prince Henry’s painter, Robert Peake. Cleland’s treatise contains dedications to various Jacobean courtiers, including Henry’s tutor, and praises ‘the Academie of our Noble Prince’,93 a group of young aristocrats who were apparently being educated alongside the heir to the throne. Some of them appear with Henry in portraits by Peake.94 In these works, and in others which show the Prince on his own, he is represented in physically active postures which refect what is known of his personal temperament, moral principles and political aspirations. Cleland, for example, addresses him at one point as a future champion of European Protestantism.95 Although the aesthetic of these paintings is somewhat limited and old-fashioned, they clearly project an ethic of action, and, in the context of the progressive artistic tendencies espoused by Henry, his mother Queen Anne and their fellow collector Lord Arundel, adumbrate the possibility of more advanced pictorial styles which will make the sense of animated mobility intrinsic to portrayals of the human fgure. Such styles – especially exemplifed by the English work of Van Dyck and Rubens in the 1620s – will make it impossible to assume that the ‘beautiful Image’ of a noble sitter must necessarily lack ‘life and motion’.

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Nobility Reproduced or Created? The arguments about nobility and imagery developed by Humphrey, Ferne and Cleland all take place in a resolutely Protestant context, where uneasiness about images even of a non-religious kind is endemic. A corresponding argument from a Catholic point of view can be seen in a book published midway in time between those of Ferne and Cleland, Nennio Or A Treatise of Nobility (1595). This is a translation by William Jones of the dialogue Il Nennio by Giovan Battista Nenna, which originally appeared in Venice in 1542. Its content is described by the title of a second English printing in 1600, A discourse whether a nobleman by birth, or a Gentleman by desert, is greater in Nobilitie.96 The two conditions are spoken for by the allusively named Possidonio and Fabricio: one ‘possesses’ nobility by descent, the other is a ‘fabricated’ noble through merit; and a mixed company of gentlemen and ladies, after the example of Castiglione, join in the debate. One of the men, Peter Anthonie, supports Possidonio’s case with the familiar reference to Roman portrait sculpture. Instead of ancestral images, however, he cites statues erected in public to commemorate military leaders who had conquered new territories for Rome. These, he says, were designed to stimulate future generations to glorious enterprises of the same kind, and honour was paid to them on a regular basis: For it was a thing ordained among the Romaines at a certaine prefxed time, in festival manner to visite these bodies, and behold these Images. Et quei corpi & quelle statue in un certo & diterminato tempo dovevano festevolmente visitare i Romani.97 If, the argument continues, the statues of national leaders were honoured in this way, their offspring should be even more honoured, ‘in as much as a fained forme of man, is lesse to be esteemed then that which representeth him truly’ (quanto che quelle le quali delle humane forme sono fngimento, sono meno da stimarsi di questi, che le vere rappresentano).98 Descendants, being the most authentic representations of their honoured forbears, should inherit their honourable pre-eminence, as happened with the ruling families of republican Rome, and happens today with the ruling dynasties of modern states; so that ‘this grace and nobility which is in the predecessors doth deservedly remaine with the children’ (quella gratia & nobiltade che ne superiori si trova, ne fglioli sia meritevolmente rimasta).99 Possidonio hastens to reinforce this argument with his own: whereas the statues of great Romans remained only as fxed and ‘immoveable’ exemplars of virtue, their living images in their posterity were able to beneft the commonwealth. He agrees that the offspring of noble ancestors should inherit their status and power, ‘as they which doe represent the dead members of their predecessors’ (si come…che le morte membra de suoi antecessori rappresentano).100 Fabricio rebuts these arguments, fxing on the issue of honour awarded to the images of those who originally performed noble actions, and the claim that their true representations were descendants rather than statues, which ‘were but an imitation of nature, whereas nature her selfe was apparent in the children’ (quelle fngimento sono di natura, là ove essa natura in costoro si vedeva).101 All this, he says, rests on a false assumption. Honour was not being offered to the statues themselves, but to the memory of the virtuous acts performed by those whose appearance the sculptor had recorded; and to honour anyone else, such as a descendant, for the virtues inherent in an individual’s life, would not make sense.102 The latter part of this argument has been

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set up in the preceding pages, where Fabricio contends that if nobility originates ‘in the vertues of the mind…and not in the lineaments of the bodie’, it cannot be biologically transmitted down a bloodline, just as it cannot be adequately represented by an artist.103 The frst part of the argument refects the Catholic Church’s recent sensitivity to the question of images. To the challenge of the Reformers that images of God and the saints were the objects of idolatry, the Church’s answer was that respect and veneration on the part of worshippers were paid not to the images themselves but to the prototypes which they represented, a doctrine which was to be included in the decrees of the Council of Trent.104 Fabricio simply adapts this doctrine to a secular context, transferring it from the spiritual to the ethical sphere. At the same time it remains accentuated by the struggles of the Reformation, and allows him to score a fundamental point against his opponents: the cult of nobility of blood is implicitly identifed as a social and political superstition. By setting up the debate so that inherited nobility is involved with awkward questions to do with images and representation, Nenna, a lawyer who obtained knighthood in the course of his professional career, makes it easier to promote the cause of nobility springing from merit, which (the general argument goes) is unsusceptible of reproduction, either by nature or art. So, just as Fabricio contends that the statues of noble Romans were not honourable in themselves because nobility could not inhere in them, he claims, à propos modern kinds of portraiture, that a painter cannot depict the nobility of a sitter: Nobilitie is a hidden propertie of the minde, in regard that it proceedeth of virtue: So that a painter…can never paint forth with his pensill, the nobilitie of the minde, as being a thing not subject unto the sight of bodily eyes. la nobiltà è propriotade occulta dell’anima, perche dalle virtù proviene: & agevolmente può il dipentore [il corpo] dell’huomo dipignere ma la nobiltà dell’anima come all’occhio del corpo non soggiacente non mai….105 Of course this rests on a tendentious assumption, and the notion that painting could not represent the mind was to be challenged throughout the sixteenth century, from Leonardo onwards.106 What is important to note here is the effort to separate nobility from representation. Just as English Protestant writers were anxious to distinguish gentility or nobility per se from its own ‘counterfeit’, Nenna, in the spirit of the Catholic Reform, draws a zealous line between the real thing and its image. The appearance of his book in 1590s London, half a century after it was frst published in Venice, may have attracted approval, in the context of an established but not yet (in some eyes) perfected Protestant reform, of the potentially iconoclastic spirit of his critique. If the English version of Nennio belongs in a series of publications from Humphrey to Cleland, it remains to look further at Cleland and consider his place in this series more fully. We have seen that he adapts Ferne’s analogy of the beautiful but lifeless image to express the idea of inadequate nobility. He also reiterates several motifs used by Humphrey, such as that of the Socratic mirror, and that of the counterfeit. Humphrey had used the mirror metaphor to characterise his own treatise and its desired effect; Cleland adapts it to praise one of his dedicatees, Lord Hay: You are the mirrour…wherein I would have all Nobles to contemplate themselves, ether to see their own beauty, if they be truly Noble, and therby to continue in

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vertuous and laudable actions, or to wash their spots, and amend what is amisse, if they be degenerate or ignoble.107 As for the motif of the counterfeit, which had run ambivalently through Humphrey’s discussion, Cleland uses it to focus on one specifc problem: the case of someone newly ennobled who is seen to be undeserving. He compares such a person to one of the coins called a noble which is discovered to be a forgery, apparently bearing ‘the Kings right stampe’ but made of base metal gilded instead of gold. In the same way, an unworthy recipient of nobility, however wealthy or powerful, ‘if he lack the character of vertue, he is to be valued but as a stampe of honour set upon base bullion….108 Whereas Humphrey had been more protractedly preoccupied with the question of distinguishing true from false nobility, and posed it in various contexts, Cleland seems to typify it with this one instance. The reason he does so is related to his motive for making Lord Hay the Socratic mirror for all other nobles, and to the new historical situation of early seventeenth-century England in which his book appeared. Cleland was a Scot, and his treatise appeared only four years after James VI, King of Scots, became King of England. It is aimed at the Jacobean court from a Scottish perspective. There is an overall dedication to the young Prince Charles; at the same time, each book of the treatise has a separate dedication, the frst book to the King’s Scottish favourite, James Hay. Cleland fnesses the question of priority by addressing Charles only to say that he is not offering him the treatise, as the King’s own manual of princely education, the Basilicon Doron, is far more suitable. This leaves the way open for a fulsome address to Lord Hay as the ‘lively image’ of Cleland’s theme of nobility, which ‘needeth no other declaration [i.e. clarifcation] then your Lordships name Printed in the fore front….’ Cleland writes to Hay in ‘bounden dutie’, and by referring to his recent marriage, which had been celebrated at court with an elaborate wedding masque, reminds him of his power as a patron.109 At the same time, he aims at court patronage from another angle, in a preceding preface ‘To The Noble Reader’.110 Here he announces that he will imitate the method of the King’s manual. Instead of following the example of Plato in the Republic, Xenophon in the Cyropaideia and Cicero in the Orator (once more, the precedents also cited by Castiglione), to produce an ideal fgure of a nobleman, he will construct a practical model of education and conduct which can be put into effect, just as King James has done in the Basilicon Doron. By declaring himself a literary disciple of the King, and declaring the King’s favourite the perfect embodiment of his theme, Cleland fxes his sights squarely on the court. At the same time, he is not happy with everything he sees there, as he implies after setting out to discuss the nature of nobility. He dismisses any concern with the usual debates about whether noble descent or nobility conferred for merit is better: ‘My intention therefore is not to grinde my selfe betweene two milstones, in extolling the one above the other….’111 This leads, as we have seen, to a narrow characterisation of ‘counterfeit’ nobility as that conferred by the sovereign for an appearance of meritorious virtue which turns out to be false. The restricted scope of reference seems to emerge from contemporary exigencies. After the creation of new peerages all but stopped during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth, James I had been distributing titles of nobility with comparative extravagance. Cleland does not demur at the creation of new nobles: he takes the usual humanist line that nobility of whichever kind, inherited

26 Courtiers, Nobles, Visual Representation or acquired, can only be validated by virtue. But he seems hypersensitive to the possibility that some new creations might be undeserved: Whosoever intrudes himselfe, and creepes into this rancke…by monie, or a friend in court, I maie justly mainetaine that his title of honor redounds in a double dishonour to him. First for surprising his Prince unawares, by seeking a title which suits not, neither can agree with him; whereby hee brings his Majesties prudencie in question for giving equal honours to unequall deserts.112 This veiled critique of the growing infation of honours under the Jacobean regime tactfully shifts responsibility away from the King; in identifying two causes, wealth and court patronage, Cleland ignores a third, royal favouritism. As his chosen mirror of perfection, Lord Hay, had been ennobled for this very reason, he could scarcely make an issue of it. To avoid the grinding millstones of traditional debate about nobility is a necessary manoeuvre, as he can appear to be impartial between the increasing crowd of new knights and peers created by King James and the ‘old’ nobles of Tudor or medieval origin. In this changing historical context, the problematic role played by representation in attempts to defne nobility takes on a more practical character. Explanatory motifs which Cleland inherits from his Elizabethan predecessors – the mirror, the image, the counterfeit – are used more straightforwardly. This is also the case with a motif found in the recently translated Nennio, that of the child as a representation of the parent. In place of the tortuous debates which Nenna’s speakers conducted around this concept, Cleland takes it for granted, and uses it in his advice about the choice of a young nobleman’s tutor. Having been in this position himself, he insists that for such a special kind of pupil an exceptionally qualifed instructor must be found. He makes an analogy between the father who chooses the best possible tutor and Alexander the Great, who would only allow himself to be painted by the great Apelles. ‘Why then’, he says to the father, ‘should not you be as carefull to see your owne lively Image wel drawen?’ In the process of educating the son, the tutor will produce in effect a fresh portrait of the father, who must therefore seek out a master of his art: ‘Have then a special eie to this Limmer, who in one Picture must pourtraie both Sonne & Father’.113 Once again, Cleland reuses a motif by removing it from the mystifed context of lineage into the practical sphere of education. Just as he takes Ferne’s metaphor of the motionless image which fgures noble birth without virtue and makes it signify moral knowledge without moral practice, so here the idea that the nobleman is represented in his child becomes a matter not of biology but of upbringing. As the loyal literary imitator of a king who was to create knights by the hundred and peers by the dozen, Cleland can be seen as providing a manual to complement that of his royal master. The Basilicon Doron presents kingship as a craft to be acquired through instruction and training. Cleland’s project follows logically: being a nobleman is something that has to be learned, especially (he implies) in a climate where new titles multiply. His touchstone James Hay, who rose from the Scottish gentry to become Earl of Carlisle, was a case in point, demonstrating that high nobility was a carrière ouverte aux talents. Even if the talents were not always those which Cleland recommended for development, his idea that nobility, rather than being recognised and revered, must be elicited and developed to an admirable pitch, looks back not only to Elyot but also to Castiglione in seeing it as the outcome of a discipline of social and cultural formation.

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The Visual Art of Virtuous Nobility The writer who has most to say about questions of representation in the context of nobility and its meaning is also closest in time to the milieu of Van Dyck. Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman appeared frst in 1622, with reissues in 1626 and 1627 and then a revised edition in 1634. Like Cleland, Peacham had been a tutor after taking his M.A. at Cambridge, and he writes in the humanist educational tradition. He was also an amateur painter, whose frst publication in 1606 had been The Art of Drawing, a manual of drawing and painting which recommended these pursuits to the gentry; it was republished in 1612 (and again in 1634) as The Gentleman’s Exercise, with the alternative title Graphice. In effect, he fulfls one of the demands for new élite pursuits made by Castiglione and is showing others how to do likewise. There is a chapter in The Compleat Gentleman on ‘Drawing, Limning and Painting’ in which he confesses to a compulsive love of painting, ‘because ever naturally from a child I have been addicted to the practice hereof’, and goes on to describe himself as a schoolboy surreptitiously drawing during lessons and being punished by ‘ill and ignorant Schoolemasters’; in the same breath, Peacham mocks the howlers which one punitive master makes in construing Horace.114 The anecdote serves as a parable about how a ‘Scholler’ can equally well be a ‘Painter’: painting can be compatible with humanist culture, and therefore with the accomplishments of the ‘compleat gentleman’. To reinforce this point, he refers to the high status of painting in ancient Greece, ‘admitted into the frst place among the liberall Arts, and…taught only to the children of Noble men in the Schooles’, and he cites some familiar names from classical and modern history of nobles and rulers who practised the art.115 Earlier in the 1634 edition, he had singled out one contemporary fgure – not a practitioner but a patron – to attest the nobility of painting and visual culture generally: Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and Earl Marshal of England. As head of the peerage and also the doyen of English art collectors, Arundel had done most – after Queen Anne, Prince Henry and King Charles I – to confer social prestige on the visual arts. Peacham calls him ‘as great for his noble Patronage of Arts and ancient learning, as for his birth and place’,116 recognising the exemplary way in which Arundel’s art collections gave what was in seventeenth-century England a new kind of representation to his exalted status. Although an explicit encomium of Arundel is not made until the 1634 edition, his presence in the book is perceptible from the frst edition of 1622. This is dedicated and addressed to his youngest son William Howard, whom Peacham had tutored. The ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ makes much of the boy’s noble descent and the qualities inherited from his immediate forebears, referring to his father and his great-grandfather, the fourth Duke of Norfolk: already you grow apace: refecting, as from a faire Glasse, that princely moderation and honesty of heart; of the good Duke your great Grand-father, the honourably disposed minde of my Lord, your Noble Father: together with his love and admiration, of whatsoever is honest or excellent….117 Peacham has to tread warily here, as Norfolk had been attainted and executed for treason, and his son, Arundel’s father, had embraced Catholicism and died in the Tower also under attainder. The latter, whose memory was very painful to Arundel,

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goes unmentioned, while the Duke is rehabilitated and praised (whatever his historic mishaps) for his personal goodness. The phrase ‘princely moderation’ is carefully chosen. Aristotle had defned virtue as a mean which lies between two extremes; as Peacham writes later, ‘Moderation of the mind and affections…is the Ground of all Honesty….’118 Quickly sketching in then a view of Norfolk as the type of the virtuous man, he goes straight on to praise Arundel, more plausibly, for his ‘Honourably disposed minde’. In fact Arundel was obsessed with the honour of his eminent but (in previous generations) unfortunate family, a trait which Peacham can identify with one leading Aristotelian virtue, that of megalopsychia (greatness of soul) or magnanimity, the quality of the intrinsically superior man who is concerned with honour above all else.119 Having offered young William Howard family exemplars out of Aristotle’s Ethics, Peacham can conclude: ‘verily you need no other patterne to the absolute shaping of your selfe, then the Images of your Forefathers’.120 The term ‘Image’ refers metaphorically to personal character; taken literally, its reference could be either contemporary or classical. In the contemporary context, William Howard would be familiar with painted portraits of his great-grandfather, such as that by Hans Eworth or the more recently discovered painting now in the National Portrait Gallery.121 For the classical context we have only to turn to the end of Peacham’s frst chapter, where he discusses nobility acquired through ‘vertuous endeavours’ by the ‘new men’ of republican Rome. He quotes the complaints of Gaius Marius against the senators who scorned him for having none of the ancestral portrait busts which signifed noble lineage: ‘they deny me…because I have no Images….I cannot, to proove my discent, bring forth the Images of my Ancestors….’122 A statue of Marius was one of the prize pieces of classical sculpture owned by Lord Arundel, who had no lack of ‘Images’ in the literal or metaphorical sense. In this web of associations, for Peacham to direct William Howard to ‘the Images of your Forefathers’ straight after specifying ‘my Lord, your Noble Father’ is at once to intensify his father’s presence in the text by alluding to the grand panorama of his art collection, in which antique sculpture confers a deeper perspective on modern dynastic portraits.123 In fact Arundel’s presence is implicitly established on the allegorical title-page of The Compleat Gentleman, engraved by Francis Delaram but no doubt designed by Peacham. It is dominated by fgures of Nobilitas and Scientia, Nobility and Knowledge. Above Scientia are attributes of the kind of enlarged humanist education to be recommended by Peacham in the ensuing text. Volumes of Greek and Roman history are surrounded by geometrical instruments, a celestial globe, a musical instrument of the woodwind family, and – newly signifcant – a painter’s palette and brushes. On the opposite side (heraldically, the right-hand side and therefore the more honourable) the fgure of Nobilitas displays an escutcheon with the Howard arms surmounted by a peer’s coronet; she wears a medal presumably intended to be the Lesser George (the medal of the Order of the Garter) and a similar coronet, and in her right hand holds the Earl Marshal’s staff. The allusions are unmistakable, to Arundel as the prototype of nobility and to his advanced intellectual and cultural sympathies which embrace the visual arts. One later coded reference, to Arundel’s personal appearance, helps to fll out the virtual portrait of him which is embedded in Peacham’s text.124 This occurs in the chapter ‘Of Reputation and Carriage’, which deals among other things with appropriate demeanour in public. Peacham cites a number of great personages renowned

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for the simplicity of their dress: the Emperor Charles V, Maurits Prince of Orange, his opponent the Marchese Ambrogio Spinola. Charles V ‘would goe…as plaine as any ordinary Gentleman, commonly in black…without lace or any other extraordinary cost; onely his Order of the golden Fleece about his necke in a ribband….’ This could (with the substitution of the Garter for the Golden Fleece) just as well describe the portrait of Arundel painted by Van Dyck only a year before Peacham’s book was published.125 The other grandees are described in similar terms. ‘And’, Peacham adds, ‘the plainenesse of the late Duke of Norfolke derogated nothing from his Esteeme’.126 The mention of Arundel’s attainted grandfather once more evokes unspoken tension. Peacham smooths this over by concentrating again on his private virtues, framing the passage about unpretentious great men with two marginal headings: ‘The modesty and humilitie of Charles the ffth’ and ‘The Duke of Norfolke’. The subtext of this episode would be clear to contemporary readers. Arundel at different times tried and failed to have the dukedom of Norfolk restored in his own person. Meanwhile he became a byword for the plainness of his dress and appearance, making an understated spectacle of his austerity, which commanded respect. Lord Hay, Cleland’s ‘Patterne of true Nobilitie’ who ended up as Earl of Carlisle, was reported to exclaim, ‘Here comes the Earl of Arundel in his plain Stuff and trunk Hose, and his Beard in his Teeth, that looks more like a Noble Man than any of us’.127 Peacham affrms that despite the ‘derogated’ rank inherited by Norfolk’s grandson, there is no derogation of nobility, in this passage which allusively evokes Arundel’s customary public demeanour. These various allusions build up an image of Arundel inscribed between the lines of The Compleat Gentleman with a judicious reticence appropriate to their subject. There is almost an effect of anamorphosis, as if looking at the text from one angle, the reader sees ‘the complete gentleman’ discursively detailed, while from another angle the perfect exemplar of this fgure sometimes steals momentarily into view.128 The effect is initiated in the original edition of 1622 and compounded in the revised edition of 1634, where Peacham actually names Arundel in order to praise him as a cultural pioneer. This is in a newly added chapter, ‘Of Antiquities’, dealing with classical statues, inscriptions and coins, which argues that a knowledge of these things should be part of the gentleman’s range of accomplishments. Beginning with contemporary English collectors of classical sculpture, Peacham contrives to suggest that Arundel’s name inevitably crops up in the foreground: And here I cannot but with much reverence, mention the every way Right honourable Thomas Howard Lord high Marshall of England, as great for his noble Patronage of Arts and ancient learning, as for his birth and place. To whose liberall charges and magnifcence, this angle of the world oweth the frst sight of Greeke and Romane Statues, with whose admired presence he began to honour the Gardens and Galleries of Arundel-House about twentie yeeres agoe, and hath ever since continued to transplant old Greece into England.129 With a brief but pointed encomium and narrative Peacham portrays Arundel in a way designed to lend authority to his new idea of the gentleman, who gives a special place in his essential repertory of interests to the arts of visual representation. Before introducing Arundel as the protagonist of his new chapter ‘Of Antiquities’, Peacham has explained that those who have a skilled knowledge of classical artefacts ‘are by the Italians tearmed Virtuosi, as if others that either neglect or despise them,

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were idiots or rakehels’.130 However, when he comes to the passage quoted above, the humorously deprecated term assumes in retrospect a substantive signifcance. He praises Arundel’s ‘liberall charges and magnifcence’ in bringing antique statues to England, once more referring to Aristotle’s Ethics. For Aristotle, magnifcence, necessarily allied to liberality, is a quality peculiar to great men who have the resources to do good on a grand scale, ‘obliginge the places wherein they lived by great benefts’, as Peacham has already explained in his frst chapter. There his prime example of someone ‘liberall and magnifcent’ was Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder, especially because of his patronage of art, architecture and learning.131 This accords with Aristotle’s claim that the magnifcent man is like an artist, as his acts are ‘great and beautiful’ like the most valuable works of art, and inspire the same admiration.132 In this perspective, Arundel the virtuoso is thereby virtuous: by giving his country ‘the frst sight of Greeke and Romane Statues’, he has displayed antique virtue, both in these fgures of the gods and worthies of antiquity and in his own magnifcent philanthropy. Peacham goes on to remind his readers that part of the collection has been made available to a wider international audience: the inscriptions in Greek and Latin have been published by John Selden in his Marmora Arundelliana (1629).133 The comprehensive title denoting the entire assemblage of ‘Arundel Marbles’, given to an edition purely of texts, confers a traditional scholarly character on the collection, and draws it into the ambience of that classical humanism which for Peacham (and so many of his predecessors) is necessarily fundamental to the formation of an élite. The Arundel Marbles furnish a mise-en-scène in which art, virtue and learning can be seen consorted to adumbrate ‘the compleat gentleman’. It therefore makes sense for Peacham to add that the Marbles ‘honour’ the place in which they are displayed, Arundel House. The statement has a different nuance from his later point that York House, the residence of the recently assassinated Duke of Buckingham, is ‘ennobled’ by its collection of Roman busts and statues, purchased from Rubens.134 The arriviste Buckingham’s bulk buying of antique sculpture, as if to put in place a virtual legacy of ‘images’, had been part of a campaign to authenticate his freshly acquired nobility by imitating the likes of Arundel, whereas the latter’s collection can be understood to enhance the honour of a locale which is intrinsically noble to begin with. The addition of honour is inherent in what Peacham elsewhere calls ‘venerable Antiquities’, the revered remains of the ancient world. It derives not only from the numinous presence of antique statues, but also from the inscribed stones published by Selden which, we are told, have been attached to the walls of Arundel House: ‘You shall fnde all the walles of the house inlayed with them, and speaking Greeke and Latine to you’.135 This was an arrangement found in the palaces of modern Italian aristocrats who wished to suggest their descent from ancient Roman families, as Arundel would have known from his time in Rome.136 He is not following this example literally, but by incorporating ‘venerable antiquities’ into the space and even the fabric of his house he makes a symbolic extension of his already time-honoured lineage back into the hallowed past of the classical world. As the latent hero of The Compleat Gentleman, Arundel serves Peacham’s purpose perfectly. In all important respects, he exemplifes the programme for a reformed or modernised type of English gentry and nobility which the 1634 edition sets out, the type of the virtuous virtuoso. His exalted rank and historic ancestry, expressed in the austere gravitas of his demeanour, underwrite a new social ideal which might otherwise, continental and Italianate as it is, be easily dismissed as an undesirable

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novelty. By fguring Arundel as above all a collector and exhibitor of antique sculpture Peacham assimilates his compulsive preoccupation with the visual arts (which Peacham himself shares) into the European humanist tradition with its sober emphasis on the union of knowledge and virtue. The new chapter ‘Of Antiquities’, strategically positioned preceding the chapter ‘Of Drawing…and Painting’, while it is compounded of encomium, narrative and information, acts as a virtual allegory of Peacham’s new ideal of nobility, in which ancient lineage joins with virtuous humanist culture under the partly covert aegis of the arts of visual representation: the union of Nobilitas and Scientia made concrete in the Arundel Marbles. This ideal had already been compactly expressed in the frst edition of the treatise, awaiting, as it were, further development. It is initially stated in a metaphor derived from painting. Having discussed nobility in general terms in his opening chapter, Peacham goes straight on in Chapter 2 to argue for ‘the dignitie and necessitie of Learning in Princes and Nobilitie’, insisting that ‘the culture of the minde’ augments the honour of noble birth: Since Learning then is an essentiall part of Nobilitie…it followeth, that who is nobly borne, and a Scholler withal, deserveth double Honour, being both εύγενής [eugenes, well born] and πολυμαθής [polymathes, erudite]: for heereby as an Ensigne of the fairest colours, he is afarre off discerned, and winneth to himselfe both love and admiration, heighthing with skill his Image to the life, making it precious, and lasting to posteritie.137 This single sentence contains three points which place its claim in a long historical perspective, from the classical past to the current era. The Greek epithets recall Aristotle’s discussion of nobility in his Rhetoric and Politics. The simile of the ‘Ensigne’ or banner evokes the semiotics of heraldry, the medieval system for designating family rank with which the early modern English upper classes were still nostalgically preoccupied. And the metaphor of the ‘Image’ into which the ‘Ensigne’ modulates is evidently that of a painted portrait in the Renaissance tradition of naturalism: the term ‘heighthing’ is glossed in Peacham’s later chapter on painting, where he talks of the need to ‘heighthen or deepen’ by the use of light and shade the apparent three-dimensionality of objects in a picture.138 So his effort here to express the double (rather than simple) nature of real nobility settles on the analogy of a realistic painting, which, because of its truthfulness and beauty, will be conspicuous and valuable in both the present and the future.

Nobility as Self-Picturing The comparison between personal qualities which set each other off and the disposition of colours and chiaroscuro in a painting had of course been made by Castiglione, with the advice that the courtier should display his virtues in relation to each other with the skill of a good painter composing a picture.139 Peacham recapitulates this in abbreviated form, with special stress on how learning makes the nobleman skilful at ‘heighthing…his Image to the life’, expert at social self-portrayal of exceptional authenticity. The more concentrated emphasis on realising and projecting ones ‘Image’ was suggested by Tasso. In his Institution of a Young Nobleman, Cleland had recommended the reading of Castiglione alongside ‘Tasso’s booke of Nobilitie’.140 Peacham

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mentions neither in his listing of predecessors, but he was obviously familiar with both. Cleland was referring to Tasso’s dialogue Il Forno overo della nobiltà, named after the Ferrarese courtier Antonio Forni, one of its two speakers.141 Its line of argument is not in accord with Peacham’s at all: Tasso, both master and theorist of heroic poetry, is interested in nobility as a momentous natural phenomenon, and is prepared to think that in the social sphere it can, in its entirety, be genetically transmitted. At the same time, he makes suggestive analogies between nobility and pictorial art which are susceptible of adaptation into a different context. Forni’s companion in the dialogue is the scholar and diplomat Antonio Bucci. At one point, Forni challenges him with a paradox: whereas nobility of its nature should be illustrious and clear to see, the very antiquity of noble families whose origins lie in the distant (or even legendary) past raises doubts, and obfuscates their imputed distinction.142 Bucci agrees that ancient origins are inseparable from obscurity, but the kind of obscurity which has an enhancing rather than a diminishing effect. He compares this effect to the use of shadow in a painting: it makes the colours stand out and so helps to model the fgures in a convincing way, which provokes admiration. Forni presses on however, and reminds him of the disparaging comments about noblemen made by Aristotle, who saw most of them in his own society as ‘good for nothing’.143 Bucci takes up this further challenge and confronts Aristotle’s most critical point, that nobles rarely possess personal characters equal to their lineage or family pride: for example, when the distinction achieved by their ancestors is equalled by any of their contemporaries, they still look down on such people ‘because the same things are more honourable and more able to be vaunted when remote than when they are recent’.144 As Bucci repeats this observation, he smooths over Aristotle’s dispassionate tone and puts the point in positive terms: La nobiltà dunque, quanto è più antica, tanto è più orrevole e più gloriosa. E dice Aristotele che i nobili sono inclinati a schernir coloro che di virtù son somili a’ suoi antecessori, percioché quelle cose onde procede la nobiltà, quanto sono più remote, tanto più recan di dignità, in quella guisa forse ch’alcuna pittura più piace quanto più è posta di lontano. Nobility, therefore, the more ancient it is, the more honourable and glorious. And Aristotle says that nobles are prone to scorn those whose merit is similar to that of their ancestors, because those things from which nobility comes, the more remote they are, the more dignity they bear, in the way that perhaps a certain picture is more pleasing the more it is viewed from a distance.145 To turn Aristotle’s awkward comment in a favourable direction, Bucci makes a comparison with a painter, Titian, who was both ‘diffcult’ and admired. Vasari had recently described how Titian’s later works were painted with such freedom that ‘they cannot be viewed from close by, while from a distance they look perfect’.146 With this formula Bucci deftly makes good the apparently perverse relationship in noble dynasties between reputed honour and remoteness. These analogies between noble lineage and painting not only help to explain and justify Tasso’s idea of nobility but invest it with an aesthetic appeal similar to that conferred on the courtier by Castiglione. At the same time, by comparing a supposedly intrinsic condition with a technical procedure – as both the topic of chiaroscuro and that of ‘painterly’ style draw attention to making art as well as viewing it – Tasso

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unsettles his analogies even as he puts them into place, and leaves them open to be coopted into a different argument, which might see nobility as needing to be cultivated rather than simply reproduced by nature. Hence the comparison between a noble person and a beautifully executed painting fnds its way into Peacham’s discussion of ‘the dignitie…of Learning’, with his repeated emphasis on ‘the culture of the minde’, which ensures that the educated noble ‘is afarre off discerned…heighthing with skill his Image to the life….’147 While Peacham, unlike Tasso, does not allude to any specifc painter, he does refer to a notion of painting which has a recognisably modern character. This becomes more obvious when he gets to his later chapter ‘Of Drawing, Limning, and Painting’, which clarifes the concept of ‘heighthing’ an image, that is, rendering a fgure or object in realistic relief. Here he addresses the reader as a pupil who, after acquiring the rudiments of drawing, must learne to give all bodies their true shaddowes according to their eminence and concavity, and to heighthen or deepen, as your body appeareth neerer or farther from the light; which is a matter of great judgement, and indeed the soule (as I may say) of a picture.148 As we have observed in relation to Castiglione and Guazzo,149 the claim about identifying the soul of a work of art derives from Aristotle. In the Poetics, he analyses the constituent elements of tragedy, the frst two being, in order of priority, plot and character: The Plot…is the frst principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colours, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait.150 As the Poetics was repeatedly translated and commented upon during the sixteenth century, Aristotle’s simple analogy of an outline drawing came to be expressed in more loaded terms. In Lodovico Castelvetro’s version, for example, the fnal sentence of the extract above reads: ‘the most beautiful colours spread about confusedly would not give as much pleasure as a fgure represented through the medium of light and shade’.151 Like other editors of this era, Castelvetro is reading into Aristotle’s text the new and increasingly powerful concept of disegno, which signifes not only the act of drawing but the fundamental design of a picture.152 At the same time, the scheme used by Aristotle to analyse tragedy comes to be applied to the analysis of painting, with the result that disegno, the equivalent of plot, is identifed as the animating principle of pictorial art. This crossover was more or less established by the turn of the sixteenth century, so when Peacham tells his readers that the accurate modelling of bodies in relief through the use of chiaroscuro is ‘the soule…of a picture’ he is passing on Italian art theory of recent date. He is also implicitly rejecting a more old-fashioned doctrine still current in contemporary English culture. It was set out in Nicholas Hilliard’s Treatise on the Art of Limning, which circulated in manuscript during the early decades of the seventeenth century. Hilliard had been concerned to defend his own style of limning, which harked back to Holbein and was essentially linear, against that of his rival Isaac Oliver, who

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looked to contemporary continental mannerist painting and modelled his fgures with a pronounced use of light and shadow. In Hilliard’s argument shadow is associated with obscurity and a lack of visual candour: reliance on it is ‘like truth ill told’, whereas on the contrary, ‘the principal part of painting or drawing after the life consisteth in the truth of the line….’153 While Peacham admired Hilliard as a painter,154 he argues precisely the opposite, that ‘the principal part of painting’ is modelling in chiaroscuro, and he promotes a more advanced aesthetic. With Peacham’s treatise, especially the enlarged edition of 1634, the view of nobility as a kind of visual representation, launched by Castiglione’s idea of the courtier as a self-formed work of art and developed both in the succeeding ‘courtesy’ literature and by writers (some with wary provisos) concerned to defne nobility and educate the noble class, is restated in contemporary terms for early Stuart England. These terms acknowledge new tendencies in English élite culture, especially the possibility of supplementing the patronage of humanist learning by the collection of works of art to manifest noble identity in a modern, European fashion. By taking as his exemplar Lord Arundel, whose enrichment of his compatriots’ milieu with art works shows him to be the pattern of ‘magnifcence’, the virtue which according to Aristotle makes one akin to an artist, Peacham places the issue of noble self-representation in a newly enhanced context. The ‘shaping of [the] selfe’ into a state of socially conspicuous pre-eminence may now refer not only to the ‘Images’ (literal or metaphoric) of ones ‘Forefathers’ but also to a wider heritage of imagery – invested with striking historical, moral and aesthetic prestige – from the classical past and its revival through the more proximate traditions of Renaissance art.

Notes 1 Luitpold Dussler, Raphael. A Critical Catalogue, London and New York, 1971, 33–4, pl. 79; Michael Jaffé, Rubens. Catalogo completo, Milan, 1989, 297, no. 865; Jeremy Wood, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard XXVI (2). Rubens Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Later Artists. Italian Artists I. Raphael and His School, vol. 1, London and Turnhout, 2010, 292–9, no. 47, pl. 1 and fg.121; Paola Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols., Milan and Naples, 1971–77, II, 1529–31; Robert Klein and Henri Zerner, Italian Art 1500–1600. Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966, 32–3. 2 Bull, 32; Cian, 4, Lettera dedicatoria.I.64–7. In quoting Bull’s translation, I have on a few occasions adjusted the wording, e.g. here changing the translation of ‘ignobile’ from ‘worthless’ to ‘lowly’. 3 Bull, 33; Cian, 4, Lettera dedicatoria.I.70–2. 4 Poetics VI.14–15 (1450a–b) in S. H. Butcher ed. and trans., Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 4th edn., New York, 1907 (reprinted 1951), 26–9. The text most available to Castiglione would probably have been Aristotelis de poetica Interprete Georgio Valla Piacentino, Venice, 1515. 5 Bull, 35–6; Cian, 9, Lettera dedicatoria.III.4–8. 6 Bull, 51; Cian, 36, 1.XII.20–3. 7 Bull, 70; Cian, 69, 1.XXVIII.41–6. 8 Bull, 114; Cian, 148, 2.VII.33–8. 9 De Offciis III.iii.15 in Cicero, De Offciis, ed. and trans. Walter Miller, London and Cambridge, MA, 1968, 282–3. 10 Carnes Lord and Dain A. Trafton ed. and trans., Tasso’s Dialogues. A Selection, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1982, 154–5. 11 Ibid., 156–7. 12 Ibid., 180–1.

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13 Ibid. 14 George Pettie and Bartholomew Young, The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo The First Three Books Translated by George Pettie, Anno 1581 And the Fourth by Barth. Young, Anno 1586, intro. Sir Edmund Sullivan, 2 vols., London and New York, 1925, The Second Booke, I, 144–5; Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, ed. Amedeo Quondam, 2 vols., Modena, 1993, Libro secondo, I, 100–1. 15 Pettie (as note 14), I, 145; Guazzo (as note 14), I, 101. Guglielmo, as he speaks in the dialogue, is called ‘Guazzo’ in Pettie, and ‘Cavaliere’ in the original. 16 Pettie (as note 14), I, 138; Guazzo (as note 14), I, 96. 17 See back pp. 1–2. 18 Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica D’Aristotele Vulgarizzata E Sposta, Vienna, 1570 (facsimile Munich, 1968), 74 verso, 78 verso–79 verso; Vasari/Milanesi, IV, 7–15, ‘Proemio alla Parte Terza’. 19 Alessandro Piccolomini, Annotationi nel libro della poetica d’Aristotile; con la traduttione del medesimo libro, Venice, 1575, 117–18. 20 Robert Peterson, Galateo of Manners and Behaviours (1576), con testo originale a fronte di Giovanni della Casa, ed. Carmela Nocera Avila, Bari, 1977, 24–5. 21 Ibid., 130–1. 22 Bull, 211; Cian, 301, 3.IV.14–19. Metamorphoses X.242–97 in Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, London and New York, 1916, 80–85. The naming of Pygmalion’s statue come to life as Galatea is not in Ovid, and appears to be not only postclassical but post-Renaissance, frustrating any idea that Della Casa’s Galateo may be the vehicle of a pointed allusion to the Ovidian myth. 23 Ibid., 128, 130; Giovanni della Casa, Galateo or The Book of Manners., trans. R. S. PineCoffn, Harmondsworth, 1958, 85. 24 De Architectura, III.i.1–4 in Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans., Frank Granger, 2 vols., London and Cambridge, MA, 1955, I, 158–61; Vitruvio, I dieci libri dell’architettura tradotti e commentati da Daniele Barbaro 1567, ed. Manfredo Tafuri and Manuela Morresi, Milan, 1997, 108–12. 25 The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldassare Castiglione Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby Anno 1561, intro. W. H. D. Rouse, London, Toronto, and New York, 1928, 1, ‘To The Reader’, lines 9–12. 26 Peterson/Della Casa (as note 20), 142–5. 27 Ibid., 152–3. 28 Ibid., 4. 29 John Shute, The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, London, 1563; Elizabeth Goldring, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and the World of Elizabethan Art, New Haven and London, 2014, 38–9, pls. 34–8. 30 Debates about the Pontormo portrait are clarifed in Marco Chiarini, Alan P. Darr, and Cristina Giannini eds., L’ombra del genio. Michelangelo e l’arte a Firenze 1537–1631, Milan, 2002, 173–4, no. 32. Jacopo Carrucci detto il Pontormo, Ritratto di Giovanni Della Casa, 1541, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art. For the use of columns in English portraiture, see Karen Hearn ed., Dynasties. Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630, London, 1995, 49–50, no. 13, 53–4, no. 15, and especially 96–7, no. 49, Anglo-Netherlandish School, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester (with Dog), c.1564. 31 Eustache de Refuge, Traicté De La Cour Ou Instruction Des Courtisans, Paris, 1619; A Treatise of the Court or Instruction for Courtiers. Written in French by…Denys de Refuges…Done into English by John Reynolds, London, 1622. 32 See back p. 2 and note 5. 33 De Refuge/Reynolds (as note 31), (a) 4 verso. 34 L’Honneste-Homme Ou, L’Art de Plaire A La Court. Par Le Sieur Faret, Paris, 1630; The Honest Man: Or the Art to Please in Court. Written in French by Sieur Faret. Translated into English by E. G. [Edward Grimestone], London, 1632. 35 Nicolas Faret, L’Honnête homme, ou l’art de plaire à la cour, ed. M. Magendie, Paris, 1925 (facsimile Geneva, 1970), xlix–li, on Faret’s style and his contemporaries’ esteem for it. 36 Ibid., 3–5. The frst three editions, of 1630, 1631 and 1634, contain, as well as the dedication to Gaston, a second complimentary address to Antoine de l’Aage, Seigneur de

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Courtiers, Nobles, Visual Representation Puylaurens, who as Gaston’s favourite could be seen as a subsidiary model of the successful courtier; ibid., iv. Faret/Magendie (as note 35), 9; Faret/Grimestone (as note 34), 9. Faret/Magendie (as note 35), 102, and cf. 39, where the novice courtier is advised to choose a trustworthy friend ‘qui nous fasse…voir un tableau des coustumes qui s’observent ….’ Cian, 147–8, 2.VII.20–27; Bull, 114. Faret/Magendie (as note 35), 46–7; Faret/Grimestone (as note 34), 164–6. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke named the Governour, intro. Foster Watson, London and New York, 1907, 253–4. Laurence Humphrey, Optimates, Sive De Nobilitate, Basel, 1560 (hereafter Optimates); idem, The Nobles, or of Nobilitye, London, 1563, facsimile Amsterdam and New York, 1973 (hereafter The Nobles). ODNB, vol. 28, 796–800. The Nobles, A ii recto, A vii recto. Ibid., L iii recto. Ibid., A v recto. Ibid., B viii recto. Ibid., B iii recto. Ibid., B viii verso (punctuation adjusted); and see forward, chapter 4, pp. 123–4. See John Peacock, The Look of Van Dyck, Aldershot and Burlington VT, 2006, 31–2, 54 notes 91–3. The Nobles, l iii recto-verso. Ibid., A iv verso, A iv recto. Optimates, 11. The Nobles, A iv recto. Ibid., A iii recto. Ibid., e iv verso. Ibid., e iv recto; Optimates, 98. Pliny, Natural History, Volume IX, Libri XXXIII–XXXV, ed. and trans. H. Rackham, London and Cambridge, MA, 1952, XXXV.ii.6–7, 264–5, quoted by early modern writers e.g. Guillaume Budé, Annotationes…in Pandectas, Paris, 1566 (frst edn. 1508), 39 recto. Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700, London, 1994, 34–6. The Nobles, f viii verso. Optimates, 121–2; In L. Calpurnium Pisonem, I.1 in Cicero, The Speeches, ed. and trans. N. H. Watts, London and Cambridge, MA, 1953, 144–5. Juvenal, Satire VIII, lines 19–20, in Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. G. G. Ramsay, revised edn., London and Cambridge, MA, 1961, 158–9. The Nobles, b iv verso, b vi verso; Optimates, 56, 59 Ibid., a iv recto; and 11. Ibid., h viii verso; and 151. Ibid., f i recto, e viii recto; and 106, 105 Ibid., A vii recto; and 22. Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 1560–1620, Leamington Spa, 1981, 38f. The Nobles, x viii recto; Optimates, 335. The Nobles, l iii verso. Ibid., p vi recto. For Humphrey’s part in the vestiarian controversy, see ODNB, XXVIII, 797–8. Optimates, 248. Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, Oxford, 1988; John Peacock, ‘The Politics of Portraiture’ in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake ed., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, Basingstoke, 1994, 200–3. John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie, London, 1586 (facsimile Amsterdam and New York, 1973) (hereafter Ferne), 150; Budé (as note 57), 39 recto, quoted in Ferne, 86. Ferne, 85: ‘this word Gentill, doth in true speech comprehend all estates and degrees of nobleness, by the opinion of Budaeus’. Ferne, 86; Budé (as note 57), 39 recto (my translation).

Courtiers, Nobles, Visual Representation 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107 108 109 110 111 112

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Pliny (as note 57), XXXV.ii.7, 264–5; Budé (as note 57), 39 recto. Ibid., 39 recto (my translation). Ferne, 150, recalling Budé (as note 57), 38 verso. Ferne, 82. Ibid., 150; Budé (as note 57), 38 verso. Ferne, 15, 14, 19. Ibid., 19. See back pp. 16–17. Cf. Sir Thomas Smith, The Commonwealth of England….Newly Corrected & Amended, London, 1633, 57: ‘as for Gentlemen, they bee made good cheape in England…. And (if need be) a King of Heralds shall also give him [i.e. someone attaining gentry status] for money Armes newly made and invented, the title whereof shall pretend to have been found by the said Herald, in perusing and viewing of old Registers….’; Henry Peacham, Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman 1634, intro. G. S. Gordon, Oxford, 1906, 172: ‘Coates sometimes are by stealth purchased, shuffed into Records….’ Simon Healy, ‘Ferne, Sir John’ in ODNB, vol. 19, 404–5. Ferne, 15. Ibid., A iiii recto. Ibid., A vi recto. Rhetoric II.xv.3 in Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, ed. and trans. John Henry Freese, London and Cambridge, MA, 1947, 256–7; Matthew VII.17–20. James Cleland, ΗΡΩ-ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑ, or the Institution of a Young Noble Man, Oxford, 1607, facsimile intro. Max Molyneux, New York, 1948, 163. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, London, 1965, 104. Sidney’s text had been published only twelve years previously; his brother and sister were still living and were prominent members of the Jacobean aristocracy. Cleland (as note 90), 163. See forward chapter 3, p. 86. Ibid., 35. Catharine Macleod et al., The Lost Prince. The Life & Death of Henry Stuart, London, 2012, 36, fg. 12, Robert Peake the Elder, Henry Prince of Wales and Sir John Harington; 70–1, no. 14, Peake, Prince Henry with Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex. Cleland (as note 90), 17. Il Nennio Nel Quale Si Ragiona Di Nobiltà. Del Magnifco Dottor di Leggi & Cavalier di Cesare M. Giovambattista Nenna da Bari, Venice, 1542 (hereafter Nennio); Nennio or a Treatise of Nobility….Written in Italian by…Sir John Baptista Nenna of Bari. Done into English by William Jones Gent., London, 1595, facsimile intro. Alice Shalvi, Jerusalem and London, 1967 (hereafter Jones). Jones, 14 recto–14 verso; Nennio, B7 verso. In the Italian text, contracted spellings have been expanded and punctuation simplifed. Jones, 14 verso; Nennio, B8 recto. Jones, 14 verso; Nennio, B8 recto. Jones, 15 recto; Nennio, B8 verso. Jones, 34 verso; Nennio, E1 verso. Jones, 35 recto; Nennio, E2 recto. Jones, 31 recto; Nennio, D6 verso, D7 verso–D8 recto. Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 4th edn., Oxford and New York, 1978, 108. Jones, 32 verso, Nennio, D8 recto. The capacity of painting to represent the mind was a topic initiated, from the Renaissance point of view, by Pliny, who singled out Aristides as the frst painter to depict the inner life of his human subjects: ‘in omnium primus animum pinxit….’; Pliny (as note 57), XXXV .xxxvi.98, 332–3. Cleland (as note 90), ¶¶ 4 verso; and see back p. 14 and notes 47–8. Ibid., 10. Ibid., ¶¶ 4 verso. Ibid., ¶ 3 recto. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 7–8.

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113 Ibid., 23–4. 114 Peacham (as note 84), 126–7. He relates how the master mistranslates the frst line of Odes I.i, getting things wrong from the very start. 115 Ibid., 125–6, adapting and at times translating a passage in The Courtier; cf. Cian, 122–3, I.XLIX.7–20; Bull, 96–7. 116 Peacham (as note 84), 107. 117 Ibid., The Epistle Dedicatory, c 4 recto. 118 Ibid., 221–2. 119 Ethics IV.3 in Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and intro. David Ross, revised J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson, Oxford, 1980, 89–95. Conspicuously unmentioned by Peacham is William Howard’s great-great-grandfather, the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, yet another distinguished but dishonoured forbear, executed under Henry VIII for (among other alleged offences) advertising his descent from the pre-Tudor royal family. 120 Peacham (as note 84), The Epistle Dedicatory, c 4 recto. 121 Hearn (as note 30), 70–1, no. 27, Hans Eworth, Thomas Howard 4th Duke of Norfolk; Tarnya Cooper and Charlotte Bolland, The Real Tudors: Kings and Queens Rediscovered, London, 2014, 128. 122 Peacham (as note 84), 17. 123 Hearn (as note 30), 208–12, nos. 140–1, Daniel Mytens, Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, and Alatheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel, showing in the respective backgrounds galleries of antique sculpture and of family portraits. See forward Figs. 5.14, 5.15. 124 Other glancing references in Peacham (as note 83), 161, 172 (the dignity of the Earl Marshal’s offce in upholding authentic nobility) and 187 (Arundel’s descent from Adeliza of Louvain, widow of King Henry I and Countess of Arundel by her second marriage), 125 Ibid., 226–7; Complete Paintings, 139, I.161. See Plate 12. 126 Peacham (as note 84), 227; Cooper and Bolland (as note 121), 128. 127 David Howarth, Lord Arundel and His Circle, New Haven and London, 1985, 221. 128 For a near-contemporary example, see the anamorphic portrait of Charles I reproduced in Margery Corbett and Michael Norton, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries. Part III. The Reign of Charles I, Cambridge, 1964, 342, no. 10, and pl. 181. 129 Peacham (as note 84), 107. 130 Ibid., 105; and see forward chapter 4, p. 117. 131 Ibid., 6–7. 132 Ethics IV.2 in Aristotle (as note 119), 86–7. 133 John Selden, Marmora Arundeliana, London, 1629; Peacham (as note 84), 112. 134 Ibid., 108. On Buckingham as a collector, see most recently Christiane Hille, Visions of the Courtly Body. The Patronage of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, Berlin, 2012, 126f. 135 Peacham (as note 84), 104, 112. 136 See e.g. Ulisse Aldrovandi’s description of the sculpture collection of the Cesi family in Le Antichità De La Città Di Roma….per Lucio Mauro….Et insieme ancho Di tutte le statue antiche, che per tutta Roma…si veggono, raccolte e descritte, per M. Ulisse Aldroandi…, Venice, 1556, 122–38, ‘In casa del R. di Cesis, in Borgo, presso à S. Pietro’, and especially 134: ‘A le mura…si veggono attaccate diverse tavole marmoree, con antichi epitafi, che fanno tutti mentione dell’antica famiglia Cesia, che hoggi di Cesis diciamo….’ 137 Peacham (as note 84), 18. 138 Ibid., 127.The metaphor of added height, used to describe the salience of an image, implicitly brings with it the notion of increased social eminence. 139 Cian, 148, 2.VII.33–8; Bull, 114. See back, p. 3. 140 Cleland (as note 90), 153. 141 Torquato Tasso, Il Forno overa della nobiltà. Il Forno secondo overo della nobiltà, ed. Stefano Prandi, Florence, 1999. 142 Ibid., 121–2. 143 Aristotle, Rhetoric (as note 89), II.xv.3, reported by Tasso (as note 140), 122. Aristotle’s recognition of nobility as both a genetic and a social condition underpins his critique of it

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144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153

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in the Rhetoric and his ambivalence towards it in the Politics; see Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge, 1988, 8, 70, 94, 110 (I.6, III.13, IV.8, V.1). Aristotle, Rhetoric (as note 89) II.xv.2. Tasso (as note 141), 124. Vasari/Milanesi, VII, 452: ‘da presso non si possono vedere, e di lontano appariscono perfette.’ Philip Sohm, Pittoresco, Cambridge, 1991, 51. Peacham (as note 84), 2, 18, 39. Ibid., 127. See back, pp. 1–2, 5–6. Poetics VI.14–15 in Butcher (as note 4), 26–9. Castelvetro (as note 18), 74 verso: ‘non diletterebbe altri havendo distesi bellissimi colori confusamente (come farebbe) se di chiaro & di scuro havesse fgurate una imagine)’ John Peacock, ‘The Stuart Court Masque and the Theatre of the Greeks’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LVI (1993), 196. Peacock in Sharpe and Lake (as note 72), 205; Nicholas Hilliard, A Treatise concerning the Art of Limning, ed. R. K. Thornton and T. G. S. Cain, Ashington, 1981, 85–7; for an original spelling edition of the manuscript, see Nicholas Hilliard’s Art of Limning, ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Linda Bradley Salamon, Boston, 1983, 28–9. Henry Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise, London, 1634: ‘Mr. Hiliard…inferior to none in Christendome for the countenance in small….(a judgment repeated from the earlier editions of Peacham’s treatise in 1606 and 1612).

2

Sprezzatura and its Afterlife From Castiglione to Faret

The Art of Sprezzatura Castiglione’s idea of the courtier as a self-created work of art, an idea which leaves its imprint not only on the literature of ‘courtesy’ but also on the more general treatises and dialogues dealing with gentility and nobility, raises an obvious problem. If the courtier is to display all his virtues in effective relationship to each other with the skill of an artist composing and executing a picture,1 he becomes both the painter and the painting, but how can the process of making and the fnished product be identifed with one and the same person? The answer lies in the concept of sprezzatura, which brings this identifcation about, causing the self which makes to be subsumed in the self which is made. In Book One of The Courtier, Count Lodovico requires the ideal fgure whom he is portraying to be of noble birth; Gaspare Pallavicino disagrees, and the argument is left unresolved. What is agreed, however, is that the courtier must have ‘that certain air and grace that makes him immediately pleasing and attractive to all who meet him; and this grace should be an adornment informing and accompanying all his actions….’2 The Count reiterates his insistence on grace several times,3 until he is challenged to explain how, for those not gifted with it by nature, it can be acquired. He recommends two complementary methods, one for learning how to acquire grace, and the other for putting what is learnt into practice. The frst method is imitation: the aspiring courtier should study others who exhibit grace, and judiciously select aspects of their behaviour to make his own. The second method cannot be summed up in a word, and so a conceptual term has to be invented: …I have discovered a universal rule which seems to apply more than any other in all human actions or utterances: namely, to steer away from affectation at all costs, as if it were a rough and dangerous reef, and (to use perhaps a novel word for it) to practise in all things a certain nonchalance (sprezzatura) which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless. I am sure that grace springs especially from this, since everyone knows how diffcult it is to accomplish some diffcult feat perfectly, and so facility in such things excites the greatest wonder; whereas, in contrast, to labour at what one is doing… shows an extreme lack of grace and causes everything, whatever its worth, to be discounted. So we can truthfully say that true art is what does not seem to be art; and the most important thing is to conceal it, because if it is revealed this discredits a man completely and ruins his reputation.

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…trovo una regula universalissima, la qual mi par valer circa questo in tutte le cose umane che si facciano o dicano più che alcun altra: e cio è fuggir quanto più si po, e come un asperissimo e periculoso scoglio, la affettazione ; e, per dir forse una nova parola, usar in ogni cosa una certa sprezzatura, che nasconda l’arte, e dimostri, ciò che si fa a dice, venir fatto senza fatica e quasi senza pensarvi. Da questo credo io che derive assai la grazia: perché delle cose rare e ben fatte ognun sa la diffcultà, onde in esse la facilità genera grandissima maraviglia ; e per lo contrario, il sforzare, e, come si dice, tirar per i capegli, dà summa disgrazia, e far estimar poco ogni cosa, per grande ch’ella si sia. Però si po dir quella esser vera arte, che non appare esser arte ; né più in altro si ha da poner studio, che nel nasconderla: perché se è scoperta, leva in tutto il credito, e fa l’omo poco estimato.4 Just as the graceful qualities of others have to become one’s own, the exhibition of them, once acquired and composed into a new personal synthesis, has to become unself-conscious. The acquisition of grace is a project which must cover its tracks, and the practice of grace an art which must hide its operations. The models for these procedures are literary and rhetorical. When Count Lodovico advises the courtier to engage in eclectic imitation of his most graceful fellows, he does exactly what he recommends by taking an analogy from Latin literature: Just as in the summer felds the bees wing their way among the plants from one fower to the next, so the courtier must steal away this grace from those who appear to possess it and take from each one the quality that seems most commendable.5 E come la pecchia ne’ verdi prati sempre tra l’erbe va carpendo i fori, così il nostro Cortegiano averà da rubare questa grazia da que’ che a lui parerà che la tenghino, e da ciascun quella parte che più sara laudevole….6 The image of the bee is taken from one of Horace’s odes, in which he describes his methods of composition. Unlike his predecessor Pindar, who is a swan lifted up on inspiring winds, Horace works at his poems like an industrious bee from his native Apulian countryside, ‘after the way and manner of the Matinian bee that gathers the pleasant thyme’ (apis Matinae/ more modoque// grata carpentis thyme).7 The poet’s suave self-deprecation, which makes light of his expert artistry, exemplifes the quality of grace which Count Lodovico is discussing and the practice of sprezzatura which he is about to describe, so that with his literary imitation of Horace the Count deftly mimics the social imitativeness which he is recommending, and demonstrates, on both the poet’s part and his own, that graceful self-presentation which is its objective. Alongside the Horatian allusion is another, to Seneca. In a passage which became a locus classicus on the topic of literary imitation, Seneca advises writers to ‘imitate’ the bees ‘who fit about and cull the fowers that are suitable for producing honey’ (Apes…debemus imitari, quae vagantur et fores ad mel faciendum ideonos carpunt). In the same way, he continues, we should read widely and gather ingredients which can be blended into a new and unique favour.8 Count Lodovico is adapting the image and the advice to the situation of the courtier in pursuit of grace. Castiglione presupposes a reader who, without needing an especially recherché knowledge of classical authors, might appreciate this briefy intricate episode of allusion, where an imitatio of Horace confessing that he cannot emulate the exalted Pindar overlaps with an imitatio

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of Seneca, who himself imitates Horace’s motif of the bee, revising it into a model of literary imitation and advising writers to ‘imitate’ it. The social process which the Count describes is at the same time represented by a literary process in the allusive texture of the writing, a contrivance passed off with an air of graceful facility. The exposition of sprezzatura which follows also takes its model from the written word, but this time from writing socially projected in the form of oratory. It is based on the attempt of Cicero to ‘fashion’ (fngere) or ‘portray’ (informare) the perfect orator,9 which lies behind Castiglione’s overall project of portraying the perfect courtier. When he comes to describe the three types of oratorical style, Cicero begins with the plain or Attic style, and sets out to delineate the true Attic orator. He is the one who follows the common usage of speech so skilfully as to convey the idea that anybody could speak in the same fashion, although no style is in fact more diffcult to imitate. The sense of familiarity and freedom, says Cicero, shows a ‘not ungraceful carelessness’ (non ingratam negligentiam); at the same time he warns against being casual in reality, and recommends a ‘careful carelessness’ (negligentia diligens).10 Castiglione’s concept of sprezzatura is distilled from this paradox. Cicero goes straight on to illustrate his paradox by analogy. The effect of the Attic orator’s careful carelessness, he explains, is similar to that made by certain women who contrive to look most attractive by forgoing personal adornment; dispensing with jewellery, coiffed hair or cosmetics, they achieve complete elegance.11 This comparison extends his argument from the sphere of rhetorical style into that of social selfpresentation, in a way which makes it more adaptable to Castiglione’s discussion. Castiglione does appropriate this passage about female elegance owed to what he calls ‘sprezzata purità’ (nonchalant simplicity),12 but he defers that move to a much later point in the dialogue, and so avoids the appearance of slavish transcription, allowing Count Lodovico’s account of sprezzatura to conceal its Ciceronian provenance. At the same time, as if complete concealment would be an unthinkably mediocre subterfuge, he obliquely signals that provenance in the Count’s next words: I remember once having read of certain outstanding orators of the ancient world who, among the other things they did, tried hard to make everyone believe that they were ignorant of letters; and, dissembling their knowledge, they made their speeches appear to have been composed very simply and according to the promptings of Nature and truth rather than effort and artifce. For if the people had known of their skills, they would have been frightened of being deceived. E ricordomi io già aver letto, esser stati alcuni antichi oratori eccellentissimi, i quali tra l’altre loro industrie, sforzavansi di far credere ad ognuno, sé non aver notizia alcuna di lettere ; e, dissimulando il sapere, mostravan le loro orazioni esser fatte simplicissimamente, e piuttosto secondo loro porgea la natura e la verità, che lo studio e l’arte: la qual se fusse stata conosciuta, aria dato dubio negli animi del populo di non dover esser da quella ingannati.13 The reference to ‘orators of the ancient world’ has a studied vagueness which offers to give the game away. Castiglione masks and then partially unmasks his reworking of Cicero, so as to exemplify the covert artfulness which Count Lodovico is inculcating, and then to allow a glimpse of himself exemplifying it. Even as the Count explains sprezzatura it is being demonstrated by his author with inescapable stylishness.

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While their creator (or, as he would have it, the recorder of their conversations) gives an initial illustration of sprezzatura in the literary domain, Castiglione’s speakers begin to apply the concept to all aspects of appearance and behaviour relevant to the courtier. Even so, their discussions of courtly accomplishments keep returning to matters of more specialised artistic practice, as if only the dedicated artist can fgure as a paradigm for the intensive social discipline which sprezzatura entails. So, after Count Lodovico has expounded his new concept, the frst burst of discussion begins with dancing, horsemanship and soldiering, then focuses in on music and painting. These latter arts furnish cautionary examples of misapplied effort, such as a piece of music which strives too obviously for harmonic consonance, or a painting which is over-worked. The Count repeats the famous criticism made by Apelles of Protogenes, that his pictures were too highly wrought, as he never knew when to leave them be, or, in Pliny’s phrase, ‘manum de tabula tollere’ (levar le mani dalla tavola), that is, withdraw his hand from the panel (‘table’ in then contemporary English) on which he was painting.14 Seizing on the expression, with the ambiguity of the word ‘tavola’, another courtier turns it into a joke about the gluttony of an absent member of the company, as if humorously to shrug off the idea that their social skills should be compared with the art of the greatest painters from antiquity. This neat stroke of sprezzatura lightens the conversation and sets it on a turning point, so that the Count can now expound the positive effects of performing one’s accomplishments with the appearance of facility. Again, as we have observed in the previous chapter,15 the discussion starts with familiar courtly pursuits – handling weapons and dancing – and moves on to the more specialised disciplines of musical performance and painting, the conclusive example being that of the artist who shows his excellence with ‘a single line which is not laboured, a single brush stroke made with ease’.16 It would seem that, from both negative and positive points of view, the most telling exemplifcation of sprezzatura, almost its prototype, is to be found in the art of the painter. Appropriately then, pictorial art does not remain simply a topic which supplies examples or analogies: in the concluding pages of Book One, it is brought into the centre of the discussion. In detailing the accomplishments which are essential for the courtier, Count Lodovico deliberately pushes beyond the traditional pairing and contrast of ‘arms’ and ‘letters’ , military skills and humanistic learning, and requires the courtier to be a competent musician who is able to play several instruments.17 This provokes sharp debate, which he interrupts, and with the impetus created launches his fnal and most controversial proposal: that the courtier should be able to draw, and should be knowledgeable about the art of painting (saper disegnare, ed aver cognizion dell’arte propria del dipingere).18 He anticipates the objection that these are mechanical and not liberal pursuits with several references to classical authors which were becoming familiar in this kind of debate. Writing about education in the Politics, Aristotle had recognised drawing as a liberal discipline alongside reading and writing, gymnastic exercises and music.19 Pliny recorded that in Greece only the free-born were taught drawing, which was forbidden to slaves; and that in Rome, painting was considered an honourable art, as attested by Quintus Fabius, a learned orator of senatorial rank, who frescoed the Temple of Salus and bequeathed the cognomen ‘Pictor’ to his aristocratic descendants.20 The Count does not cite chapter and verse for these references, but again uses the casual formula ‘I remember having read…’,21 which gracefully avoids pedantry, allows him to bend his sources a little to his own advantage, and invites his listeners to recall the texts and so to an extent co-operate with his apologia.

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His advocacy is energetic and persistent; even when it leads to objections and side issues he keeps returning to his theme. He argues that painting is not only ‘a very noble and worthy art in itself’ but useful as well: in warfare, for example, being able to sketch the terrain and its features (rivers, bridges, fortifcations, and so on) helps to formulate and communicate ones plans.22 This is obviously a concession to the traditional view of the nobleman (which Lodovico from the start had wanted the courtier to be) as a warrior, to which pictorial art becomes contributory. At the same time, on the side of humanist values, he stresses the representational skill of the professional painter as something intrinsically praiseworthy, given that it relies on an extensive knowledge of the natural world, for which painting was honoured in classical antiquity.23 But the ultimate claim is made on aesthetic grounds. Aristotle had preferred this claim over the argument for utility. Free-born citizens might be taught to draw, he says, because that will sharpen their attention to material objects and prevent their being cheated in buying and selling, but as he enunciates this reason he brushes it aside in favour of another: drawing is valuable ‘rather because it makes them judges of the beauty of the human form’. And he adds: ‘To be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls’.24 It is on this idealistic note that Count Lodovico rests his case. Painting is a source of the greatest pleasure, he concludes, because it makes more manifest the beauty of beautiful things, both artefacts and living creatures, and especially the human body. He reinforces the point with one example: let those refect on this who are so carried away when they see a beautiful woman that they think they are in paradise, and yet who cannot paint; for if they did know how to paint they would be all the more content, since they would then more perfectly discern the beauty that they fnd so agreeable. E questo pensino quei che tanto godono contemplando le bellezze d’una donna che par lor essere in paradiso, e pur non sanno dipingere: il che se sapessero, arian molto maggior contento, perché più perfettamente conosceriano quella bellezza, che nel cor genera lor tanta satisfazione.25 One can infer from the context that this is partly a dig at some member of the group, which allows the Count to round off his lengthy plea with humorous aplomb. At the same time it expresses an important argument, which he recapitulates in a kind of coda. Earlier, he has recalled the value placed on the work of Apelles by Alexander the Great, and the story of how Alexander gave up his mistress Campaspe to Apelles, who had fallen in love while painting her portrait. The Count’s very last words return to this story and offer an interpretation in line with his concluding argument: given that both men loved Campaspe because of her beauty, and that the painter’s perception of it would have been evidently more acute, Alexander surrendered her because he realised that Apelles would understand it more thoroughly.26 At this point Castiglione contrives that the conversation is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Prefect of Rome and heir presumptive to the duchy of Urbino. The discussion winds down, with the prospect of being resumed the next evening, and Book One is brought to a close. This means that Count Lodovico has had the last word, with his insistence that the courtier should know how to draw and, if not to practise, to understand painting with an insider’s expertise, given that pictorial art is not a mechanical labour but a mode of cognition, a means to the apprehension of beauty. The argument is given a privileged position in the dialogue

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(but, characteristically, in a seemingly casual way), constituting the fnal touches which are applied to the representation in Book One of the perfect courtier. Of course every argument in The Courtier is in a sense provisional, because of the dialogue form and the humorously contentious quality with which Castiglione endows it. But the force of this particular argument is renewed in Book Four, in the closing pages of the whole work, where Pietro Bembo delivers his famous speech about love and its power to elevate the lover to the highest levels of enlightenment, gradually raising his contemplative gaze from earthly to heavenly beauty. As Bembo’s typical lover is a male, initially in love with a beautiful woman, the frst stage of his speech may recall Count Lodovico’s claim that if such a lover could paint he would have a more complete understanding of the beauty which so pleased him. More fundamentally, the neo-Platonic tendency of Bembo’s description, which equates knowledge with vision, supplies a philosophical backing to the Count’s contention that painting is a cognitive process, an intensifed kind of seeing which leads to an exceptional knowledge of beauty. Viewed in this context, the painter and the neoPlatonic lover are engaged in the same quest, albeit the lover strives for a transcendent experience while the painter pursues beauty in the here and now. The courtier is like the painter in his pursuit of ‘grace’, beauty of social and moral conduct, through the process of representation, given that he in his own person is both the agent and the outcome of the process. By concealing the process itself, sprezzatura ensures that these potentially divided roles remain one, enabling the courtier to become his own ideal self-portrait.

Sprezzatura Revised: Writer and Narrator in the Galateo Castiglione’s most prominent successors, Della Casa and Guazzo, who in their different ways discuss notions of courteous conduct beyond the confnes of the court, are both aware of his stress on grace and its attainment through sprezzatura, although each places the emphasis differently. As much of the Galateo is concerned with the correction of bad manners in the modern sense, of offensive and sometimes gross behaviour, and the attainment of generally acceptable standards of civility, its scope seems to fall short of the subtleties of sprezzatura. However, the topic does have an implicit presence in Della Casa’s text. This can be discerned in the section towards the end of the treatise where the narrator refects in general terms on the advice he has been dispensing and on himself as an advisor, in his account of ‘Maestro Chiarissimo’, Polycleitus, who formulated the canon or ‘regolo’ for the making of the perfectly proportioned statue. As we have seen, he feels obliged to confess that, whereas ‘Chiarissimo’ could fashion a perfect fgure both in writing and in sculpture, he can only describe his ideal of courtesy in written form, and cannot embody it in his own person.27 He maintains however that although he cannot perfectly exemplify his own teaching, it may still be not ineffective: Perciocché in vedendo il buio si conosce quale è la luce…sì potrai tu, mirando le mie poco aggradevoli e quasi oscure maniere, scorgere quale sia la luce de’ piacevoli e laudevoli costumi. Because by seeing darkness one knows what light is…so may you, in regarding my scarcely pleasing and as it were dark manners, perceive what may be the light of pleasing and praiseworthy behaviour.28

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To associate the metaphor of light with fne and pleasing conduct is to bring together two motifs which Castiglione had placed at opposite ends of The Courtier: Bembo’s aspiration to the enlightenment of supernal beauty and Count Lodovico’s guide to perfection of courtly comportment. Della Casa’s speaker appears to be reading Book Four of The Courtier back into Book One, to produce an ostensibly plain man’s vignette of his own defciencies and capabilities which suggests he is actually more capable than he admits. This is his version of sprezzatura, the art which artfully conceals itself. The same teasing atmosphere of muffed self-awareness is sustained during the latter stages of the text, as he continues to refect in general terms on the practical advice which he has been giving for most of the book. Announcing that this is the concluding phase of the treatise, he sums up its overall argument to date by defning what constitutes acceptable social behaviour: diciamo, che I modi piacevoli sono quelli, che porgon diletto, o almeno non recano noia ad alcuno de sentimenti, ne all’appetito, ne alla imaginazion di coloro, co quali noi usiamo…. Wee say that Those be good maners and fashions, which bring a delight: or at least, offend not their senses, their mynds, and conceits, with whom we live.29 He goes straight on to justify this defnition by explaining the principle which underlies it: Ma tu dei oltre accio sapere, che gli huomini sono molto vaghi della bellezza & della misura, & della convenevolezza; & per lo contrario delle sozze cose, & contrafatte, & difformi sono schif…. But you must understand with all this, that, Men be very desirous of beautifull things, well proportioned and comely. And of counterfet [i.e. wrongly formed] things fowle and ill shapen, they be as squemish againe, on the other side.30 The Elizabethan translator diminishes the scope of the principle as it is actually stated: ‘gli huomini sono molto vaghi della bellezza, & della misura, & della convenevolezza’,31 that is, ‘men are very desirous of beauty and symmetry and proportion’. The speaker, described on the title page as a ‘vecchio idiota’, a fgure informed by experience rather than education, nonetheless moves from practice to theory; having given an extensive range of detailed advice about specifc personal habits and social circumstances, he shifts his discourse onto the level of philosophical generalisation. This is managed in his characteristically modest tone. To defne beauty, he confesses, is diffcult, so he will simply offer a distinctive sign by which it can be identifed: nondimeno accioche tu pure habbi qualche contrasegno dell’esser di lei; voglio che sappi, che dove ha convenevole misurs fra le parti verso di se, & fra le parti, e ‘l tutto; quivi è la bellezza: & quella cosa veramente bella si puo chiamare, in cui la detta misura si truova. yet that you may have some marke, to know her by: you must understand, that Where jointly & severally, every parte & the whole hath his due proportion and measure, there is Bewtie. And that thing may justly be called fayer in which the said proportion and measure is found.32

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In fact, the description of the ‘marke’ is a perfectly recognisable defnition of beauty which can be found in other writers of the sixteenth century.33 While professing to restrict himself to an empirical discourse, the narrator is actually keeping in play the abstract concepts such as ‘measure’ and ‘proportion’ which he has already introduced. And he continues in this vein: Et per quello, che io altre volte ne intesi da un dotto & scientiato huomo, vuolo essere la bellezza uno quanto si puo il piu: & la brutezza per lo contrario è molti…. And by that I did once learne of a wise and learned man: Bewtie he saide, would consist but of one, at the moste. And Deformitie contrarywise, measured he selfe, by Many.34 Here however, as if this might be one step too far into abstraction, he brings his discourse back down to earth. To illustrate the difference between the one and the many in the feld of aesthetics he chooses the example of women’s faces. The features of beautiful women all seem to ft together as if they were made for that face alone, whereas those of ugly women are so disparate that they seem to be derived from different faces. A moment before, the ‘wise and learned’ informant about the one and the many might have been a cover for Socrates in The Republic conversing with Glaucon about the idea of the beautiful,35 but now the illustration brings matters down to a less demanding level as if to confrm the narrator’s account of his own limited capacities. Della Casa represents his protagonist in such a way that this self-deprecation never wholly convinces, as the unassuming expositor sometimes appears a more knowledgeable fgure than he himself claims, and the covert skill of the author in characterising the role seconds that dissembled awareness. Sprezzatura must by defnition involve dissembling; at the same time, in the narrator’s case, it is underwritten by the same explicit justifcation which it had received in The Courtier. His discussion of beautiful forms leads up to an important point: that, as well as beauty of faces and bodies, there is a beauty of speech and behaviour, and this is defned frst of all in terms of social proprieties and expectations. He gives the example of a richly dressed noblewoman washing her crockery in a roadside gutter. There is nothing in this situation to offend the senses, unlike the long catalogue of social ineptitudes which he has been criticising through most of the treatise so far, and yet it is upsetting. The reason is that it offends the mind, it upsets one’s understanding of the way things ought to be. The narrator’s example clearly invokes the concept of decorum, an exceptionally powerful idea in the early modern context where the social hierarchy may be taken as part of the natural order. But his notion of beautiful behaviour goes beyond that concept, or else could be seen as expanding the category of decorum to its widest possible limits. Social conduct which is ftting and therefore pleasing to the mind will display ‘beauty and grace or charm’ (bellezza e leggiardria o avvenentezza).36 In the course of this explanation, the narrator makes clear that the argument of his seemingly modest treatise has entered a new phase. He is no longer concerned just to give practical advice about conduct which is displeasing or pleasing and can be judged by the senses, but instead to consider forms of behaviour in the context of general principles which are meaningful to the intellect (intelletto).37 This is why he has appealed to the concept of ‘misura’ in identifying the qualities of ‘bellezza e

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leggiardria o avvenentezza’, which he sees as not merely desirable in the social sphere but essential: Non si dee adunque l’huomo contentare di fare le cose buone, ma dee studiare di farle ancho leggiadre: Et non è altro leggiadria, che una cotale quasi luce, che risplende dalla convenevolezza delle cose, che sono ben composte, & ben divisate l’una con l’altra, & tutte insieme; senza laqual misura etiandio il bene non è bello; & la bellezza non è piacevole. E si come le vivande, quantunque sane & salutifere, non piacerebbono agl’invitati se elle o niun sapore avessero o lo avessero cattivo ; cosi sono alcuna volta i costumi delle persone…se altri non gli condisce di una cotale dolcezza, la quale si chiama, si come io credo, gratia, & leggiadria. It is not inoughe for a man, to doe things that be good: but hee must also have a care, he doe them with a good grace. And a good grace is nothing els, but suche a maner of light (as I may call it) as shineth in the aptness of things set in good order and wel disposed, one with another: and perfectly knit and united together. Without which proportion and measure, even that which is good is not faire: & the fairenes it self, is not pleasaunt. And as meates, though they be good & savourie will give men no minde to eate them, if they have no pleasaunt relish and taste: So fares it with the maners of men…if a man do not season them with a certaine sweetnes, which you call (as I take it) Grace, and Comlines.38 The key term which recurs in this passage is ‘leggiadria’ (elegance or charm). The Elizabethan translator, by rendering this as ‘grace’ (except at the end, where the word ‘gratia’ has to be rendered as ‘grace’) points up, knowingly or not, its relationship to Castiglione’s corresponding term ‘grazia’, for which, in Della Casa’s vocabulary, it appears to be a match. The insistence on not just decency but also beauty of conduct follows the example of The Courtier, while replacing the momentous concept of ‘grace’ (with its religious hinterland of meaning39) with a more modest term, of more restricted reference. A modest scaling-down can be seen as indicative of Della Casa’s relationship to Castiglione as it emerges in this fnal section of the Galateo. The passage quoted above echoes two motifs from The Courtier; of these, the more prosaic is dwelt upon while the more elevated is curtailed. The parallel between behaviour lacking in ‘Comlines’ and food which has not been seasoned occurs in Book One, where the Signora Emilia suggests that the quality of ‘grace’ which Count Lodovico demands is like a seasoning (condimento) added to the courtier’s actions.40 This comparison is paraphrased by Della Casa into a detailed analogy, as if its homeliness will suit his unpretentious protagonist. On the other hand, the metaphor of illumination or radiance, ‘a maner of light’, comes from Book Four, where Bembo defnes beauty as an infux of the divine goodness which, like the light of the sun, is shed over all created things but especially displays itself in all its beauty when it discovers and informs a countenance which is well proportioned…and the subject wherein it shines it adorns and illumines with wonderful splendour and grace…. un fusso della bontà divina, il quale benché si spanda sopra tutte le cose create, come il lume del sole, pur quando trova un volto ben misurato…vi s’infonde e si dimostra bellissimo e quel subietto ove riluce adorna e illumina d’una grazia e splendore mirabile….41

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Della Casa adapts this defnition to explain ‘leggiadria’ as ‘una cotale quasi luce’ (such a quality as resembles light) which shines from things which possess ‘misura’, that is, concordant proportions, order and unity. Bembo’s metaphysical explanation of ‘bellezza’ as the result of divine infuence is modifed into the more down-to-earth description of ‘leggiadria’, which singles out inherent formal properties and concedes that it is using the image of light simply as a metaphor. Once again, as when earlier the narrator apologetically argued that his own ‘as it were dark’ manners could by contrast illustrate the ‘light’ of ‘pleasing and praiseworthy’ comportment, Della Casa is reading Book Four of The Courtier back into Book One, reading Bembo’s account of ‘bellezza’ back into Count Lodovico’s account of ‘grazia’, while dispensing with Bembo’s neo-Platonic metaphysics and placing the emphasis not on a quest for transcendent beauty but on felicitous and appealing social conduct.42 This compacting of The Courtier helps to adapt it to the admonitory and prescriptive format of Della Casa’s small-scale treatise and to the modest intellectual horizons of his mouthpiece. At the same time, such an economical revision of Castiglione, especially as it occurs in the latter part of the treatise where we are told that the judge of good conduct must be not just the senses but the mind, suggests that full awareness of what is going on in the text may not simply be confned to the author and withheld from the speaker. This latter section where practical advice takes second place to theoretical argument had been initiated by the passage about Polycleitus and his ‘regolo’, which took as its theme the relationship between theory and practice.43 Here, where the narrator is at his most self-deprecating as he regrets his imperfect ability (unlike Polycleitus) to put his own rules into practice, Della Casa is noticeably skilful in mediating his learned material about Greek sculpture, derived from Pliny and Galen,44 through the voice of his uneducated narrator (the ‘vecchio idiota’ of the title-page). The supposedly dissembled transaction between a sophisticated writer and a naïf speaker cannot help but strike the reader, invited to appreciate the author’s adroit duplicity. As the book in its latter stages makes a nearer approach to The Courtier, Della Casa’s individual take on sprezzatura, his artful artlessness, becomes more discernible. This latter phase of the treatise gives further instances of the ingeniously contrived symbiosis between writer and speaker which makes the former’s art seem natural. The narrator takes occasion to criticise people who walk gracelessly in the street, in a variety of ridiculous ways that make them resemble peacocks or ill-disciplined horses. Horses which bear themselves awkwardly, he adds, are likely to be despatched to the sale yard, however sound they may be; we prize ‘leggiadria’ not only in human behaviour but in animals too, and even inanimate things. So two houses which are equally well built and well furnished will not fetch the same price if one has good proportions (convenevoli misure) and the other lacks them.45 This train of association, which links the well comported human body with the well proportioned building, is not only informed by Vitruvian theory (as the educated reader would recognise)46 but extends that theory beyond its usual boundaries. In making its analogy between architectural and bodily proportions, Renaissance Vitruvianism had used a notion of the body as a statically posed form.47 Here however, the well proportioned building is compared to the body in graceful motion, acting in a live social situation. The narrator’s quite ordinary list of examples, arguing for the value of ‘leggiadria’ in all things, implicitly revises Vitruvian theory by endowing its notion of the body with a new quality of dynamism. His ordinariness reveals an unexpectedly suggestive dimension.

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The same suggestiveness appears in a fnal summary made as the treatise draws to a close. Robert Peterson’s English version gets this partly wrong, but his inaccuracies help to point up the calculated asymmetry between the writer and the speaker: Et io udii gia raccontare (che molto ho usato con persone scientate, come tu sai) che un valente huomo, ilquale fu nominato Pindaro, soleva dire, che tutto quello che ha in se soave sapore, & acconcio, fu condito per mano della Leggiadria, & della Avenentezza. And I have heard it saide (for you knowe I have byn familiarly acquainted with learned men in my time) that Pindarus that worthy man was wont to saye: that Whatsoever it were that had a good & savourie taste: was seasoned by the hands of the Graces.48 In fact the Italian text refers to ‘a worthy man, who was named Pindar’ (un valente huomo, ilquale fu nominato Pindaro) and for the fnal phrase has ‘seasoned by the hands of Leggiadria and Avvenentezza (charm)’.49 Peterson’s wording implies that at least Pindar’s name and reputation are familiar to the narrator, whereas Della Casa as usual represents him as quite uninstructed, purveying information gained at second hand, unaware of Pindar’s cultural identity and innocent of the knowledge (which Peterson also ascribes to him) that as a poet rather than a sage Pindar had invoked the Graces, rather than some less specifc notion of gracefulness. His creator would have known that Pindar’s Odes refer frequently to the Graces; the covert reference here is probably to Olympiad XIV, where they are addressed and celebrated at length, as the deities ‘by [whose] aid all things pleasant and sweet are accomplished by mortals’.50 The narrator’s naively skewed transmission of this topic can also be perceived as a learned allusion by Della Casa, exemplifying the Christian humanist tendency to reread pagan mythology in allegorical terms. This allows the conversion of mythological into philosophical discourse – as Pindar’s Graces are transformed into ‘Leggiadria’ and ‘Avvenentezza’ – to be performed here with clever suavity, disguised as another of the narrator’s ingenuous exercises in passing on cultural hearsay. Della Casa’s graceful allusion to the Graces, which is also the speaker’s fnal appeal to his touchstone of ‘leggiadria’, is placed just before the end of the treatise, which then tails off with a rueful admission that faults of conduct are ‘innumerable’, so that the speaker cannot include them all, and has probably put the reader off with a catalogue of bêtises already too long. This dejected coda dims the tribute paid to the ruling idea of ‘leggiadria’, which might otherwise have struck a positive note. However the apologetic close leaves the reader with a fnal intimation of the speaker’s modesty and his author’s cleverness. By carrying through this relationship between an untutored speaker and a learned writer, involving a carefully unequal symbiosis between practical savoir vivre and a ‘philosophy’ of social conduct, Della Casa has, in the realm of literary art, exemplifed Castiglione’s idea of sprezzatura, albeit in an idiosyncratically revised form. Castiglione’s Count Lodovico assumes that an artful presentation of the accomplished self to best advantage can become to all appearances natural, that selfconsciousness can transcend itself into unself-consciousness through a process of dissembling. Della Casa turns this model on its head. Through the invention and display of a textual ‘persona’ (to use the term on the title page) who is a master of civilised manners but unlettered, the ‘natural’ self which constitutes the sophisticated

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author’s disguise becomes inferior to the ‘artful’ self which fashions it, an exercise in imperfection rather than the reverse. Della Casa plays a game with the business of sprezzatura, turning it inside out with well dissembled but appreciable virtuosity. His experimentation could be seen in one perspective as a parody, exposé or critique; it is certainly a tribute to the fascination of the concept which Castiglione had launched into European élite culture.

Guazzo and Sprezzamento A more straightforward attitude to the concept is seen in Guazzo’s Civil conversazione. Towards the end of Book Three the participants in the dialogue pay tribute to Castiglione as a famous predecessor, and especially as a writer who has anticipated what would otherwise be an important topic in their own discussions. This book deals with domestic and family relationships in the broadest sense, including proper social conduct between masters and servants. As it draws to a close, Guazzo points out that they should have paid attention, and given priority, to the appropriate mode of ‘conversation’ between the prince and the courtier, at least (as it is not in their remit to prescribe the behaviour of princes) from the courtier’s point of view. Annibale replies that the work has already been done for them ‘by him who with his learned penne hath most perfectly fourmed the Courtier’ (la polita penna di chi formò perfettamente il corteggiano), and Guazzo immediately adds his own praise: That Gentleman by the excellency of that worke hath no doubt won to himselfe immortal fame, neyther hath he omitted any thing belonging to the duty of a right courtier…. Veramente quel cavalier con la felicità di quest’opera s’acquistò immortal fama, né ha lasciato che desiderare intorno all’uffcio del corteggiano.51 The compliment is heartfelt but at the same time not exactly faithful to The Courtier as it stands, concerned as it is with accomplishments rather than duties, with the matter of self-cultivation before that of service; and Guazzo’s speakers implicitly acknowledge as much by proceeding to supply their own account of how the courtier should behave towards his prince. At the same time, the way in which they manoeuvre round the fact that The Courtier is engaged in a rather more specialised enterprise than their own exchanges shows a certain fnesse, especially as Castiglione is not named, as if to suggest his self-evident distinction. The skill of invoking a writer recognisably without having to name him had been singled out near the beginning of the Civil conversazione, in an initial debate about the relative value of two kinds of life, the solitary and the sociable. After the Cavaliere has made the case for solitude, Annibale compliments him on his expertise as a speaker: You have swarved nothing at all in this discourse from the dutie of a perfect Courtier, whose propertie it is to do all things with carefull diligence, and skilfull art; mary yet so that the art is hidden, and the whole seemeth to be done by chaunce that he may thereby be had in more admiration. Voi non vi sete punto discostato in questo discorso dall’uffcio del perfetto corteggiano, a cui è comandato che nelle sue azzioni ponga diligentissima cura e faccia il

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Sprezzatura and its Afterlife tutto con arte, ma in maniera che l’arte sia nascosta e paia il tutto a caso, accioché ne venga più ammirato.52

The allusion to Count Lodovico’s defnition of sprezzatura is unmistakable; and Annibale goes on to explain how he has been able to detect this quality in the Cavaliere’s discourse. Some of the Cavaliere’s arguments were evidently his own, while some were derived from ‘famous writers, and specially…Petrarch and Vida’;53 but instead of portentously citing these authorities, he has silently transmitted their ideas. In this respect, he has fgured in the debate not like a pedantic savant but as ‘a perfect Courtier’. Annibale’s praise refects back on himself, for having the discernment to appreciate his friend’s artfulness. It also refects on Guazzo, the author who has actually written this exchange, and by concealing and then revealing his literary sources contrived this manifestation of sprezzatura in ‘civil conversation’. The master source who lies behind this self-conscious vignette remains unnamed, as he does when the speakers reinvoke him to pay tribute at the end of Book Three, in the knowledge that declining to identify Castiglione confrms his presence precisely by enacting his ideal of courtly understatement. Part of Guazzo’s admiring attitude towards sprezzatura is never to use the word itself, just as he refrains from naming its inventor.54 This light touch is pointed up by the one occasion on which he offers a synonym. In Book Two the discussion turns to questions of speech and language and the proper linguistic register for different social situations. Annibale appeals to a principle of decorum, of suiting ones speech to the context, and argues that one should be particularly aware of those occasions when informality is appropriate: Sometimes such matters come in talke wherein negligent carelesnesse in words, is more acceptable than diligent curiousnesse [i.e. carefulness]; and nowe and then common and familiar words, set foorth the matters which are handled, farre better then Tragicall [i.e. elevated] and stately words doe. cadono bene spesso ne’ ragionamenti alcune cose, nelle quali è più grata la negligenza, o sprezzamento, che la diligenza delle parole, e talora l’umiltà loro essaltà più le cose che si trattano, di quel che si facciano le parole tragiche e magnifche.55 The epithet ‘Tragicall’ here refers not to narratives of misfortune in high places but to the style in which they are conventionally articulated, using ambitious and exalted language. Annibale’s paradox is that casual, ordinary words may (as the Italian text has it) ‘exalt’, that is, give salience to, certain subjects in conversation more effectively. His term for this ‘carelesnesse’ of speech is sprezzamento, which alludes to the word sprezzatura without copying it. By setting this term between the antonyms negligenza and diligenza, Guazzo extends his play with Castiglione’s concept, hinting at the idea which lies behind it, the paradoxical quality of negligentia diligens recommended to Cicero’s orator.56 The deftness of these moves illustrates the practice of sprezzamento and bears out its graceful gesture of acknowledgement to Castiglione. By taking the concept of sprezzatura back to its classical origins in the arts of language and showing how it can be a feature of educated discourse both in speech and writing (exemplifed by his interlocutors and by his own literary skill which represents them) Guazzo suggests a rapprochement between two ideals: that of the consummate courtier and that of the gentleman whose status is authenticated by the

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virtues associated with humanistic learning. In the Civil conversazione the Cavaliere Guglielmo and the learned physician Annibale divide these two roles between them; they were combined in the life of Guazzo’s admired predecessor, Castiglione, and in his own career of service to Castiglione’s former masters, the Gonzaga, when they became rulers of his native Monferrato. From a different point of view, Guazzo’s English translator, George Pettie, queries the value of combining these dual roles. Pettie, as a younger son from a gentry family, had the resultant contradictory legacy of high status insecurely possessed; this insecurity seems to colour his ‘Preface to the Readers’, where he worries over his appearance before them as a gentleman in the literary marketplace, and the anomaly which this might suggest. He had taken a degree at Oxford and become a professional soldier on the continent,57 so that on the basis of personal experience he is able to pose his problem in the framework of a familiar debate, as to whether arms or letters constitute the defnitive qualifcation of a gentleman. As a practitioner of both, far from seeing himself in a doubly strong position, he feels vulnerable to criticism: why should a military offcer do literary work and a gentleman accept the stigma of publication? His response is a vigorous advocacy of ‘studie or learning in Gentlemen’ along modern humanist lines: only an educated governing class can fulfl its proper function in the state, by providing counsellors to the prince, administrators and diplomats. The argument begins with his own case: even soldiers need to study their profession. They also need the awareness to realise that the art of war does not provide an adequate formation for a ruling class: If we in England shall frame our selves only for warre, yf we be not very well Oyled, we shall hardly keepe our selves from rustyng, with such long continuance of peace, it hath pleased God to blesse us.58 Here Pettie recapitulates a joke from The Courtier. Count Lodovico in Book One lays down the principle that ‘the frst and true profession of the courtier must be that of arms’, although he must shrug off his military bearing during the ordinary round of court life. He relates an anecdote about a soldier at court who refuses to dance with a lady because his business is fghting; she retorts that as he is not at war he should be oiled and stored in a cupboard to avoid becoming rustier than he is already.59 By borrowing this motif, Pettie seems to associate his wish for an educated, adaptable gentry class with the gracefully understated versatility of Castiglione’s courtier, to be reformulated in the ensuing text as sprezzamento or ‘carelesnesse’. What follows however is an attack on that very quality. It becomes clear that Pettie is co-opting Castiglione’s anecdote into the debate whether arms or letters are the touchstone of gentility, and using it to mock the traditional idea of the gentleman as a warrior. His desired alternative is not a cadre of omnicompetent courtiers masking their abilities under the guise of amateurism but a frankly learned governing élite, whose intellectual ascendancy will not be dissembled: Those which myslike that a Gentleman should publish the fruites of his learning, are some curious Gentlemen, who thynke it most commendable in a Gentleman, to cloake his art and skill in every thing, and to seeme to doo all thynges of his owne mother witte as it were…and if you shall chaunce to enter into reasoning with them, they wyll at the seconde woorde make protestation that they are no

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Sprezzatura and its Afterlife Schollers: whereas notwithstanding they have spent all theyr tyme in studie. Why Gentlemen is it a shame to shewe to be that, which it is a shame not to be? Alas you wyll be but ungentle Gentlemen, yf you be no Schollers: you wyll doo your Prince but simple service….60

The manifest attack on sprezzatura as a social pose grows into a confrontation between different political cultures, as if Castiglione’s courtier is being elbowed aside by the ‘governor’ of Elyot, and Guazzo’s manual of élite conduct in the north Italian states skewed towards the requirements of Tudor bureaucracy. Pettie’s position becomes most obvious in his critique of the very idea of sprezzatura: it rests on a misconception, by making acquired accomplishments seem spontaneous, ‘not considering how we deserve no prayse for that, which God or Nature hath bestowed upon us, but only for that, which we purchase by our owne industry….’61 In this recognisably Protestant perspective, to minimise or mystify virtuous human striving is to create moral confusion. Pettie’s particular concern is to justify his own work of translation and claim credit for the ‘arte and skill’ deployed to achieve it. He sums up the result as ‘these my labours’,62 a formula which rules out any pose of genteel insouciance. By insisting that art is work he goes against the grain of his author, who is inclined to celebrate sprezzatura, especially in written and spoken intercourse, and instead he pre-emptively dismisses the concept as morally idiotic.

Tasso: Sprezzatura, Prudence and Feigning This contradiction between Guazzo and his earnest English translator parallels an ambiguous attitude towards sprezzatura which begins to appear within the courtesy literature itself. It can be seen in Tasso’s Malpiglio, composed around the same time as the publication of Pettie’s Guazzo.63 While Tasso’s spokesman in the dialogue praises Castiglione as the creator of a timeless ideal, he does so in reaction to the proposal that ‘courts change with the times’;64 and although he argues that the essential features of the court and the courtier remain constant, his picture of the court turns out to vary from Castiglione’s in important respects. In the discussions throughout The Courtier the fgure of the prince is a shadow: the physically disabled Duke of Urbino is absent from the gathering, and the topic of the ruler’s power receives slight attention. In the court envisaged by Tasso the prince is a dominant presence and may well be temperamental or irascible. Again, Castiglione’s courtiers, along with their ironic raillery, are on the whole genial and benign; Tasso’s are prone to be competitive and envious. When the young Giovan Lorenzo Malpiglio declares that he wants to be a courtier, he asks the Neapolitan Stranger (who speaks for Tasso) how he can at the same time win the prince’s favour and the good will of his fellows. The answer is that he cannot: to attract the prince’s attention he must become exceptionally accomplished, but his excellence is bound to provoke envy in other courtiers. He can only escape this dilemma by making light of his superior attainments.65 The accomplishments of this alternative, more wary type of courtier are similar to those found in Castiglione. He must excel as a ‘cavaliere’, both in chivalric exercises and in warfare, according to the traditional military ideal of knighthood, to which Tasso adds the Aristotelian civic virtues of liberality and magnifcence. He must also cultivate the intellect, and be familiar with mathematics, philosophy, theology,

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literature and ‘the noblest of the arts’, which are sculpture, painting and architecture.66 At the same time, none of these capacities must be too openly displayed, for fear of arousing envy among fellow courtiers or even, possibly, in the prince. Therefore, above all other virtues, he must exercise prudence, which will restrain him from ‘trying to outdo others in letters or arms…making him seem equal (molto ricercar a gli altri ne le lettere o ne l’armi…facendosi equali in queste cose)….’ This is the way to achieve a genuine superiority in such a diffcult, unstable environment; prudence is ‘the principal virtue in courts’.67 Tasso’s prudence bears a family relationship to Castiglione’s sprezzatura, in promoting disingenuously ingenuous behaviour, while more frankly disposing the courtier to dissemble. The Neapolitan Stranger, for example, warns that a courtier with exceptional intelligence should modestly cover it up, and not arouse the prince’s hatred by making him feel inferior. He declares that ‘concealment becomes the courtier more than showing off’, a statement which appeals to two concerns, self-preservation and ftness of demeanour. When young Malpiglio confesses that as a raw recruit to the court, he will easily be inclined to self-concealment so as to hide his defciencies, the Stranger responds with further worldly advice that is double-edged. Maintaining a cautious reserve can be done in an astute fashion, ensuring the little part of oneself that is revealed can create a desire to know what is covered up; it can cause men generally and even the prince to believe that something (un non so che) rare, singular, and perfect is being hidden. la picciola parte che si dimostri generi desiderio di quell ache si ricopre, e una stima e opinion de gli uomini e del principe medesimo, che dentro si nasconda un non so che di raro e di singolare e di perfetto.68 The benefts will not be merely selfsh; given such a reputation for hidden reserves of sagacity, the courtier’s counsel to the prince will acquire authoritative force. Once again, the dissembled calculation of appearances interweaves two concerns, shrewd careerism and fealty to good government. For Castiglione, the goal of the perfect courtier had been to win the prince’s favour and always tell him the truth, to persuade him to be a just and virtuous ruler; but this is announced very late on,69 and during most of the dialogue, the enterprise of attaining perfection, of cultivating the self and mystifying its operations, seems to be its own reward. For Tasso likewise, the courtier manages the business of self-representation with the aim of infuencing his master, but his prior personal aim is simply to survive, to disarm the hostility and secure the goodwill of everyone around him. Sprezzatura is revised into prudence. The same happens to Castiglione’s comparison of the courtier to a painter. We have seen that when Federico Fregoso likens the courtier’s deployment of his virtues to the painter’s use of light and shadow in the composition of a picture, Tasso imitates the analogy;70 but he does so in his own terms. The passage occurs as the Stranger winds up his argument that the courtier must not ‘try to outdo others in letters or arms’ but excel above all in prudence.71 Malpiglio complains that this reduces all the courtier’s virtues to one. The Stranger demurs: prudence is rather the leader of all the other virtues, while they are not always equally manifest. Here The Courtier’s analogy with a painting is taken up, with one signifcant difference. To express the interrelationship of the virtues, Castiglione had used the concepts of chiaroscuro and fgure composition; Tasso adds to these the concept of distance (di lontano) or background.

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This allows him to explain that some of the virtues in the company of prudence are sketched as shadowy forms in the background, while others are depicted in lively colours.72 The distribution of virtues can be surprising. Those more vividly apparent include liberality, courtesy, candour, but also modesty, no doubt in accord with the overall regime of prudence. The same regime relegates courage and magnanimity to the background; we have already been warned that these qualities provoke envy,73 and presumably must understand that they are better adumbrated than portrayed with clarity and salience. What Tasso calls ‘the fnest colours of the courtier’s art’74 are used with caution. In Castiglione’s description chiaroscuro had been an aesthetic resource to set off the courtier’s contrasting and complementary virtues; in Tasso’s it reveals its capacity for reticence and prevarication, allowing the courtier to obfuscate his more inexpedient moral strengths. Malpiglio greets the Stranger’s picturing of courtly virtues with the enthusiasm of a convert. His response, as we have seen, acknowledges Castiglione’s achievement in ‘portraying’ the courtier and insists that the Stranger has done the same for the present age.75 What remains to be noted is the reason for this accolade, which seems to have a sting in the tail: I see not just the outline but the very image of the courtier, his portrait in colour. And if that other portrait by Castiglione ftted the age in which it was written, yours ought to be highly prized in these times when the ability to feign is one of the greatest virtues. Io veggio non solo il disegno, ma l’imagine del cortigiano e ‘l ritratto già colorito. E se l’altro del Castiglione fu per quella età ne la qual fu scritto, assai caro dovrà essere il vostro in questi tempi, in cui l’infnger è una de le maggior virtù.76 Malpiglio’s compliment centres on the term ‘l’infnger’ (modern Italian ‘infngere’), which has largely negative connotations, and might be more frankly translated as ‘pretend’ or ‘dissimulate’. However, to take it in a more ambiguous sense would be in keeping with the vocabulary which he uses. His words are chosen (obviously by Tasso the author) to recall the relationship between pictorial and literary art which Castiglione establishes at the beginning of The Courtier; there, he undertakes to attempt a ‘painted portrait’ (ritratto di pittura) of the court of Urbino, whose members set out to ‘fashion in words’ (formar con parole) a perfect courtier, who in turn is advised to portray his own qualities as if he were a painter. So here each ‘portrait’ (ritratto) of the courtier by Castiglione and Tasso is referred to interchangeably as being ‘painted’ (colorito) and ‘written’ (scritto). This association of the two arts is also implied in the opening words of Malpiglio’s tribute, where he exclaims that he sees not just a preparatory drawing (disegno) of the courtier but a fully fnished painting (ritratto già colorito). Here he invokes well known terms from the major contemporary work of north Italian art theory, Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della Pittura (1557), which treats ‘the parts of painting necessary for the perfect painter’; they are, invenzione, disegno and colorito.77 Just as Castiglione’s account of the perfect courtier was based on Cicero’s Orator and drew frequently upon Ciceronian texts (as Dolce, who published an edition of Castiglione, continually reminds the reader78), Dolce’s schedule of concepts relevant to the perfect painter was based on rhetorical theory, and so by using this language, Malpiglio further suggests a relationship between visual and verbal representation. In such a context, the term ‘l’infnger’ evokes not just the idea of falsehood but that of fction – of

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what Tasso’s English contemporaries, with comparable ambivalence, called ‘feigning’, a word which can denote both pretence and artistic representation.79 Before assenting to Malpiglio’s praise the Stranger challenges its chief assumption by asking ‘Can a truthful man feign?’ Malpiglio confdently cites the cases of Socrates and Giotto, whose adherence to truth could only be considered compromised by one thing, their excessive modesty about their own abilities. Unabashed, the Stranger immobilises this argument with an Aristorelian pincer movement: how can moderation (in self-esteem) be excessive? And how can an excessive quality be thought a virtue? Having prevailed, he graciously backs down, admitting that in the context of the court one must be fexible: if no excess is praiseworthy, that which involves diminishing the praises due to oneself deserves praise and honour beyond all others. As a courtier then, signor Lorenzo, I readily grant you that this kind of feigning is a courtly virtue, not only a Socratic one. se niuno eccesso è laudevole, questo co ‘l quale si scemano le proprie laudi, oltre tutti gli altri merita lode e onore: come cortigiano dunque vi concederò facilmente, signor Lorenzo, che ‘l simulare in questo modo sia virtù di corte, non solamente socratica.80 As he plays on the word ‘praise’, one gathers that the Stranger is laughing at his eager but inexperienced companion. His irony is also aimed at the court, that perilous environment which demands a rueful sophistication of moral principle. The overarching irony is that the Stranger, who demurs at his own praises, is playing the Socratic role in this very dialogue, although in a modernised form. As he goes on to explain (and is exemplifying in his own side of the discussion), it is a stance which must be adapted to the present age. In its pristine form it would scarcely be welcome at a contemporary court: Courtiers might fnd it rather exasperating…if one were to insist constantly upon one’s ignorance while at the same time trying to win every debate by attacking the statements of others. potrebbe parer a’ cortigiani cosa odiosetta…se alcun dicesse di non saper nulla e, riprovando sempre quel ch’è detto da gli altri, volesse rimaner al disopra in tutte le questioni….81 This makes even clearer his scepticism about Socrates and Giotto, cited as archetypal fgures of moral and cultural authority. Socrates having been characterised as exasperatingly inconsistent, Giotto remains undiscussed, but seems to be regarded as a parallel case. Della Casa’s Galateo had already criticised his modesty in refusing the title ‘maestro’ in spite of being the outstanding artist of his era.82 Tasso implies a further query about the modesty (in a historical perspective) of his art, about his method of ‘feigning’ and its relevance to modern court culture. Just as the uncompromisingly down-to-earth penetration of Socratic argument would be out of place at the court, so would the veracious simplicity of Giotto’s art. To represent himself in the most convincing fashion, the courtier must adopt a more evolved and refned style of depiction. While Castiglione’s account of how the courtier will portray his virtues implies

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an analogy with Raphael, Tasso’s assumes even more advanced and complex pictorial resources, the most recent developments in what Vasari calls the maniera moderna,83 the art of the mid-sixteenth century. It appears that courtly styles of self-representation must change with the times. Although Tasso arranges at the beginning of his dialogue to salute Castiglione as the creator of a timeless ideal, the discussion proceeds to make clear that, over half a century later, the modern courtier must look to a more hard-headed model of behaviour. And while Tasso imitates Castiglione’s metaphor of the courtier as a self-composed work of art, the elements of the composition are rearranged with artful expediency, and its execution involves concealment as much as display. Sprezzatura is revised into l’infnger, ‘feigning’, a word which retains something of the concept of creative simulation, with reference to the idea of the courtier as a fne social artefact, while it inevitably gravitates towards the concept of dissimulation, of aiming to pretend and deceive. Uncomfortably, it is a word which highlights the process of the courtier’s formation instead of the perfected outcome which is demonstrated by sprezzatura. And by revising the terminology to emphasise that the consummate courtier is more properly thought of as a fction rather than a representation, it undermines the conceptual prestige of sprezzatura, exposing it as no more than dissimulation dissimulated.

De Refuge: The Art of Courtly Dissimulation In identifying the courtier’s most essential virtue, Tasso’s Stranger had momentarily hesitated between two possibilities. Even as he opts for prudence, he pauses over an alternative: knowledge of nature (la cognizione de le cose naturali84). But this, he decides, is a philosopher’s virtue, and the corresponding virtue proper to the ‘cavaliere’ is prudence. While acknowledging that one may fnd philosophers at court, he assumes that the ‘cavaliere’ is the typical courtier, and the dialogue continues with prudence as its focus. What Tasso seems to mean by ‘la cognizione de le cose naturali’ is knowledge of the natural order in all its variety and vicissitudes, which means, in the environment of the court, a knowledge of the vagaries of human nature and the dangers it may pose to the courtier’s survival and success. While he proceeds to study such problems under the rubric of prudence, there are other writers on the court who choose to approach them from the alternative point of view, more as matters of ‘natural philosophy’ than applied ethics. This approach is exemplifed by Eustache de Refuge in his Traité de la Cour,85 the title of which suggests its scientifc intentions. In the posthumous editions which followed on the frst two anonymous printings of 1616 and 1617 (the year in which De Refuge died) it is set out as a manual of instruction, with the chapters divided into numbered sub-sections, each with its own heading. At frst sight the discussion has a character familiar from ones general impression of the ‘courtesy’ literature, consisting of descriptive and prescriptive analysis of élite social relations in a moralising mode. However, through this emerge less familiar discourses: a sociology of the court and a great deal of psychology derived from treatises on the theory of the passions, both designed to help the courtier understand his habitat and his fellow inhabitants so as to advance his own interests. De Refuge argues that, notwithstanding the unpredictable workings of Fortune, there is an ‘art’ which the courtier can exercise in shaping his conduct to achieve self-advancement.86 But whereas Tasso, for all his latter-day realism, had followed Castiglione in analogising ‘the art of the courtier’ (l’artifcio del

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cortigiano) to the work of a skilled painter who is his own subject, De Refuge uses the term ‘art’ in a more basic, Aristotelian sense, to denote the habitual and systematic application of reason to a particular aspect of human activity. His courtier is not a virtuoso artifcer of the self who transcends his own exertions in the attainment of sprezzatura, but a methodical careerist who aims to be as agreeable as possible and who, when he has to, dissimulates. The art of the courtier has been redefned in terms other than Castiglione’s idea of it as a kind of pictorial representation where the artist and picture are the same. We have observed how John Reynolds, the English translator of De Refuge, attempts to pull his work back into a tradition stemming from Castiglione, by interpolating prefatory compliments which revive the image of the courtier as a skilfully executed picture: ‘he hath delineated him in so lively a shape, and depainted him in such rich Colours….’88 The phraseology italianises De Refuge’s protagonist, using the distinction between disegno and colorito in terms which recall Malpiglio’s praise of the courtier depicted by Tasso’s Stranger.89 These manoeuvres to give the book a more acceptable orientation actually begin on the title page, which doubles as an engraved frontispiece. Under the heraldic badge of Charles, Prince of Wales, the title appears within a frame of seven compartments containing personifcations of virtues. Across the top are the theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity, and on either side, the cardinal virtues, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance and Prudence. Even before the prompting to accept De Refuge as the offspring of Castiglione comes the assumption that the literary tradition which Castiglione initiates is primarily concerned with moral instruction. A view of The Courtier as a kind of educational manual had been gaining ground in Italy in the later sixteenth century, and had especially found favour in England.90 It is this face which Reynolds imposes on his translated Treatise of the Court, characterising it in terms of an orthodox Christian morality which is irrelevant to its author’s concerns, and quite far from those of Castiglione, his suggested exemplar. The discrepancy is pointed up by one seeming correspondence between the moral framework fgured in the frontispiece and De Refuge’s actual scheme of instruction. Chapter XVI of Book One contains a number of sections headed ‘The causes of Hope’, ‘How Experience fortifes Hope’ and ‘The force and power of Hope’. These would appear to tie in with the image of Hope on the title page. However the overall heading of the chapter is ‘Of the order of the Passions as they engender one another’, and the discussion deals with hope not as a virtue but as a passion or ‘motion of the will’ which can be harnessed to help advance the courtier’s interests.91 While the frontispiece promises moral theology, the text comes up instead with applied psychology, and the mismatch could scarcely be more striking. De Refuge’s courtier is instructed in psychology so as to achieve self-discipline and self-advancement. The chapter preceding the analysis of hope is headed ‘The use of the knowledge of the motions of our Will’, which, we are told, 87

chiefy consists in seeking out the meanes, either to incite and stirre them up in others, or to moderate them not only in others, but also in our selves: or else by pleasing and humouring them (par la complaisance), to dispose and accommodate our selves to others, if it bee requisite and necessary to follow them. consiste principalement à rechercher les moyens, ou de les reveiller en autruy, ou de les moderer non seulement en autruy, mais aussi en nous: ou bien par

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Ones fellow courtiers, in other words, are to be expertly played upon: either agitated, or pacifed, or beguiled into sympathy, depending on the needs of the situation. The most important skill, De Refuge goes on to argue, is that of moderation, and, frst and foremost, the capacity to moderate our passions. This seems at frst sight to connect with the fgure of Temperance on the title page, and to sound like the language of Aristotelian moral philosophy, a language which is in fact used elsewhere in the treatise. Earlier, for example, there is an analysis of ‘Affabilitie’, the quality which produces the third of the effects mentioned above of eliciting sympathy through agreeable behaviour. This, we are warned, is not merely a matter of making oneself signally pleasant, but must include a measure of gravity appropriate to one’s rank: as true harmony is ingendered of the sweet and judicious Diapason of these two discordant tones, pleasant, and grave: so affabilitie must be intermixed with sweetnes, and severitie, (or statlinesse:) or to say truer, to be a Medium twixt these two extreames…. comme l’harmonie naist d’une douce & judicieuse correspondance de ton aigu & du grave: ainsi l’Affabilité doit estre meslee de la douceur & de la severité, ou pour mieux dire, doit estre comme un moyen entre ces deux extremitez….93 Just as the analogy with music may recall The Courtier, the concept of the mean echoes the Nicomachean Ethics, without however turning out to be a sign of any thoroughgoing allegiance to Aristotle’s idea of virtue. When De Refuge comes to talk about moderating one’s passions, he makes clear that the aim is to become capable of controlling other people’s, ‘to become masters of other men’s affections’ (estre maistres des affections d’autruy). Moral equilibrium is instrumental, enabling us ‘to compasse our designes’ (venir à bout de nostre dessein).94 These designs are identifed in the plainest terms: ‘We throw our selves on the Court, to obtaine Wealth, Honour, Authoritie and Power….’ (Vous vous jettez à la Cour pour avoir richesses, honneurs, authorité ou puissance).95 The practice of moderation which leads to these goals is fostered by three main factors: upbringing, experience, and what De Refuge calls ‘Discourse of Reason’ or ‘Philosophie’, the application of rational thought to ‘the true estimation of things’ (le discours de la raison…embrasse…la vraye estimation des choses).96 The last factor is the most crucial although, seeing little evidence of it among courtiers, he urgently recommends this habit of mind and its principal beneft: I willingly counsel every one…that he seeke and procure this moderation (which is the most requisite perfection of a Courtier) and having found it to make use thereof, and never to neglect it. Co[n]seillerois-je volontiers à chascun…pour acquerir ceste moderation (qui est la partie la plus necessaire en la Cour & le principal fondement de l’Accortise) de ne les negliger.97

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The courtier’s ‘perfection’ is no longer what it was for Castiglione, but has changed both its nature and its function. It has become a covert discipline without being at the same time a manifest distinction, a means and not an end. The question of means and ends for Castiglione’s perfect courtier is of course far from straightforward. His ultimate goal is to attract the prince’s favour and by giving truthful counsel to encourage virtuous government, but this is only proposed in the fourth and fnal book of The Courtier, after the frst two books have created an almost indelible impression that the courtier’s cultivation of all his talents to form an ideal identity is an end in itself. To accept this impression however is to raise a further uncertainty: can the courtier be content to pursue an aestheticised ideal of individuality as if he were an early modern version of the nineteenth-century dandy, to attain a social superiority not necessarily related to political infuence? The answer is no, and the explanation lies enfolded in the concept of sprezzatura. The exercise of sprezzatura, by defnition imperceptible to the spectator whom it is designed to subdue into a state of disarmed admiration, ensures that accomplishments which have been worked at and refned are displayed without any sense of deliberation or effort, and made to appear entirely innate. In this way, a social group composed of such paragons can represent its superiority as part of the natural order and, whatever its relationship to a princely ruler, exercise on its own account considerable political sway. The unique quality which Castiglione prescribes as ‘the most requisite perfection of a Courtier’ is no less instrumental than De Refuge’s preferred ‘moderation’, and no less directed towards ‘Honour, Authoritie and Power…’. Just as sprezzatura reappears in Tasso’s Malpiglio transmogrifed into l’infnger, it survives, further mutated, in De Refuge’s treatise. By this stage it has split into two kindred qualities, which he identifes as dissimulation and dexterity. When Reynolds the translator arrives at the chapter dealing with the frst of these qualities, ‘De la retenue ou dissimulation’,98 he squeamishly chooses to render the French ‘dissimulation’ thereafter as ‘Reservedness’, which does however point up its particular usage in this context. By ‘dissimulation’, De Refuge means the concealment of the courtier’s ‘thoughts, desires and designes’ while he is seeking to fathom those of his fellows. This process is compared to a card game in which we must conceal our hand from our opponents; and gaming, in which we may ‘imploy and exercise all the motions of our Will’, is identifed as a good teacher of dissimulation.99 By ‘dexterité’ De Refuge means a felicitous agility of mind and temperament in all social transactions, by analogy with the skill of being ‘quicke, proper, and gracefull’ (legers, propres & habiles) in one’s physical movements and responsive to challenging circumstances.100 This is an aptitude by meanes whereof we converse and treate fortunately, making that which is diffcult, easie and pleasant, and representing and receiving it without gall or bitternesse par le moyen de laquelle l’on les traicte heureusement, rendant ce qui est diffcile, facile & plaisant, & les recevant & representant sans fel & sans amertume.101 He makes a comparison with a faultless tennis player, who not only receives the ball squarely but returns it in such a way as to advantage himself further. In practice, dissimulation and dexterity are closely allied, if not symbiotic: dexterity may involve

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dissimulation, undetected feints and unexpected changes of pace in an exchange, in order to operate at the peak of effciency.102 In De Refuge’s latter-day view of the court, articulated a century after Castiglione’s, this is what sprezzatura has come to: the symbiosis of dissimulation and dexterity. To recognise this evolutionary turn is to witness, perhaps regretfully, an implicit unmasking of the original consummate courtier’s most expert attainment, now retrospectively revealed as an artful dodge posited on deception. It is true that in his classic exposition of sprezzatura in The Courtier Count Lodovico frankly explains that it relies on concealment, but this is declared without any hint of moral unease. His courtier is simply practising the innocent disingenuousness of art, which must by defnition conceal itself to achieve the ultimate perfection of ‘grace’ and ‘nonchalant spontaneity’ (la grazia…di quella sprezzata disinvoltura).103 In De Refuge’s updated, more analytical schedule of instructions, this contrived unity of effect is undone. The solo performance of spontaneous grace devolves – to use De Refuge’s analogies – into a kind of private drama with a double structure, the main plot featuring the expert tennis player and the subplot the wily gamester, both of whom are the same fgure in different guises. Duplicity knows itself for what it is, while keeping the knowledge from its audience of competitors. By undergoing this dispersal of its mystique, the idea of sprezzatura is both demeaned and given a more historically advanced form. Castiglione’s courtier was an ideal fgure, constructed through a series of dialogues which, with their atmosphere of contentious but benign sociability, represent an almost ideal court. Urbino as nostalgically reimagined by Castiglione bears little relation to, say, the court of his great admirer Charles V as described by Antonio de Guevara104 in terms probably typical of early modern courts, where careerism and competitiveness are the rule, and frustration or failure endemic dangers. It is the latter type of milieu which De Refuge’s courtier inhabits, contending for survival and success in an environment of competitive struggle. In such a context, to perfect a masterly self-representation can scarcely be thought a defnitive achievement; there is a constant need to manoeuvre, negotiate, contend and press forward – activities which can never be left off. To recall De Refuge’s advice in Reynolds’s slightly overwrought translation, the courtier’s ‘perfection’ must be in continual ‘use’;105 and the logical awkwardness of regarding perfection as so frankly instrumental suggests the dynamic agitation of this environment. Inconceivable in his original form in this new world, Castiglione’s courtier has been demystifed and even debased, but at the same time set in motion – not a motion which aspires to some ideal, whether the celestial rapture of Platonic love described by Pietro Bembo in Book Four, or the fawless social grace of sprezzatura, but a still stylish turbulence on a more uneven feld of operations.

Faret: How to Impersonate Oneself Honestly The attempt by John Reynolds to bring the worldly realism of De Refuge closer to Castiglione’s ideal courtier of the previous century, by sometimes cushioning the sharpness of the text in translation and adding a preface which gives it a misleadingly benign character, results in obvious incoherence. Less than a generation afterwards, Nicolas Faret’s ‘precepts’ for the would-be courtier in L’Honneste Homme Ou, L’Art De Plaire A La Court (1630) attempt a similar synthesis which has been thought through from the start.106 He suggests how implausible this may appear at frst sight

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in his introduction entitled, presumably in allusive tribute to Castiglione, ‘Tableau de la cour’,107 which confesses how attractive and destructive at the same time the court can be. It has a compelling fascination because of ‘the natural desire which all men have to acquire honours and riches’, a ‘pleasing affiction’ (agreable maladie) to which most people succumb in the milieu of the court. Faret describes the court, in smilingly resigned terms, as ‘cette belle confusion’, a paradox which implies the strangeness of transplanting the perfect courtier into modern reality. For Castiglione, the beauty of court life came from super-eminent poise and self-possession displayed in social intercourse animated by benign contentiousness and regulated by ritual. Faret by contrast suggests the allure of agitation and turbulence, even while launching a programme of disciplines aimed at mastery of such an environment. The language of paradox, succinctly positioned, announces both the ambivalence and the confdence of his enterprise. Faret’s treatise, while it carries on the spirit of De Refuge in signifcant ways, borrows extensively from Castiglione, copying or adapting passages from The Courtier in what appears to be an unashamed fashion. In the latter stages of his advice he is prepared to recommend dissimulation and pretence per se as necessary instruments, but much earlier; when detailing his courtier’s defnitive qualities, he emphasises the supposedly self-transcending form of dissimulation which is sprezzatura. His account of it sticks very close to the wording of Castiglione, as does the surrounding explanatory context; so he describes how to maintain ‘grace’: I conceive that we may say, that as this grace whereof we speake, extends generally to all his actions, and hath an interest in his least discourses; there is in like sort a general rule, which serves, if not to get it, yet never to stray from it. That is, to fy, as from a mortall precipice, that wretched and importune affectation, which doth blemish and defle the goodliest things, and to use a certaine negligence, which doth hide all Art, and doth witnesse that hee doth not any thing but as it were without thought, and without any kind of constraint. il me semble qu’on peut bien dire que comme cette grace dont nous parlons, s’estend universellement sur toutes les actions, et se mesle jusques dans les moindres discours; il y a de mesme une reigle generale qui sert sinon à l’acquerir, du moins à ne s’en esloigner jamais. C’est de fuyr comme un precipice mortel cette malheureuse et importune Affectation, qui ternit et souïlle les plus belles choses, et d’user par tout d’une certaine negligence qui cache l’artifce, et tesmoigne que l’on ne fait rien que comme sans y penser, et sans aucune sorte de peine.108 Like many other passages derived from Castiglione, this cannot be considered a literary imitatio, as the relationship between dependence and independence seems determined not by art but by expediency. The one obviously individual touch bears this out. Castiglione’s Count Lodovico compares affectation to a ‘rough and dangerous reef’ which must be avoided;109 Faret substitutes the image of a ‘deadly precipice’, which looks like a factitious change aimed at disguise. His dealings with a distinguished predecessor give no evidence of the stylish nonchalance which is the very point of this reiterated mandate. Not only the description of sprezzatura but various key motifs from Castiglione’s entire discussion of it are reproduced by Faret. As we have seen, he adopts the initial

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problem of how the courtier is to display the supreme quality of ‘grace’ in all his behaviour, and, like Castiglione, makes ‘négligence’ (a knowingly clever translation of sprezzatura) the answer for those who are not innately endowed with grace but can take as models those who are. He also repeats topics which follow the description of sprezzatura: the example of orators who sway their audience by concealing their rhetorical skill, the warning that even stylish perfection can be overdone, and the illustration of painters in antiquity criticised for pictures which were too fnished. All this material is retailed in exactly the same sequence as it appears in The Courtier.110 Even so, Faret is rather more than an unabashed compiler whose ‘thefts’ (larcins), as he himself calls them,111 cast an ironic light on the ‘honnête homme’ of his title. His rewriting of The Courtier, and especially of its account of sprezzatura, bears the marks of opportunism while at the same time effecting signifcant revisions. Three of these relate to the passage just quoted: his description of grace, his translation of the term sprezzatura itself, and his displacement of the image of the reef which fgures the perils of affectation. Castiglione’s main account of grace, and how a modest endowment of it can be cultivated and enhanced, is set out in an exchange between Cesare Gonzaga and Count Lodovico.112 Faret follows this in a passage designated ‘De la grace naturelle’, after he has detailed all the qualities and accomplishments needed for success at court: but the fulnesse of these things consists in a certaine Naturall Grace, which in all his exercises, yea, in his least actions, must shine like a little Beam of Divinity, which is seen in all those are borne to please the world. This point is so high, as it is above the precepts of Art, and cannot be well taught. mais le comble de ces choses consiste en une certaine grace naturelle, qui en tous ces exercices, et jusques à ses moindres actions doit reluire comme un petit rayon de Divinité, qui se voit en tous ceux qui sont nays pour plaire dans le monde. Ce point est si haut, qu’il est au dessus des preceptes de l’Art, et ne se sçauroit bonnement enseigner….113 These words, and the context in which they occur, form a very selective rendering of two long paragraphs in The Courtier assigned to different speakers. As with all his adaptations of Castiglione, Faret abolishes the differentiations of dialogue and condenses the text, making it amenable to his own economically designed manual of advice. But in this case he contrives a bolder than usual compression of the original. The ray of divine light which fgures the manifestation of grace is an image taken from the fnal pages of The Courtier and transposed to this much earlier context from the middle of Book One. The image occurs in Bembo’s discussion of Platonic love, where he defnes beauty as ‘an infux of the divine goodness’, which ‘illumines with wonderful splendour and grace the object in which it shines, like a sunbeam….’114 Faret has interpolated this motif of celestial illumination into his description of grace, scaling it down appropriately: he compares grace to ‘a little ray of divinity’. This is a deft and knowing touch, as if, instead of merely copying his predecessor, he is engaged in a selfconscious game of adaptation. Certainly by characterising grace in terms of beauty he recognises the latent kinship between two principal concepts lodged at opposite ends of The Courtier, showing himself an attentive reader of Castiglione’s text and the way in which it canvasses ideas of transcendence and perfection which shift between the social domain (in Book One) and the theological realm of Christian neo-Platonic

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aesthetics (in Book Four). It may be that Faret has a more inward understanding of sprezzatura than his copycat account of it suggests. He is clearly aware of its provenance as a concept, and gives a signal to that effect. Instead of trying to fnd a word in French that will correspond to the novelty of sprezzatura, he omits Castiglione’s point that only a new word can express the idea and translates it as ‘négligence’. The two extant French translations of The Courtier from the sixteenth century had used the word ‘nonchalance’.115 Faret ignores their example and goes back to the Ciceronian source of the concept in the paradox ‘negligentia diligens’, used, as we have seen, to describe a rhetorical style of calculated informality.116 He also restores another aspect of the same classical context. Cicero had compared the orator’s diligent negligence to a woman who, doing without cosmetics, wore her clothes and dressed her hair in a carefully unstudied fashion, and so made herself more attractive by eschewing artifcial aids to beauty. Castiglione picked up and elaborated this analogy, but placed it a long way after his own account of careful negligence or sprezzatura.117 Faret in his turn takes up this passage from Castiglione, adapts it, and puts it back in its original place, next to the description of ‘négligence’.118 These revisions again suggest an alert scrutiny of Castiglione’s text, a reading around or behind it to bring its classical antecedents more into the foreground. By rewriting sprezzatura to this discreet extent Faret goes some way towards reclassicising it. In both these cases – the confation of grace with beauty, and the rediscovery of negligentia under the guise of sprezzatura – Faret repeats and adapts The Courtier in a typically selective fashion, using a small range of signifcant passages which are ftted in to his more schematic arguments. The condensations and rearrangements involved in this process result in a terser, neater version of Castiglione which, from one point of view (looking back to the animated richness of the original) may seem tight-lipped and meagre, but from another (looking forward into the Grand Siècle) methodical, economical and pointed. Although L’Honneste-Homme is printed in continuous prose, marginal cues divide it into carefully articulated sections and sub-sections, which anticipate the structural discipline of seventeenth-century French classical drama, and remind us that Faret was to be a founder member of the Académie Française. His modernising revisions of The Courtier are typifed by his fnal words on the matter of grace, affectation and ‘négligence’. Castiglione had summed up here by having Count Lodovico contrast affectation with ‘quella sprezzata disinvoltura’ shown by the courtiers of Urbino.119 Faret makes a very modest paraphrase of this ringing conclusion, referring to ‘that pleasing simplicity, which should shine in all the actions both of body and minde’ (‘ceste agreeable simplicité qui doit reluire en toutes les actions du Corps et de l'Esprit’).120 By taking what for Castiglione is a crucial and complex concept (sprezzata disinvoltura) and simplifying it into the notion of simplicity, Faret’s text mimics its own process of revision, its classicising refnement of The Courtier and courtiership for a new social and literary culture. Sprezzatura is transformed into ‘négligence’ with a discreet ingenuity which meets the criteria of either quality. The fnal revision to be noted in Faret’s rewriting of Castiglione’s account of sprezzatura concerns the image used to represent its opposite, affectation. Count Lodovico warns his hearers ‘to steer away from affectation at all costs, as if it were a rough and dangerous reef….’ Faret paraphrases this as a warning to his readers to ‘fee as from a deadly precipice….’121 The substituted image seems to tempt fate, by provoking a plunge into mixed metaphor, as he goes straight on to say that this precipice-like affectation ‘tarnishes and soils the fnest things’.122 However this incoherence is not

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merely the faux pas of a faltering plagiarist. It turns out that, far from suppressing Castiglione’s image of the reef to disguise his own derivativeness, Faret has promoted it from a minor role in this passage into the forefront of his own treatise. Metaphors of navigation and shipwreck recur throughout his descriptions of the court and its perils. Great courts, he warns, are like great seas, in a state of continual turbulence. An aspiring courtier who is a good man in every respect may embark with a favourable wind and still come to grief. The merest traces of pride or conceit may become like dangerous reefs on which ones good reputation will be wrecked. On frst arrival as an unknown novice, the most useful thing is to pause and study the condition of this tempestuous sea before launching oneself upon it, laying ones plans in advance ‘with prudence and dexterity’.123 The cautionary language of Tasso and De Refuge, warily supplementing Castiglione’s idealism, attaches to this pervasive representation of the courtier’s career as a sea voyage fraught with danger. The image of shipwreck is a momentary implication in The Courtier: by actualising and magnifying it into a recurring motif, Faret seems to suggest that Castiglione’s brief resort to it was a sign of naïveté, as if affectation were the paramount threat to the courtier’s well-being. Instead, Faret makes clear, the greatest perils are elsewhere, issuing either from the courtier’s own mind or from his hostile environment: imprudence, anxiety and despair; ill luck, humiliation and disgrace.124 To fgure these manifold dangers he reaches beyond the metaphor of the voyage into further areas. So the image of the precipice is also used to describe a mania for gambling; or again, the confict between fear and hope in the courtier’s heart is ‘a private Hell’ (un secret Enfer), while the blameless lives of those ‘honnêtes gens’ who stand out in the crowd resemble the ‘innocent joys of Paradise’.125 Unsafe as it would be to make any detailed reference to the contemporary court of Louis XIII, and irrelevant to evoke like Castiglione an idealised community of the past, Faret works out a conventional but expressive moral geography which supplies the various features of his courtly landscape. Within this variety, the dominant feature remains the tumultuous sea on which the ‘honnête homme’ and his like must voyage without respite: How wonderfull is it to see them amidst so many rocks whereof the Court is full, sometimes to avoid one, sometimes to resist the force of some contrary wind, sometimes to yield to the violence of the waves, and in those places where as others dare not approach for feare of perishing, to passe freely without any shew to have been in the least danger? Their conduct is accompanied with so much judgment…. Quelle merveille est-ce de les voir parmy tant d’escueils, don’t la Cour est toute pleine, maintenant esquiver le choc de quelque pointe de roche, tantost resister à la force de quelque vent directement contraire, tantost ceder à la violence des vagues ; et aux mesmes lieux que d’autres n’oseroient aborder sans y perir, eux passer librement, et sans qu’on s’apperçoive qu’ils ayent couru le moindre danger du monde ? Leur conduite est accompagnée de tant de prudence….126 Once again the metaphor of the reef crops up, displaced from Castiglione’s account of affectation into an animated scene of rocks, winds and waves. The effect of rewriting here is the precise opposite of that noticed previously. Just as the assimilation of the concept of beauty to that of grace marked a compression of Castiglione’s text, the displacement and elaboration of the reef image involves, as it were, a stretching

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and spreading of the text to release fresh meaning. Here, this meaning issues from an implied judgment that affectation, the problem of personal inauthenticity, is by no means the defnitive danger of court life, beset as that is by much graver perils. Through these, Faret rejoices, the ‘honnête homme’ can navigate unharmed, guided by his exceptional prudence, and without betraying the least sign of having undergone such trials. The travails of virtue are transcended in a consummate moral composure. With this revised recognition of the dangers faced by the courtier comes a new version of sprezzatura, which has been raised to a higher power, advanced from the social to the ethical plane. This new sprezzatura is generated by a contradiction, between the worthiness of Faret’s desiderated courtier, the ‘honnête homme’, and the unworthiness of the courtly milieu. The ‘honnête homme’, Faret argues, has a duty to serve his country, and must therefore make his way at court, the centre of political power.127 It is undeniable that the court is a place almost devoid of virtue: Every man sees, that the corruption is in a manner generall, and that the good which is done, is without any designe, and the evill as it were by profession. Chacun voit que la corruption y est presque generale, et que le bien ne s’y fait que sans dessein, et le mal comme par profession.128 Nonetheless, in this morally perverse setting, a good and wise man can maintain himself without sacrifcing his principles: In the meane time, mauger all these…diffculties, a wise man may in the middest of vices and corruptions, preserve his virtue pure and without blemish. Malgré toutes ces…diffcultez, le Sage peut au milieu des vices et de la corruption conserver sa vertu toute pure et sans tache.129 To pursue his virtuous ends he needs to acquire the ‘art’ which Faret’s book teaches, ‘l’art de plaire’, the art of making one’s behaviour agreeable to others. The means to achieve this are summarised in a section entitled ‘Maximes Generales de la Conversation’,130 where the term ‘conversation’ retains much of the meaning that it had for Guazzo, and signifes social intercourse in general, whether for serious business or for recreation. Faret’s initial advice is about self-control, and here he closely follows De Refuge: we must become masters of our own passions, our own ‘humours’ and ‘affections’, if we are to hold sway over those of other people, especially – he adds a new point – if we are to infuence the ‘honnêtes gens’ to be found at court. With an ‘esprit moderé’ one can respond fexibly to all circumstances, even to the extent of feigning (feindre) and dissimulating (desguiser) if the rules of good breeding are not compromised (si la generosité n’y est point offensée).131 Faret places a major emphasis on fexibility (souplesse), above all on being able to react to contrary turns of events with no sense of injury. He equates it with ‘complaisance’, the necessity to be always agreeable and obliging, which he says is ‘one of the sovereign precepts of our art’. It comes from a versatility of spirit, a readiness to adapt to every new encounter, and to make concessions, provided they are reasonable.132 Here he copies from De Refuge the example of Alcibiades, who changed to suit the various nations among whom he moved, and so was philosophical in Athens, austere in Sparta, ultra-masculine in

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Thrace, idle in Ionia and luxurious in Persia.133 Faret omits these latter implications of decline and highlights only the capacity to accommodate to different societies, adapting De Refuge’s anecdote about adaptability to his own purposes. This, like the other material which he takes from De Refuge, is made ‘complaisant’ to a partly altered argument.134 Notwithstanding these revisions – feigned behaviour must be compatible with good breeding, fexibility must be guided by reason, and so on – Faret fnds himself forced to admit that the ‘sovereign precept’ of ‘complaisance’ demands systematic pretence, for which a price must be paid. Dissimulation is a remorseless discipline and must always be carried out perfectly, or ones plans may be ruined. To deal with so many variegated personalities at odds with ones own is frustrating and exacts an emotional price: it is a diffcult thing, but in the end it will ingender waywardnesse, to counterfeit himselfe in this manner, and to torture himselfe so often. Il est bien diffcile qu’à la fn il n’engendre du chagrin à se contrefaire ainsi, et se donner si souvent la torture.135 The term which denotes the cause of complaint here is ambiguous. ‘Se contrefaire’ means to counterfeit oneself, to dissemble; ‘contrefaire’ on its own can mean to imitate, resemble or feign.136 All along, Faret has been expounding an ‘art’, a method of composing the self to face the world and act upon it, so as to achieve what one wants, to realise one’s objectives – one might say, to realise oneself – through feigning: the aim of the ‘art’ is a perfect and effective representation of the self. Yet it would appear, at least in this moment of protest and regret, that self-representation is nothing but self-misrepresentation. There is, Faret hastens to explain, a compensating relief from this torture: the company of other ‘honnêtes gens’.137 They are kindred spirits among whom one does not have to act oneself but can, so to say, be oneself. The welcome division between acting and being immediately raises problems. After all, these are the people over whom the ‘honnête homme’, after mastering his own passions, has been especially advised to exert psychological control, and in what sense they form a sympathetic fellowship for him is not clear. The more like-minded they are, the more individualistic and disingenuous they will be, and the less disposed to a relationship of candour. Faret overrides these problems in an ‘Eloge Des Honestes Gens’, where the generic conventions of the eulogy allow him to surmount unresolved diffculties with eloquent praise.138 It is here that he compares the innocence of their lives to ‘the joys of Paradise’, the pre-Fall state ‘of our First Parents’, and marvels at the undemonstrative moral certainty with which they navigate the turbulent ocean of the court. He goes on to praise their courtesy (courtoisie), their fnely articulated respect for other people which is (not least by etymological determinism) the defnitive social virtue of the courtier. Moreover, theirs is a special kind of courtesy: it is unstudied (sans estude). Their perfectly judged civility towards others of every rank is the more admirable because it is uncalculated and unforced (sans art et sans aucune contrainte).139 The latent implication is inescapable: they have studied the ‘art de plaire’ so well that it no longer appears an art but has become second nature, just like the unself-conscious moral composure which carries them through the perils of court life. The vexation of the divided self, the existential split which looked to be the bane of the ‘honnête homme’, has been transcended in new forms of sprezzatura.

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Faret’s relationship to this crucial concept, and to its inventor, remains unresolved. In the frst place, as we have seen, he essays an economical restatement of the idea of sprezzatura as Castiglione expounded it, graced with its ancestral name of ‘négligence’ from classical antiquity. Thereafter, considering the dangers and dilemmas of court life which Castiglione had left out of account, he comes round to a reinvention of sprezzatura in terms of his own concept of ‘honnêteté’: within this new perspective, consummate goodness and courtesy, effortlessly virtuous and fne conduct, become the distinguishing marks of the ‘honnêtes gens’, the happy few who are a kind of informal court within the court. Their distinction comes from nature, which is to say that they are masters of the art which Faret’s treatise teaches, although he never acknowledges this, or even implies it, and the reader, appropriately outfaced by such perfect composure, can only infer as much unassisted. In the freemasonry of this élite, the ‘honnête homme’ can fnd relief from the self-abnegating round of dissimulation which the practice of the ‘art de plaire’ imposes on him, communing with those others for whom there is no split between who one is and how one behaves, and who are like him and unlike him at the same time. This fantasy enacts a revealing perception about sprezzatura: insofar as it requires the perfect courtier to dissemble, it is both the cause and the solution of the problem which the ‘honnête homme’ fnds most irksome, the necessity of ‘counterfeiting himself’, of having to perform a social identity while increasingly aware that this goes against the grain. It is the cause in that it promotes a sense of the self divided between being and agency. It is the solution in that provides a process for healing this division, as artful conduct takes on the guise of naturalness. In trying to reinvent sprezzatura as a central feature of ‘honnêteté’, Faret exposes to view its inherent contradictoriness. As his work draws to a close, Faret reviews the course it has pursued, and makes a deliberate attempt to leave it in a state of nonchalant equilibrium, with a concluding air of sprezzatura which may recall that quality as described by Castiglione and also exemplify it as recharacterised by himself. He foreshadows this effect, before he begins to sum up, in his fnal piece of practical advice, which warns against displaying pride in one’s accomplishments. This is illustrated from two archetypal courtly activities, dancing and tilting: no matter how good one is at either, one must not seek opportunities to show off, or betray any hint of self-satisfaction. Especially with chivalric exercises, one must never appear conscious of superiority, but treat success with an ‘appealing coolness’ (agreable froideur).140 The expression, not traceable to another writer, appears to be Faret’s own; it could equally be applied to the inscrutably fne conduct of his ‘honnêtes gens’, modifying as it does the idea of sprezzatura with an additional notion of reserve. And a literary version of this attitude seems to inform his conclusion, which lowers the temperature by disowning any consciousness of achievement. The conclusion offers an apologia for his treatise and a valedictory characterisation of himself as its author. He begins in a tone of self-deprecation, by describing himself as ‘the worst courtier in the world’ (le plus mauvais Courtisan de la terre).141 By the end, this extreme modesty has become ironic, as he deals with the question of his borrowings from other writers. He admits to having mixed his own views (meslé mes opinions) with those of other authors both ancient and modern, so thoroughly that he would now fnd it impossible to identify the different sources of his arguments.

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He refuses to be troubled on this score: he is so unconcerned to distinguish between invention and imitation in his work that I am ready to confesse, that the good things which they shall observe in this Discourse, are (if they please) mere thefts, that the indifferent have beene ill copied out of good originals; and that the bad, (if they shall fnde a greater number then of good) are all of mine owne growth, and of my invention. Je suis tout prest de confesser que les bonnes choses que l’on remarquera dans ce discours ne sont, si l’on veut, que purs larcins; Que les mediocres ont esté mal copiées sur de bons originaux; Et que les mauvaises, qui s’y trouveront en beaucoup plus grand nombre que les bonnes, sont toutes de mon creu et de mon invention.142 These are Faret’s last words and his literary signature, a stylish self-inscription which enunciates unpretentiousness with expert rhetorical skill. It appears to demonstrate sprezzatura or his own variant, ‘appealing coolness’, equally well. At the same time it cuts short the consideration of an unsolved puzzle. The author has anticipated an unease in the reader’s mind about how far his text relies on imitation, but brushes the question aside by claiming only the worst parts as his own. This is an evasion. Any puzzled reader would not be concerned about imitation of other writers’ work (that is, about creative adaptation available to be recognised) but about ‘thefts’ and ‘copies’, to use Faret’s own ironically provocative terms, about whether he has been not imitative but derivative. By cleverly fudging this issue, Faret, ‘the worst Courtier in the world’, has produced what amounts to a simulacrum of sprezzatura or coolness, an instance of that self-counterfeiting about which earlier he expressed such divided feelings. Faret’s rewriting of The Courtier deranges and condenses the text so as to render it effcient for a grimmer, more current, and perhaps more realistically portrayed historical situation. From his viewpoint, Castiglione’s not merely famous but revered book belongs in a twofold past: the decades of the mid-sixteenth century when, following its initial publication, it accrued international renown, and the early years of the same century, in which it is nostalgically set. Bringing it up to date necessitates shifting the social and political setting from the palace of a long-ago, idealised north Italian duchy to the centre of government of a great modern European power. Even so, Faret’s revision of the image of ‘the perfect courtier’ putatively undertaken by ‘the worst Courtier in the world’ is by no means the frst attempt to adapt or update Castiglione’s enterprise. Such attempts are typifed by Tasso in Il Malpiglio when he writes that The Courtier portrays a timeless ideal even though ‘courts change with the times’,143 putting the speakers of his dialogue to work through this contradiction, and to emerge with the idea that the modern courtier’s defnitive strategy is that of ‘feigning’, l’infngere, an ambiguous concept which makes a fragile substitute for the seemingly sturdy paradox which was sprezzatura. Whereas Della Casa had played a sophisticated game with the concept of sprezzatura, attesting to its fascination, and Guazzo had extended its applicability from courtiers to gentlemen in ‘civil’ society, stressing its wider social amenity, Tasso implicitly undermines it by choosing to emphasise the basic element of fction in the successful courtier’s identity, leaving the way open for Faret eventually to suggest that ‘l’art de plaire à la cour’ is the discipline of self-impersonation. While Castiglione’s book, having undergone over a hundred editions by 1600, continued to

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be reprinted into the next century, his idea of the courtier as a self-made and selfperfected work of art remained signally available for translation into élite portraiture of the early modern era. At the same time, in strands of the literary tradition which stemmed from his masterpiece, the ideal of the perfect courtier or, in more general terms, of a pre-eminent, self-cultivated social identity able to transcend its own strenuous formation, had been exposed as irretrievably questionable. 144

Notes 1 Cian, 147–8, II.VII; Bull, 114. The association between Stoic teaching on the relationship of virtues to each other and the component qualities of a work of art, especially a painting, is made by Cicero: De Offciis III.iii.12–15 in Cicero, De Offciis, ed. and trans. Walter Miller, London and Cambridge, MA, 1968, 280–83. 2 Bull, 55; Cian, 41–2, I.XIV.48–53. 3 Bull, 63, 64, 65; Cian, 56, I.XXI.37–9; 58, I.XXII.16–18; 59, I.XXIV.1–4. 4 Bull, 66, 67; Cian, 63–4, I.XXVI.18–32. 5 Bull, 66–7. 6 Cian, 62–3, I.XXVI.7–10. 7 Odes IV.ii.25–9 in Horace, The Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. C. E. Bennett, London and New York, 1919, 288–9. 8 Epistulae Morales LXXXIV.3.5 in Seneca, Epistulae Morales, ed. and trans. R. M. Gummere, 3 vols., London and New York, 1917–25, vol. 2, 276–9. Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson, New Haven and London, 1981, 6–7. 9 Orator ii.7 in Cicero, Brutus. Orator, ed. and trans. respectively G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell, London and Cambridge, MA, 1952, 310–11. 10 Ibid., xxiii.75–8, 360–3. 11 Ibid., xxiii.78–9, 362–5. 12 Cian, 101, I.XL.34; Bull, 86 (‘uncontrived simplicity’). 13 Cian, 64, I.XXVI.31–8; Bull, 67; De Oratore II.1–4 in Cicero, De Oratore. Books I–II, ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, London and Cambridge, MA, 1996, 196–203. 14 Historia Naturalis XXXV.xxxvi.80 in Pliny, Natural History. Volume IX. Libri XXXIII– XXXV., ed. and trans. H. Rackham, London and Cambridge, MA, 1952, 320–1; Cian, 68, I.XXVIII.15; Bull, 69. 15 See back chapter 1, p. 2. 16 Bull, 70; Cian, 69, I.XXVII.41–2. 17 Bull, 94; Cian, 116, I.XLVII.2–4. 18 Cian, 122, I.XLIX.4–5; Bull, 96. 19 Politics VIII.3 in Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge, 1988, 186–8. See back chapter I, p. 27 and note 115; see forward chapter 3, p. 92 and note 62. 20 Pliny (as note 14), XXXV.xxxvi.77, 316–19; XXXV.vii.19, 274–5. 21 Bull, 96; Cian, 122, I.XLIX.7. See back note 13. 22 Bull, 97; Cian, 123, I.XLIX.22-5. See forward chapter 3, p. 89 and note 52. 23 Bull, ibid.; Cian, ibid. 24 Aristotle (as note 19), VIII.3, 187–8. 25 Bull, 101; Cian, 130, I.LII.45–9. 26 Bull, 102; Cian, 131, I.LIII.21–7. 27 See back chapter I, p. 7 and note 21. 28 Robert Peterson, ‘Galateo of Manners and Behaviours’ (1576), con testo originale di fronte di Giovanni Della Casa, ed. Carmela Nocera Avila, Bari, 1997, 136–7. I have replaced Peterson’s clumsy rendering of Della Casa at this point with a literal translation. For a smoother version in modern English see Giovanni Della Casa, Galateo, trans. R. S. PineCoffn, Harmondsworth, 1958, 89. 29 Peterson/Galateo (as note 28), 138–9. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid.

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32 Ibid. 33 E.g. Pietro Bembo in Gli Asolani (1505), quoted by Claudio Milanini in his edition of the Galateo, Milan, 1986; Mario Equicola in Libro di natura d’amore (1526), excerpted in Paola Barocchi ed., Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols., Milan and Naples, 1971–77, II, 1615 and note 4. 34 Peterson/Galateo (as note 28), 138–9. 35 Republic V.479 a–f in Plato, The Republic, ed. and trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols., London and Cambridge, MA., 1956, I, 528–35. 36 Peterson/Galateo (as note 28), 142–3. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 142–5. Cf. Agostino Nifo, De Pulchro (1529), excerpted in Barocchi (as note 33), 1663f. 39 Bull, 65; Cian, 59–60, I.XXIV.1–6 40 Ibid. 41 Bull, 325–6 (translation modifed); Cian, 473, IV.LII.4–10 42 See back p. 45 and note 28. 43 See back chapter 1, p. 7 and note 21. 44 ‘Polykleitos of Argos’ in J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Greece 1400–31 B.C. Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965, 88–9. 45 Peterson/Galateo (as note 28), 150–3; and see back chapter 1, p. 9 and note 27; Peterson in his translation misses the motif of the house by reading ‘cose’ (things) instead of ‘case’ (houses), owing either to inattention or a misprint in his copy text. 46 See back chapter 1, p. 8. 47 See James S. Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo, Harmondsworth, 1970, 38, on Michelangelo’s pioneering conception of the Vitruvian body as organic and dynamic. 48 Galateo (as note 28), 165. 49 Ibid., 164. 50 Pindar, Olympian XIV for Asopichus of Orchomenus, in The Odes of Pindar, ed. and trans. Sir John Sandys, London and New York, 1927, 145–9. 51 George Pettie and Bartholomew Young, The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo: The First Three Books Translated by George Pettie, Anno 1581 and the Fourth by Barth. Young Anno 1586, intro. Sir Edmund Sullivan, 2 vols., London and New York, 1925, The Thirde Booke, II, 111–12. Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, ed. Amedeo Quondam, 2 vols., Modena, 1993, I, 261–2. 52 Pettie (as note 51), 27; Guazzo/Quondam (as note 51), I, 22. 53 Ibid. 54 Guazzo/Quondam (as note 51), II, 203. 55 Guazzo/Quondam (as note 51), I, 94. 56 See back p. 2 and note 10. 57 Helen Moore, ‘Pettie, George’, ODNB, vol. 43, 937–8. 58 Pettie (as note 51), I, 7–8. 59 Bull, 58; Cian, 47, I.XVII.31–43. 60 Pettie (as note 51), I, 8. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., I, 12. 63 Pettie’s translation of Guazzo frst published 1581. Malpiglio probably dates from 1585; see Carnes Lord and Dain A. Trafton ed. and trans., Tasso’s Dialogues. A Selection, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1982, 254, note 1. 64 Ibid., 154–5. 65 Ibid., 158–9, 162–3. 66 Ibid., 158–61. 67 Ibid., 178–9. 68 Ibid., 174–5. 69 Bull, 284; Cian, 412, IV.V. 70 See back chapter 1, p. 4. 71 Lord and Trafton (as note 63), 178–9. 72 Ibid., 180–1. See back chapter 1, p. 4 and note 12.

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79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106

107 108

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Ibid., 178–9. Ibid., 181. See back chapter 1, p. 4 and note 13. Ibid., 180, 181. See forward p. 59 and note 89. See his marginal cues in Il Libro Del Cortegiano Del Conte Baldessar Castiglione. Nuovamente Con Diligenza revista per M. Lodovico Dolce, Venice, 1556, e.g. 1. 3, 55, 105, 159, 178, 227, 327, 399. Some of such references (but by no means all) are picked out in Dolce’s index under the rubric ‘Imitatione di Cicerone’. Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 1560–1620, Leamington Spa, 1981, 38. Lord and Trafton (as note 63), 180–3. Ibid., 182–3. Peterson/Galateo (as note 28), 58–9. Vasari/Milanesi, IV, 11 (Proemio alla Parte Terza). Lord and Trafton (as note 63), 178–9. Anon., Traicté De La Cour, Paris, 1616 and 1617; thereafter published as Eustache de Refuge, Traicté De La Cour. Ou Instruction Des Courtisans, Paris, 1618, 1619 et seq. Quotations which follow come from the edition of 1619 (hereafter De Refuge 1619). For the frst edition and various reissues see M. Magendie, La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté, en France, au XVIIe siècle, de 1600 à 1660, 2 vols., Paris, 1925, 351f. A Treatise of the Court or Instructions for Courtiers….Written in French by…Denys de Refuges…Done into English by John Reynolds, London, 1622 (hereafter Reynolds). Ibid., 3–4. Lord and Trafton (as note 63), 180–1. Reynolds, (a) 1 verso; see back chapter 1, pp. 10–11. See back p. 56. Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier. The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, Cambridge, 1995, 43–4; Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. XIV, No. 1–2), Urbana, IL, 1929, 129. Reynolds, 53, 57–8; De Refuge 1619, 54, 57–9. Reynolds, 53–4; De Refuge 1619, 50–1. Reynolds, 10–11; De Refuge 1619, 9. Reynolds, 92; De Refuge 1619, 87–8. Reynolds, 106; De Refuge 1619, 101. Reynolds, 94–5; De Refuge 1619, 90–1. Reynolds, 95; De Refuge 1619, 91. De Refuge 1619, Chap. XXXV, 159f. Reynolds, 167f., 171–2. Reynolds, 172–3; De Refuge 1619, 164. Reynolds, 173; De Refuge 1619, 164–5. Reynolds, 174–5; De Refuge, 166–7. Bull, 68; Cian, 64, I.XXVI.45–7. A looking Glasse for the Court. Composed in the Castilian Tongue by the Lorde Anthony of Guevara….Drawne into French by Anthony Alaygre. And Out of the French Tongue into Englishe by Sir Frances Briant One of the Privy Chamber, in the Raygne of K. Henry the Eyght, London, 1575. Reynolds, 95; see back p. 60 and note 97. L’Honneste-Homme Ou, L’Art De Plaire A La Court. Par Le Sieur Faret, Paris, 1630. A modern reprint (of the edition of 1636) is Nicolas Faret, L’Honnête Homme ou l’art de plaire à la cour, ed. M. Magendie, Paris, 1925, facsimile Geneva, 1970 (hereafter Faret/ Magendie). Edward Grimestone made a prompt English version in The Honest Man: Or the Art to Please in Court. Written in French by Sieur Faret. Translated into English by E. G., London, 1632 (hereafter Faret/Grimestone). Faret/Magendie, 7. Faret/Grimestone, 52–4. Faret/Magendie, 20. For the Castiglione passage in English see back p. 40.

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109 110 111 112 113 114

Bull, 67; Cian, 63, I.XXVI.20–21. Faret/Magendie, 20–1. Bull, 67–9; Cian, 64, I.XXVI.31–8, 67–8, I.XXVIII.12–21. Faret/Magendie, 104. Bull, 64–5; Cian, 59–60, I.XXIII–XXIV. Faret/Grimestone, 49–50; Faret/Magendie, 18–19. Bull, 325–6; Cian, 473, IV.LII.4–10. The confation of these two motifs of light and grace, from Books Four and One respectively of The Courtier, is found earlier in Galateo; see back p. 45 and note 28, p. 49 and note 42. Faret/Magendie, 19 and note 2, 20. Jacques Coulin trans., Le premier livre Du Courtisan Du Comte Baltazar de Castillon Reduit de langue Ytalique en Francoys, Paris, 1540, 32 verso; Le Parfaict Courtisan Du Comte Baltasar Castillonois….De la traduction de Gabriel Chapuis, Lyon, 1580, 65. Bartholomew Clerke in his Latin translation, frst published in 1571, also restores the concept of negligence, rendering ‘usar in ogni cosa una certa sprezzatura’ as ‘negligenter et …dissolute proferatur’ (things should be carried forward negligently and loosely); see Balthasaris Castilionis Comitis, de Curiali sive Aulico, Libri Quatuor, Interprete Bartholomaeo Clerke Angl…, Frankfurt, 1606, 49. Burke (as note 90), 67–72, discusses this matter in detail. See back p. 42. Bull, 86; Cian, 100–1, I.XL.28–35. Faret/Magendie), 21–2. Cian, 64, I.XXVI.46; Bull, 68. Faret/Grimestone, 62; Faret/Magendie, 22. See forward chapter 3, p. 105, on Quintilian’s notion of simplicity of utterance as taken up by Franciscus Junius. Bull, 67; Cian, 63, I.XXVI.20–21; Faret/Magendie (as note 106), 20. Ibid. Ibid., 8, 11, 15, 39. E.g. ibid., 9, 11, 18, 35. Ibid., 18, 35, 77. Faret/Grimestone, 291–2; Faret/Magendie, 77–8. Ibid., 39. Faret/Grimestone, 109–10; Faret/Magendie, 33. Faret/Grimestone, 116; Faret/Magendie, 36. Ibid., 68–77. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 70. Reynolds (as note 85), 124. For other borrowings from De Refuge see Faret/Magendie, 71 note 1, 72 note 2. Faret/Grimestone, 268; Faret/Magendie, 72. Randall Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, London, 1611, facsimile intro. William S. Woods, Columbia, SC, 1968, fol. Viij recto: ‘Contrefaire. To counterfeit, imitate, resemble, faign….Se contrefaire. To dissemble, or disguise himselfe, to seeme other then he is.’ Faret/Magendie, 72. Ibid., 77f. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 100–1. Ibid., 102. Faret/Grimestone, 142; Faret/Magendie, 104. See back p. 54 and note 64. Burke (as note 90), 158–62.

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Elyot: Visual Art, Knowledge and Virtue Treatises on gentility and nobility written during the century or so after The Courtier was published, reprinted, translated, read and reread place little if any emphasis on the practice of sprezzatura, that is, to put the point more generally, on the formation of élite identity; their concern to defne a true, genuine or authentic nobleman is not, on the face of it, compatible with the idea of social preeminence achieved through artful calculation. One of the speakers in Nennio belittles Fabricio (the ‘fabricator’ of his own high status), who has attained honour through success in a learned profession, because his nobility is ‘not natural, but artifciall’, not stemming from noble birth: It is a matter manifest which can in no sort be denied, that dame Nature doth both in dignitie and perfection, far surpasse industrious art, seeing it doth onely in the operation thereof force it selfe, to imitate nature. Now this sort of nobilitie, which thou wouldst have in thy selfe, is not naturall, but artifciall, because as I have saide unto thee, thou art not noble by nature, but ennobled by the exercise of learning, and so consequentlie noble by Art. Chiara cosa è, nè in modo alcuno negare mi si può, che la maestra natura d’essai sopravanza in dignità & in perfettione la ingeniosa arte come che questa in ogni sua operatione quella immitare si forzi. Ma cotesta tua nobiltade, la quale vuoi che sia teco, non naturale, ma artiftiosa è: percioche di natura nobile non sei, come gia t’ho detto, ma dallo essercitio delle lettere nobilitato sei, & conseguentemente nobile per arte.1 This general position is not as strong as it sounds: it fies in the face of what Aristotle says about how art imitates and may perfect nature,2 and it is certainly contested in the ensuing argument, but it indicates a climate of debate inhospitable to the notion of social superiority made to seem ‘natural’ by expert contrivance. Nobility or claims to nobility may be enhanced by sprezzatura, as some writers suggest, but it can scarcely be allowed any defnitive signifcance. It follows that Castiglione’s idea of the courtier’s social identity as a work of art, a kind of idealised self-portrayal which involves him in the dual role of artist and subject, cannot be associated with any model of ‘true’ nobility. Although writers may suggest (however inadvertently) that noble status is enacted through various forms of self-representation, their overt discussions repeatedly contend that it can only be authenticated by traditional guarantees: lineage, outstanding virtue, princely creation.

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An art of constructing and exhibiting the self, of composing ones fnest qualities with the skill of a painter composing a picture, does not align itself easily with these guarantees, but may seem rather to undermine or displace them. The rapprochement which Castiglione promotes between the fgure of the courtier and that of the painter (even if his preferred exemplar is the ‘princely’ Raphael who depicts idealised human types3) poses a challenge to the terms in which questions about nobility continue to be debated during the sixteenth century and beyond. To suggest that the establishment and maintenance of superior social status is an art like, say, the art of the painter, is to raise an awkward question, to do with the unsettled position of the artist in early modern European society. While Castiglione has Count Lodovico argue for the nobility of painting and recommend that the perfect courtier should learn something of how to draw and paint, later writers on nobility as a social concept usually treat this topic in a more perfunctory way. Annibale Romei, for example, lists painting and architecture among the liberal arts, in contrast to his old-fashioned English contemporary John Ferne, who does not mention painting, and still sees architecture as a ‘Mechanicall science’;4 but there is no suggestion that skill in painting might enhance the honour of someone who already possesses gentle or noble status. Laurence Humphrey in The Nobles, reviewing the pastimes of ‘the auncyents’ as detailed by Plato and Aristotle, includes painting as ‘a gentlemanlye recreation’, probably recalling Aristotle’s recommendation of graphice in the Politics;5 but he mentions it only in passing, and it seems irrelevant to the regime of humanistic and theological studies which he lays down for his ideal Protestant élite. The kinship between the courtier and the painter expounded by Castiglione appears to be a topic left alone by the literature on nobility. Two English writers, a century apart, form an exception: Thomas Elyot and Henry Peacham. Elyot’s The Boke Named The Governour, in its account of how a young member of the governing class should be educated, includes an entire chapter on painting and sculpture, headed ‘That it is commendable in a gentilman to paint and kerve exactly, if nature therto doth induce hym’.6 As this title indicates, Elyot is not saying, like Count Lodovico in The Courtier, that all gentlemen should develop graphic and pictorial skills, but that those with an innate talent for painting or sculpture should be given instruction in those arts alongside their more conventional studies; and he stresses that this should be done ‘in vacant tymes from other more serious lernynge….’7 He rebuts the objection that these are ignoble, mechanical pursuits by citing a series of Roman emperors who practised them with success. This was becoming a routine move in defences of the nobility of painting, the precedent having been set in Alberti’s De pictura. Elyot does not cite the same emperors as Alberti, whose roll-call begins with Nero, but mentions only good or at least passable rulers, including Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.8 His list is historically shakier but more respectable: it gives strong rhetorical support to his initial contention, which brings together what most of his readers might think of as very disparate social categories, ‘excellent princes’ and ‘noble artifcers’. In effect, most of Elyot’s argument leaves sculpture aside and concentrates on what he calls ‘portraiture’, that is, graphic and pictorial representation, and its usefulness to a ruler or his auxiliary ‘governors’.9 In warfare (as Castiglione’s Count Lodovico had already argued) it allows one to take a view of the situation in all its aspects: to map the terrain, plan encampments, and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of fortifcations. In peacetime it helps in taking a similar overview of the

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realm and its needs: where to site defence works, or enterprises that will increase national prosperity.10 It serves not only the state but also the individual gentleman, enabling him, for example, to become, if occasion requires, his own architect (although Elyot does not use this term): he can articulate his personal conception of the house which he wants, refning it through drafting and redrafting, so that builders cannot fall short of realising his intentions, nor run into unforeseen expense. All these instances characterise ‘portraiture’ as a practical instrument which enables the ‘governor’ to exercise his sway, a means of cognition, communication and control. At the same time, Elyot emphasises the pleasure to be gained from exercising a skill in ‘portraiture’. Here his chief argument is that this skill adds a dimension to the intelligence (‘witte’) of its adepts by enlarging their imaginative faculty (‘fantasie’), and disposing them in their studies to supplement the processes of reading and listening with that of visualisation.11 He gives the example of ‘fable or historie’, fctional or factual narratives with an instructive purpose, to which the student who can envisage their content will be more keenly receptive. In effect he will derive pleasure from every kind of knowledge susceptible of ‘portraiture’. Underlying this proposition is a general principle, which Elyot states as follows: And where the lively spirite, and that which is called the grace of the thyng, is perfectly expressed, that thinge more persuadeth and stereth the beholder, and soner istructeth hym, than the declaration in writynge or speakynge doth the reder or hearer.12 In support he cites the disciplines of geometry, geography and astronomy, where diagrams, maps and charts are much speedier aids to learning than books or lectures. These examples ft suitably into his argument but also come as an anti-climax after the fervent, almost poetic terms in which he urges the superiority of visual demonstration over verbal articulation. When he evokes ‘the lively spirite, and that which is called the grace of the thyng’ he anticipates the kind of language which was to become familiar in sixteenth-century Italian art theory, language used to describe the power of painting or pittura, a concept close to his own ‘portraiture’; and the phrase ‘that which is called’ suggests he could be drawing on an unfamiliar, specialised discourse.13 As he dwells on the pleasure to be had from ‘portraiture’, the question of its utility seems to be momentarily sidelined, and his advocacy of pictorial art and the pictorial imagination takes on a life of its own. This ambivalent relationship between utility and pleasure is also evident in two descriptive passages which he adds to back up his argument, and which actually focus on the topic of sculpture. The frst is an ekphrasis, a rhetorical evocation of a work of art. It springs from further advice to the student who has been trained in ‘portraiture’. If he happens to read ‘any noble and excellent historie’ recounting worthy acts which will stimulate him ‘to the imitation of virtue’, he can set out to draw or paint the narrative as vividly as possible and so make it more real to himself, intensifying its effect as a moral exemplum.14 There is a play here on the concept of ‘imitation’: by imitating virtue in one sense – representing pictorially what has already been represented textually – the student will be moved to imitate it in a consequent sense, that is, emulate it in his own life. Elyot illustrates his point about the power of visual mimesis with an ambitious description of (what he assumes to have been) a bronze relief by Lysippus,

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showing Alexander the Great at the climax of a lion hunt, vanquishing the quarry, while his lieutenants participate with diverse degrees of forwardness. In fact no work of precisely this kind by Lysippus is recorded. Elyot has worked up his ekphrasis from a story in the Life of Alexander by Quintus Curtius.15 By making a literary imitation of the pictorializing procedure which he urges his student to follow he boosts his claim that visual and verbal representation can effectively reinforce each other in the process of educating a governing class. The second passage follows on without a break, and relates a story about the celebrated statue of Olympian Zeus by Phidias. Questioned about the model for his superlative conception of deity, the sculptor replied that he had followed a description of the god in Homer. Elyot translates the relevant lines of the Iliad into English, warning that he will not match the force of the original, and summarises their context. He stresses the wonder provoked by the statue in antiquity, while making the point that ‘Jupiter’ (as he calls Zeus) was a pagan god, ‘honoured by the gentiles’, and that the work’s achievement was to represent the idea of divine supremacy in a polytheistic world view; but the overriding tone is again one of rhetorical fervour.16 The ostensible theme of educating a political and administrative élite by having them imitate representations of virtue seems to have been left behind, while another, underlying theme has come to the fore. By evoking Alexander’s heroic courage and Jupiter’s awesome authority, Elyot in effect celebrates a further kind of force or power, the power of representation, and the potentiality of texts, of verbal representations, to stimulate an extension of that power into the even more commanding mode of the visual. An argument for the moral effcacy of ‘portraiture’, now understood in its broadest sense to include classical sculpture and images of the pagan gods, modulates into an admiration for its aesthetic potency and emotional force. At this point, as if sensing he has gone too far, Elyot curbs his rhetorical fervour, and repeats his previous assurance that he has no intention of turning ‘a prince or noble mannes sonne’ into a workaday painter or sculptor, besmirched by the materials of his craft. Acquiring the skills of ‘portraiture’ is simply a pursuit for those who have the aptitude and the inclination, and one to be followed in private, as a relief from ‘serious studies’, just as it was by the artistically talented emperors cited earlier in the argument. Nonetheless, he adds, the resulting knowledge, and especially the ability to exercise the faculty of judgement through the eyes, has a distinct usefulness: it equips one not only to assess the work of artists, but also to reinforce ones control over the world of practical affairs (referring back to the previous examples of military and peacetime planning and domestic architecture).17 Here, in a peroration, the tone of enthusiasm returns, as Elyot translates a dictum of Lactantius in support of his general argument. The original text reads: ‘Ex scientia enim virtus, ex virtute summum bonum nascitur’ which Elyot renders ‘Of conninge commeth virtue, and of virtue perfect felicite is onely ingendred’, so that in his English, ‘scientia’ becomes ‘conninge’, that is, skilled profciency in an art, as if Lactantius is praising technical forms of knowledge instead of knowledge in general.18 The concept of ‘virtus’ is given an equally convenient bias, as Elyot goes on to cite the Roman practice of recognising those deceased emperors who had ‘excelled in virtuous example’ to be gods.19 This starry-eyed account of imperial deifcation was cut from The Governour after its frst publication in 1531, along with the entire concluding passage which took Roman rulers as exemplary. For the

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edition of 1546, for example, as the English Reformation was about to go into a higher gear, humanist applause for the ‘divinity’ of pagan virtue, mixed up with the notion of paying divine honours to a ruler, may well have seemed unacceptable. However Elyot’s overriding theme remained manifest: the compelling force of visual representation, and its desirable partnership with the power to be exercised by a ‘governor’.

Peacham: Picturing Complete Gentility The same association is made a century later by Henry Peacham, although in a cultural situation which has considerably changed. Elyot, in the early years of English Renaissance humanism, when classical writings were to the fore and classical works of art almost unknown at frst hand, had evoked the compelling effect of antique ‘portraiture’ with reference to literary texts supplemented by rhetorical enhancement. Peacham, in the chapter ‘Of Antiquities’ which he added to The Compleat Gentleman in 1634, can point to several major collections of antique sculpture recently assembled in contemporary London, which had begun to make the ‘portraiture’ of the ancients seem familiar rather than far off and legendary. As a result, Elyot’s emphasis on the superhuman courage of Alexander or the awesome supremacy of Jupiter is replaced – appropriately for the peaceful 1630s – by a more relaxed view of the ‘old…Emperors, Captaines and Senators’ whose images populated St James’s Palace or Arundel House as aesthetic and moral exemplars of an approachable kind.20 Peacham writes of ‘the pleasure of seeing, and conversing with these old Heroes’ so as ‘to grow familiar with them, and so practice their acquaintance’, as if they could be considered ones social equals in a fellowship of what Guazzo had called ‘civil conversation’.21 At the same time, by taking for granted that only a privileged minority would have access to these statues, and by recommending his ‘compleat gentleman’ to use this access to study them closely, he makes a connexion similar to Elyot’s between the attractive effect of visual representation and the enjoyment and exercise of élite status. The connexion had been programmatically set out, through both precept and example, in the engraved title page (Figure 3.1) originally used for the frst edition of Peacham’s treatise in 1622, and reproduced for the reissue of 1627 and the revised edition of 1634.22 While this bears the name of the engraver Francis Delaram, it must certainly have been designed by Peacham, as it sums up in pictorial form the argument of the book, and consequently demonstrates the importance which he claims for pictorial art in the education of the ‘noble gentleman’, to use the formula in which he amalgamates the two strata of the governing class. The design is dominated by two allegorical fgures of ‘Nobilitas’ and ‘Scientia’, who derive their appearance and attributes largely from Ripa’s Iconologia. Ripa gives three versions of an image to personify Nobiltà, and Peacham makes a composite of all of them. The most salient image, illustrated in the accompanying woodcut (Figure 3.2), is a ‘donna in habito grave’ (woman soberly dressed) who holds a spear in her right hand and a statuette of Minerva in her left, to signify the outstanding intellectual or military virtues (Ripa’s terms are ‘scienze’ and ‘armi’, with ‘scienze’ coming frst) by which nobility is acquired, and which are both under the aegis of the martially attired goddess of wisdom.23 Another of the three fgures described carries a crown of gold and one of silver, symbolising the good qualities of the soul and the body which comprise a

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Figure 3.1 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, London, 1622, title-page, engraved Francis Delaram. Copyright The British Library Board. G.16576.

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Figure 3.2 Nobiltà from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1611. Photo: Warburg Institute.

noble lineage.24 The remaining image provides the matrix on which Peacham disposes these attributes: A woman richly dressed in a toga, with a star on her head and a sceptre in her hand. Among the Romans such a long robe was not allowed to be worn by those not of noble birth. The star on the head and the sceptre show that the function of a noble mind is frst to attach to itself spiritual splendours, signifed by the star, and then bodily advantages, signifed by the sceptre, and that Nobility issues from the virtue of a bright and shining soul, and is readily maintained by means of earthly riches. Donna togata riccam[ente] co[n] una stella in capo, & co[n] un scettro in mano. La veste lunga presso à Romani non era lecito portarsi da ignobili. La stella in capo posta, & lo scettro in mano, mostrano che è attione d’animo nobile prima inclinare a gli splendori dell’animo, signifcati per la stella, poi à commodi del corpo, signifcati nello scettro, & che la Nobiltà nasce dalla virtù di un animo chiaro, & splendente, & si conserva facilmente per mezzo delle richezze mondane.25 Peacham’s fgure is ‘richly robed’ in a long embroidered surcoat fringed with ermine. The star on her head has become attached to one of the two crowns, and the sceptre in her right hand (corresponding to the spear of the sister image) is paraphrased as the Earl Marshal’s staff, complimenting the Earl of Arundel, to whose son William

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Howard The Compleat Gentleman is dedicated. Continuing in this vein of allusive compliment, she wears the Lesser George, the medal of the Order of the Garter to which Arundel belonged, and holds in her left hand (paraphrasing the statuette of Minerva) the armorial shield of the Howard family, surmounted by the other crown, which in its ambiguously fudged resemblance to a ducal coronet hints at the family claim to the dukedom of Norfolk.26 By cleverly assimilating symbolic motifs from Ripa to recognisable marks of Howard preeminence, Peacham suggests that Lord Arundel, as titular head of the English peerage, is also the paragon of nobility itself. This manoeuvre attenuates the force of Ripa’s representations of Nobiltà as ideally comprising ‘scienze’ and ‘armi’, and combining bodily attributes with those of the mind or soul, by collapsing such distinctions into a concept of lineage; but at the same time Peacham redresses the balance with his personifcation of ‘Scientia’. This fgure, which is of paramount importance to the overall thesis of his book, is derived from Ripa’s personifcations of Verità and Dottrina, Truth and Learning, which Peacham had already incorporated (Figure 3.3) into his Minerva Britanna, a collection of ‘Emblemes and Impresa’s’ published ten years previously.27 Truth is described by Ripa as follows: A very beautiful naked woman who with her right hand holds on high a Sun, which she regards admiringly, and with the other hand an open book and a palm branch, and under her right foot is a globe of the world.

Figure 3.3 Doctrina from Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna, London, 1612. Copyright The British Library Board. C.38.f.28, p.26.

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Una bellissima donna ignuda, tiene nella destra mano alto il Sole, il quale rimira, & con l’altra un libro aperto, con un ramo di palma, & sotto al destro piede, il globo del mondo.28 Nudity signifes the inherent simplicity of Truth, and the sun her affnity to enlightenment (amica della luce); the open book shows where true knowledge is to be found. For the palm branch, which denotes the victorious force of Truth, Peacham substitutes a branch of laurel, to mark his emphasis on the arts of poetry, music and painting; and his fgure stands not on the terrestrial globe (to signify the supremacy of Truth) but on a square block, symbolising the stability of wisdom.29 Her open and inviting gaze is adapted from Ripa’s image of Dottrina (Figure 3.4), who also displays a sun as a symbol of enlightenment, and from the same image come the falling droplets in the background, to signify that, just as young plants are softened by the dew, receptive young minds are willingly enriched by learning.30 In addition, the actual pose of Peacham’s fgure is derived from Ripa’s image of Chiarezza or Brightness (Figure 3.5), a nude female who also holds up a sun. She fgures ‘the renown which man acquires for either nobility or virtue’,31 which in the contemporary Italian context recalls the title of ‘Clarissimo’ used by the Venetian patriciate. In associating the two ideas of social and moral prestige, Chiarezza forms an appropriate matrix for the qualities from which Peacham’s ‘Scientia’ is compounded. Between these carefully composed personifcations of ‘Nobilitas’ and ‘Scientia’ is engraved the title of Peacham’s book: ‘The Compleat Gentleman Fashioning him absolute in the most necessary & commendable Qualities concerning Minde or Bodie that

Figure 3.4 Dottrina from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1611. Photo: Warburg Institute.

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Figure 3.5 Chiarezza from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1611. Photo: Warburg Institute.

may be required in a Noble Gentlema[n]’. The complementary attributes of body and mind which are defnitive in Ripa’s images of Nobiltà, but which in Peacham’s adaptation are overlaid by traditional marks of English aristocracy, make their reappearance elsewhere on this title page, which is also a frontispiece, as crucial concepts. As one scans the entire range of imagery displayed here, it becomes evident that for Peacham, ‘Nobilitas’. is not the inclusive category which it is for Ripa, but only one half of the gentleman’s ‘compleat’ identity. The other half must be supplied by ‘Scientia’. This theme is articulated verbally in the dedication which comes soon after the frontispiece, addressed in Latin to Peacham’s pupil William Howard. The actual formula of dedication, which makes fulsome reference to his ‘most illustrious and truly most honourable’ father, is followed by a poetic postscript, warning the young man that noble birth has no necessary value on its own: Ingenio, genio, dum vis Generosus haberi, Ingenua haec discas, ingeniose puer. Stemma nihil, cultis animum nisi moribus ornes, Et studeas studiis nobilitare genus.32 As long as you wish to be held noble in mind and spirit, may you learn these liberal tenets [i.e. these lessons for the gentleman], O talented youth. Lineage is nothing, unless you adorn your mind by cultivating virtuous practices, and study through your studies to bring renown to your race. Persistently clever playing on the concepts ‘genus’ (stock) and ‘genius’ (spirit) and their cognates seems an effort to drive home the message in an engagingly admonitory

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Figure 3.6 Sea mark emblem from Roemer Visscher, Sinnepoppen, Amsterdam, 1614. Copyright The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Douce V 15, p.32.

way. On the frontispiece it had already been summed up for the general reader in a more reserved and intriguing style. The topmost place in the design is occupied by an impresa, a coded vignette of élite symbolism. At its centre is the image of a seamark or signal buoy – a motif used in a recent Dutch emblem book (Figure 3.6) – in the midst of waves and rocks, with the motto ‘Dum indico voluor’ (While I proclaim I am turned about).33 The frst notion fgures the gentleman as a conspicuous point of reference to whom others can look to be guided, and safely set their bearings; the second suggests his ‘compleat’ versatility, his ability to present any side of his perfected character to the world. By combining ‘Scientia’ with ‘Nobilitas’, he becomes a cynosure to his fellows. By adapting Ripa’s descriptions of Nobiltà as a compound concept into a fgure which simply denotes noble status and lineage, Peacham has ranged ‘Nobilitas’ with the ‘Qualities…concerning Bodie’ which constitute only one side of the ‘Compleat Gentleman’. This is confrmed by the symbolic motifs piled above her on the arch-like structure which articulates the space of the frontispiece, motifs all associated with warfare. Above them in turn a putto displays a pennant with the inscription ‘Extra’. The corresponding pennant, inscribed ‘Intus’, fies above an assemblage of objects associated with learning and the arts, piled above the fgure of ‘Scientia’. The distinction comes originally from the Rhetoric of Aristotle, who details which ‘internal’ and ‘external’ advantages constitute human happiness,34 although his analysis is adapted in accord with Ripa’s imagery. In terms of Ripa’s schemes – arms/letters, body/mind, physical/spiritual – Peacham’s representation of ‘Nobilitas’ is obviously aligned with

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the notion of the physical, with traditional ideas of warrior élites and aristocratic bloodlines. The limitations of a nobility conceived in these terms is indicated by the fgure’s pose, which is static, frontal, and close to symmetrical, with details such as her ermine-fringed surcoat, centre-parted hairstyle, and chivalric medal suggesting that the attitude depicted is meant to evoke the medieval past, venerable but outdated. By comparison, ‘Scientia’, with her eye-catching nudity and the contrapposto of her pose adapted from the late mannerist style of Ripa’s illustration of Chiarezza, strikes an attitude manifestly more expressive and more modern, especially as on her plinth she could be seen as a pastiche of classical sculpture by a contemporary artist, bringing the past up to date. While ‘Nobilitas’ stands arrested and immobile in front of what appears to be a broad, blank pilaster, ‘Scientia’ is in motion, and the corresponding pilaster behind her opens out into a pictorial feld, where the vivifying dew of learning is depicted falling from the sky. She represents the dynamic principle needed to make Peacham’s gentleman ‘compleat’: without it, noble lineage will resemble a mere effgy of archaic honour.35 Not many years before, Cleland had spelt out a similar argument about the need for a motive force to animate the gentleman’s otherwise inert attributes. We may recall his warning about the study of ethics: I adde unto the Theoricke of your studie a particular practise of good manners [i.e. virtuous conduct]; without the which al that you can learne, seems to be no better then a fair and beautiful Image without life and motion.36 Cleland makes the familiar Aristotelian point that the knowledge of moral philosophy is insuffcient unless it is acted upon in daily life. Peacham actualises the fgure of the motionless image, in a version of the argument which translates it into visual form and enlarges its scope to embrace the concept of the gentleman’s ‘compleat’ identity. While the symbolic objects clustered above ‘Nobilitas’ simply connote military prowess, representing an established tradition about the origins of nobility in a turbulent historical past, those associated with ‘Scientia’ are manifold, and invite detailed interpretation. Most prominent are three books inscribed with authors’ names: ‘Thucid[ydes]’ and ‘Tacitus’ side by side, with ‘Plutarch’ resting symmetrically above the two of them. Peacham’s readers would recognise the most admired historians of Greece and Rome, surmounted and conjoined by the comparative biographer of the ‘noble Greeks and Romans’.37 The gentleman could make an instructive and impartial study of the classical world in the historians, especially its legacy of statecraft, while taking the ‘noble’ subjects of Plutarch as his exemplars ‘for Morality and rules of well living’.38 The original symbolism here would have been enhanced in the 1634 edition, with its added discussion of Greek and Roman statues, described by Peacham as living witnesses of classical history: For next men and manners, there is nothing fairely more delightfull, nothing worthier observation, than these Copies, and memorials of men and matters of elder times; whose lively presence is able to perswade a man, that he now seeth two thousand yeeres agoe.39 Above the Plutarch volume is a pair of compasses, next to a ruler and a set square. These are the three items held by Ripa’s personifcation of Misura or Measure (Figure 3.7):

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Figure 3.7 Misura from Cesare Ripa, Della Novissima Iconologia, Padua, 1624–25 (previous edition 1618). Photo: Warburg Institute.

his text explains that she carries geometrical instruments because mensuration originated from geometrical techniques.40 Peacham evidently shows them here to represent geometry (on which he has an entire chapter) in conjunction with the adjacent image of a globe, neatly measured out, signifying cosmography (which also has a chapter to itself). At the same time, the way in which the compasses are poised above the volume of Plutarch, forming an apex to the symmetrical stack of exemplary authors, indicates that the implicit concept of Misura is also to be understood in moral terms; the gentleman must learn how to gauge the precise worth of those ‘men…of elder times’, the protagonists of classical history and biography, upon whom he may choose to model himself. Altogether, the geometrical instruments, given their close relationship to the classical texts, while illustrating the need for mathematical knowledge, ask to be read fguratively, as metaphors of measure, proportion and rectitude in human behaviour. As such, they recall Della Casa’s idea of a ‘regolo’ from the classical past (and one of the instruments is a regolo, a ruler), a perfect model of social conduct based on the canonically perfect male form realised both in sculpture and in writing by Polycleitus. The subtitle of The Compleat Gentleman, by claiming that the author will be ‘Fashioning him absolute in the most necessary…Qualities’, offers to carry out the same kind of project, to make or represent a paradigm of gentility, a model of the ‘Noble Gentleman’, to quote Peacham’s inclusive category. Given that Peacham only adds his discussion of antique sculpture to the revised edition of 1634 and views it in terms of history and iconography rather than technique, his

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preferred medium of ‘fashioning’ is pictorial art, which in the frst edition and thereafter has a long chapter to itself, where he confesses he has always been ‘addicted to the practice’ of painting. He recommends it as part of a liberal education, on the authority of Aristotle, who had included mousike and graphice among ‘the generous [i.e. noble] Practices of youth in a well-governed Common-Wealth’:41 hence the appearance of a wind instrument and a painter’s palette and brushes in the cluster of objects above the fgure of ‘Scientia’. The palette and brushes are to one side of the central group of classical texts and geometrical instruments which symbolise the measured emulation of antique virtue, although the palette and the ruler incline towards each other as if they have some sort of kinship. This is revealed in Peacham’s chapter on painting, where he instructs the novice that ‘proportion is the principall and chiefe thing you are frst to learne’, which begins with drawing geometrical fgures and works up to mastering the system of proportions formulated by ‘that Prince of Painters and Graund-master Albert Durer’, both in his actual depictions of the human form (exemplifed by his prints) and in his well known treatise.42 The perfect proportioning of the human body in accord with a canonical model is the apex of pictorial representation, like the proportioning of the mind and character in accord with the defnitive example of ‘the noble Greeks and Romans’. Unlike Della Casa, Peacham (who appears to take Dϋrer as his ‘Chiarissimo’ or Polycleitus) does not make such a parallel explicit in his text, but it is fgured in the visual argument of his frontispiece, where Misura is seen as integral to the ‘fashioning’ involved in both pictorial mimesis and moral self-formation. Peacham does imply as much in the text, when he relates that ‘at thirteene and fourteene yeeres of age’ he could draw ‘the Mappe of any Towne according to Geometricall proportion, as I did of Cambridge when I was of Trinity Colledge, and a Junior Sophister’;43 here we see his graphic talent developing alongside the intellectual endowments which would lead towards the Master of Arts degree entitling him to gentry status. But the value of pictorial ‘fashioning’ has already been demonstrated by the frontispiece alone, which, prior to the lengthy discourse of the text, uses a carefully designed programme of imagery to portray the ‘Compleat Gentleman’ in his ideal character. At the summit of the design, the impresa occupies a special place. Peacham will be arguing that one useful outcome of learning to paint is to ‘furnish your conceipts & devices of Emblems…and the like with bodies [i.e. visual motifs] at your pleasure, without being beholden to some…Artist’, that is, to be able to execute oneself those pictorial enigmas composed of image and motto which during the previous century had become markers of élite individuality. In this context, the impresa which surmounts and sums up the frontispiece could be seen as an abstract self-portrait of ‘The Compleat Gentleman’ (the title inscribed directly beneath it), representing him with the appropriate combination of display and reserve, of outwardness and inwardness, which is characteristic both of his superior position and of the impresa’s special mode of signifcation. Here, under the banners ‘Extra’ and ‘Intus’, Peacham’s favoured pictorial mode and the subject to which he devotes his work are at one.

Peacham: ‘Scientia’ and Pictorial Art When he comes to discussing painting and allied matters in his text, Peacham addresses many of the same topics as Elyot had before him, almost a century ago; and much of what he says is condensed from his earlier specialised treatise, The Art of Drawing, frst published in 1606.44 In the second, enlarged edition of 1612, with the variant titles

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of Graphice and The Gentleman’s Exercise, the title-page bears the motto In Genium peccare nefas (It is unlawful to wrong ones own talent), echoing Elyot’s argument that if a well born youth shows an aptitude for the visual arts, he should be trained to develop it. Peacham, however, goes further than Elyot in urging that graphice, as part of Aristotle’s educational programme for free citizens, should be taught to all members of the gentry class along with their conventional humanistic studies.45 When The Compleat Gentleman frst appeared in 1622, Peacham made cross-references to the 1612 revision of The Art of Drawing, calling it ‘my booke, entituled the Gentlemans Exercise’,46 as if he meant the two treatises to be taken as complementary; and it seems no accident that in 1634, when the augmented edition of The Compleat Gentleman came out, the other book was also published again, under the title referred to in 1622, opportunely reinforcing the chapter on ‘Drawing, Limning, and Painting’ in the more general treatise and extending its potential scope.47 Like Elyot, and every other writer on painting from Alberti onwards, Peacham is at pains to include it among the liberal arts by citing socially exalted practitioners. Instead of the usual list of Roman emperors however, he gives the argument a modern context by picking out European rulers of the modern era: Francis I, Marguerite of Navarre (whose poetic gifts are also praised), and Carlo Emanuele of Savoy.48 This leads him on to ‘the excellency of many Nobles and Gentlemen of our owne nation herein’, and he singles out Nathaniel Bacon, as ‘not inferior in my judgment to our skilfullest Masters’. Modern criticism has endorsed Peacham’s ‘judgment’, on which he does not elaborate; he is more concerned to point out that Bacon’s father is the premier baronet of England, and to expatiate on the various qualities of his ‘right noble and ancient family’.49 By associating painterly talent with lineage rather than just one élite individual, Peacham is able to suggest that it can be inherent in gentility, rather than a felicitously incidental occurrence. Again like Elyot, Peacham is keen to point out how useful it is for the gentleman, either in peace or war, to articulate and record information in graphic or pictorial form. At the end of his chapter ‘Of Cosmography’ he recommends the practice of drawing copies of maps and learning to make watercolour sketches of any locality or terrain, ‘for the practice of the hand doth speedily instruct the mind, and strongly confrme the memory beyond any thing else….’50 This argument is fully rehearsed as the later chapter ‘Of Drawing, Limning, and Painting’ gets under way. With Aristotle’s inclusive term graphice, and ‘The manifold use of painting or Limning’, Peacham considers their benefts to the gentleman in two characteristic roles, as a military offcer or a traveller.51 In warfare, graphice helps him to design fortifcations, make battle plans, map the scene of operations, and work out marches through diffcult country. In peacetime travel abroad, undertaken to enhance his experience and education, it serves to make a lasting record of everything that is unusual and remarkable: countryside, sea coast, agricultural produce, fora and fauna, populations and all aspects of their culture; and with all this, it can make a faraway friend or lover present, through a portrait.52 The order in which Peacham deals with these matters is signifcant. Instead of starting with historical examples to demonstrate the nobility of painting, as Elyot had been anxious to do, he begins by citing Aristotle, who had specifed graphice as a basic educational discipline, and then follows him in pointing out useful skills acquired from its study. But where Aristotle had been brief, Peacham becomes very voluble, launching straight into a long passage of rhetorical advocacy designed to excite and compel the

90 Nobility and the Art of Painting reader’s attention. This is how he describes the benefts of graphice for the gentleman traveller: It bringeth home with us from the farthest part of the world in our bosomes, whatsoever is rare and worthy the observance, as the general Mappe of the Country, the Rivers, Harbours, Havens, Promontories, &c. within the Landscap, of faire Hils, Fruitfull Valleys: the forms and colours of all Fruits, severall beauties of their Flowers; of medicinable Simples never before seene or heard of: the orient Colours, and lively Pictures of their Birds, the shape of their Beasts, Fishes, Wormes, Flyes, &c. It presents our eyes with the Complexion, Manner, and their Attyre. It shewes us the Rites of their Religion, their Houses, their Weapons, and manner of Warre.53 The abundance of vivid descriptive detail creates a particular effect, which is indicated by the occurrence of the word ‘Landscap’. This was a new term in the vocabulary of pictorial art, recently introduced into English from Dutch. Peacham had explained it in The Art of Drawing.54 By using it here he signals the tendency of his overall design: the passage is a verbal panorama, mimicking the pictorial notes and records which Peacham’s ideal traveller might eagerly put together, and arousing a desire for depiction. The word ‘Landscap’ is not the only novel feature of this description. The young gentry addressed here in their role as travellers would usually be going to similar places as they might do in their previously designated role as soldiers. In this period most serving English offcers were to be found in the European theatre of war, fghting for the Protestant cause. Likewise, gentleman travellers, even in a time before the Grand Tour had acquired its set pattern, were usually bound for familiar European destinations: the Low Countries, France, Switzerland, the German lands, and Italy. These were not places where ‘medicinable Simples never before seene’ would be found, or unrecorded forms of religious ritual be encountered. It becomes apparent that when Peacham evokes ‘the farthest part of the world’ he means it. The hypothetical ‘Landscap’ described turns out to be that of the New World: the exotic fora, fauna and social cultures which he itemises recall the illustrated records of travellers to the Americas, diffused in books and manuscripts since the previous century. Peacham magnifes the value of graphice by offering the gentleman who practises it the prospect of being an adventurer into new worlds of knowledge. He concludes his panoramic praise of graphice as a means of exploration and discovery with a traditional religious argument in favour of visual representation: And since it is onely the imitation of the surface of Nature, by it as in a booke of golden and rare-limmed Letters, the chiefe end of it, wee reade a continuall Lecture of the Wisedome of the Almightie Creator, by beholding even in the feather of the Peacocke a Miracle, as Aristotle saith.55 Here the early Church’s defence of religious imagery as the bible of the illiterate is adapted and transposed into a modern Protestant culture. In Peacham’s view, the gentleman traveller engaged in observation and depiction is continually refreshing his knowledge of the divinely created beauty of the natural world. The venerable pedigree of this argument is suggested in its analogy between topographical painting and a precious illuminated manuscript, and its new application is confrmed by alluding

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in the same breath to Aristotle and the Book of Job (‘Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks?’), placing it in the context of a modern Christian humanism.56 Peacham recommends looking and depicting as a more vivid and immediate form of reading and writing, through which a Protestant élite may apprehend God’s wisdom and benefcence manifest in the beauty of creation. In place of the religious images, once the biblia pauperum, dismissed by the Reformation, the imaging of the natural order through pictorial art is hailed as a new biblia nobilium. By urging the practical value of graphice for the soldier and the traveller, Peacham is addressing his ‘compleat gentleman’ in the two complementary roles which are symbolically represented on his title page: the traditional role of the well born warrior and the newer role of the well educated devotee of ‘Scientia’. It is the second of these roles which receives the greater share of his attention, that of the traveller who adventures after fresh knowledge. To place this fgure in the foreground is to intensify his complimentary focus on the Howard family. As we have seen,57 Peacham dedicates his book to William Howard, praises his great-grandfather Norfolk and his father Arundel, and shows the personifcation of ‘Nobilitas’ bearing the Howard coat of arms and the staff of his father’s offce as Earl Marshal. Arundel had of course been a traveller of the most serious kind, dedicated to the study of Italian Renaissance culture and to the acquisition of works of art, especially paintings and drawings. By proposing as a model the gentleman who travels after knowledge, and learns about the world through the medium of graphice,58 Peacham pays an allusive tribute to Arundel, which can also reinforce his argument by implicitly indicating an exemplary fgure of the highest lineage who is at the same time an enthusiast for pictorial art. The idea that visual representation is a worthy and effective means for acquiring the breadth of knowledge necessary to a ruling class had of course been advocated by Elyot a century earlier. He had included the arts of ‘portraiture’ among the ‘sciences’ in which a young nobleman or gentleman, given the appropriate talent, should be instructed, and had stressed their cognitive power, their capacity to help the ‘governour’ gain that purchase on the world which was his birthright and his political duty. In this perspective graphice, like ‘portraiture’, can be seen as a medium of governance, an educational discipline which teaches a certain method of apprehending and mastering ones environment. At the same time, each writer reveals an individual enthusiasm which spills over from his recommendation of its utility. Each rationalises this enthusiasm in Christian humanist terms. Elyot equates ‘cunning’ (artistic skill) with ‘science’ (knowledge), and quotes Lactantius, the ‘Christian Cicero’, on how knowledge engenders virtue and virtue leads to the summum bonum.59 Peacham, addressing a much later readership largely brought up in the reformed religion and sensitised to the ‘vanity of the eye’, the moral dangers of visual imagery used for the wrong purposes, invokes Aristotle alongside the claim that such imagery can display ‘the Wisedome of the Almightie Creator’.60 In each case the rhetorical fervour of the apologia suggests a feeling of pleasure in visual representation which is not wholly accounted for by the justifcatory argument.

Aristotle and Castiglione: The Nobility of Pictorial Art This kind of pleasure had been allowed for by Aristotle in his recommendation of graphice as an educational discipline for the élite. In fact, he argues on a broader front in the Poetics that the tendency to take pleasure in any form of representation,

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whatever the medium, is innate in human nature. The reason is the equally fundamental human desire to learn. He gives the example of a portrait: if we know the subject, we enjoy the experience of recognition, and if we do not, we can enjoy the evidence of the painter’s representational skill, ‘the execution, the colouring, or some such other cause’.61 This implies that the knowledge acquired through representation, especially through pictorial representation, has a practical element and an aesthetic element. The same distinction, as we have seen, appears in the Politics when Aristotle discusses the place of graphice in the education of the young. Like reading and writing, he says, it is ‘regarded as useful for the purposes of life in a variety of ways’. It enables, for example, ‘a more correct judgment of the works of artists’, the implication being that the citizen who purchases works of art will want value for money; and Aristotle also suggests that it develops the capacity to appraise a whole range of material objects which one might have occasion to buy. In addition however, he argues that ‘there is a sort of education in which parents should train their sons, not as being useful or necessary, but because it is liberal or noble’.62 Reading and writing give access to useful knowledge, but also to other kinds of knowledge beyond the merely useful. In the same way, children may be taught graphice not to prevent their making mistakes in their own purchases, or in order that they may not be imposed upon in the buying or selling of articles, but perhaps rather because it makes them judges of the beauty of the human form. To be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls.63 The worthier aim of acquiring graphic and pictorial skills is to learn to appreciate beauty. And this kind of aesthetic enjoyment is associated with what is ‘liberal’, ‘noble’, ‘free’ and ‘exalted’. Castiglione’s reworking of Aristotle’s argument that graphice has a place in élite education because it brings the knowledge of beauty to ‘exalted souls’, noted by Richard Haydocke in the preface to his English translation of Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura,64 is likely to have been remarked by both Elyot and Peacham. As we have noted, Count Lodovico wants the courtier to be able to draw and to be knowledgeable about painting (saper disegnare, ed aver cognizion dell’arte propria del dipingere.65 In support of this argument, he rehearses familiar material from Pliny, used also by Elyot and Peacham, among others: that drawing and painting were part of a liberal education in classical Greece, and that the Roman patrician Quintus Fabius though it honourable to be a painter and adopt the cognomen ‘Pictor’.66 He points out that pictorial skills are not only noble but useful; for example, in military affairs they help to record and communicate the features of the terrain of operations.67 Here he gives a lead to Peacham and goes straight on, as Peacham would, to eulogise painting’s capacity to embrace the variety and beauty of the entire world, which ‘can be said to be a great and noble painting, composed by the hand of Nature and of God’ (una nobile e gran pittura…per man della natura e di Dio composta).68 Throughout Count Lodovico’s argument, this word ‘noble’ recurs as a leitmotiv. In ancient Greece, painting was taught to ‘fanciulli nobili’; the family of Fabius Pictor was ‘Nobilissima’; compared to sculpture, painting is ‘più nobile’; the painters of antiquity were numerous and ‘nobili’, as were the authors who wrote about painting.69 A sustained effort is made to demonstrate the nobility of painting, both intrinsically and through its élite affnities, especially by providing it with an honourable ancestry in classical Greece

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and Rome. The Count’s concluding point concerns its effect on and beneft for the modern courtier. A knowledge of painting is a source of the greatest pleasure (grandissima piacere):70 by sharpening the courtier’s gaze and his aesthetic sense, it opens his eyes to beauty, which he can then appraise (giudicar),71 whether in works of art and architecture or in living creatures, especially in human beings. To recall Aristotle, it enables ‘free and exalted souls’ to become informed ‘judges of the beauty of the human form’. In taking over Aristotle’s argument, Castiglione restates it in a more eloquent and artful fashion, which shows its key concepts to best advantage. Count Lodovico’s repeated stress on nobility is matched by a corresponding emphasis on the idea of knowledge. The painter’s ability to represent the ‘great and noble’ complex of the created universe (and to represent it more naturalistically than the sculptor can) is said to depend on ‘the knowledge of many things’, and it was this extensive knowledge, according to the Count, which explained the prestige and honour accorded to painters in antiquity.72 From a complementary angle, the noble connoisseur’s inward knowledge of pictorial art (fostered by the practice of drawing) opens his eyes to the further knowledge of beauty in all its range of manifestations,73 from artefacts to human beings. This latter argument fgures in the Politics as a series of discrete points, separated from each other in a longer discourse on education. Castiglione gathers them together in the concluding words of Count Lodovico’s discussion of painting, and expresses them with a rhetorical warmth which goes beyond the philosopher’s style of dry clarifcation. He also, in the Count’s eloquent and genial peroration, characterises the symbiosis of nobility and knowledge in his own individual terms. When Aristotle talks of graphice as part of a ‘liberal or noble’ education, making pupils ‘judges of the beauty of the human form’,74 he is most likely giving pride of place to the male body. Count Lodovico by contrast explicitly cites the example of female beauty: So you see that a knowledge (cognizione) of painting is a source of very profound pleasure. And let those refect on this who are so carried away when they see a beautiful woman that they think they are in paradise, and yet who cannot (non sanno) paint; for if they did know (sapessero) how to paint they would be all the more content, since they would then more perfectly discern (conosceriano) the beauty that they fnd so agreeable. Vedete adunque come lo aver cognizione della pittura sia causa di grandissima piacere. E questo pensino quei che tanto godono contemplando le bellezze d’una donna che par lor essere in paradiso, e pur non sanno dipingere: il che se sapessero, arian molto maggior contento, perché più perfettamante conosceriano quella bellezza, che nel cor genera lor tanta satisfazione.75 This fts in with the tendency of The Courtier to romanticise and idealise female beauty, summed up in Bembo’s praise of a Platonic love which originates in male desire for a woman and ascends to a knowledge of the divine. It also fts in with the tendency of the male speakers to make ironically joking allusions to unrequited love for women who are unnamed but seemingly known to the assembled company; one of the men present does respond with laughter to the Count’s words, taking them as a humorous provocation to such a joke and encouraging the reader to perceive them as an elegant coda to what comes before, an impromptu rewriting of Aristotle for a modern courtly

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milieu. In this way, Castiglione makes the ideas of knowledge and nobility associated with graphice by Aristotle very much his own: knowledge is characterised as a romantic desire for a perfect understanding of female beauty, and nobility is exemplifed as courtly sprezzatura. Count Lodovico’s advocacy and defence of painting as a proper interest or pursuit for the courtier, taken in conjunction with Bembo’s neo-Platonising account of beauty, looks forward to Italian art theory of the later sixteenth century, which argues explicitly for the ‘nobility’ of pictorial art.76 The argument is based not only on the historical affnity of painting with socially exalted and powerful people – the aristocrats, kings and emperors in antiquity cited as its patrons and practitioners – but on its own intrinsic power to give access, through the depiction of beauty, to the loftiest reaches of knowledge and enlightenment. In this view painting, rather than being deemed honourable by association, merits the admiration of its noble devotees by the nobility of its cognitive purpose.

Peacham: Pictorial Art and Gentlemanly Moderation What Elyot and Peacham do with this idea, as we have seen, is to place it in an explicitly Christian framework, each in his own way. Elyot, in recommending ‘exquisite knowledge and understanding’ of ‘statuary, or paynters crafte’, calls on Lactantius to witness that knowledge produces virtue, which in turn leads to the summum bonum.77 Peacham argues that drawing and painting reveal the beauty of God’s creation ‘as in a booke of golden and rare-limned letters’;78 in other words, they reproduce the liber creatorum, the legible fabric of the natural world which complements divine revelation as spelt out in scripture. By using the analogy of the book which records the word of God he suits his argument to a Protestant readership, while implicitly reinvoking the appeal which visual imagery had enjoyed in medieval Christianity before the critiques and assaults of the Reformation.79 This fresh (or revived) emphasis on visuality is reinforced elsewhere in The Compleat Gentleman. In his chapter ‘Of Travaile’, for example, Peacham advocates travel as a means of learning about the world with ones own eyes, through ‘Observation’. From Diogenes Laertius, he quotes a story about Alexander the Great, whose ‘usual boast’ it was to have ‘found out more with his eies, then other Kings were able to comprehend in thought’.80 He begins the chapter by acknowledging that foreign travel was by no means unanimously approved of among the English élite (much like an undue interest in the visual arts), while at the same time he would have been aware of contrary cases, in which travel was bound up with the viewing and acquisition of art works, as it was for Lord Arundel, the father of his book’s dedicatee. In the chapter ‘Of Antiquities’ added to the 1634 edition, paying tribute to Arundel and his collection of classical sculpture, Peacham again brings the topic of visuality to the fore. Speaking of antique statues he insists ‘It is not enough for an ingenuous Gentleman to behold these with a vulgar eye: but he must be able to distinguish them, and tell who and what they are’.81 The ‘vulgar eye’ is that of the mass of common people, uninstructed and ignorant. The gentleman must acquire a learned eye which corresponds to his ‘ingenuous’ [i.e. well born] condition. This notion of an ‘ingenuous’ eye makes once again the association between nobility and knowledge in the context of visual art which stems from Aristotle and reappears in Castiglione’s courtly paraphrase. What is not found in Peacham’s account of this complex of ideas is any notion of visual art being associated with sprezzatura. He certainly argues that the ‘compleat

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gentleman’ needs to be self-conscious and circumspect, aware that his social position makes him a conspicuous fgure who must appear to best advantage, so that ‘hereupon as on the frontispice of a magnifcent Pallace, are fxed the eyes of all passengers….’82 However, the image of a façade does not imply the same kind of thoroughgoing calculation expounded by Castiglione. The difference may be gauged with a small but signifcant comparison. In Book Two of The Courtier Federico Fregoso is charged with explaining how the ideal courtier’s qualities should be put into practice, and one theme he takes up is that of dress and comportment, even though these might be considered superfcial aspects of behaviour: ‘I do not call walking, laughing, looking and so forth, activities, and yet all these external things provide information about what is within’.83 The topic reappears in Peacham, with an echo of the wording, but is expressed in the language of the Bible: ‘By gate, laughter, and apparell, a man is knowne what he is’84 (Ecclesiaticus XIX.30). The biblical verse may lie allusively behind Castiglione’s text, but by quoting it directly Peacham indicates that his particular concern with the calculation of social appearances is of a relatively sober kind. The quality which takes the place of sprezzatura in his scheme of things makes an early appearance, in the chapter ‘Of a Gentlemans carriage in the Universitie’: Carry your selfe even and fairely, Tanquam in statera [i.e. as if poised on scales], with that moderation in your speech and action, (that you seeme with Ulysses, to have Minerva alwayes at your elbow:) which should they be weighed by Envy her selfe, she might passe them for currant….85 This fnely balanced self-possession is expounded more fully in a later chapter ‘Of Reputation, and Carriage in generall’, which begins with an emphatic proposition: There is no one thing that setteth a fairer stampe upon Nobility then evennesse of Carriage, and care of our Reputation, without which our most gracefull gifts are dead and dull….86 The metaphor of the stamp indicates that this ‘one thing’, this self-conscious social and moral composure, is not what defnes nobility but is certainly what perfects it and makes it gracefully manifest to the world. The essence of the quality which Peacham is describing emerges as he advises how to sustain it as a constant attribute of ones behaviour: The principall meanes to preserve it, is Temperance, and that Moderation of the mind, wherewith as a bridle we curbe and breake our ranke and unruly Passions, keeping as the Caspian Sea, our selves ever at one height without ebbe or refuxe.87 The image of the Caspian Sea had already appeared in Peacham’s book of emblems, Minerva Britanna, signifying the same concept of temperance or moderation;88 and it is this concept which for his ‘compleat gentleman’ corresponds to the sprezzatura of Castiglione’s perfect courtier. However broad and advanced his cultural sympathies, especially the advocacy of drawing and painting which follows Castiglione’s example, Peacham is concerned with educating an élite in post-Reformation England, so that for him the quality of moderation rests on a religious discipline: he quotes the Psalmist’s advice that a young man must observe God’s statutes (Psalms CXIX.9).89 At the same time, he is aware of

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moderation as a central concept in Aristotle’s Ethics, which defnes virtue as a mean situated between opposing extremes and of temperance as a cardinal virtue in its own right, conveyed into Christian thought via the traditions of classical moral philosophy. When he writes of ‘Temperance, and that Moderation of the mind, wherewith… we curbe…our ranke and unruly Passions’ he recalls the language of Cicero in De Offciis, ‘temperantia et modestia omnisque sedatio perturbationum animi et rerum modus….’90 These words herald Cicero’s crucial discussion of decorum, the concept of what is ftting or appropriate, which, he explains, stands in relation to virtue as bodily beauty does to health.91 It is these notions of the golden mean and of comely moral congruence which Castiglione had fnessed into his idea of sprezzatura, a perfect balance in social and moral conduct which renders invisible all signs of the relational processes and adjustments which have brought it about. Peacham declines and in effect dismantles Castiglione’s refned conceptual construction, and returns to the foundations on which it was raised.92 A comparison with Peacham’s contemporary and follower Richard Brathwait reveals a similar revision of Castiglione, carried out more overtly. Brathwait’s The English Gentleman appeared in 1630, eight years after the frst edition of Peacham’s treatise, and it places even more emphasis on a context of sober, reformed Christianity. A pictorial title-page displays a fgure of the exemplary gentleman with the motto ‘Spes in caelis, pes in terris’ (aspiring to heaven, treading the earth), surrounded by vignettes illustrating the various phases and aspects of his life, culminating in ‘Moderation’, which shows him in a contemplative pose, and ‘Perfection’, where he ascends to heaven in glory. It is clear from the ensuing text that Brathwait has read The Courtier and drawn on the discussion of sprezzatura. He borrows Castiglione’s examples of affectation and laboriousness: Count Lodovico’s joke about a courtier who dances stiffy, as if made of wood, and the reported criticism by Apelles of Protogenes, ‘in that he could not hold his hands from his table’ (that is, the panel on which he executed a painting).93 By contrast, Brathwait recommends the opposite kind of behaviour: But others there are, and these onely praise-worthy, who with a gracefull presence gaine them respect. For in exercises of this kinde (sure I am) those only deserve most commendation, which are performed with least affectation.94 And earlier he has praised those who conduct themselves ‘with a reserved grace… rather than with an affected curiositie [i.e. carefulness]’.95 But all this advice is relegated to a chapter ‘Of Recreations’, and applied solely to a discussion of dancing as a social accomplishment. Brathwait gives no countenance to graceful unaffectedness or sprezzatura as a concept with an overall application to conduct, but scales it down to a minor role in the domain of social pastimes. And his account of these pastimes begins with the proviso that they should be ‘tempered and moderated with discretion’. As in Peacham’s treatise, sprezzatura yields place to its Aristotelian predecessor, moderation. In the end, the primacy of moderation as a constitutive value proves to be a source of tension within the identity of Peacham’s ‘compleat gentleman’, given that this goes beyond traditional models of gentility to embrace the knowledge, and even the practice, of pictorial art. The problem can be discerned in his chapter ‘Of Drawing, Limning, and Painting’, which continues on, as the title informs us, ‘with the lives of the famous Italian Painters’. These short biographies, he reveals at the end, are derived from Vasari by way of Karel van Mander. One of the shortest is that of Ambrogio

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Lorenzetti, which nonetheless contains a signifcant sentence: ‘He was very moderate, and went rather like a Philosopher than a painter’.96 Behind this lies a somewhat longer statement by Vasari, rendered more briefy by van Mander: Furono I costumi d’Ambruogio in tutte le parti lodevoli, e piuttosto di gentiluomo e di flosofo che di artefce…sopportò con animo moderato e quieto il bene ed il male che gli venne dalla fortuna. Ambrogio’s conduct was in every respect praiseworthy, and more that of a gentleman and a philosopher than an artist…he endured in a moderate and calm spirit the good and the bad visited on him by fortune. hiel hem seer statich en matich, en in alles verduldich: geleeck beter een Edelman oft Philosooph, als een Constenaer.97 The information that Ambrogio’s conduct was admirable and gentlemanly is summarised in Peacham’s word ‘moderate’ (matich’, modern Dutch ‘matig’, in van Mander), as if that said it all. Even though the word ‘gentleman’ does not fgure in his summary, he tersely sharpens the distinction between what he regards as the essential mark of gentility, moderation, and what it might mean to be merely a ‘painter’. He seems to endorse an acknowledgement of the traditional social gulf between a gentleman and a painter, even while engaging in a campaign of rapprochement between the two. It must be said that each writer is addressing the relationship from opposite ends: Peacham wants gentlemen to become painters, while Vasari wants painters to be considered gentlemen. By reporting that Ambrogio’s style of behaviour was that of ‘a Philosopher’, Vasari helps to promote the cause of early modern Italian artists who wished to be recognised as intellectuals rather than merely manual workers. And by retelling Vasari’s Lives as part of a campaign urging the English élite to acquire expertise and skill in painting, Peacham attempts to modernise the view that gentility is founded on ‘Scientia’ by extending the domain of ‘Scientia’ into the visual arts. In theory, it looks as if each writer’s programme should complement the other’s. Paradoxically, what prevents them from meeting mid-way is Peacham’s insistence on the value of moderation. At times he issues warnings to the ‘compleat gentleman’ not to become disproportionately absorbed in certain interests or accomplishments. In the chapter ‘Of Musicke’ he recommends the gentleman with musical talent to cultivate it as far as possible, citing biblical and classical authority and modern practitioners of princely rank such as Henry VIII and Gesualdo.98 At the same time he warns that musicianship must not become an overriding concern or be developed to professional standards: I desire not that any Noble or Gentleman should (save at his private recreation and leasureable houres) prove a Master in the same, or neglect his more weighty imployments: though I avouch it a skill worthy the knowledge and exercise of the greatest Prince.99 He goes on to give cautionary examples of ‘great personages’ who became addicted to artisanal hobbies, such as ‘Rodolph the late Emperour, in setting of Stones and making Watches’.100 This dismissal of Rudolph II, the greatest European art patron of the era, betrays a sensitivity on Peacham’s part to the existence of a boundary not to be crossed, separating the noble amateur’s keen but proportionate pursuit of the arts from an immoderate obsession tantamount to a demeaning professionalism.

98 Nobility and the Art of Painting As for pictorial art, we have seen that Peacham is almost fanatically enthusiastic in commending it to his readers, whom he wants to see not only connoisseurs but practitioners as well: ‘ingenuous Gentlemen…are the onely men that imploy Poets, Painters, and Architects, if they be not all these themselves’. When he comes to offer practical instruction in the chapter ‘Of Drawing, Limning, and Painting’ he makes a pause between the section on limning, that is, painting in watercolour on a small scale, and the next section on oil painting, and inserts a caveat: Painting in Oyle is done I confesse with greater judgement, and is generally of more esteeme then working in water colours; but then it is more Mechanique and will robbe you of over much time from your more excellent studies, it being sometime a fortnight or a moneth ere you can fnish an ordinary peece.…beside, oyle nor oyle-colours, if they drop upon apparell, wil not out; when water-colours will with the least washing.101 Pages of technical advice follow, which, Peacham says ‘may proft others’, while the gentleman reader has been assured that this is not for him. Oil painting is a ‘Mechanique’ employment which would compromise his social position and distort his commitment to ‘Scientia’. The image of the indelible stain (which it can leave on his presumably expensive and fashionable costume) sets it apart from limning, which Nicholas Hilliard had memorably characterised as ‘a kind of gentle painting’, that is, a method of painting not just unmessy and so compatible with gentility but, because of its demanding technical refnement, intrinsically gentlemanly.102 It is in this appropriately circumscribed sense that Peacham’s ‘compleat gentleman’ is invited to become a painter. It turns out that whatever capacity for limning he may develop is to be put to one especial use. At the beginning of this chapter which encourages the gentleman to draw and paint, Peacham has already characterised him, in accord with his social status, as a military offcer who may need to map and depict the terrain of warfare, and as a peacetime traveller who will want to record the landscapes, fora and fauna of foreign countries.103 These introductory inducements lead on to detailed advice about how to acquire the skills of limning, with reference to the author’s manual The Art of Drawing, republished as The Gentleman’s Exercise. The goal is to be able to imitate to the life (according unto my directions in that booke:) wherein by degrees you will take incredible delight, & furnish your conceipts & devices of Emblems, Anagrams, and the like with bodies at your pleasure, without being beholden to some deare and nice professed Artist.104 Peacham envisages his skilled amateur engaging in the gentlemanly pursuit of designing ‘devices’, emblems and imprese, exquisite compounds of verbal and visual symbolism, and able to provide at will not only the textual element, which a classical education will have facilitated, but the pictorial components (‘bodies’) too, without having to employ some costly and fnicky professional painter.105 In the later chapter ’Of Reputation and Carriage’ he reminds the reader that, of these ‘devices’, imprese especially are associated with gentry status, being esoteric symbols of noble identity; he cites the famous collection of chivalric imprese painted on shields used in the Elizabethan Accession Day tilts by Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex and others,

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preserved at Whitehall. Peacham himself of course had turned his pictorial bent to designing collections of ‘devices’, aimed at the patronage of King James and Henry Prince of Wales.106 His own specialised aspiration as an amateur painter parallels the direction in which he urges his preferred reader: the ‘compleat gentleman’ should cultivate the kind of painting which will affrm his status. This kind of pictorial art is exemplifed by the impresa at the top of the engraved title-page which illustrates the gentleman’s versatility or ‘completeness’,107 but beyond that there are no examples in Peacham’s treatise of ‘devices’ which combine picture and text. He had of course already provided such examples in advance, with his Minerva Britanna Or A Garden Of Heroical Devises, furnished, and adorned with Emblemes and Impresa’s of sundry natures, published in 1612. Now, ten years on, he confnes himself to giving ‘a taste of some of my Anagrams’, which convert the names of selected élite individuals into ingenious mottoes108 – purely textual examples of the duality characteristic of the ‘device’. There is however one section of the treatise which contains a series of visual illustrations, woodcuts based on illustrations which Peacham very likely drew himself. This is the lengthy section on heraldry, which comes immediately after the chapter ‘Of Drawing, Limning, and Painting: with the lives of the famous Italian Painters’, so that the climactic biography of Raphael leads straight on to a highly schematic account of the theory of blazoning arms. Once again the gentleman reader is being given to understand that the pictorial skills which he is urged to acquire have their proper function in a restricted context, defned by his social position. So Peacham’s disquisition on the science of heraldry, which begins with theoretical and historical material, proceeds to a sizeable sub-chapter headed ‘The practice of blazonry’, which illustrates a wide selection of coats of arms, glossed by heraldic and genealogical commentary.109 In the absence of those ‘devices’ which have been cited as the acme of the gentleman painter’s art, and which carry with them the prestigious aura of Italian Renaissance culture, Peacham displays an alternative and more traditional repertory of compact and esoteric images which signify élite status. The exemplary end product of all his arguments for expanding the education of the gentry to include painting is an exhibition of armorial shields. Nowhere does he suggest that his ‘compleat gentleman’ should learn to depict coats of arms: that, he tacitly assumes, is to be left to professional heraldic painters. What he desiderates is a serious study of heraldry, so that the gentleman has a knowledge of it appropriate to his rank as a member of the armigerous upper classes. There are two reasons given for acquiring this knowledge.110 One is that armorial science is a complex discipline in its own right, worthy to be included in any programme of humanistic learning. The other, more compelling, is that arms are the ‘outward ensigns and badges of Vertue’, the marks of authentic gentility, which signify the origins of that condition in military service to the monarch performed by ones meritorious ancestors; it follows that the knowledge of armorial science among the armigerous will promote an affrmative self-consciousness, a true sense of their instinctive superiority, based not only on present social conditions but on history. In this perspective, heraldry is a feld of study in which ‘Nobilitas’ and ‘Scientia’ are perfectly conjoined. The images of armorial shields which back up this discussion take on, however, an ambiguous character. They are the only visual illustrations which occur within the text of Peacham’s treatise and are positioned in such a way as to provide symbolic reassurance that gentility and pictorial craft can go together. At the same time, there is not the slightest hint that the gentleman should try his hand at heraldic painting: his

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knowledge of blazonry is to be theoretical and historical, not practical at all. In this respect, heraldic painting lines up with oil painting as a professional branch of pictorial art from which the gentleman amateur is to refrain. Peacham’s exhortation that the ‘compleat gentleman’ should learn to paint, expressed at length with missionary zeal, appears at the same time fraught with restrictions: only certain kinds of painting will be compatible with his social status. Peacham, having frankly admitted his passion for drawing and painting and in the interests of instructing the reader, allows himself to stray beyond the boundaries which he eventually demarcates. When it comes to exemplifying the practice of pictorial art for the gentleman who, he urges, should take it up, he provides two contrasting instances. Firstly there is the allegorical fguration and symbolic imagery of the title page, spelling out the thesis or programme of his book; and secondly, within the text, the visual catalogue of armorial shields already noted. The imagery of the title page uses the recently developed science of imprese and Ripa’s newly published and republished manual of ‘iconology’ to project the ‘compleat’ gentleman in all his versatility as a modern ideal. The display of heraldry later in the text recalls the same gentleman to the antiquarian study of lineage and its proudly archaic lexicon of symbolism. In the very feld of pictorial representation, which is the topic of Peacham’s most radical proposal about the fashioning of his new kind of gentleman, there emerges a tension between his forward-looking ideal, which would complement gentle birth with widely ranging education, and a conservative notion of inherited honour, which defnes the gentleman as the worthy issue of his supposedly chivalric forbears. Looking back from the procession of traditional heraldic imagery which is the sole illustrative outcome of Peacham’s proselytising for ‘Drawing, Limning, and Painting’ to his optimistically progressive frontispiece, we may query whether its disparately fgured concepts of ‘Nobilitas’ and ‘Scientia’ do in fact jointly inform the text which follows, or whether they strain against each other, implicitly continuing the historically prolonged debate between ‘arms’ and ‘letters’, or lineage and virtue, as essential markers of nobility. Peacham’s ambivalent insistence that the English gentry take up painting, which qualifes initial eagerness with subsequent reservations and half-acknowledged cautions, suggests the diffculties of the programme optimistically pictured on his titlepage: the project of combining a traditional idea of nobility based on military values transmitted through lineage with a more progressive idea founded on ‘the culture of the mind’, even to the extent of embracing the visual arts as part of the liberal education which supplies the modern half of ‘compleat’ gentility. This ambivalence is matched by a disregard of Castiglione, the originally infuential advocate of painting as a ftting accomplishment for a ruling class, and a revision of his concomitant ideal of the élite male as a self-created work of art, so that in place of sprezzatura there is a retreat to a more sober classical precursor, the concept of balance or moderation. With the enlarged edition of The Compleat Gentleman appearing in 1634, Peacham therefore bestowed on the decade of Charles I’s personal rule, when the country was governed from the court at Whitehall – adorned with the royal collection of pictures and the presence of the consummate courtier-artist Van Dyck, not to mention the tableaux vivants of the court masques in which courtiers could enact ideal identities – a half-hearted account of the potential associations between pictorial art and a courtly élite. However a treatise published a little later in the 1630s was to draw out these associations in a fresh and eloquent fashion, with a complexity accorded them in the frst place by Castiglione.

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Junius on Grace and Facility This treatise was The Painting of the Ancients by Franciscus Junius, librarian to the Earl of Arundel. First written in Latin and addressed to the European republic of letters, it appeared as De Pictura Veterum in Amsterdam in 1637; the English translation, which Junius says he undertook at the Countess of Arundel’s request, was published the following year in London.111 It is a work of what we would call art theory, based on a large and painstaking assemblage of information from Greek and Latin writers about the art of painting, and more general questions of aesthetics, in antiquity. The Latin text quotes its sources in extenso, combining scholarly compilation with continuous commentary and argument on art and aesthetics. The English version, ‘with some Additions and Alterations’ according to the title-page, is more readerly in format, slimming down the bulk of the citations (which are rendered into English) and weaving them more amenably into Junius’s own text, which is in some parts rearranged and augmented, so that the author’s individual voice, coloured by an excellent command of English idiom, prevails persuasively throughout. Junius’s book, like Peacham’s, is placed under the aegis of the Howard family and its head, the Earl of Arundel, premier nobleman of England. But while the 1634 edition of The Compleat Gentleman praises Arundel as a collector of antique sculpture and inscribed marbles, in The Painting of the Ancients he is singled out as a collector of modern drawings. Junius salutes his matchhlesse collection of designes…seeing our Honourable Lord out of his noble and art-cherishing minde, doth at this present expose these jewells of art to the publike view in the Academie at Arundell-house.112 At the same time, Junius emphasises the interdependence of drawing and painting, so ‘that many who have a deeper insight into these Arts, delight themselves as much in the contemplation of the…draughts which great Masters made of their workes, as in the workes themselves….’113 This impromptu shift from ‘the painting of the ancients’ to that of the moderns – by contrast with Peacham’s celebration of Arundel in terms of a more traditional humanism – characterises him as a preeminent connoisseur of pictorial art, whose profound knowledge issues in visual pleasure. The original Latin text does not contain this passage praising Lord Arundel, and Junius evidently added it to the English edition as a compliment to his employer. However it is not merely a piece of fattery gratuitously inserted. To characterise Arundel, ‘the very patterne of true Nobilitie’ (as Junius describes him in the dedication to Lady Arundel),114 as a connoisseur of drawing and painting and their symbiotic relationship, is to connect two themes which prove to be of importance to the overall scheme of the treatise. This praise of his ‘noble and art-cherishing minde’ occurs early in Book Three, the fnal book, in which the theoretical content of the discussion is most substantial. Later, as the argument reaches its culmination, the idea that nobility and the cherishing of art go hand in hand will take on a particular signifcance. In the summary of the argument which prefaces Book Three, Junius claims that, for the ancients, the art of painting comprised ‘fve principall points’: Invention, Proportion, Colour, Motion and Disposition’.115 He glosses all these terms for the reader, explaining for example that by ‘Proportion’ he means symmetry and by ‘Disposition’ what

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we would call composition; and that ‘Colour’ includes chiaroscuro, while ‘Motion’ includes not only physical movement but emotional expression. However, he continues, to fulfl these requirements was not in itself suffcient: Yet did not the ancients think that the perfection of Art consisted in a meete observing of these fve points, except the whole worke did breath forth a certaine kinde of Grace proceeding out of a decent comelinesse of every point by it self, and out of a mutuall accord of all fve.116 To produce the crowning quality of Grace, not only must each element of the pictorial art be beautifully realised, but all these elements must be harmoniously related: the whole must be greater than the simple sum of its parts. The metaphor ‘breath forth’ suggests the notion of an inanimate complex coming alive, and when spelling out this argument later Junius will invoke the myth of Pygmalion, having explained that ‘In beautifull bodies grace is the life of beauty’.117 Moreover, the phrase ‘a certaine kinde of Grace’ implies that this vital quality cannot be pinned down in a precise defnition. Grace emerges as a singularly powerful concept, associated with ideas of miraculous animation and indefnable transcendence. Junius defers a detailed account of Grace until Chapter VI of Book Three, which, as the penultimate chapter of the whole work, is a ftting place to discuss what he calls ‘the height of Art’.118 He begins by reaffrming the special relationship between this culminating quality and the constitutive elements of painting: ‘these fve heads concurring, and lovingly conspiring, should breath forth a certain kinde of grace, most commonly called “the aire of the picture”….’119 The newly introduced term ‘aire’ reinforces the metaphor in ‘breath forth’ and the previous play on the word ‘conspiring’ (literally, ‘breathing together’) to stress the idea of animation or vivacity. At the same time it carries a social connotation, suggesting that an excellent painting may be like an exceptionally glamorous individual. Junius compounds the latter idea by quoting some lines of English poetry to illustrate the concept of Grace or ‘aire’: the author is identifed as ‘a noble and famous Poet’, named in a marginal note as Sir Philip Sidney, the legendary perfect knight and admirable writer, who excelled in both nobility and artistry. This reference (like that to Lord Arundel’s ‘noble and art-cherishing minde’120) is not in the original Latin text, having been added to the English version; the lines of Sidney replace a Latin quotation from Martial,121 so that the ‘painting of the ancients’ is being illustrated by the poetry of the moderns or, more precisely, of a modern English aristocrat. It appears that, in the context of contemporary England in the 1630s, Junius may be concerned to explain the transcendent pictorial quality of Grace with a particularly local and current emphasis, in terms which link the aesthetic and the social. This tendency affects the passage immediately following, which, while close to the Latin text, now acquires a fresh character. In it, Junius expounds the quality of grace as it may be manifested in the human body. As with a work of art, grace does not result from every feature of a body being beautiful in itself, ‘but when the perfection of every part produceth a perfectly well favoured comelinesse in [its] whole shape and posture’. He illustrates this distinction between beauty and ‘gracefull comelinesse’ by quoting Suetonius on Nero, ‘whose body was rather faire than comely’, but mainly by citing a series of poets on female beauty: Ovid on Venus, Catullus on Lesbia, Tibullus on Sulpitia.122 The sequence concludes with Martial’s praise of a fellow Roman’s beautiful

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British wife, who has acquired all the enhancing charms to be absorbed from metropolitan society: Claudia Rufna an English Lady endued with many extraordinary gifts of nature, is likewise commended by Martial, for having added to these good parts all the Graces which either Greece or Rome were able to afford.123 In his original Latin text, Junius had quoted Martial’s epigram verbatim; here he paraphrases it in such a way as to turn the poet’s British matron into ‘an English Lady’, recalling his own ‘Singular Good Ladie and Mistresse’, the Countess of Arundel, whose attachment to Greek and Roman culture and to pictura is the very reason why De pictura veterum is now being ‘Englished’.124 The idea that grace can be a personal endowment or a social accomplishment as well as the culminating quality of a work of art is pointed up by this adroitly placed allusion. The subtle courtesy of Junius’s compliment to his patroness could itself be seen, in a broader sense, to exemplify a quality of grace. In general terms this English translation which he has undertaken at Lady Arundel’s request is designed to read much more fuently than the original text. The De pictura veterum is both a collection of source materials and a treatise based upon them, and the transitions between compilation and commentary or argument are often abruptly managed. The sources are both Greek and Latin, with the Greek extracts made accessible in Latin versions, so that there are four linguistic registers: Greek sources, Latin translations, Latin sources, and the Latin of Junius’s own discourse; again, the passage from one to another has to be taken in the reader’s stride. By comparison, The Painting of the Ancients, while it remains a demanding work, is distinctly more readable. The entire text, apart from marginal or interstitial source references, is monolingual; and although Junius apologises for writing in the ‘stile of a forrainer’ rather than ‘one in-bred’125 his English is fuent and idiomatic, and his style has a recognisable individuality. Instead of making a consistently close translation of his original text he sometimes paraphrases, rearranges, abbreviates, or even adds to it, so that the new text is not a replication of the old, but takes on its own character for a new readership. This awareness of an audience seems especially evident in the chapter we are considering, where Junius sets out to expound the crucial concept of grace. Much unobtrusive effort has gone into reshaping the original text: rough edges are smoothed out and abrupt transitions eased. Quotations from poetic sources are paraphrased in prose, and, like the corresponding extracts from prose writers, worked into the overall discursive fow. The result, compared with the earlier text, is a more amenable suavity which consorts with the central topic under discussion. Junius ensures that the fabric of his own writing takes on some tincture of that grace which he is expounding to his vernacular readers. And in paying a courtly tribute to his noble ‘Ladie and Mistresse’ as part of a consciously refned deployment of the language she has requested him to adopt, he underwrites the suggestion that grace as an aesthetic concept has an analogous social dimension. The very project of translating the treatise into English could be seen in this light. De pictura veterum begins with a dedicatory epistle addressed to Charles I, in the style of a classical panegyric.126 Junius praises the king for his peaceful rule and his love of the arts, which fourish through his active encouragement. Charles is held up as an exemplary ruler before the international audience to whom the book is addressed. For his part, Junius adopts not merely a humble but an explicitly marginal role. He stresses

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that he is a foreigner (homo exterus, homo peregrinus), a grateful refugee from the religious and military strife of continental Europe, and subscribes himself the king’s ‘client’ (cliens), that is, his protected dependant; as a native of the Dutch Republic, he cannot claim to be Charles’s subject. The contrasting dedication of The Painting of the Ancients to the Countess of Arundel is briefer, less intense as a literary performance and, while duly deferential and adulatory, more familiar in certain respects. Although Junius modestly disparages his English as that of ‘a forrainer’, he recalls that the original work has been produced ‘in your service and within the walls of your own house’, and he expresses satisfaction that ‘these rude and imperfect attempts of your dutifull servant’ have the guarantee of ‘wearing the faire and glorious livery of your most noble and worthy name’.127 While he was a professional scholar who became the Earl of Arundel’s librarian, Junius (François du Jon) was descended from the minor nobility of France and Flanders (his family having been displaced by the wars of religion).128 An Englishman of corresponding lineage from a gentry family would traditionally think it no derogation of status to be ‘servant’ to an aristocratic magnate, in the sense of being an employed member of his establishment, or to wear his livery on certain occasions.129 So when Junius writes that his book is invested with the livery of the Earl and Countess of Arundel he characterises it as the product of a noble household, in fact the most noble household in England (as Arundel was Earl Marshal). Whereas the Latin edition had been addressed to a learned, cosmopolitan readership and dedicated to King Charles as a fgure of international standing, the English version stresses its emergence from a local and uniquely distinguished aristocratic milieu. In this perspective it presents itself as a more courtly enterprise. By emphasising its issue from the household of England’s premier nobleman, and smoothing the arduous density of the original text into a more fuent and amenable vernacular format, The Painting of the Ancients tends towards that grace which it holds to be the supreme quality of a work of art. And especially in the culminating chapter, where that quality is expounded, Junius’s literary style takes on the ‘aire’, the preternaturally animated demeanour which, he argues, is the sign of ‘gracefull comelinesse’ in a picture or a person. As Junius develops his explanation of ‘that same ayre and comely Grace’,130 the link between the personal and the pictorial, the social and the aesthetic, is maintained, partly through explicit comparisons but also by becoming an implicit element in the fabric of the argument. He advances his argument by quoting Quintilian; in this, he follows the precedent set by Italian writers from Alberti onwards, who used rhetorical theory from antiquity to generate art theory for their own early modern epoch. His leading contention is that grace cannot be taught by rules, nor acquired through study. According to Quintilian, a too studied effort is inimical to grace, which can only coexist with moderation, and moderation cannot be calculated according to a formula but only gauged by individual temperament and judgment. As a result, grace may appear to be the product of nature rather than art, except that it would be wrong to think of nature and art separately, and not appreciate their inextricable relationship. Junius infers that, although grace cannot be obtained by the studied application of art, it is nevertheless the product of a certain kind of art, which is ‘hidden and warily concealed’, operating as if in its own absence. His conclusion is ‘that we hold this grace to be the worke of a wisely dissembled art’.131 The topic of art concealing or dissembling itself had already been raised near the beginning of the treatise. In the third chapter of Book One, Junius discusses how the art of painting progressed through the process of imitation, that is, of novice painters

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studying and emulating the successful methods and effects of the best masters who had preceded them. He is referring not to mere copying, but to the more selective and intrinsic appropriation of the work of one’s predecessors which is involved in the classical doctrine of imitatio, and again he is resorting to the rhetorical theory of Quintilian.132 Like the author whom he paraphrases, he speaks in the present tense, as if addressing a timeless audience comprising both the ancients and the moderns; the immediate effect, especially in the English vernacular text, is of an informed and experienced voice giving instruction to contemporaries. The idea of concealment in art comes up in two related connexions, that of the master being imitated, and that of the learner who engages in imitation. Junius sees both roles in terms of an underlying assumption: that artistic accomplishment depends on skills which are not manifest in the fnished work. He describes these as ‘the deep and hidden mysteries of Art’,133meaning by the term ‘mysteries’ not only esoteric qualities beyond immediate comprehension (as in our modern understanding of the word) but also ‘masteries’, talents developed by study and practice to the greatest pitch of expertise. In the work of those worthy to be imitated this expertise is not to be observed on the surface; Junius warns that it must be sought for, ‘because it is often seene that the best Masters do purposely hide and conceale their owne vertues….’134 Correspondingly, the novice who learns by imitation must not leave external traces of the process in his work: ‘a good Imitator must by all meanes be a concealer of his Art, and it is somewhat too childish to follow the same strokes and lineaments in all things’,135 that is, to replicate the exact appearances of ones model. In either case, that of the master or that of the novice, the ‘mysteries of Art’ pertain not to the surface but the interior of the work; they are necessarily latent. If the fnest capacities of art are rendered intrinsic through a process of concealment, it makes sense for Junius to argue later that the supreme capacity, grace, must be the product ‘of a wisely dissembled art’. To return to his chapter on grace, having established his point, he pushes the argument further by declaring how especially the artist is to dissemble: he must achieve the effect of ‘a bold and confdent Facilitie’.136 Junius expounds the concept of facility with the well known anecdote from Pliny, already quoted in The Courtier during Count Lodovico’s exposition of sprezzatura: Apelles, as the greatest painter of the ancient world, praised his talented contemporaries but claimed that his own work surpassed them all in its quality of grace, instancing his rival Protogenes, who was his equal in every respect except in not knowing when to stop work on a picture.137 For Pliny, this criticism shows the harm done by excessive diligence (diligentia), and Junius goes on to quote from his account of the arts in antiquity other examples of the same fault, such as the sculptor Callimachus, one of whose most perfect works is judged a failure because ‘“diligence defaceth in it the whole Grace of the workmanship”’.138 Laborious diligence is what stifes grace, whereas facility is what makes it stand out. Although Junius seems to be defning facility as the opposite of diligence, his argument takes a more subtle turn. Once again he quotes Quintilian, whose term facilitas he has borrowed, and who recommends to the orator ‘“a plaine and unaffected simplicitie”’ (apheleia simplex & inaffectata) resulting from ‘”a slender diligence”’ (e tenui diligentia), a quality equally agreeable in women who adorn themselves with a similar restraint.139 As happened with the concept of grace, the exposition of facility is moving from the aesthetic to the social. The parallel with female adornment gives a cue to quote Cicero’s advice to the orator on how to cultivate a rhetorical style which disclaims rhetoric, by analogy with a woman

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who emphasises her beauty by relinquishing ornament; both use ‘“a certaine kind of negligent diligence”’140 to present themselves more resourcefully. This in effect is how Junius defnes facility; it is not merely the reverse of diligence but a special kind of diligence which paradoxically minimises its own efforts to the point of imperceptibility, an art which dissembles its own operations. It must by now be apparent that Junius is traversing the same ground as that covered by Castiglione more than a century before. By designating grace as the acme of fne qualities, citing in support Pliny’s comparison of Apelles and Protogenes, and disclosing the secret of grace by way of Cicero’s paradox of negligentia diligens distilled into a single concept (facility for Junius, sprezzatura for Castiglione), he follows in the footsteps of Count Lodovico in Book One of The Courtier. Also like the Count, Junius stresses that grace, and his equivalent of sprezzatura, facility, must never be affected. He condemns an ‘over-curious [i.e. excessively painstaking] affectation of grace’ and ‘a poore and silly affectation of fnenesse’, concluding that ‘Grace hath no greater enemy than affectation’.141 Such repeated warnings are also found in The Courtier, where they stem from the initial metaphor of affectation as a dangerous reef on which grace must at all costs avoid being wrecked. These parallels are corroborated by the synonym used by Junius to gloss his concept of facility, which is ‘carelessness’. He praises ‘a temerary [i.e. daring] and confdently carelesse Art’, and declares that ‘picture… must follow a bold and carelesse way of art, or it must at least make a shew of carelesness in many things’.142 This notion recalls the sixteenth-century English translation of Castiglione by Sir Thomas Hoby, who had rendered sprezzatura as ‘recklessness’,143 and suggests that Junius is talking about essentially the same thing. There are of course broader structural similarities between the books of Castiglione and Junius which help to explain the rapprochement between both authors’ accounts of grace, and its attainment through the adoption of sprezzatura or facility. In order to theorise the respective practices which concern them, the professions of the courtier and the painter, cortegianía and pictura, both draw on the major extant body of writings from antiquity which offer to theorise an art which is also a profession, namely treatises on rhetoric. As we have seen,144 Castiglione in his dedicatory preface invokes three precedents for his own enterprise. The frst two are Plato on the ideal state and Xenophon on the ideal ruler, but it is the third, Cicero’s Orator which turns out to have most relevance to The Courtier. It hovers, for example, via its companion text De Oratore, behind Count Lodovico’s description of sprezzatura when he recalls reading about ‘certain outstanding orators of the ancient world’ who feigned to be uneducated so that their speeches would disarm the hearers by seeming ‘natural and truthful’.145 In his own style of feigned naturalness he leaves unspecifed the Ciceronian source of this citation, just as he gives no hint at all that sprezzatura itself is a refnement of Cicero’s notion of negligentia diligens from the Orator. This courtly insouciance about chapter and verse could not be more different from Junius’s scholarly habit of perpetual quotation, especially from the rhetorical manuals of Cicero and Quintilian. However as their texts come together on the crucial topic of grace and open the possibility of cross-reading and cross-reference, Junius’s candid exhibition of his sources begins to expose Castiglione’s contrasting camoufage, and reveal their shared reliance, as good humanists, on classical theories of rhetoric. The comparison is also revealing in the other direction. Castiglione’s smooth assimilation of his classical sources points up the way in which Junius sometimes forces the issue when relating rhetorical theory to the precepts about pictorial art which

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he derives from it. Developing his explanation of facility, for example, he quotes Quintilian: it concerneth an Artifcer very much that he should resolve to do with ease whatsoever he doth…. I must needs adde thus much onely, that never any Painter was ranked with the better sort of Artists, except “learning, studie, and exercitation had frst enabled him with this Facilitie,” sayth Quintilian. “A plaine and unaffected simplicitie,” sayth the same Author, “is commendable for a certain kinde of pure ornament it hath, and for a certain kind of neatnesse which seemeth to proceed out of a slender diligence, and is lovely even in women.”146 The frst of the embedded quotations here points up Junius’s frankness in showing that he has taken the concept of facility from Quintilian. The second, by contrast, with its notion of ‘“unaffected simplicitie”’, provides a clue to the reader of Castiglione that his concept of affectation, used to defne sprezzatura by contrariety, is undemonstratively appropriated from the same classical author; Quintilian had declared that ‘nothing is more hateful than affectation’ (nihil est odiosius adfectatione), and he regularly condemns it as the mere simulacrum or indeed opposite of everything that is fnest in oratory.147 At the same time, reversing ones point of view, it becomes apparent that Castiglione’s suavely surreptitious use of Quintilian (which conforms to the advice given by Count Lodovico, and by Junius too, on imitation) points up how Junius has put his own abrupt construction on Quintilian’s openly acknowledged words. The frst quotation in the passage above, about how to achieve facility by ‘“learning, studie, and exercitation”’,148 clearly applies to the orator; Junius commandeers it without the slightest gesture towards adaptation and makes it apply to the painter. Admittedly his adjustment of Quintilian’s, along with Cicero’s, writings on rhetoric to theorise pictorial art is usually less peremptory, but this instance does highlight one habit which results from the process. Given that Quintilian and before him Cicero are addressing their contemporaries in the classical era, the copious and overt use of their words by Junius, together with his own paraphrases and elaborations, makes it seem as if he is addressing these doctrines, maxims, counsels and criticisms to his contemporaries in the early modern age rather than simply trying to reconstruct and describe a long-past aesthetic culture. His research into the painting of the ancients is projected vividly into the present, as if to suggest with exigent idealism how a perfect modern painter might be formed. In this respect it follows on Castiglione’s more explicit representation, based on classical writings, of his ideal modern type, the perfect courtier. Each writer’s specifc advice on how to acquire grace by the exercise of facility, or sprezzatura, confrms the parallel. We have seen that for Junius, the painter ‘must follow a bold and carelesse way of art…or at least make a shew of carelesnesse in many things’.149 To suggest that these two procedures are virtually the same recalls not only his earlier maxim that grace is the product of an art which is concealed or dissembled,150 but also Castiglione’s emphasis on the calculation of appearances without allowing any trace of that calculation itself to appear. So Count Lodovico describes sprezzatura as a practice ‘which conceals art, and makes one’s actions and words seem effortless and unpremediated’ (che nasconda l’arte, e dimostri, ciò che si fa e dice, venir fatto senza fatica e quasi senza pensarvi),151 and he goes on to restate the point in general terms: ‘So we can say that true art is that which does not appear to be art; and how to conceal it is the only aspect that must be considered…. (Però si po dir quella

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esser vera arte, che non appare esser arte; né più in altro si ha da poner studio, che nel nasconderla….).152 The classical commonplace that the essence of art lies in hiding its own operations (ars est celare artem) is also invoked by Junius: As in many other Arts the maine strength of Art doth principally consist in the warie concealment of Art; so doth the chiefest force and power of the Art of painting especially consist therein, that it may seeme no Art.153 This is the common ground on which the courtier and the painter meet. The correspondence is not, of course, a simple one. While the fgure of the courtier matches that of the painter, it also corresponds to the picture which the painter produces, given that the courtier is his own self-created work of art. Junius, in shadowing Castiglione, has allowed for this complexity by illustrating the pictorial qualities of grace and facility not only with descriptions of artefacts or artists’ working methods, but also with examples of personal beauty and exquisite comportment. To illustrate his version, just quoted, of the principle that art is self-concealing, he fnesses on this procedure by citing the myth of Pygmalion and his perfectly wrought statue which is transformed into a perfectly beautiful woman. In Ovid’s account the crucial factor in the story is the consummate art which brings the statue into being, causing the artist to fall in love with his creation as if it were real and to pray for it to be endowed with life: ‘ars…latet arte sua’ (his art conceals his art).154 Junius follows this lead, and takes Ovid to be offering a fable about art and how it works, ‘attributing the cause of the heart-ravishing force which was in that image to Pygmalion his skill of concealing the Art in such a notable piece of Art’.155 The artist’s skill in hiding his art is so complete that he ends by hiding it from himself, with the consequence that he takes his fctive image for real and responds accordingly; the coming to life of the statue merely draws the logic of the narrative to its conclusion. Pygmalion’s objective had been to fashion an ideal woman; by using him to exemplify the notion of an artistic agency so perfect that it procures its own disappearance, Junius illustrates his own ideal of visual representation in a way which fgures equally well Castiglione’s ideal of courtly conduct. A humorous aside in Book Three of The Courtier foreshadows the coincidence. The Magnifco Giuliano, instructed by the Duchess to fashion (formare) the fgure of an ideal court lady (donna di palazzo), jokes that when he has done so he will take her for himself, like Pygmalion.156 Castiglione does not pursue the possibilities of this motif; it is touched upon lightly, with a sense of opportunity casually bypassed, but the underemphasis characteristically points up its suggestive quality. The Magnifco is laughing at Pygmalion for being fxated on his own private creation, for being unsociable, obsessional and possessive – unsuited to their outward-looking, debonair company – leaving the relevance of the Ovidian fable to be brought out by Junius, following in his footsteps. By citing the case of Pygmalion’s statue, which combines unparalleled artistic skill with irresistible loveliness, Junius neatly sums up his tendency to illustrate the qualities of grace and facility in painting with reference to examples of personal beauty enhanced by exquisite comportment. Castiglione had done exactly the opposite, expounding the courtier’s grace, to be achieved through sprezzatura, by analogies with various arts such as oratory, dancing and music, all culminating in the art of the painter, with his ‘single line which is not laboured’ and ‘single brush stroke made with ease….’157 The exposition of Junius moves from the pictorial to the personal, and that of Castiglione

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from the personal to the pictorial. The symmetry of these procedures reveals how Junius has undertaken a reverse rewriting of Castiglione, reformulating the courtier’s graceful sprezzatura as the painter’s graceful facility, and making manifest the common ground, frst outlined by Castiglione, between cortegianía and pictorial art.

Notes 1 Nennio: Or, A Treatise of Nobility….Written in Italian by…Sir John Baptista Nenna of Bari. Done into English by William Jones Gent., London, 1595 (facsimile intro. Alice Shalvi, Jerusalem and London, 1967), 19 verso; Il Nennio. Nel Quale Si Ragiona Di Nobiltà. Del Magnifco Dottor di Leggi & Cavalier di Cesare M. Giovambattista Nenna da Bari, Venice, 1542, C4 verso. 2 Physics II.VIII in Aristotle, Physics, ed. and trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford, London and Cambridge, MA, 1934, 172–3: ‘Indeed, as a general proposition, the arts either, on the basis of Nature, carry things further than Nature can, or they imitate Nature.’ Cf. Politics I.VI in Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge, 1988, 8: ‘People…think that as men and animals beget men and animals, so from good men a good man springs. Nature intends to do this often but cannot.’ 3 Vasari/Milanesi, IV, 385; Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, Toronto, 2000, 172–9. 4 Annibale Romei, The Courtiers Academie, trans. John Kepers, London, 1598 (facsimile Amsterdam and New York, 1969), 269; John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie, London, 1586 (facsimile Amsterdam and New York, 1973), 48. Kepers was translating Discorsi Del Conte Annibale Romei…di nuovo ristampati, ampliati, e con diligenza corretti, Ferrara, 1586. 5 Laurence Humphrey, The Nobles, or of Nobilitye, London, 1563 (facsimile Amsterdam and New York, 1973), y viii recto. See back chapter 1, p. 27 and note 115; chapter 2, p. 43, notes 19, 20. 6 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named The Governour, London and New York, 1907, I.viii, 28f. 7 Ibid., 28. 8 Ibid.; Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson, London, 1972, 62–5. For a comparable list by Peacham see back chapter 1, p. 27 and note 115. 9 Elyot (as note 6), 29f. 10 On the usefulness of ‘portraiture’ in warfare see back chapter 2, p. 44 and note 22. 11 Elyot (as note 6), 29–30. 12 Ibid., 30; The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols., London and Cambridge, MA, 1958, XI.iii.67, IV, 280–1. 13 See e.g. the selection of writings on ‘Bellezza e grazia’ in Paola Barocchi ed., Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols., Milan and Naples, 1971–77, II, 1613–1711. 14 Elyot (as note 6), 30. 15 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named The Governour, ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft, 2 vols., London, 1883, I, 46 note b (with the reference to Quintus Curtius VIII.i.11–16), 47, note a. Plutarch in his life of Alexander refers to a group of bronze sculptures (rather than a unitary narrative work), some of them by Lysippus, representing the episode described by Quintus Curtius; see J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Greece 1400–31 B.C. Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965, 144, 146. Elyot may have known an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, the most famous Italian printmaker of the early sixteenth century, of an antique relief representing a scene which resembles the story about Alexander; see The Illustrated Bartsch 27 Formerly Volume 14 (Part 2) Marcantonio Raimondi Part 2, ed. Konrad Oberhuber, New York, 1978, 110, no. 422 (217), The Lion Hunt. After an ancient funerary monument. 16 Elyot (as note 6), 31. 17 Ibid., 31–2. 18 Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones III.xii. For a near-contemporary text, see e.g. L. Coelii Lactantii Firmiani divinarum institutionum Libri septem, Venice, 1515, 93 recto. 19 Elyot (as note 6), 32.

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20 Henry Peacham, Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman 1634, intro. G. S. Gordon, Oxford, 1906, Chapter XII. Of Antiquities, 104–24, 108. 21 Ibid., 110. 22 Both versions reproduced ibid., 65 verso–66 recto. For the engraver Francis Delaram see Arthur M. Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries. Part II. The Reign of James I, Cambridge, 1955, 237–8, no. 42. 23 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia overo Descrittione Di Diverse Imagini, cavate dall’Antichità, & di propria inventione, Rome, 1603, 359. 24 Ibid., 359–60. 25 Ibid., 359. 26 The shield should be surmounted by an earl’s coronet, which has a markedly different design from the one shown here, as Peacham knew perfectly well and made clear in the chapter on heraldry added to his revised edition of 1634; see Peacham (as note 20), 183–5. 27 Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna Or A Garden Of Heroical Devises, London, 1612, 26 (Doctrina), 134 (Veritas). 28 Ripa (as note 23), 499. 29 For the same symbolism of stability or steadfastness (constantia) see Peacham’s image of Atlas bearing the world while standing on a marble cube in The English Emblem Tradition, general ed. Peter M. Daly, 5. Henry Peacham’s Manuscript Emblem Books, ed. Alan R. Young, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1998, 42, 111, 184; and for other instances of the symbolism of the square see John Peacock, ‘The “Wizard Earl” portrayed by Hilliard and Van Dyck’, Art History, 8 (1985), 147 and note 48. 30 Ripa (as note 23), 111–12. 31 Ibid., 68–9. 32 Peacham (as note 20), c 2 verso. 33 Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schӧne, Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. Und XVII. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart and Weimar, 1996, 1431–2, ‘Seezeichen im Meer verankert’, instancing Anna Roemers Visscher, Zinne-Poppen, Amsterdam, 1651 (frst edn., 1614), Book I, no. 31, where the sea mark or signal buoy is an emblem of Christ as the means of rescue or salvation from the perils of evil and mortality. 34 Rhetoric I.v.4 in Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, ed. and trans. John Henry Freese, London and New York, 1926, 48–9. 35 On nobility as a mere effgy or image see back chapter 1, pp. 16–17. The association of ‘Scientia’ with classical sculpture would recall the celebrated collection of antique statues belonging to William Howard’s father, Lord Arundel, especially those displayed in his sculpture gallery as depicted in the portrait by Daniel Mytens; see Karen Hearn ed., Dynasties. Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630, London, 1995, no. 140, 208–9. See forward Figs. 5.14, 5.15. 36 James Cleland, ΗΡΩ-ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑ, Or The Institution Of A Young Noble Man, Oxford, 1607 (facsimile intro. Max Molyneux, New York, 1948), 163. See back chapter 1, pp. 21–2. 37 Peacham (as note 20), 46, 50, 52, for his respective recommendations of Tacitus, Thucidydes and Plutarch. 38 Ibid., 51–2. 39 Ibid., 105. 40 Nova Iconologia Di Cesare Ripa, Padua, 1618, 342–6 (Misura does not appear in the frst illustrated edition of 1603 to which reference has been made in other notes). 41 Peacham (as note 20), 126, 124. On graphice as a ‘generous Practice’ see back chapter 1, p. 19, and chapter 2, p. 3. 42 Ibid., 127–8. Peacham refers to the Latin translation of Dϋrer’s treatise by Joachim Camerarius, Alberti Dureri clarissimi pictoris et Geometrae de Sym[m]etria partium in rectis formis hu[m]anorum corporum, Libri in latinum conversi, Nuremberg, 1532. 43 Peacham (as note 20), 126. 44 The successive titles, all published in London, are The Art of Drawing With the Pen, and Limming in Water Colours, 1606; The Gentleman’s Exercise, 1612; Graphice, or the Most Auncient and Excellent Art of Drawing and Limning, 1612. The alternative titles of 1612 together make the argument that graphic and pictorial art are worthy pursuits for the well born. 45 For the same point made about Castiglione’s courtier see back chapter 2, pp. 43–4. 46 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, London, 1622 (facsimile Amsterdam and New York, 1968), 109; for this reference repeated in the 1634 edition see Peacham (as note 20), 129.

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59 60

61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76

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Henry Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise, London, 1634. Peacham (as note 20), 126. Ibid. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 124–5. For the usefulness of graphice in warfare, already pointed out by Castiglione and Elyot, see back note 10. Ibid. Peacham (as note 47), Chap. XI. Of Landtskip., 38–43. Peacham (as note 20), 125; cf. Peacham (as note 46), 2. A marginal note refers to Job 39.13 and to the Aristotelian epithet ‘thaumaston’ (marvellous). See back chapter 1, p. 27. A procedure which Arundel was to adopt as it were by proxy during his embassy to the Emperor Ferdinand II in Vienna, when he employed the artist Wenzel Hollar to record the various stages and landmarks of the journey; see Francis C. Springell, Connoisseur and Diplomat, London, 1963. See back p. 78 and note 18; and see forward chapter 4, p. 117 on Aristotle’s characterisation of artistic skill as a kind of wisdom. Peacham (as note 20), 125. In an earlier book, he had endorsed in purely general terms the argument taken by Elyot from Lactantius. This was in the text attached to the image of Doctrina or Learning in Minerva Britanna, glossed by an apothegm from Hugh of St Victor: ‘Via ad Deum est Scientia quae ad institutionem recte et honeste vivendi pertinet’ (The path to God is Knowledge, which leads to a training in how to live righteously and virtuously); see Peacham (as note 27), 26. Poetics IV.5 in S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 4th edn., New York, 1907 (reprinted 1951), 14–15. Politics VIII.3 in Everson (as note 2), 186–8. Ibid., 188. See back chapter 2, p. 44 and note 24. Gian Paolo Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing The Artes of curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge, trans. Richard Haydocke, Oxford, 1598 (facsimile Farnborough, 1970), ¶ vi recto: ‘Aristotle…as may appeere by…his Politickes… requireth [painting] of his Common-welthes man, as Castilio doth it in his Courtier.’ See back as before, and note 18; Cian, 122, I.XLIX; Bull, 96. See back as before, and note 20. See back as before, and note 22. Bull, 97 (translation adjusted); Cian, 123, I.XLIX.30–31. Cian, 122–3, I.XLIX, 127–9, I.LII; Bull, 96–7, 99–100. Bull, 101; Cian, 130, I.LII.45. Bull, 101; Cian 129–30, I.LII.39–44. Bull, 97, 99–100; Cian, 123, I.XLIX.33–41, 127–8, I.LII.1–8. In Count Lodovico’s arguments here, Castiglione uses a vocabulary pertaining to the concept of knowledge (e.g. sapere/avere notizia/conoscere) which Bull’s translation does not always render precisely, as in the following examples: Cian, 122, I.XLIX.4–5: il saper disegnare, ed aver cognizion dell’arte propria del dipingere; Bull, 96: the question of drawing and of the art of painting itself; Cian, 129 I.LII.12: fa conoscere ancor la bellezza dei corpi vivi; Bull, 101: reveals the beauty of living bodies; Cian,130, I.LII.49: conosceriano quella bellezza; Bull, 101: they would discern the beauty. Politics VIII.3, in Everson (as note 2), 187–8. Bull, 101; Cian, 130, I.LII.44–9. See back chapter 2, p. 44 and note 25. See e.g. Romano Alberti, Trattato della nobiltà della pittura (frst edn., Rome, 1575) in Paola Barocchi ed., Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols., Bari, 1960–2, III, 195–235; and titles such as Michel Angelo Biondo, Della nobilissima pittura, Venice, 1549, or Giacomo Franco and Jacopo Palma il Giovane, De excellentia et nobilitate delineationis, Venice, 1611. See also John Peacock, ‘The Nobility of Painting’ in The Look of Van Dyck, Aldershot and Burlington VT, 2006, 254–8. Elyot (as note 6), I. ix, 31–2; see back p. 78 and note 18. Peacham (as note 20), 125; see back p. 90 and note 55.

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79 Ibid., 175 for a sideswipe at Reformation iconoclasm, ‘that fury of knocking Churches and sacred monuments in the head….’ 80 Ibid., 235–7. 81 Ibid., 109. 82 Ibid., 221. 83 Bull, 137; Cian, 180, 2.XXVIII.18–20. 84 Peacham (as note 20), 221; Ecclesiasticus 19.29–30: ‘A man may be known by his look, and one that hath understanding by his countenance, when thou meetest him. A man’s attire, and excessive laughter, and gait, shew what he is.’ 85 Peacham (as note 20), 40. For the use of the metaphor of the statera or balance in a nearcontemporary élite portrait see Peacock (as note 29), 139–41, 149. 86 Peacham, (as note 20), 221. 87 Ibid. 88 Minerva Britanna (as note 27), 27. This emblem is dedicated to Lord Harrington, Prince Henry’s close friend, and makes reference to Philip Sidney, paragon of Elizabethan gentility. 89 Peacham (as note 20), 222. 90 Cicero, De Offciis, ed. and trans. Walter Miller, London and Cambridge, MA, 1968, I.xxvii.93, 96–7. 91 Ibid., I.xxvii.93–9, 96–7. Peter Burke, The Fortunes of The Courtier, Cambridge, 1995, 10–11. 92 Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman, London, 1630 (facsimile Amsterdam and Norwood, NJ, 1975), 205. 93 Ibid., 204–5. See back chapter 2, p. 43 and note 14. 94 Ibid., 204. 95 Ibid. 96 Peacham (as note 20), 146. 97 Vasari/Milanesi, I, 524–5; Het Schilder Boeck…Door Karel van Mander Schilder, Amsterdam, 1618, fol. 34 recto. 98 Peacham (as note 20), 97–9. 99 Ibid., 98–9. 100 Ibid., 100. 101 Ibid., 129–30. 102 Nicholas Hilliard’s Art of Limning, eds. Arthur F. Kinney and Linda Bradley Salamon, Boston, 1983, 16. 103 See back, p. 89 and notes 52, 53. 104 Peacham (as note 20), 129. 105 For the reverse case, in which an artist might seek assistance from a classically educated gentleman, see Van Dyck’s letter to Franciscus Junius requesting a Latin motto to inscribe on an engraved portrait of his friend Kenelm Digby in William Hookham Carpenter, Pictorial Notices…A Memoir of Sir Anthony Van Dyck, London, 1844 (facsimile London, 2015), 55–6; and Karen Hearn ed., Van Dyck & Britain, London, 2009, 148. 106 See back notes 27, 29. 107 See back, p. 84 and note 33. 108 Peacham (as note 20), 232–3. 109 Ibid., 178–213. 110 Ibid., 160–1. 111 Franciscus Junius, The Literature of Classical Art, eds. Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, Raina Fehl, 2 vols., Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1991, I The Painting of the Ancients. 112 Ibid., III.ii.12, 239. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’, 5. 115 Ibid., ‘The Thirde Booke. The Argument’, 195. 116 Ibid. On this theme see Jeffrey M. Muller, ‘The Quality of Grace in the Art of Anthony van Dyck’ in Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Susan J. Barnes and Julius S. Held eds., Anthony van Dyck, Washington, DC, 1990, 26–36. 117 Junius (as note 111), III.vi.1, 285, III.vi.5, 290. 118 Ibid., III.vii.1, 295. 119 Ibid., III.vi.1, 284.

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144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157

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See back note 112. Ibid., III.vi.1, 284 and note 1. Ibid., 284–5. Ibid., 285. Junius (as note 111), ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’, 5. Ibid. Ibid., Appendix 1, 315–22; Francisci Iunii F. F. De Pictura Veterum Libri Tres. Amsterdam, 1637, facsimile Portland, Oregon, 1972 (The Printed Sources of Western Art. 25, general editor Theodore Besterman), *2 recto-**4 verso. Junius (as note 111), ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’, 6. Ibid., Introduction, xxvi–xxvii. Peacham (as note 20), ‘To my Reader’, c 5 verso–c 6 recto, on gentry employed in a noble household; Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite. Clothes in Early Modern England, Oxford and New York, 2003, 97–8. Junius (as note 111), III.vi.1, 284–5. Ibid., III.vi.2, 286–7. Ibid., I.iii.5, 34 and note 1. Ibid., I.iii.6, 35. Ibid., I.iii.5, 34. Ibid., I.iii.6, 36. Ibid., III.vi.3, 287; Quintilian (as note 12), X.i.1, IV, 2–3. See back chapter 2, p. 43 and note 14. Junius (as note 111), III.vi.3, 287–8 and notes 28, 34, 35. Ibid., III.vi.4, 289 and note 37; De Pictura Veterum (as note 126), III.vi.3 for both quotations from the Latin; Quintilian (as note 12), VIII.iii.87, III, 260–1. Junius (as note 111), III.vi.4, 289 and note 40. See back chapter 2, p. 2 and note 10. In his original Latin text Junius actually quotes Cicero on negligentia diligens; see De Pictura Veterum (as note 126), 202. Ibid., III.vi.4, 289, III.vi.7, 294. Affectation and its opposite, the ‘sweet Grace of an unaffected Facilitie’ are also made an issue at III.vi.6, 293. For the general context in which Castiglione’s key terms became diffused see Philip L. Sohm, ‘Affectation and Sprezzatura in 16- and early 17th-century Italian Painting, Prosody and Music’, Akten des XXV. Internationalen Kongresses fur Kunstgeschichte, Band 2: Sektion 2, Kunst, Musik, Schauspiel, Vienna, Cologne and Graz, 1985, 23–40. Ibid., III.vi.3, 289, 288. The Book of The Courtier by Count Baldassare Castiglione Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. W. B. Drayton Henderson, London, Toronto and New York, 1928, 48: ‘This virtue…contrarie to curiositie [i.e. excessive carefulness, or affectation] which we for this time terme Recklessnesse…from the which all grace springeth….’ At the frst appearance of sprezzatura in Castiglione’s text Hoby had translated it as ‘disgracing’ (ibid., 46) but seems to have realised that this term could cause confusion in later contexts. See back chapter 1, p. 2 and note 5. See back chapter 2, p. 42 and note 13. Junius (as note 111), III.vi.4, 289 and notes 37, 38. Quintilian (as note 12), XII.ix.20, IV, 448–9; VIII.iii.87, III, 260–1. Ibid., I.vi.40, I, 130–1; VIII.iii.56, III, 240–1. Ibid., XII.ix.20, IV, 448–9: ‘orator, cui disciplina et studium et exercitatio dederit vires etiam facilitatis….’ Junius (as note 111), III.vi.3, 288; and see back p. 106 and note 142. Ibid., III.vi.2, 286. Bull, 67 (translation adjusted); Cian, 63, I.XXVI.23–4. Bull, 67 (translation adjusted); Cian,63–4, I.XXVI.29–30. Junius (as note 111), III.vi.4, 290. Metamorphoses X.252 in Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols., London and New York, 1916, II, 82–3. Junius (as note 111), III.vi.4, 290. Bull, 211; Cian, 301, III.IV.17–19. Bull, 70; Cian, 69, I.XXVIII.41–4.

Colour Plates

Plate 1 Anthony van Dyck, Self-portrait, c.1620–21, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Plate 2 Van Dyck, Self-portrait, c.1640–41. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.

Plate 3 Van Dyck, Portrait of Two Young Men, c.1638. Copyright National Gallery, London.

Plate 4 Van Dyck, Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart, c.1638, National Gallery, London. Copyright Bridgeman Images.

Plate 5 Van Dyck, Sir Thomas Hanmer, c.1638, The Weston Park Foundation, Staffordshire. Copyright Bridgeman Images.

Plate 6 Titian, Young Man with a Glove, c.1620, Louvre, Paris. Copyright Bridgeman Images.

Plate 7 Van Dyck, George Gage with Two Attendants, c.1621–22, National Gallery, London. Copyright Bridgeman Images.

Plate 8 Van Dyck, Self-portrait with a Sunfower, c.1633, private collection. Copyright Bridgeman Images.

Plate 9 Van Dyck, George Lord Digby and William Lord Russell, c.1635, from the Collection at Althorp.

Plate 10 Van Dyck, Self-portrait with Endymion Porter, c.1633, Prado, Madrid. Copyright Bridgeman Images.

Plate 11 William Dobson, Endymion Porter, c.1642–45, Tate Britain. Copyright Tate, London.

Plate 12 Van Dyck, Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel, c.1620–21, J. Paul Getty Museum.

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From the ‘Courtesy’ Literature to Art Theory The association between cortegianía and pictura, exemplifed in the frst place by Castiglione and enhanced by Junius’s take on Castiglione a century after the original publication of The Courtier, happened to become even more apparent when each author’s text was translated into Dutch, Junius’s native language. De pictura veterum came out in Middleburg in 1641 as De schilder-konst der oude. In his passage referring to the rivalry between Apelles and Protogenes, which had fgured as a prominent illustration in Castiglione’s account of sprezzatura, Junius recounts Pliny’s story of their competing to paint ‘lines most subtilly drawne with a light and gentle hand’ (de nudo linearum suspensa manu subtilissimè ductarum certamine).1 In the 1641 translation what appears as the fnal phrase in the English version is rendered as ‘met een losse hand’ (with a loose hand), employing the concept of lossigheid (modern Dutch losheid) or looseness, from the vocabulary of seventeenth-century Dutch artists and art theorists.2 The very same idea of a subtly ‘light’ or ‘loose’ painterly technique takes centre stage in the frst Dutch translation of The Courtier twenty-one years later (Amsterdam, 1662) by Lambert van den Bos. As a vernacular equivalent for the crucial concept of sprezzatura he settles on ‘een lossigheydt gelijck het de Schilders noemen’ (a looseness, as painters call it),3 awarding the fgure of the painter pride of place as the courtier’s alter ego, and consolidating the rapprochement between cortegianía and pictorial art which had informed Castiglione’s text from its initial moment of stylish self-deprecation when the author avowed himself no equal of his friend Raphael but instead ‘pittor ignobile’. This rapprochement had been taking place in the course of the sixteenth century, following the publication of Castiglione’s book in 1528 and the subsequent spread of its European reputation. An early instance is seen in Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della pittura of 1557, subtitled L’Aretino after its principal speaker. In a passage where Pietro Aretino complains of the overbold and unsubtle use of colour by some painters, his interlocutor Giovan Francesco Fabrini agrees and adds his own criticism: In questo mi pare, che si voglia una certa convenevole sprezzatura, in modo che non ci sia né troppo vaghezza di colorito, né troppo politezza di fgure: ma si vegga nel tutto una amabile sodezza. It seems to me that what is needed in this context is a certain appropriate sprezzatura, so that one does not get either too much beauty in the colouring or

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too high a fnish in the fgures, but sees in the whole an agreeable frmness of handling.4 Fabrini goes on to condemn painters whose fgures are so overwrought that they seem to be wearing make-up and have not a hair out of place, ilche è vizio e non virtù: perche si cade nell’affettatione, che priva di gratia qualunque cosa. Onde il giudicioso Petrarca parlando del capello della sua Laura, chiamallo, Negletto ad arte, inannellato et irto. and this is vice, not virtue, because there is a lapse into affectation, which denies grace to any object there may be. Hence the discriminating Petrarch, in speaking of his Laura’s hair, described it as being: Artfully neglected, curly and unkempt.5 Aretino agrees, declaring that the chief necessity is to avoid excessive diligence (fuggire la troppa diligenza), and sums up with the often retold critique by Apelles of Protogenes (already cited by Castiglione) for not knowing when to leave alone a painting that was fnished (levar la mano dalla Pittura).6 The linked chain of concepts – sprezzatura, affectation, grace, diligence – together with the anecdote about Apelles and Protogenes and the resulting apothegm clearly evokes the parallel context in The Courtier; and the example of ‘artful neglect’ as a factor in female beauty suggests Dolce’s awareness of the Ciceronian paradox, negligentia diligens, from which the notion of sprezzatura is generated,7 as he imports that notion, and the argument which sustains it, into the feld of art theory. A similar crossover occurs in the later dialogue by Gregorio Comanini, Il Figino overo del fne della pittura of 1591.8 The title refers to the Milanese painter Giovan Ambrogio Figino, who is the leading speaker. At one point he utters a warning about patterns of contrast in pictures which balance fgures of women and men, or young people with old, or else pair views of sea and land, valleys with mountains, and so on. Such schematic contrasts, he claims, run the risk of resembling over-deliberate antitheses in poetry which, while aiming for stylistic magnifcence, can only have a demeaning effect. Antithetical structure needs an element of the casual or irregular, ‘una sprezzatura artifciosa’ (an artful nonchalance), in order to succeed. For an example, Figino quotes an appreciation by Tasso of a sonnet by Giovanni Della Casa, in which a symmetrical contrasting of epithets is fltered through subtle distortions which produce a complex beauty by avoiding ‘umile affettazione’ (drab affectation).9 The argument turns, with an appropriate kind of discernible unobtrusiveness, on Castiglione’s antithesis of sprezzatura and affectation, which had been developed in a context of conversable informality. As Figino’s critique proceeds it becomes clear that he is using antithesis to typify an entire repertoire of artistic devices which, in the pursuit of a magnifcent style, need to be used counterintuitively, with discretion rather than abundance, with ‘un giudicioso disprezzo’ (a judicious disregard).10 Moving back from poetry to painting he resumes his rhetoric of contrasts; the painter who matches a giant with a dwarf, a beautiful girl with an ugly crone, a pale Slav with a dark African,

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or fgures alternately standing or sitting, seen from front or back, will produce a result that is ‘affettatissima’ (extremely affected). Instead he must vary his fgures with conscious adroitness, so that his work manifests ‘una nobile negligenza, anzi che una vil diligenza’ (a noble negligence, rather than a lowly diligence).11 If we recognise disprezzo as a lexical variant of sprezzatura, the constellation of terms sprezzatura/affectation/negligence/diligence, like the similar constellation used by Dolce, obviously recalls Castiglione and a similar traffc between cortegianía and art theory, although Comanini has added weight to the argument being made by describing ‘negligence’ as ‘noble’ and ‘diligence’ as its social antithesis, ‘vile’ or base. Meanwhile the introduction of Della Casa into the discussion complicates the picture. Dolce’s Fabrini requires sprezzatura in the depiction of heads and faces, while Comanini’s Figino enlarges this demand to take in fgures at full length, with their attitudes and actions. It seems appropriate that his argument, conducted by way of Castiglione’s key concepts, should include the other famous theorist of perfect behaviour, Della Casa, whose major emphasis is on bodily comportment. The use of Della Casa’s sonnet in an analogy between poetic and pictorial art presents it as an instance of affectation avoided to exemplify literary sprezzatura in Castiglione’s sense and also of perfect literary behaviour in Della Casa’s own perspective, attaining excellence by avoiding the dangers of gaucherie and banality which the Galateo so reprehends. Comanini has carried forward the work begun by Dolce, broadening the communication between the literature of ‘courtesy’ and that of art, especially by equating ‘negligence’ or sprezzatura with nobility. The explicit adoption of the Galateo into art theory had already occurred some years before Comanini’s dialogue appeared, in Giovan Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1584). The Second Book of Lomazzo’s treatise dealt with the representation of fgures, especially with their ‘Actions and Gestures’, to quote the running title supplied by his English translator, Richard Haydocke;12 and the Twelfth Chapter deals with the movements and attitudes of fgures of rule and authority, of ‘Honour, Commaundment, Nobility, Magnanimity, Liberality, Excellency….’13 To take the frst and preeminent case, a person of honour will, in Haydocke’s words sit or stande in some principall or eminent place….so placed to rest himselfe without moving, (except upon just occasion;) to carry his body upright, with his face more upwards then downewardes, not suffering him to put one knee upon the other; or to crosse his legs, to hold his hands behind him, or stande picking his eares &c. as Joan: de Casa in his Galatea observeth: but rather to beare the partes of his body a farre of, one from the other, as the feete and knees, stretching forth his right hand with a kind of magnifcencie, with his hands at liberty, nothing restrained, as those doe which put one within another, clasping the fngers, or crossing the armes; which are all base actions, and therefore to be avoided of all honorable personages…as Popes, Emperours, and such like States.14 Not a single one of the ‘actions and gestures’ which Lomazzo dismisses here is specifcally identifed and castigated in the Galateo. Nonetheless, as he prescribes a demeanour ftting the status of ‘honorable personages’ which will eschew unconsidered movements and commonplace postures, he reproduces the spirit of one major strand of Della Casa’s project, what might be called its corporeal casuistry.15 The complementary

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strand, the exposition of an artistry of graceful and pleasing comportment, is left aside, to be taken up soon afterwards by Comanini under the aegis of Castiglione.

The Virtue and Nobility of Painting Injunctions that the creative procedures of the artist should follow the models of élite social conduct formulated by Castiglione and, to a lesser extent, Della Casa obviously gained impetus from the analogies with visual art which each writer had used in expounding his ideal: Castiglione by exemplifying sprezzatura in the painter’s spontaneous line and effortless brushstroke, not to mention his own large-scale ‘portrait’ of the courtiers of Urbino; and Della Casa by dwelling on the canonical statue by Polycleitus as the acme of bodily perfection.16 Subsequently, the tendency to see art as a kind of perfect conduct was fortifed by viewing it also in terms of two related notions, those of virtue and nobility. The idea that exceptional profciency in art could be seen as a sort of virtue had been formulated in Aristotle’s Ethics. In Book VI he discusses intellectual virtues, including wisdom (sophia), moving from its narrower to its wider meaning: Wisdom in the arts we ascribe to their most fnished exponents, e.g. to Phidias as a sculptor and to Polycleitus as a maker of portrait-statues, and here we mean nothing by wisdom except excellence in art; but we think that some people are wise in general, not in some particular feld or in any other limited respect….17 Aristotle makes clear that wisdom is attributed to these excellent artists in a specialised, restricted sense. The concept of excellence is expressed by the word arete, which could likewise have a broader or a narrower sense, meaning goodness or simply skill. Early modern translations of the Ethics relay this term through the prism of Roman antiquity: in Latin it becomes virtus, in Italian virtù, in French vertu.18 This word in its related guises conveys well enough the restricted meaning intended by Aristotle, while opening itself to a potentially broader signifcance. The extension of meaning is registered in Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman, as we have observed. In the chapter ‘Of Antiquities’ added to the edition of 1634 he describes for English readers the new European breed of collectors and connoisseurs devoted to the study of Greek and Roman artefacts: ‘Such as are skilled in them, are by the Italians tearmed Virtuosi, as if others that either neglect or despise them, were idiots or rakehels’.19 Peacham’s joke suggests that he is no wiser than his insular readership about this lexical swerve, but at least he can report on a trend: the expanding concept of virtuosity, of expertise in art spreading from practitioners to connoisseurs. Aristotle’s attribution of virtue to excellent artists had already received a more liberal, revisionist interpretation by the Oxford philosopher and physician John Case. Writing a commendatory preface to his friend Richard Haydocke’s English version of Lomazzo, he praised the unexpected intellectual substance to be found in the treatise: in mine opinion, I never found more use of Philosophie, in any booke I ever read of the like theame and subject. And truly had I not read this your Auctor and Translation, I had not fully understoode what Aristotle meant in the sixth booke of his Ethickes, to call Phidias and Polycletus most wise men; as though any parte of wisedome did consist in Carving and Painting; which I now see to be true….20

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As Case had published a commentary on the Ethics, and was a distinguished Aristotelian scholar, this seems more than mere compliment, especially as he continues without pause to quote scripture in corroboration: because God himselfe flled Bezaleel the son of Uri, with an excellent spirit of Wisedome and understanding, to fnde out curious works, to worke in Golde, Silver, and Brasse, and in Graving stones to set them, and in Carving of wood, even to make any manner of fne worke. In like manner he indued the heart of Aholiah with Wisedome (as the Texte saith) to worke all manner of cunning in embrodred and needle-worke. And this he did for the making of his Arke, his Tabernacle, his Mercy-seate….21 He is quoting Exodus 35, where Moses recapitulates God’s words to him from Exodus 31, inaugurating the building of the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant. By associating Phidias and Polycleitus with Bezaleel and Aholiab, irradiating the sober text of ‘the Philosopher’ with the splendour of God’s word, Case authenticates and enhances the idea of the artist’s wisdom, which comes to fgure as a more momentous virtue than Aristotle had initially allowed. The virtue of artistic virtuosity acquired added signifcance from the debates about the nobility of the arts which proliferated during the sixteenth century; and in this context Castiglione was a powerful presence. When towards the end of Book One, Count Lodovico is maintaining that the courtier should receive instruction in drawing and painting, given that in the ancient world this was a discipline reserved for the privileged classes, he pursues his argument by launching a discussion of the paragone, the comparison of painting and sculpture to decide which is more noble. Debating with the sculptor Giovan Cristoforo Romano, the Count is clearly allowed the upper hand.22 When Giovan Cristoforo accuses him of mere favouritism, of covertly advocating the superiority of Raphael to Michelangelo, he denies the charge, even though it does seem that in the cultural economy of Castiglione’s text the courtly or even princely Raphael fgures by implication as the supreme artist.23 But it is the Count’s overt arguments, eloquent, abundant and in the end left unchallenged, which make a winning case for the nobility of painting. While these arguments serve a particular purpose in the overall programme of The Courtier, their substantial summary of what came to be familiar topics in disputations about the paragone earned them references from later writers on the arts. In 1549 the Florentine academician Benedetto Varchi published Due lezzioni (Two Lectures), the second concerning Quale sia più nobile arte, o la scultura o la pittura (which is the nobler art, sculpture or painting).24 Beginning from the principle that such questions can be settled by resort to authority and to reason, he cites as his frst authority ‘il conte Baldassare da Castiglione’, who presso la fne del primo libro del suo dottissimo e giudiziossimo Cortegiano… allegando molte ragioni per l’una parte e per l’altra, conchiuse fnalmente che la pittura fusse più nobile.25 near the end of the frst book of his very learned and judicious Courtier…adducing many reasons on one side and the other, concluded fnally that painting was more noble.

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His next quoted authority is the Della pittura of Alberti, whose credentials he sets out with even more lavish praise; but it seems signifcant that he gives Castiglione primacy and precedence over a famous and versatile professional artist who was also the founding father of Renaissance art theory. Varchi’s ranking of authorities was reproduced by Raffaello Borghini in his dialogue of 1584, Il riposo, and in fact he copies some of Varchi’s text word for word as if its content is patently uncontroversial,26 tacitly acknowledging Castiglione as a mainstream advocate of the nobility of the painter’s art. The conceptual convergence between virtue as a mark of nobility and virtuosity as a sign of artistic excellence became well established in Italian culture. Andrea Palladio’s Quattro Libri Dell’Architettura carried a frontispiece which made four appearances before each of the four books and was dominated by an allegorical fgure of ‘REGINA VIRTUS’, announcing the ethical value of what the author in a dedicatory preface called ‘this most noble branch of knowledge’ (questa scientia nobilissima), inspired by the ‘virtue and greatness’ (virtù, &…. grandezza) of classical Rome.27 The pioneering confraternity of Roman painters founded in the midsixteenth century and dedicated to St Joseph came to be known as the ‘virtuosi del Pantheon’, after the famous antique temple converted to Christian worship where they exhibited their work each year on the feast day of their patron. One of the newest palaces in early seventeenth-century Rome (to be discussed in the next chapter), completed not long before Van Dyck arrived there in the early 1620s, Palazzo Mattei di Giove, bore a monumental inscription with the wish of its founder that its assemblage of antique statues and relief sculptures would remain for his descendants an ‘incitement to ancient virtue’.28 It was in this frame of mind that the Italophile Lord Arundel, in an early draft of his will, ordained that his books, pictures, antique sculptures and inscriptions should be passed on as an intact collection ‘to infame the Heyres of my House w[i]th the love of things virtuous and noble’ and made accessible to ‘all gentlemen of Vertue or Artistes’.29

Bellori on the Wisdom and Nobility of Van Dyck Anthony van Dyck, not only court painter but a distinguished courtier of King Charles I, had his life and work described a generation after his early decease in The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Le Vite De’ Pittori, Scultori Et Atchitetti Moderni) published in 1672 by Giovan Pietro Bellori. Unlike the artists’ biographies of Baglione, conceived as an updated sequel to Vasari and set out as a wide-ranging compilation, Bellori’s volume was selective and programmatic, prefaced by his discourse on the relation between idealism and naturalism in art, and detailing the lives of only a dozen artists whose work had made a signifcant impact on Seicento Rome. Four of these are foreigners, the frst two of whom to appear in the sequence of lives, following that of Caravaggio, are Rubens and Van Dyck. Bellori introduces the life of Rubens with a short narrative structured in the manner of Vasari, about the vicissitudes undergone by the art of painting between ancient and modern times.30 However, instead of Vasari’s more general concern with the representational power and aesthetic quality of the arts, Bellori focuses his attention on the cultural prestige of painting. In antiquity, he relates, it was held in the highest honour, included among the liberal arts and regarded as an intellectual discipline. In modern times, while equally admirable painters are not lacking and are honoured in the same

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way, there are many others for whom painting, instead of engaging the mind, is mere handiwork to be undertaken for gain; it comes to be seen as a lowly, mechanical occupation, compromising the ‘noble intellects’ who practise it for higher motives. While this malaise afficted Italy and other countries as far away as Flanders, a light appeared in the city of Antwerp which was to restore the nobility of painting, namely the birth of Rubens. Although Rubens, a distinguished native of Antwerp, was not actually born there, Bellori does state correctly that his family was ‘well-bred and respected’ (molto civile ed onorata),31 proposing to associate his élite social status, which was enhanced as his career developed successfully, with the ennobling effect of his art. This prelude established a dual theme to be pursued even more intently in the succeeding life of Van Dyck. Bellori introduces Van Dyck to the reader as an enfant miracle sprung up in the milieu of Rubens, and destined to be his most brilliant disciple, because of ‘such noble generosity of manners and such fne lively intelligence in painting’ (così nobile generosità di costumi e da così bello spirito nella pittura).32 Bellori’s phrase ‘generosità di costumi’ cannot be translated straightforwardly and requires comment. The word ‘generosità’ in this period retains some element of the Latin ‘generosus’, meaning ‘well born’; and the word ‘costumi’, like the English ‘manners’ in its older sense related to the Latin ‘mores’, can refer to moral as well as social behaviour. Bellori is attributing to the youthful Van Dyck, issue of a bourgeois family, a kind of innate nobility which matches his intelligently deployed talent for painting. It is the combination of social and artistic distinction which makes him the ideal pupil for Rubens who, Bellori writes, warmed to his fne conduct and his graceful drawing (li buoni costumi, e la gratia…nel disegnare).33 Pursuing the story, after his formative years, of Van Dyck’s successful career in Italy, the southern Netherlands, and England, Bellori stresses not only the felicitous match between his character and his talent, but the good fortune and the noble lifestyle which were the result. In Rome, still in his early twenties, he was distinguished by a grave modesty of disposition and nobility of mien….His manners were those of a lord rather than a commoner, and his bearing was resplendently enriched by the formality of his attire, accustomed as he had been to the society of noblemen in the school of Rubens….his breast was adorned with gold chains, and he had a retinue of servants.34 da grave modestia di animo e da nobiltà di aspetto….Erano le sue maniere signorili più tosto che di uomo privato, e risplendeva in ricco portamento di abito e divise, perché assuefatto nella scuola di Rubens con uomini nobili….portava collane d’oro attraversate il petto, con seguito di servitori.35 Bellori sums up this description with a classical parallel: Van Dyck was ‘imitating the pomp of Zeuxis’ (imitando…la pompa di Zeusi),36 the famous Greek painter who, according to Pliny, advertised his accumulated wealth by appearing at the Olympic Games with his name embroidered on his cloak in letters of gold. The comparison is ambivalent: whereas Bellori’s friend Carlo Dati in his Lives of the Ancient Painters (Vite De Pittori Antichi) of 1667 had called Zeuxis proud and presumptuous,37 Bellori himself criticises the Flemish artists in Rome for not taking satisfaction in their compatriot’s display of success. This ambivalence fnds a focus in the motif of the gold chain. Such ornaments might be worn by nobles as a matter of course; they were also

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specially presented by rulers to favoured court artists. The gold chains with which the young Van Dyck adorned himself suggest he is anticipating his own inevitable artistic and social advancement. Bellori describes how he achieved these goals in London, succeeding Rubens in the favour of King Charles, and establishing an élite lifestyle of even more conspicuous splendour than before, gauged by a further comparison with a painter from antiquity: the highest nobility frequented his house, following the example of the king…. He rivalled the magnifcence of Parrhasius, keeping servants, carriages, horses, players, musicians and jesters, and with these entertainments he played host to all the great personages, gentlemen and ladies, who came daily to have their portraits painted….38 essendo frequentata la sua casa dalla primaria nobiltà, coll’esempio del re…. Contrastava egli con la magnifcenza di Parrasio, tenendo servi, carrozze, cavalli, suonatori, musici e buffoni, e con questi trattenimenti dava luogo a tutti li maggiori personaggi, cavalieri e dame, che venivano giornalmente a farsi ritrarre….39 Parrhasius is not a fattering counterpart. Although Bellori cites him simply as a measure of the ‘magnifcence’ of Van Dyck’s London residence, which was both household and studio, his reputation as reported by Pliny and rehearsed in moralistic vein by Carlo Dati was for exceptional success resulting in extreme arrogance and self-indulgence. He notoriously called himself ‘habradiaitos’ (the luxurious) and ‘the prince of painting’, who had brought the art to perfection.40 None of this is in Bellori’s text, which confnes itself to detailing, with a certain rhetorical élan, the luxury of Van Dyck’s domestic and professional arrangements; but the invocation of Parrhasius conjures up a theme of hedonistic egoism to shadow the picture of Sir Anthony the brilliant arriviste. From the implicitly parallel life of Parrhasius, one further motif makes a later, modifed but striking appearance: that of ‘prince of painting’. In his conclusion, Bellori observes that, at his death, Van Dyck for all the riches he had acquired, left little wealth, as he spent everything on the sumptuousness of his way of life, more that of a prince than a painter.41 per tante richezze acquistate, lasciò poche facoltà, consumando il tutto nella lautezza del suo vivere più tosto da principe che da pittore.42 The fnal, telling phrase, which was repeated by a later biographer, is a reminiscence of Vasari, and carries with it a certain tone of approbation. An initial version of it occurs in the life of Ambrogio Lorenzetti (and was borrowed, as we have observed, by Peacham43). Vasari relates that he had received a humanistic education, which not only benefted his work as a painter but also ftted him for the company of ‘educated or worthy men’ (letterati o virtuosi uomini) and ensured that he was not just a skilled craftsman but a well rounded and eminent citizen: Ambrogio’s conduct was in every respect praiseworthy, and rather that of a gentleman and a philosopher than an artist. Furono I costumi d’Ambruogio in tutte le parti lodevoli, e piuttosto di gentiluomo e di flosofo che di artefce.44

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The formula of praise is crystallised in the life of Raphael, the ‘noble spirit’ (nobile spirito) whose talent and personal character exalted the art of painting ‘above the heavens’ (sopra il cielo). Vasari remarks on the winning effect of his courteous manners and his artistic achievements, and above all his generosity towards colleagues, assistants and pupils, who were united in admiring him, so that whenever he went to the papal court he was attended by a thronging entourage of fellow artists. ‘In short, he lived not like a painter, but a prince’ (non visse da pittore, ma da principe’).45 By echoing this aphoristic summary of the combined genius and charisma of the painter who is the jeune premier or romantic hero of Vasari’s Lives, Bellori steers his ambivalent strain of comment on Van Dyck’s ostentation and extravagance in a more positive direction, recalling his introductory matching of innate personal distinction and extraordinary artistic ability in the youthful disciple of the noble and talented Rubens. A tribute along these lines from Van Dyck’s own lifetime is paid in a letter sent him by the Earl of Newcastle, one of the numerous aristocrats who, as Bellori relates, visited his London residence to be painted and enjoy his bounteous hospitality. Newcastle was a very cultivated grandee, who wrote poems and plays, and he addresses Van Dyck in a compact but ambitious literary performance: Noble Sir, The favours of my friends you have so transmitted unto me as the longer I look on them, the more I think them nature and not art. It is not my error alone: if it be a disease it is epidemical, for such power hath your hand on the eyes of mankind. Next the blessing of your company, and sweetness of conversation, the greatest happiness were to be an Argus or all over but one eye, so it, or they, were ever fxed on that which we must call yours. What wants in judgment I can supply with admiration, and scape the title of ignorant since I have the luck to be astonished in the right place, and the happiness to be passionately your most humble servant, W. Newcastle46 The compelling quality of Van Dyck’s art is registered through strenuously witty conceits which at one moment threaten to go adrift; at the same time they frame the Earl’s courtly acknowledgement that the ‘noble’ painter’s ‘company’ and ‘conversation’ are equal, if not superior, to his astonishing gifts as a portraitist. Bellori’s fnal judgment of Van Dyck is in essential accord with Newcastle’s praise, while eliciting one qualifcation: that his unique success in portraiture surpassed his capacity in historic or narrative painting. However this assessment has been anticipated in more favourable, even idealised, terms at the very beginning of the life story. Each of Bellori’s biographies is introduced by three preliminary features: a decorative title page, an engraved portrait of the artist, and an allegorical vignette related to his work. The life of Caravaggio, for example, is prefaced by an image of an elderly female fgure holding a plumb line and a pair of compasses, accompanied by the motto ‘PRAXIS’, to suggest his adherence to immediacy and naturalism of representation.47 Van Dyck’s biography is preceded by a portrait in which he wears a conspicuous gold chain crosswise (as Bellori will go on to describe) and then cued by the image of a muse seated on a stone block who is looking at her own face in a mirror, while her right foot tramples on the sprawling fgure of a monkey (Figure 4.1); the stone is inscribed with the words ‘IMITATIO SAPIENS’.48 The abject monkey, symbol of mere mimicry, obviously suggests that, despite the lowly position usually assigned to portraits in the

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Figure 4.1 Imitatio Sapiens from Antonio Vandyck in G. P. Bellori, Le Vite De’Pittori, Scultori Et Architetti Moderni, Rome, 1672. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Douce BB 448, p.253.

hierarchy of pictorial genres, there may be a nobler kind of portraiture which rises above literalism, and that Van Dyck is to be presented as its champion. The muse of ‘wise imitation’ who inspires him derives her signifcance from Greek philosophy. In his discourse on The Idea of the Painter, the Sculptor and the Architect which prefaces the Lives Bellori quotes a dictum of Apollonius of Tyana, ‘that imagination makes the painter wiser than imitation’ (che la fantasia rende più saggio il Pittore, che l’imitatione).49 The notion that imitation may have its specifc kind of wisdom, or that artistic representation in general may demonstrate a form of wisdom, is expressed, as we have seen, in the Ethics of Aristotle, who ascribes sophia in a specialised sense to artists who excel.50 This concept of the artist’s wisdom is amplifed by the image of the muse studying her face in a mirror, a symbol of a more general philosophical urge, as Seneca for one explains: Mirrors were invented in order that man may know himself, destined to attain many benefts from this: frst, knowledge of himself; next, in certain directions, wisdom. The handsome man, to avoid infamy. The homely man, to understand that what he lacks in physical appearance must be compensated for by virtue.51

124 The Nobly Negligent Painter Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Philosophers traces Seneca’s advice back to Socrates who, according to a sixteenth-century paraphrase, recommended that his disciples scrutinise their faces in a mirror, so that those who were ugly could acquire beautiful souls by practising virtue, and those who were beautiful would avoid deforming themselves with the ugliness of vice.52 And by the sixteenth century this Socratic tradition had produced images of Wisdom not unlike the traditional personifcation of Prudence, as a woman scrutinising herself in a mirror. For example, the Symbolicae Quaestiones of Achille Bocchi (1555, 1574) contains not only an illustration of Socrates offering a mirror to a pupil but another of Socratic provenance which shows Sapientia, seated on a block of stone inscribed ‘SEMPER EADEM’, gazing at her face in a mirror while treading underfoot the hydra of sophistry with its speciously manifold ‘heads of argument’.53 This is a close precedent for Bellori’s image, which goes on to locate the notion of philosophic wisdom in the sphere of artistic representation, with the motif of facial scrutiny making felicitous allusion to the process of portraiture and its capacity, at the hands of the ‘wise imitator’, to rise above mundane replication. This idealised characterisation of Van Dyck, ascribing virtue and intelligence to his best work, complements the ensuing narrative which dwells on the qualities of nobility and stylishness. In fact these latter qualities are adumbrated visually even before the narrative starts, in the setting where the muse of ‘wise imitation’ appears. Behind her majestically seated fgure is a background divided between interior and exterior zones. On the left is a wall partly covered with a large curtain or drape, hanging in irregular folds indicated by highlights. Beyond it on the right is part of a loggia, with a view of treetops and sky seen between two columns. The height at which this view appears implies that the scene is set on the piano nobile of a palace; and the elevated, amply draped interior along with a segment of distant landscape recall in abbreviated form the settings of various portraits by Van Dyck, especially those depicting the Genoese aristocracy. The muse has been posed in a setting appropriate to a Van Dyckian grande dame, a conceit which sums up the thesis simultaneously spelt out in allegorical terms, the symbiosis of pictorial intelligence and nobility.

Van Dyck’s ‘Heureuse Négligence’ The anonymous French biographer of Van Dyck, whose narrative, dating from the later eighteenth century, benefts from earlier sources not available to Bellori or subsequent writers, takes up the theme of the princely or noble painter, but in a spirit which combines praise with explanation. Typical is his detailed account of how an artist of bourgeois origins contracted marriage, arranged by the King, with Mary Ruthven, maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria and granddaughter of the Earl of Gowrie; in brief, as a rich, brilliant and famous courtier, inducted into the English gentry by the accolade of knighthood, Van Dyck had become a plausible match for an aristocratic young lady of compromised lineage and little fortune.54 At various points the French biographer notes the part played by material rewards and accumulated wealth in the painter’s social ascent; he records, for example, that one of the habitually worn gold chains was bestowed by the Duke of Mantua as a recompense for a portrait,55 and he argues that Van Dyck’s extravagant lifestyle was not just for show but a ‘noble expenditure’ of hospitality to the élite clients who paid so handsomely for his work,

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as if the artist had become a cultural magnate accepting his reciprocal obligation to keep open house.56 Van Dyck’s initial period of social success during his stay in Rome is treated by the French biographer in terms recognisable from Bellori, although the emphasis is more on explanation than description. We are told that the artist earned a great deal of money and lived up to it, dressing magnifcently, keeping servants, and mixing only with people of higher rank than his own. The last point is typical of the French writer, who goes on to explain that Van Dyck had imbibed the poise and sensibility appropriate in such circles from frequenting the studio of Rubens. Accepted by the Roman élite, he also gained a reputation among the populace as il pittore cavalieresco, the gentleman painter.57 While his text is more analytical in its approach, the French writer is just as concerned as Bellori to associate the exceptional distinction of Van Dyck’s work with an inseparable distinction of personal character. However his overall thesis is that the painter’s nobility of spirit was not innate (as Bellori had seemed to suggest) but gradually formed. He explains as follows: Mixing with people of exalted rank had endowed him with a well-bred refnement which few people of his origins and his station in life have possessed. His conversation was animated, sprightly, engaging. He was quick in repartee, but witty, felicitous, and always with that noble frankness, that charming straightforwardness, which is so agreeable to the high born. La fréquentation des personnes d’un rang élevé lui avait acquis une politesse, que peu de personnes de sa naissance et de son état ont possédés. Sa conversation était vive, enjouée, intéressante. Il avait la repartie prompte, mais fne, heureuse, et toujours accompagnée de cette noble franchise, de cette naiveté charmante, qui plaisent tant aux grands.58 Even if the account of his conversation here is purely speculative, the general tendency of this analysis is clear enough. We are told, in a convincing fashion, that Van Dyck turned his artistic talent to the greatest possible social advantage, that he learned to be noble. The key quality which the biographer attributes to him is ‘cette noble franchise’ which is said to be the defnitive currency of aristocratic social intercourse. ‘Franchise’ denotes candour along with sincerity, freedom of expression springing from authentic selfhood; and we are later told that it characterised not only his social conduct but also his activity as a painter: as he never fattered anyone, the noble frankness which prevailed in his conversation was also there at the tip of his brush. comme il ne fattait jamais personne la noble franchise qui régnait dans ses discours se trouvait au bout de son pinceau.59 Again, the suggestion that his portraits were never fattering, like the knowing summary of his conversational powers, may arouse scepticism ; what is signifcant is the general argument, following in Bellori’s footsteps, that a spirit of genuine nobility informed both his social behaviour and what Vasari in an earlier age would have called his maniera, his pictorial style.

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To that earlier age (although to a generation before Vasari) the biographer harks back when coming to consider Van Dyck’s portraits of individual sitters. He complains that in line with (what he alleges to be) then contemporary fashion most of them are dressed in black, but goes on to praise the variety of pictorial resources with which the painter is able to overcome this restriction. Chief of these is ‘that agreeable carelessness which he would introduce into the arrangement of this apparel’ (cette heureuse négligence qu’il introduisait dans la disposition de ces habillements).60 While the assertion about black as a predominant colour is debatable, the notion of agreeable carelessness or ‘heureuse négligence’ strikes a memorable chord, taking us back to the milieu of Castiglione and the concept, derived from Cicero’s negligentia diligens, of sprezzatura, later revised by Faret into négligence. Having made the equation between nobility of social and pictorial conduct (as Comanini had done previously by recommending to the painter ‘a noble negligence’), the writer represents Van Dyck dealing with his élite subjects in the style of Castiglione’s courtier, demonstrating in their persons and his own artistic personality that apparently unstudied franchise which has been identifed as the touchstone of a noble nature. The idea of ‘heureuse négligence’, of a felicitously contrived casualness, at the heart of Van Dyck’s portrayals is of course compatible with the general argument that, while not born noble, he attained nobility by schooling himself in its social practices and styles. It is also an idea which, well before the French biographer’s exposition, is articulated in Van Dyck’s own era, during the generation following his early decease. William Sanderson in Graphice (1658), a successor to Henry Peacham’s Art of Drawing, memorably described Van Dyck as ‘the frst Painter that e’re put Ladies dresse into a carelesse Romance’.61 The fnal phrase refers to the ways in which he simplifed or modifed the more punctilious and elaborate features of contemporary élite costume in the direction of a sometimes fantasticated informality. Sanderson had already given an example with his ekphrastic evocation of the portrait painted by the artist of his wife, Mary Ruthven, who wears a ‘Petty-coate, and…morning dresse’, a white smock under a blue silk gown, its billowing sleeves having theatrically scalloped fringes. The description goes into a wealth of detail, as the author rhetorically contrasts his own attentiveness with the portrait’s show of sartorial insouciance: ‘But ile say so much for this Piece, not over-curious (it seems) to set out her self’.62 The word ‘curious’ here means ‘careful’, so that ‘not over-curious’ is an ironical way of saying ‘careless’. Sanderson’s loose syntax seems to confuse the ‘Piece’ or picture with ’her self’, the picture’s subject in her unconcernedly loose or informal attire, so that Mary Ruthven’s relaxed but poised comportment and Van Dyck’s virtuosic treatment of her costume are both ascribed the quality of what Sanderson will go on to call ‘carelesse Romance’, an imaginative glamour attained through studied casualness. A similar quality can also be observed in a number of Van Dyck’s English male portraits, although in these pictures there tends to be a predominance of either ‘carelessness’ or ‘romance’ rather than an equilibrium of both features. ‘Romance’ prevails in the portraits of Lord Wharton as a shepherd, Lord George Stuart Seigneur d’Aubigny as a pastoral lover, and Sir John Suckling in orientalising costume, all examples of what Oliver Millar has called ‘the Arcadian/theatrical idiom’,63 in which relaxed poses accompany a relaxation of the protocols of contemporary fashion. ‘Carelessness’ or studied nonchalance, especially in the matter of dress, is most strikingly achieved in the full length Portrait of Two Young Men (National Gallery) (Plate 3), a composition reminiscent of Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart64 (Plate 4), but which paraphrases

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their consciously noble bearing and fashionable attire in a spirit of audacious informality. On a smaller scale the half lengths of George Lord Digby and Sir Thomas Hanmer65 achieve a similar effect, by deploying casually draped and brilliantly painted cloaks to muffe and romanticise the impending dullness of schematically fashionable apparel, and set off the consciously unself-conscious poise of the sitters. Of all Van Dyck’s male portraits from the English court, Sir Thomas Hanmer (Plate 5) is the best example of ‘carelessness’, of that ‘heureuse négligence’ which the French biographer, praising his treatment of dress, could justifably have attributed to the overall fgurative design of a picture such as this. It is based on a work by the artist’s revered predecessor, Titian, the Man with a Glove (Plate 6) which was then in the collection of Charles I.66 The motif of the sitter’s gloved left hand grasping the glove withdrawn from his right hand is transformed by Van Dyck into the central accent of his own composition. This image is glossed, in a coincidental but suggestive fashion, by a text almost contemporary with the portrait, an English version of Gracian’s Spanish translation of the Galateo. In a passage where Della Casa is advising men on the wearing of perfume, the English text concludes: it is best, for a Gentleman, to smell of nothing either good, or ill: this being indeede the best kinde of neatnesse. Sometimes hee may use this curiosity, by means of some rich perfumed gloves, which he wears in a careless way.67 The second sentence is not in Della Casa’s original, but has been added by Gracian, then reproduced by his English translator. It is a signifcant addition: given that curiosity (curiosidad) has its pre-modern meaning of ‘carefulness’ or ‘deliberateness’, Gracian is setting up a paradox, the notion of a careful carelessness, negligentia diligens. He is interpolating Castiglione’s concept of sprezzatura into Della Casa’s Galateo, momentarily combining the two most powerful ideals in the conduct literature of the sixteenth century, that of effortless social preeminence and that of perfectly graceful comportment, in a way which happens to illuminate Van Dyck’s image of a gentleman courtier. Thomas Hanmer had inherited a baronetcy when only twelve years old, and during his early teens served as one of Charles I’s pages, becoming familiar with court life at an impressionable age; later he was to occupy a conspicuous ceremonial role as cupbearer to the king.68 It was ftting that Van Dyck should base his image on a Titian portrait from the royal collection, consolidating Hanmer’s position at the Caroline court by adopting him into a cultural lineage of the most distinguished kind. At the same time, this pictorial genealogy is animated by Van Dyck’s effort to surpass his admired predecessor. Titian’s young man (his identity is unknown) leans with his left elbow on a marble block incised with the artist’s signature. His right hand point towards it, with the index fnger displaying his own identity in the form of a gold signet ring, while his left hand, enclosed in a glove, grasps its counterpart recently removed. In conjunction with the youth’s pensive expression, the contrasting hands, one uncovered and demonstrative, the other muffed and clenched, suggest a complex representation of personality partly manifest and partly withheld. Van Dyck adapts the composition so that the three-quarter-length format is somewhat extended and the fgure free-standing, the right hand withdrawn from view (only the wrist remaining visible) and the left hand moved across the picture space to be centred on the fgure, which as a consequence is more compactly posed. The spare glove grasped in the left hand is now longer and of lighter material (silk instead of kid leather). It hangs down with a kind of weightless

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gravity, helping with no sense of strain to tie together and stabilise the pose, in league with the gracefully erect carriage of the head. The ambiguously Giorgionesque inclinations of Titian’s fgure have been superseded by an image of perfect but unforced self-possession; and the young courtier’s sprezzatura is substantiated by the virtuosic informality with which the painter renders his person and his costume. The supreme instance in Van Dyck’s work where a representation of sprezzatura in the fgure is combined with an ‘heureuse négligence’ in the handling of paint occurs, logically enough, in a self-portrait, the last and most mature of a series extending over a quarter of a century where his likeness acquired an enhanced distinction from his extraordinary technique.69 This bust-length image in an oval format (Plate 2) appears to have been painted around the time of his marriage to Mary Ruthven, which, as she was one of the Queen’s ladies, augmented his ties to the court and confrmed his membership of the gentry. The artist poses himself sideways on to the viewer, and turns his head outwards, in three-quarter profle, to look in the viewer’s direction, over his raised upper right arm. This attitude is compatible with the act of self-portrayal, as his head could be turning towards a mirror to inspect his features and his arm raised to address a canvas with his brush. None of Van Dyck’s previous self-portraits, even those where a sideways turn of the head might imply looking into a mirror or a set-up of mirrors, had ever shown him in the act of painting, or even hinted at the material and manual processes involved in producing the casually elegant images of himself which marked successive phases of his career. But in this case he fnesses on that history of avoidance, ingeniously refecting on his previous efforts to sophisticate his own image: he plays with an ambiguous pose, so that what looks like an equable gaze accorded a putative viewer could also be the artist’s scrutiny of his own face as he pursues his craft of representing it in paint on canvas. The dissimulation of exacting and concentrated effort as a casual display of self-possessed ease is, we need scarcely remind ourselves, the hallmark of Castiglione’s perfect courtier. On the level of painterly technique, the same elusive relationship between ease and effort can be seen in the rendering of the artist’s costume. He wears a dark grey doublet which is ‘paned’, that is, decorated with vertical slashes showing the white shirt underneath; and a broad white collar, probably of linen. All three elements of his dress are painted with audacious freedom, the equivalent of the ‘noble franchise’ praised by the French biographer. If one inspects the picture at close range the painting of the costume makes little sense, dissolving into a visual turmoil, while from a due distance doublet, shirt and collar appear entirely intelligible. This shifting focus can be explained with reference to a commentary on Van Dyck’s revered and carefully studied forebear Titian. Vasari in his life of the painter observes that Titian’s earlier works are executed with ‘a certain refnement and diligence’ (una certa fnezza e diligenza incredibile) so as to be visually intelligible both from close to and from a distance, whereas his late works ‘painted with bold strokes and thick impasto’ (condotte di colpi, tirate via di grosso)70 are not intelligible close to, but make perfect sense viewed from a distance. This, he warns, has deceived many into thinking that Titian’s late style results from a slackening of effort, when in fact the opposite is the case: careful examination reveals that a great deal of labour has gone into working up these apparently dashing, smudged, spontaneous surfaces, but the labour has been concealed by a masterly art. This account of the art which conceals art in late Titian had been repeated in a language close to Van Dyck’s native Flemish by Karel van Mander, whose poetic treatise

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on painting, with its title sympathetic to the artist’s aspirations, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const (The groundwork of the noble, free art of painting), recapitulates Vasari’s didactic conclusions: For (says Vasari) the labour there is covered over by great art….that which seems thoughtless has yet been done with great care. Want (seyt Vasary) den arbeydt daer onder/ groote Const bedeck is….dat zijn dinghen schijnen/ Lichtveerdich, die doch zijn ghedaen met pijnen.71 These maxims, restored to their context in Vasari’s advocacy of Titian’s ultimate maniera, help the appreciation of what was to be Van Dyck’s not only late but last self-portrait. The ostensibly free handling of paint is apparent not just in the costume but in Van Dyck’s treatment of his hair, once auburn and now in later years a more subdued brown, its swept-back density, resolved into complementary motions of falling and clustering, depicted through a wayward interplay of lights and shadows. But the most arresting part of the design is his broad, spreading collar in creased and crumpled disarray rendered with strong grey shadows and thick streaks of white highlight overpainted with carefree frankness. In drawing attention to themselves, these streaks recall the touchstone of sprezzatura in painting proposed by Count Lodovico in The Courtier, ‘a single brushstroke made with ease’ (un sol colpo di pennello tirato facilmente). Now in a later age, a century after that of Castiglione and Raphael, when the new baroque aesthetic prompts the processes of painting to be expressively manifest, Van Dyck stylishly dramatizes this motif in picturing himself as courtier and artist. The nobility which, according to his biographers, his exceptional talent had conferred on him, is here enacted with nonchalant assurance.

Notes 1 Franciscus Junius, The Literature of Classical Art, eds. Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, Raina Fehl, 2 vols., Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1991, I The Painting of the Ancients, II.xi.1, 173; Francisci Iunii F. F. De Pictura Veterum Libri Tres, Amsterdam, 1637, facsimile Portland, Oregon, 1972 (The Printed Sources of Western Art. 25, general editor Theodore Besterman), II.xi.1, 115. 2 Maria-Isabel Pousão-Smith, ‘Sprezzatura, Nettigheid, and the Fallacy of “Invisible Brushwork” in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting’, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art. Nederlands Kunsthistorich Jaarboek, 54 (2004), 269. 3 Ibid., 263, 277 note 19. 4 Mark Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2000, 156–7. 5 Ibid., quoting Rime sparse 270, line 62; see Robert M. Durling ed. and trans., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, Cambridge, MA and London, 1976, 446–7. 6 Roskill (as note 4), 156–7. 7 See back chapter 2, p. 42. 8 See Paola Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols., Bari, 1960–2, III, 237–79. A modern English translation in Gregorio Comanini, The Figino, or On the Purpose of Painting, trans. and ed. Ann Doyle-Anderson and Giancarlo Maiorino, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2001. 9 Barocchi (as note 8), 362–4. 10 Ibid., 363. 11 Ibid., 364.

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12 Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, vol. 2, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Florence, 1974, 95–163, ‘Libro Secondo. Del sito, posizione, decoro, moto, furia e grazia delle fgure’; idem, A Tracte Containing The Artes of curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge, trans. Richard Haydocke, Oxford, 1598 (facsimile Farnborough, 1970), 1–92 (second series of pagination), ‘The Second Booke Of The Actions, Gestures, Situation, Decorum, Motion, Spirit, And Grace of Pictures….’ 13 Ibid., 41–5. 14 Ibid., 41. Lomazzo, Scritti (as note 12), 125–6. 15 Ibid., 125 and note 1. 16 Vasari reports that Della Casa began to write a treatise on painting and, as part of his technical research, commissioned Daniele da Volterra to model a fgure of David in terracotta and then produce a painted version of it on both sides of a single panel, showing both a front and a back view of the fgure. This interest in varied modes of artistically shaping the human body in action would appear to correspond to the Galateo’s insistence on a fne plasticity of social behaviour; see the life of Daniele da Volterra in Vasari/Milanesi, VI, 61. 17 Ethics VI.7 in Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and intro. David Ross, revised J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson, Oxford, 1980, 144. The Elizabethan writer Thomas Salter in his Dialogue Between Mercurie and Vertue (1579) has Virtue list as her followers ‘Socrates, Plato, Demosthenes, Cicero, Archimedes, Policlet, and many other suche like spirites devine’, following Aristotle’s association of philosophic and artistic wisdom, and instancing Polycleitus; T. S., A Mirrhor for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie….A pretie and pithie Dialogue also, betweene Mercurie and Vertue, 2nd edn., London, 1866, 37. 18 For a broader discussion of, among other matters, the etymology and signifcance of ‘virtue’ in this context see Joanna Woodall, ‘In Pursuit of Virtue’, Netherlands Yearbook (as note 2), 6–24, and Anastassia Novikova, ‘Virtuosity and Declensions of Virtue’, ibid., 308–33. 19 Henry Peacham, Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman 1634, intro. G. S. Gordon, Oxford, 1906, 105. See back chapter 1, pp. 29–30. 20 Lomazzo/Haydocke (as note 12), *j. recto. 21 Ibid. Nicholas Hilliard and Peacham were to refer to the same text in defending the visual arts against radical Protestant criticism; see John Peacock, ‘The Politics of Portraiture’ in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, eds. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, Basingstoke, 1994, 202–4. 22 Bull, 98–101; Cian, 124–30, I.L–LII. 23 The implication is made explicit by Lodovico Dolce in his Dialogo della pittura, where one of the speakers says of Raphael: ‘il Castiglione…gli da il primo luoco’; see Roskill (as note 4), 92–3. 24 Barocchi (as note 8), I, 34–52. 25 Ibid., I, 35. 26 Paola Barocchi ed., Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols., Milan and Naples, 1971–77, I, 687: ‘l’autorità del Conte Baldassare da Castiglione nel suo Cortigiano, e di M. Leon Battista Alberti, uomo nobilissimo e dottissimo in molte scienze, architetto e pittore eccellente, nel libro che egli scrive della Pittura; i quali tutti due conchiudono la pittura esser più nobile….’ 27 Andrea Palladio, I Quattro Libri Dell’Architettura, Venice, 1570, facsimile Milan, 1968, A2 recto. 28 Gerda Panofsky-Soergel, ‘Zur Geschichte des Palazzo Mattei di Giove’, Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 11 (1967–8), 152. See forward chapter 5, p. 146 and note 64. 29 John Newman, ‘A Draft Will of the Earl of Arundel’, Burlington Magazine, 122 (1980), 695. 30 Giovan Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, eds. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, Hellmut Wohl, and Tomaso Montanari, Cambridge, 2010 (hereafter Bellori/Wohl), 193. 31 Ibid., Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori scultori e architetti moderni, ed Evelina Borea, 2 vols., Turin, 2009 (hereafter Bellori/Borea), I, 240. 32 Bellori/Wohl , 215; Bellori/Borea, I, 271. 33 Bellori/Wohl , 215; Bellori/Borea, I, 271–2.

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Bellori/Wohl, 216 (translation adjusted). Bellori/Borea, I, 274. Bellori/Wohl, 216; Bellori/Borea, I, 274. Carlo Dati, Vite De Pittori Antichi, Florence, 1667, 6. Bellori/Wohl, 218 (translation slightly adjusted). Bellori/Borea, I, 278. Historia Naturalis XXXV.xxxvi.71 in Pliny, Natural History, Volume IX, Libri XXXIII– XXXV, ed. and trans. H. Rackham, London and Cambridge, MA, 1952, 314–15; Dati (as note 37), 48–9. Pliny uses the phrase ‘princeps artis’, which Dati, 45, renders as ‘principe della pittura’. Karel van Mander had earlier warned Netherlandish painters against the arrogance of Parrhasius and Zeuxis; see his Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, ed. and trans., Hessel Miedema, Vol. I, Doornspijk, 1994, 318–21. Bellori/Wohl, 220. Bellori/Borea, I, 283. The fnal phrase was repeated by Ratti in his revised edition of Soprani’s lives of the artists of Genoa, both native and foreign; see Vite De’ Pittori, Scultori, Ed Architetti Genovesi Di Raffaello Soprani…rivedute…Da Carlo Giuseppe Ratti….Tomo Primo, Genoa, 1768, (facsimile Bologna, 1969), 448: ‘poi trasferissi a Londra, chiamatovi dal Re Carlo….Colà visse graditissimo a tutti, pieno di Gloria, e più da Principe, che da Pittore….’ A variant of the formula had earlier been used by Pascoli to remark on the generous salary paid by Philip V of Spain to Andrea Procaccini, who ‘si mantenne anzi da cavaliere, che da pittore’; Lione Pascoli, Vite De’ Pittori, Scultori Ed Architetti Moderni, 2 vols., Rome, 1730–36 (facsimile intro. Corrado Ricci, Rome, 1933), II, 404. See back chapter 3, pp. 96–7 and note 97. Vasari/Milanesi, I, 524. Ibid., IV, 383–5. Dolce in the Dialogo della pittura has Aretino repeat Vasari’s point, saying it is backed up by his own experience, that Raphael lived ‘non da privato, ma da Prencipe’; see Roskill (as note 4), 178–9. For an enlightening discussion of Raphael’s artistry in both conduct and painting under the aegis of Castiglione see Daniel Arasse, ‘The Workshop of Grace’ in Raphael: Grace and Beauty, eds. Patrizia Nuti and Marc Restellini, Milan, 2001, 57–79. Karen Hearn ed., Van Dyck and Britain, London, 2009, 85–6; transcribed in original spelling in Richard W. Goulding, Catalogue of the Pictures Belonging to His Grace the Duke of Portland, Cambridge, 1936, 485. The conceit ‘to be…all over but one eye’ may be a reminiscence of the line ‘Fà di mie membra tutte un occhio solo’ in Michelangelo’s sonnet ‘Ben posso gli occhi miei’; see Rime Di Michelagnolo Buonarroti. Raccolte da Michelagnolo suo Nipote, Florence, 1623, 14. Bellori/Wohl, 179. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 58 and note 21. See back p. 117 and note 17. Naturales Quaestiones I.xvii.4 in Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones I, ed. and trans. Thomas H. Corcoran. London and Cambridge, MA, 1971, 90–1. Rafael Mirami, Compendiosa Introduttione Alla Prima Parte Della Speculativa, Cioè della Scienza degli Specchi, Ferrara, 1582, 3. See back chapter 1, pp. 14, 24–5. Elizabeth See Watson, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form, Cambridge, 1991, 122 and fg. 28, 140 and fg. 43. For the ‘heads of argument’ see Plato, Euthydemus 297c in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton, 1973, 410–11. The basic allegorical image which lies behind these more sophisticated personifcations of Prudence and Wisdom is that of Sight (Visus) in representations of the fve senses; see e.g. the four suites of engravings after Maarten de Vos. Close to the image used by Bellori is no. 1506 (engraved by Raphael Sadeler) in Hollstein’s Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450–1700, Vol. XLVI Maarten de Vos, Plates, Part II, compiled Christiaan Schuckman, ed. D. De Hoop Scheffer, Rotterdam, 1995, 242. Erik Larsen ed., La vie, les ouvrages et les élèves de Van Dyck. Manuscrit inédit des Archives du Louvre. Par un auteur anonyme (Académie Royale de Belgique. Mémoires de

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55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69

70 71

The Nobly Negligent Painter la classe des Beaux-Arts. Collection in –8⁰ – 2e série, T. XIV – Fascicule 2 – 1975), Brussels, 1975, 84f. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 110. William Sanderson, Graphice. The use of the Pen and Pensil. Or, The Most Excellent Art of Painting: In Two Parts, London, 1658, 39, quoted in Emilie E. S. Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress in Seventeenth-Century Portraiture, Turnhout, 2001, 51. Ibid., 57, quoting Sanderson (as note 61), 37. Complete Paintings, IV.237, 612–13, IV.15, 439–40, IV.222, 603. Ibid., IV.244, 618, IV.221, 602–3. Ibid., IV.93, 503–4, IV.111, 518. Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian. Complete Edition. II. The Portraits., London, 1971, no. 64, 118, plates 29–32. [William Style], Galateo Espagnol….Written in Spanish by Lucas Gracian de Antisco…. And done into English by W. S., London, 1640, 193. Lucas Gracian Dantisco, Galateo Español, Barcelona, 1595, 100 verso: ‘Padria algunas vezes usar desta curiosidad con unos Buenos guantes, traydos ab descuydo.’ In his portrait by an unidentifed artist the translator William Style, meticulously dressed in all the fnery of a Caroline gentleman, displays in his gloved left hand the glove removed from his right hand; see John Dixon Hunt, ‘The Portrait of William Style of Langley: Some Refections’, John Donne Journal, 5 (1986), 290–310. Complete Paintings, IV.111, 518. Ibid., IV.5, 432. One painting in the series, the Self-Portrait with a Sunfower, has attracted doubts about the quality of its execution, doubts which Oliver Millar rebuts, ibid., 432. On Van Dyck’s technique, Vertue, in the following century, commenting on his portraits of Lord Arundel’s family, wrote: ‘they are all right pictures, but not the most curious or fnisht. but done in a free masterly manner. not studyd. nor Labour’d. many parts (especially in the heads,) tho well dispos’d & gracefully, but not determind’. See George Vertue, Notebooks, Walpole Society, 18 (1929–30), 109, quoted Gordenker (as note 61), 116, note 96. On the production of the self-portraits see Piera Giovanna Tordella, ‘Ottavio Leoni secondo Van Dyck. Sul punto di stazione retrostatne, e l’Autoritratto con girasole’, Rivista d’arte, series 5, vol. 2 (2012), 297–312. Vasari/Milanesi, VII, 452. Karel van Mander, Den Grondt der Edel Vry Schilder-Const, ed. Hessel Miedema, 2 vols., Utrecht, 1973, II, 600, stanza 25.

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The Courtly Connoisseur Van Dyck’s picture of George Gage with two attendants (Plate 7) is a hybrid work which extends portraiture into narrative, allowing it to pose questions about the nature of nobility and how it might be represented, but in a quizzical, oblique fashion. Gage was the younger son of a Sussex gentry family who became a courtier in the service of King James I. By the time the picture was painted – most likely in Rome in 16221 – he was involved in sensitive diplomacy preceding the betrothal of Charles Prince of Wales to the Spanish Infanta. As a professed Catholic with a facility for languages, he was confdentially accredited to the papal court, negotiating the concessions towards Catholicism in England required before Pope Gregory XV would grant a dispensation for a mixed marriage. The eventual failure of the Spanish match was owed to the veiled obduracy of Olivares, and the disenchantment of Prince Charles and Buckingham at the delays and obstructions which they encountered in Madrid, rather than the insuffciency of Gage as an envoy in papal Rome. Thanks to a recent important discovery, we now know that, according to the annual census of parishioners in the records of S. Lorenzo in Damaso, Gage and Van Dyck were living in the same house in Rome in 1622.2 Their relationship as housemates helps to explain the casual air of Gage’s presence in the picture, as he seems to turn aside from the regular formalities of portraiture to lounge against a stone plinth and engage in an off-hand fashion with the secondary fgure on his left, possibly an art dealer, who draws his attention and solicits his reaction to the statue held up by the black servant in the background. The motif of leaning on a stone or marble support is found in the portraits of Titian, Van Dyck’s most admired predecessor. The Italian Sketchbook contains a drawing of a half-length male portrait fgure ascribed to ‘Titianus’ (although no longer identifable), leaning against a plinth or column pedestal which is a resting place for his arm muffed in a cloak annotated as black (‘nero’).3 A closer parallel may be a Titian then in the collection of the Duke of Mantua (with whom Van Dyck had dealings), now known as Young Man with a Glove, who, dressed in black, has the same coordinated gaze and stance as Gage, and leans in the same direction on a marble block4 (Plate 6). In general terms, a half- or three-quarter-length male portrait subject, substantially present but gazing aside from the spectator, is typically Titianesque. At the same time, the relation between Gage as principal and the secondary fgure in the foreground appears to be inspired by Raphael. Much earlier in the Italian Sketchbook than the ‘Titianus’ drawing, the lower right-hand section of Raphael’s Disputa in the Vatican Stanze has

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been reproduced in a double-page drawing,5 where, on the right-hand page (Figure 5.1), the fgure most fully realised (as if it prompted Van Dyck’s special interest) is the unknown man, dressed à l’antique, who stands second to last in the foreground range of participants. He engages with the last fgure, shown at half-length stretching across a balustrade which in the original fresco is carved with a classical bas-relief, and as he turns in the latter’s direction, his left arm, muffed in a voluminous cloak, partly rests on the balustrade. In adapting this supposedly antique fgure into that of his friend Gage, Van Dyck has turned the head, barely in three-quarter face, more towards the viewer in accord with the necessities of portraiture, and raised Raphael’s secondary fgure from a bending position upwards to confront him. Adjustments of gesture and posture are duly made, while Gage’s fgure preserves salient aspects of Raphael’s original, notably the torsion of the body, the attitude of the left hand, and the dense sweep of drapery across the waist. Both fgures are, as it were, abducted from the fringes of Raphael’s grand drama and, free of its centripetal tug, drafted into their own enclosed, self-suffcient, more relaxed interaction. If Gage was aware of this process of adaptation, he would have been keenly appreciative. His earlier experience as an occasional diplomat or go-between (on a smaller but still international scale), alluded to in this picture, concerned negotiations over works of art. An exchange of letters written in the Netherlands during 1617 reveals him as an agent for the purchase, and on occasion the commissioning, of works by contemporary painters, especially Rubens. The client is Sir Dudley Carleton, who had been English

Figure 5.1 Van Dyck, pen drawing of Raphael’s Disputa (detail), Italian Sketchbook. Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.

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resident ambassador in Venice until 1615 and was now in post at The Hague. Most of the letters addressed to him are written by Gage’s close companion Toby Mathew. In May 1614, both men had discreetly been ordained priests by Cardinal Bellarmine in Rome6 and were living for the present in the Catholic southern Netherlands. Mathew passes on news about the art market in Antwerp, particularly the current work of Rubens and his collaborators Jan Breughel and Frans Snyders. Some of his information is to do with asking prices and (on the part of Rubens) hard bargaining, some to do with aesthetic judgments and recommendations. It becomes clear that, of the two friends, the connoisseur, who can knowledgeably assess quality and value, is Gage; Mathew passes on his judgments and advice as if Carleton, a not very experienced art collector, will take them to come from trusted expertise. This assumption is reinforced by two letters from Gage himself which, for Carleton’s beneft as a prospective purchaser, evaluate different painters and their work in tones of easy certainty.7 One of these makes a comparison between Jan Breughel and Jacques de Gheyn, the latter originally from Antwerp but now domiciled in the Dutch republic, where he had trained as an engraver before becoming a painter.8 Referring to him as a local artist from Carleton’s point of view, Gage is critical of his style: howsoever yow esteeme there your Jaques de Ghein, yet we preferre by much Brughel, because his thinges have neatnesse and force, and a morbidezza, which the other hath not, but is cutting and sharpe (to use painters phrases) and his things are to much ordered.9 The phrase ‘cutting and sharpe’ translates the Italian ‘tagliente’, a term used, along with ‘morbidezza’, in Vasari’s Lives.10 Gage shows his familiarity with the language of Italian art criticism. In these exchanges, the infuence exercised by Gage owes much to his personal relationship with Rubens, ‘over whome’, according to another of Carleton’s correspondents, ‘he hath more authority then any man I know….’11 Referring to a hunting scene which Rubens was to complete for Carleton, Mathew writes: ‘Mr. Gage will gladlie use all the judgement he hath, to make the Maister doe it excellentlie’.12 This suggests that Gage not only frequented Rubens’s studio but was on sympathetic enough terms with him to survey a commissioned work in progress and persuasively ensure that the painter was engaging with it fully, instead of delegating part or whole to assistants. Their community of interest was shown in a different light in the summer of 1617, when Carleton received a shipment of antique busts and statues from Italy. Both Rubens and Gage were eager to see them, and arranged to do so together. Other commitments cropped up and prevented this expedition; but the passion for classical sculpture which they shared is a motif which came to fgure several years later in Van Dyck’s portrayal of Gage.13 To an extent, Rubens and Gage had parallel lives as sometime practitioners of both political and artistic diplomacy. While the painter was in London in 1629–30, conducting preliminary talks towards an Anglo-Spanish peace accord and receiving pictorial commissions from Charles I, Gage in turn acted as his intermediary on the local level. When Endymion Porter, another Stuart courtier and connoisseur experienced in continental missions who had offered welcome and support, lost a child to sudden illness, Gage called on him twice and sent a letter to convey respectively Rubens’s thanks and then condolences.14 The role of agent or go-between, even after his employment as an offcial envoy was well in the past, seems to have come naturally to him.

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His cultivated, cosmopolitan manners and his knowledge of art must have made a favourable impression on Van Dyck, whom he would frst have encountered in the artistic circles of Antwerp, most likely in Rubens’s studio. Gage’s posthumous reputation as ‘a graceful person, of good address, well skill’d in musick, painting, and architecture; a master of several languages’15 could be describing (given one obvious enlargement of emphasis on the topic of painting) the kind of personality which the young Van Dyck, in his precocious success, would likewise display to the world. These words also describe some of the more novel accomplishments of Castiglione’s ideal courtier, of whom a serious visual and musical culture is required, and suggest how the gentleman diplomat and the ‘pittore cavalieresco’, co-religionists but of different generations and disparate social origins, could meet in sympathy on common ground. The consciously modern demand for a practical knowledge of art which Count Lodovico makes of the courtier has behind it an appeal to classical antiquity. While he cites no specifc authorities, many readers would be able to recall the relevant passages in Aristotle’s Politics, which we have already noted,16 and Pliny’s Natural History.17 Pliny related that owing to the infuence of Pamphilus, the frst early painter educated in mathematics and other branches of learning, Greek children of free birth (pueri ingenui) were given lessons in drawing, which became ‘accepted into the front rank of the liberal sciences’. Moreover, it was forbidden to be taught to slaves, so that painting and sculpture were practised only by reputable individuals (honesti). Between the era of Castiglione and that of Gage and Van Dyck, the changing construction put on this narrative can be seen in vernacular translations of Pliny; they tended to exaggerate the social position of those Greek children who were instructed in drawing and might later go on to become visual artists. Philemon Holland rendered the word ‘ingenui’ as ‘gentlemens sonnes and free borne’,18 while Antoine du Pinet promoted them to the status of ‘enfans des Gentilshom[m]es & grands Seigneurs’, and added gratuitously that drawing lessons were denied not only to slaves but to servants (la valetaille).19 Lodovico Domenichi’s Italian translation more simply, but just as tendentiously, designated freeborn pupils as ‘fanciugli nobili’,20 a move already familiar from Renaissance Italian writers on art who, concerned to restore its former prestige in their own era, enlisted Pliny’s support, rendering his terms ‘ingenui’ and ‘honesti’ as ‘nobili’.21 Castiglione, anticipating this reading of Pliny, does much the same, as he puts a close version of Pliny’s account into Count Lodovico’s mouth.22 Of course, as we have seen, the Count never mentions his source, but begins his paraphrase with the casual remark ‘I remember having read…’, avoiding pedantry with a discreet gesture of the sprezzatura which he had earlier expounded, and which helps to insinuate that artistic competence is a noble and courtly accomplishment. It was an attainment which George Gage abundantly displayed. As well as being a seasoned and trusted connoisseur he appears to have possessed the graphic skills which Pliny, in updated guise, ascribed to ‘gentlemens sonnes’ and Castiglione desiderated of the ideal courtier. We learn this from the printmaker Lucas Vorsterman of Antwerp, who had spent eight years in London under the patronage of Lord Arundel. In a subsequent letter to Arundel he refers to an accompanying drawing after a Triumph by Holbein in the patron’s collection, and asks if it is well enough executed to be engraved; if it needs improvement, he suggests it be retouched ‘by Mr Gage, or Van Dyck, or some other….’23 While this routine task would seem too trivial for Van Dyck, the recommendation of Gage presupposes a capable amateur talent which, whatever uses it was put to, must certainly have informed his keen eye for judging works of art. The ideal which he exemplifes, authorised historically in The Courtier with reference to Pliny, is also informed, as we have seen,24 by Aristotle’s recommendation in the

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Politics that graphice or drawing should be part of a liberal education for a number of reasons. It not only helps one to judge the work of artists, but sharpens attention to the entire world of materials and artefacts, so that the buying and selling of all kinds of objects can be done with canny awareness; more importantly, it also benefts educated citizens, who are not just seekers after utility but ‘free and exalted souls’, on a loftier level, as ‘it makes them judges of the beauty of the human form’.25 As in the case of Pliny, early modern translators of the Politics tend to enhance the claims of the text in the light of contemporary debates about the nobility or otherwise of the visual arts. The concept of drawing gets to be translated as ‘drawing and painting’ or (in most cases) just ‘painting’,26 as if the focus is not merely on an elementary educational discipline but on a professional cultural practice. Some translators, either in appended commentary or in the text itself, fll out Aristotle’s terse discourse with explanatory examples,27 expanding the notion of artists’ works into ‘paintings, statues, drawings, and similar things’28 or ‘vases, statues, works in wood or marble’ and even ‘houses’;29 while the broader category of purchasable objects may be extended from artefacts like domestic wares and furnishings to include not only works of art,30 but at the other end of the spectrum living creatures such as farm animals and horses.31 This introduces a benign gradualism into Aristotle’s uncompromising argument, as if he is reassuring us that trained scrutiny of all sorts of objects can promote a sense of aesthetic form leading to an appreciation of human beauty. And a further tweak to his text occurs when translators, as had been done with Pliny, magnify the social status of the Greek schoolchildren with whom it is concerned. Aristotle designates them as free-born (eleutheros) and great-souled (megalopsychos), the frst epithet expressing a social fact and the second an ethical aspiration. Some translators intrude the term ‘noble’ into this characterisation,32 or else render ‘great-souled’ as ‘nobly born’,33 as if advantages of birth include possession of the highest virtue.34 The result of all these optimistic revisions is to romanticise Aristotle’s argument, as if he is positing a superlative élite sensitised to the gamut of aesthetic experience through a training in sophisticated representational skills. This glamourised reading of Aristotle’s views on the place of graphice in education, which becomes prevalent in the course of the sixteenth century, is anticipated and deftly deployed by Castiglione. When Count Lodovico, in his advocacy of drawing and painting as courtly skills, invokes the paragone to argue for the superiority of painting over sculpture,35 he cites the successes and prestige of ‘many noble painters’ in antiquity, and the ‘many noble writers’ (molti nobili scrittori) who have written about it.36 It is not clear whether he is referring to classical writers only or modern ones as well; but what is evident is that the summing-up which follows is taken straight from Aristotle’s observations on graphice, or rather from the somewhat creative rereading of those observations which was coming to be prevalent in Castiglione’s era. As we might expect, the work of this particularly authoritative, although unnamed, ‘noble writer’, whether under the literary rubric of imitatio or the social rubric of sprezzatura, is appropriated with felicitous insouciance. A knowledge of painting, the Count concludes, helps us to judge the merits of ancient and modern statues, of vases, buildings, medallions, cameos, intaglios and similar works, and it reveals the beauty of living bodies, with regard to both the delicacy of the countenance and the proportion of the other parts, in man as in all other creatures. giovi a saper giudicar la eccellenzia delle statue antiche e moderne, di vasi, d’edifcii, di medaglie, di camei, d’intagli e tai cose, fa conoscere ancor la bellezza dei corpi

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Van Dyck’s Almost Complete Gentleman vivi, non solamente nella delicatura de’ volti, ma nella proporzion di tutto il resto, così degli omini come di ogni altro animale.37

George Gage, capable amateur artist and experienced connoisseur, is shown by Van Dyck in precisely this situation of appraisal. Whether the statuette being presented to him is ‘ancient’ or ‘modern’ is not clear; its shapely form and graceful pose may be a neo-antique invention of the painter. What is important is that Gage is seen exercising the two most signifcant abilities gained, in Aristotle’s view, by a schooling in graphice: to assess works of art, and to understand the beauty of the human body. The stylish nonchalance of his attitude, and the gentle birth casually attested by a glimpse of his coat of arms, characterise him as the noble courtier with an inward knowledge of pictorial art envisaged by Castiglione, a fgure with a classical pedigree stemming from modern, ‘carelessly romanced’ rereadings of Aristotle on artistic education.

Heraldry and Antiquity in Early Baroque Rome The armorial bearings which indicate George Gage’s status as a gentleman are made the object of a visual conceit which plays with the idea of honourable lineage. The heraldic shield of which we can see a part appears to be carved on one side of a stone or marble plinth, with only the frst of its four quarters plainly discernible. This shows (necessarily in monochrome) the arms of Gage: per saltire argent and azure, a saltire gules. Only half visible are the arms, quartered with those of Gage, of St Clere: azure, a sun in splendour or; the alternately repeated quarterings in the lower part of the shield, while they can be inferred, remain unseen. The reticent display is in keeping with the principal fgure’s insouciance, given that the frst quarter of the shield is suffcient to show his identity and status. On the corner of the plinth above the shield is an elaborately carved ram’s head, alluding to the crest surmounting the Gage arms: a ram passant argent, armed or.38 Although only this one corner of the square or rectangular plinth is seen, there is a visual implication that the ram’s head motif is repeated on all four corners, making it resemble a Roman funerary altar. This matches the note of neo-antique pastiche struck by the statuette, and plays with the idea of ‘ancient’ lineage, counterpointing the olden times of medieval heraldry with the more prestigiously venerable time-scale of classical sculpture. Gage and Van Dyck would have been familiar with a similar sculptural conceit to be seen among the Arundel Marbles, the famous collection of antique and post-antique statues, fragments and inscriptions brought back from Italy in 1614 by the Earl of Arundel (whose portrait Van Dyck had painted in the winter of 1620–2139). This had included four pseudo-antique fgures by the contemporary Roman sculpture Egidio Moretti, two wearing togas and the other two military dress (Figure 5.2), representing the traditionally complementary aspects of nobility by which their owner set such store.40 Moretti had also contributed a pair of ponderous rectangular consoles (possibly designed as table supports), each carved with three animal heads: in the centre a horse posed frontally, and at the corners a lion and the kind of hunting dog known as a talbot. These were the heraldic animals of the Howard and Talbot families, that is, of Lord and Lady Arundel (born Lady Aletheia Talbot). The armorial shield of Howard Earl of Arundel was supported by a horse and a lion, and that of Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury (with a typical heraldic pun) by two talbots; both shields featured lions in some of their quarterings, and each had a lion as a crest. The lion common to both allowed a merging of motifs into a composite image of dynastic union; and oak branches carved in relief

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Figure 5.2 Egidio Moretti, Roman military offcer, c.1614. Copyright Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. AN1896-1908.G.1151.

between the heads back up this idea, with a reference to a family tree.41 The medieval and Tudor tradition of heraldic ‘beasts’ extrapolated from chivalric battle dress and manuscript illumination into wooden and sometimes stone sculpture42 is restated in neo-antique terms to memorialise the alliance of two houses of ancient English nobility. A related memorial image helps to fll out further the classicising context of Van Dyck’s composition. Accompanying Arundel in Italy, and especially in Rome in 1614, was Inigo Jones, who took the opportunity to have his portrait engraved by the notable printmaker Francesco Villamena (Figure 5.3). Jones’s bust appears in an oval frame set into a classical plinth. The format is derived from an earlier portrait engraving by Agostino Carracci, except that Villamena has added rams’ heads and festoons to the corners of the plinth, making it resemble a Roman funerary altar, with a Latin inscription commemorating Jones as ‘ARCHITECTOR MAGNAE BRITAN[N]IAE’.43 The aim presumably is to consign the sitter, who looks notably animated, not to funereal abeyance but to immortality, to future achievement and posthumous fame. And the Roman altar evokes an idea of classicism, with its lasting forms and values which were to inspire Jones’s architectural career in his native Great Britain. Gage and Van Dyck would have had opportunities to encounter Jones himself, and this portrait; certainly its assumption that the aesthetic forms of antiquity embody enduring virtues is a habit of thought shared by the grander portrait which they produced between them. What is not shared is the frank cultural piety of Villamena’s image of Jones. Van Dyck presents antiquity with a certain measure of irreverence. An ambiguous note is

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Figure 5.3 Francesco Villamena, Inigo Jones, engraving c.1614. Photo: Edward Chaney.

struck by the discrepancy of scale between the modestly sized statuette being shown to Gage and the monumental altar plinth which supports it. As both he and the artist would have known, in the collections of classical sculpture which had been a feature of the Roman scene for well over a century altars were sometimes used as plinths for lifesize or larger statues, and had come to be seen as complementing such fgures in scale. The same display convention appears to have been used by Lord Arundel in London.44 To exhibit a statuette on an altar plinth, as the art dealer and his assistant in Van Dyck’s picture are temporarily contriving to do, diminishes its impact by making for an awkward disparity, as emerges in the contrast between the hugely glowering animal head on the plinth and the hapless elegance of the undersized but no doubt weighty fgure being heaved upright by the attendants and scarcely being shown to sympathetic advantage. In visual terms the plinth outperforms the sculpture it is meant to support. The clash of scales between a statuette and an altar plinth more apt for a life-size fgure may well have been suggested to Van Dyck by a Roman sculptural ensemble where the combination is handled more tactfully. In the church of S. Maria in Aracoeli, prominent on the Capitoline Hill, is the funeral monument of Lodovico Grati Margani (Figure 5.4), a gifted young aristocrat – linguist, mathematician and astronomer – who died prematurely in 1531 at the age of twenty.45 His interests and his fate parallel those a century later of one of Van Dyck’s Roman sitters, the ailing young nobleman and cleric Virginio Cesarini.46 The Margani and Cesarini families were neighbours in the same quarter of Rome, extending from the Aracoeli towards S. Giuliano dei Fiamminghi, the hospital of the Flemish ‘nation’ to which Van Dyck belonged. The

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Figure 5.4 Battista da Sangallo, Funeral monument of Lodovico Grati Margani, 1532, S. Maria in Aracoeli. Rome. Photo: Conway Library. Copyright The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

142 Van Dyck’s Almost Complete Gentleman Margani monument in the Aracoeli, designed by Battista da Sangallo, now surrounded by other monuments on the interior façade of the church, was in Van Dyck’s time more noticeably positioned on the wall space between two chapels on the right-hand side of the nave.47 It is a kind of stepped pyramid formed of three rectangular sections of upwardly diminishing size. The base is a tomb chest with inscription, which is surmounted by a less wide panel with an inset bust of the deceased, and above that, with yet narrower dimensions, a modern version of a Roman funerary altar (imitated from an antique example housed, at that time, in the church).48 This altar has rams’ heads on the corners, and a heraldic shield carved on the side fronting the viewer, just like Van Dyck’s plinth; it also supports a small-scale statue of Christ, which like Van Dyck’s statuette has its weight displaced onto one foot, and one leg undraped. Given its carefully gauged relationship to other sculptural features of the ensemble – putti, portrait bust, angels in relief, candelabra, and the rams’ heads on the altar – and the ascending, narrowing shape of the structure, the small fgure of Christ (which has been attributed to Andrea Sansovino) looks perfectly posed and proportioned. Its placement on a neo-antique altar provides a suggestive precedent for the same conjunction in Van Dyck’s picture, as if he has taken over this part of Sangallo’s design while deranging its equilibrium for his own, partly ironic, expressive ends. Potential irony lies in the relationship between neo-antique architectural ornament and heraldic imagery, an association visible everywhere in the Rome of the 1620s with which Gage and Van Dyck were familiar. They would, for example, have been struck by the newly built Acqua Paola overlooking the city from the Gianicolo, and described by a later visitor, John Evelyn, as that stately fountain…being the aqueduct which Augustus had brought to Rome, now re-edifed by Paulus V…here pouring itself into divers ample lavers, out of the mouths of swans and dragons, the arms of this Pope.49 Evelyn’s memory is shaky – the heraldic animals of Paul V Borghese are dragons and eagles, not swans50 – but he readily takes the point that these symbols of the Pope’s family, now advanced because of his unique eminence to the highest nobility, are signifcant features of the architectural design. In this respect the ‘stately fountain’ imitates the earlier Acqua Felice, commissioned not long before by Pope Sixtus V, where the animal on that Pope’s heraldic shield51 is represented by four lions spouting water. Instead of being newly carved, these sculptures were appropriated from other sites in Rome, two Egyptian ones from the Pantheon, and two medieval ones from the Lateran.52 Something similar is seen in the Acqua Paola, which includes six granite columns from old St Peter’s.53 The reuse of components from earlier buildings had of course been commonplace in Roman architecture from Christian antiquity onwards. But the evidence of reuse and pastiche in these grand papal edifces does add a dimension to the project of monumentalising family pride through the interpolation of heraldic pretensions to honour, as if the continuity of the urban fabric over centuries and even millennia could stand as a guarantor of perdurable lineage. The imprint of heraldry could at times be more discreet and intrinsic. As the Renaissance in Italy developed, the grammar of classical architecture was so attentively studied and deployed that within its well rehearsed structures the vocabulary of ornament could be creatively varied or reinvented. There was antique authority for this, as Palladio suggests in his reconstruction of a Composite order which he

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associates with the Temple of Mars Ultor, where the top section of the capital, instead of volutes and foliage, has miniature fgures of winged horses.54 Gage’s compatriot Inigo Jones was well aware of this precedent, and his assistant John Webb followed it when they were both working on Wilton House by designing a Composite capital with winged dragons or wyverns, taken from the arms of Wilton’s owner, the Earl of Pembroke.55 In Rome, the Borghese dragons and eagles rearing upon the Acqua Paola were more subtly incorporated into the Capella Paolina which Paul V built at S. Maria Maggiore to celebrate his pontifcate, worked into the frieze above the giant pilasters as idiomatic ornament, innate signatures of glory.56 A similar effect is seen on the façade of the Palazzo Senatorio on the Capitoline Hill, where the frieze (Figure 5.5) is ornamented with repeating motifs from the arms of Paul’s predecessor, Clement VIII Aldobrandini.57 The recent stimulus to these self-vaunting intrusions had been Michelangelo’s completion of Palazzo Farnese, ornamenting the frieze with the heraldic feur de lys of the proprietors, and allowing that the prestige of classical architecture might buoy up an arrogation of nobility.58 While Van Dyck’s treatment of Gage is by comparison anecdotal and quizzical in tone, this is the broad context from which it springs. Within that context there are three cases which shed light on its linking of heraldry with classical antiquity. Taking them in chronological order, the frst, the Margani funeral monument, has already been noted. The second is Palazzetto Altemps, a suburban villa outside the Porta del Popolo on the Via Flaminia. This was demolished in the 1920s, but the main entrance to the complex was preserved and re-erected among the municipal offces at the back of the Campidoglio (Figure 5.6). It was designed in 1600 by Onorio Longhi and praised as ‘richly detailed and quite beautiful’ (ricca di lavoro, e assai vaga) by

Figure 5.5 Giacomo della Porta, Palazzo Senatorio (detail), engraving, from G. B. Falda, Nuovi Disegni Dell’ Architetture, E Piante De’ Palazzi Di Roma…Libro Secondo, Rome, n.d. Copyright The British Library Board. Maps 7 Tab.48.

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Figure 5.6 Onorio Longhi, Portal of Vigna Altemps (reconstructed on the Campidoglio), Rome, late 16th century. Photo: author.

his biographer Baglione, who also described him as having ‘un cervello…bizzarro’ (a freakish mind).59 The richness and strangeness of the conception, in a late mannerist style, involves working heraldic symbolism into many aspects of the design. The Altemps arms are azure, a ram rampant or (d’azzurro all’ariete d’oro), and the image of a ram’s head appears variously assimilated into the architectural members and ornaments of the façade, most strikingly to form the capitals of the two orders used (Figure 5.7), the Ionic on the lower storey and the Composite above, with the customary volutes paraphrased by curving horns.60 This arresting architectural conceit, visible on a relatively recent Roman building, may have left its mark on Van Dyck’s composition. The most thoroughgoing and impressive instance in 1620s Rome of a fusion between heraldry and classical antiquity was the courtyard of Palazzo Mattei di Giove (Figure 5.8), in the neighbourhood already noted (home to the Cesarini and Margani families) between the Aracoeli and the Flemish hospital of S. Giuliano. Work on this imposing palace, designed by Carlo Maderno, had only been completed in 1616, so that for Gage and Van Dyck it would have been among the newest of the ‘wonders of Rome’, to use the language of the guidebooks, one of which, appearing in 1610 before the palace was fnished, nonetheless asserted that it was a ‘beautiful building’.61 The owner was Asdrubale Mattei, head of a prominent Roman family which had become increasingly wealthy in the course of the sixteenth century, enabling him to buy his way into the feudal nobility. In 1594, his frst wife having died two years earlier, he married Costanza Gonzaga of Novellara, a connexion of the ruling family of Mantua;

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Figure 5.7 Detail of preceding. Photo: author.

Figure 5.8 Carlo Maderno, cortile of Palazzo Mattei di Giove, Rome, 1616. Photo: author.

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and in 1597 he and his brother Ciriaco purchased the fef of Giove from the Farnese. Asdrubale became a marquess and added Giove to his surname. As the major heraldic device of the Gonzaga family was the eagle,62 which in classical mythology was the bird of Jove, the new designation Mattei di Giove opened up a fertile prospect of symbolism with which to celebrate his social ascent. The eagle on the Gonzaga arms had been conferred as an honour by the Emperor Sigismund, so that this symbolism had not only classical but imperial associations. The principal courtyard of the new marquess’s new palace acquired an ambitious and carefully planned installation of antique sculpture. On three sides the building rose through three storeys: the central range had loggias on the ground foor and the piano nobile, while the side ranges facing each other were treated as a background setting for various types of sculpture arranged between the regularly spaced windows. The most frequent were bas relief panels with narrative scenes or groups of putti (portrait heads of emperors in antique style were to be added in the 1630s63). At ground level a series of nude male statues on high pedestals ran round all three sides; the tall windows which they fanked were surmounted by relief panels. The variety and density of sculpture compelled the viewer’s attention. There were of course precedents from the sixteenth century for this use of antique or classicising sculpture, especially relief sculpture, as an architectural component, such as the Casino of Pius IV or the garden front of Villa Medici. What is unusually striking about Palazzo Mattei is the incorporation of heraldry into the overall scheme. Heraldic imagery, indicative of longstanding family pride, is presented as a plausible element in the enveloping spectacle of antiquity. Two motifs are repeated throughout: the Mattei armorial shield – checky argent and azure, a bend or (scaccato d’argento e di azzuro alla banda d’oro attraversante) – with the chequered feld lending itself to decorative patterning as well as dynastic insistence, and the eagle which alludes both to Giove and to the heraldic signifcation of the Gonzaga as imperial honorands. Given that Giove was a papal fef, so that the Mattei and the Gonzaga were respectively feudatories of the Holy Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire, the eagle appearing repeatedly amidst a plethora of antique sculpture becomes an image of enduring romanità excessively overcharged. It commands the heights of the entire ensemble. Over every window of the top storey, which has the dimensions of a second piano nobile, the Mattei heraldic shield is reshaped as a plinth to support a large eagle with outspread wings; even higher up, at the top of the central range, the capitals of the pilasters applied to the wall use the spreadeagle carved in relief to make a paraphrase of the appropriately paramount Corinthian order. Meanwhile on the ground, at the spectator’s eye level, the plinths (Figure 5.9) which support the nude male statues, familiar lordly representatives of antique virtù, have their sides carved with the Mattei arms and their front with the eagle. These are notable features in a repertory of symbolic manoeuvres designed to assert the nobility of Asdrubale’s lineage by interpolating it into the mainstream of classical antiquity, an idealised past which is also seen as spanning historical generations: several of the relief portraits added later in the 1630s appear to be of late antique or Byzantine provenance. A monumental Latin inscription, marking the fnish of the main phase of construction, on the screen which forms the fourth wall of the cortile extends the story into the future, describing these piously preserved and exhibited remains as ‘an incitement to ancient virtue’ for the marquess’s posterity.64 One further feature compels attention, as it sums up the entire strategy. Among the plinths of the

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Figure 5.9 Heraldic plinth, Palazzo Mattei di Giove. Photo: author.

statues ranged around the courtyard,65 those in a central position against the walls of the two facing wings of the palace depart from the pattern of the overall sequence. Instead of modern work carved with the heraldic motifs described above they are antique funerary altars, adapted so as to ft into the general scheme. One of these has the requisite breadth and height but very narrow sides, so that a substantial extension in mortar has been added at the back to give it the necessary bulk. It has also been altered in another way. The front displays conventional rams’ heads at each corner, from which hangs a heavy festoon supporting an eagle with spread wings. Above it is a carved frame, with the inscription ‘DIS MANIBVS QVINTVS MVTIVS’ (Figure 5.10), which modern scholars have identifed as a pseudo-antique forgery, carved on a surface originally blank or else made so by the obliteration of a prior inscription.66 While the name Mutius was rare in ancient Roman nomenclature, it was close to home for Asdrubale, whose uncle Muzio Mattei had not many years before sponsored the erection of the famous Fontana delle Tartarughe (Fountain of the Tortoises) in the nearby piazza around which the older residences of the Mattei family were grouped.67 It would appear that the funerary altar of ‘Mutius’, conveniently displaying the image of an eagle along with a tabula rasa for the inscription of ancestral fantasy, propounds a family of the Mutii in the classical era from whom the modern Mattei might be supposed to descend. Enhancing a modern patrician identity by attaching it to an antique monument of exactly the same type is the service which Van Dyck performs for George Gage, albeit

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Figure 5.10 Antique Roman funerary altar, Palazzo Mattei di Giove. Photo: author.

with a modesty of scale and a humour very far from the marquess of Giove’s campaign of self-glorifcation. One modern commentator has judged that whole scheme marked by ‘a kind of heraldic frenzy’,68 but its programmatic expansiveness does offer a perfect demonstration of a cultural ambience in which classical antiquity can be used to sustain early modern fantasies of immemorial noble descent. One can observe such fantasies being documented in a more ingeniously witty vein, closer in spirit to Van Dyck’s picture, during the very time, around 1620, when that picture was produced. The documents in question were broadsheets recording the public defence of their theses undertaken by graduates of the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit institute of higher education. These sheets are headed by dedications to high-ranking ecclesiastics or aristocrats in pictorial form, engraved allegorical narratives focussed on the patron’s coat of arms, imagining its origins in a distant historical or mythological past. One such thesis print, dedicated to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V, imagines the invention of the Borghese arms far back in imperial Rome.69 Their armorial shield featured the two heraldic animals deployed on the Acqua Paola, an eagle in the upper half and a dragon in the lower. The pictorial narrative here (Figure 5.11) shows an allegorical female fgure of Victory between two military trophies, a scene excerpted from Trajan’s Column,70 which rises in the background. In the emperor’s presence she records on her shield his success in the Dacian Wars which the Column commemorates. The dragon standard of the Dacians is seen lowered before the Roman eagle; she inscribes both in

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Figure 5.11 Francesco Villamena, Victory creating the Borghese arms in the presence of the Emperor Trajan, engraved thesis print of Sebastiano Venturelli, Rome, 1618. Photo: Louise Rice.

their respective positions on the shield, which becomes that of the Borghese, backdated to the apogee of the Roman Empire. This conceit would have been appreciated as a clever tribute to the papal nephew, honouring his egregious eminence through a fattering historical fction. A similar narrative conceit, based this time on mythology, is developed in a thesis print dedicated to Gregory XV (Figure 5.12), Paul V’s successor. His family, the Ludovisi, came from Bologna; their arms – ‘Di rosso, a tre bande d’oro scorciate e ritirate nel capo’ – would be blazoned in English terms as gules, three bends in chief or, that is, a red shield with three gold diagonal bands in the topmost section. The print imagines these arms being devised by Iris, goddess of the rainbow.71 In the background appears the Pope’s native city, Bologna, and above it a phenomenon of three parallel rainbows, largely veiled in cloud except for one series of short refulgent segments. Iris in the foreground generates the Pope’s arms by depicting these segments on the upper part of a decoratively convex shield, which gives full value to the curvature of the rainbows while implying that, in an everyday fattened version of the design, they would appear as simple diagonal bands of brightness. This baroque play with the geometries of nature and art helps to energise an ingenious use of myth to propound the ‘illustrious’ origins of the Ludovisi family. Although aimed initially at the élite audience of a special occasion, where the privileged young males educated by the Jesuits exhibited the virtuous outcome of that

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Figure 5.12 Matthaeus Greuter after Antonio Pomarancio, Iris modelling the Ludovisi arms on three distant rainbows, engraved thesis print of Azzone Ariosto, 1621. Photo: Louise Rice.

training to their social peers, these prints would have circulated more widely, produced as they were by prominent artists in sizeable editions (between fve hundred and two thousand). The two just described, for example, were engraved respectively by Francesco Villamena and Matthaeus Greuter, both in the forefront of contemporary Roman printmakers.72 Aside from the texts which they prefaced, the engravings broadcast the prestige of nobility beyond their initial circumstance. Imbuing the schematic and fossilised images of heraldry with the dynamism of history or the natural world, locating the origins of noble families in an imagined faraway otherwhere, they generated fantasies especially sustaining to new dynastic formations created by the accident of a papal election. In general terms they rehearsed the conventional wisdom that nobility can never be factitious, issuing as it may be supposed from inveterate historical lineage and the natural order.

Narrative and Subplot The association of heraldry with the classical past to reinforce credentials of nobility, manifest in the visual culture of early seventeenth-century Rome, would certainly have had a resonance in England (for which Gage’s portrait was presumably bound), given the English obsession with coats of arms as a badge of social status. For the small but growing number of those with an informed appreciation of Van Dyck’s

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work, that resonance might have chimed with a sense of having seen this pictorial composition before, albeit in a more elaborate form. George Gage and the fgures who attend him comprise a contemporary anecdotal scene, the narrative structure of which is a condensed version of the much more complex ‘history’ represented in The Continence of Scipio,73 painted by the artist during the winter of 1620–21, his frst period of residence at the English court. It depicts the victorious Roman general after the conquest of New Carthage in Spain, declining to possess either the young female captive offered by his soldiers as a prize of war or the ransom offered by her family, and instead restoring her to the local prince who is her betrothed. The four most salient fgures are Scipio, presiding as arbiter; his prize, the beautiful Iberian maiden, whom her parents are attempting to ransom; her anxious fancé, who looks to engage Scipio’s sympathy; and the black servant who gestures towards her impudently while staring out at the spectator. The composition of George Gage translates these roles and relationships into its own more compact format. The Iberian maiden who is the focus of attention becomes the marble statue, a translation which mimics her attitude of detachment, and her downcast gaze is paraphrased by the statue’s head which seems to turn away and gaze into the distance. Scipio becomes Gage, whose look is a more animated version of the self-inhibited look of the general in the woman’s direction, as he turns his eyes towards but not upon the statue. The anxious fancé becomes the dealer who scrutinises Gage intently to assess his reaction to the potential object of desire. The black servant appears to hail the viewer, making a crass gesture similar to that of his earlier counterpart by pushing his forefnger at the statue’s naked thigh. One further parallel is the sculpted ram’s head under Gage’s left arm: this paraphrases the gorgon’s heads on the fragment of frieze lying beside Scipio’s right leg. In all, an expansive historical composition recording noble conduct has been condensed into a concise narrative of modern life involving a gentleman courtier. This condensation involves not only the cast of characters but also the levels of action. The Continence of Scipio experiments with the layered structure of the English history play and the Jacobean court masque, where the main action is often accompanied by a comic subplot of a subversive nature. So the lower zone of the picture presents a visual subplot in which animated objects, such as the stony gorgon’s heads already noted and the glaring elephant woven into the carpet on which the principals stand, interact comically with each other and with the fgures above.74 The same kind of subplot, in attenuated form, reappears in George Gage. The cornice of the altar plinth, with its strong horizontal emphasis, seems to divide the foreground into two zones. In the larger space above, the three men negotiate over the elegant statue; the cramped space below is dominated by the lowering countenance of the marble ram, whose one visible eye stares darkly, with an air of melodramatic contrariness. By extending portraiture into moderately animated narrative Van Dyck is able to suggest more facets of the sitter’s identity than might appear in an image of the person alone, however rich in implication. Complementing the heraldic symbolism carved on the altar plinth, which expresses Gage’s social status as a gentleman born, is the statue above, which echoes his fgure. Whether the painter is recording an actual piece of sculpture or simply inventing one, it is evidently late mannerist in style. The selfconsciously elegant pose, with the left knee bent, the right hand on the hip, and the head turned to the left, along with the captiously casual drapery, indicate, just as much as the pseudo-dynastic altar, a pastiche of antiquity. The stance of this ‘antique’ statue

152 Van Dyck’s Almost Complete Gentleman in a modern style, which is partly determined by its not being held perfectly upright so that it has a sideways tilt, resembles that of Gage himself. He leans similarly to his left, his head turns at the same angle, his hair has the same length and bulk, and although his right hand is disengaged his right arm is crooked in the same way; in addition his cloak is wrapped across his chest diagonally from the left shoulder to the right hip, like the drapery of the statue. While these resemblances are not overstressed (the statue being partly masked by the head of the dealer presenting it), they suggest that the statue is a fgurative paraphrase of the sitter. A surmise about its identity suggests that it is closest in type to an Apollo, the god who presides over the arts, so that by mimicking Gage’s authoritative elegance, it would confrm his character as a connoisseur. Insofar as this picture reworks the double narrative structure of The Continence of Scipio, one may see the parallel between Gage and the statue as a theme growing out of the main plot, the negotiation over a work of art. In this perspective, the protagonist of the cramped subplot is the ram’s head, its features realised by the painter in considerable detail, even though partly obscured and cast into shadow by Gage’s black cloak. The corresponding motif in Scipio is the further of the two gorgon’s heads on the broken frieze, made comically to look up at Scipio while having its gaze partly blocked by his red cloak which, by refecting a red fush onto the white marble visage, makes it appear to glower with frustration. The same motif, using the same sculptural fragment, was to be repeated more seriously by Van Dyck in a later work, the Madonna and Child now at Dulwich, where the Virgin’s cloak muffing the gorgon’s face signifes the eclipse of paganism by Christianity.75 In George Gage, as if oppressed by the weight of Gage’s body leaning casually on the overhanging cornice and irritated by his cloak cutting off part of its view, the ram’s head seems to glare with resentment. The hint of comedy is enhanced if, in view of the resemblance between Gage and the statue, we consider that his handsome head could be seen as parodied by that of the ram. In the work of Giambattista della Porta, the leading physiognomist of this era, who makes insistent analogies between types of heads in humans and animals, a ram provides one of the staple comparisons. The title-page of his treatise De Humana Physiognomonia (Figure 5.13), often reprinted, displays a portrait of the writer within a decorative frame which features a number of human facial types paired with the animals they resemble, provoking an implicit question about portraiture’s relationship to physiognomic ‘science’; especially noticeable are facing images of a ram and the corresponding human countenance.76 Van Dyck’s Gage looks nothing like this caricature. Nonetheless, the peak of his combed back hair, the height of his forehead, the prominent cheek bones, the strong downward line of his nose, the shaped beard which lengthens his jaw and chin – all these features prompt a comparison with the long, narrow visage of the sculpted animal in Van Dyck’s picture; and the luxuriant hair is a further point of similarity. Moreover, a classical precedent reinforces the association: on some of the antique funeral altars to be seen in contemporary Roman locales, from élite art collections to churches, the conventional ram’s head was replaced by the head of Jupiter Ammon, where the god’s face was framed by ram’s horns, displaying a compound image of animality and humanised deity.77 In the painter’s fguration of his protagonist a pattern emerges, which has an ironic symmetry. In the upper zone of the picture the statue suggests an idealised version of Gage as the civilised Olympian aesthete; in the lower zone the animal’s head substitutes for that noble characterisation the idea of an inferior creature driven by impulse and appetite, obeying a blindly

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Figure 5.13 Giambattista Della Porta, De Humana Physiognomonia, Vico Equense, 1586, titlepage. Copyright The British Library Board. G.2200.

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procreative instinct. This offers to derange the heraldic story about gentle birth and ancient lineage, ironically reducing it to the level of biological platitude.

Courtier, Gentleman, Virtuoso The relationship between these contrasting stories may be explained by reference to the texts about courtly conduct and nobility discussed in earlier chapters. The fgure of Gage, with his elegantly relaxed posture, rich but understated costume, refned features and gestures, and his affnity with the arts, exemplifes the by now – in the early seventeenth century – classic notion of sprezzatura in its pristine guise. By allowing only a glimpse, under his black outer garments, of white shirt cuffs and collar, and especially of the gold or saffron lining above his right wrist, Van Dyck conveys a sense of inner brightness which his sober exterior unshowily keeps in reserve. The sudden hint of gold emphasises the gesture of his right hand, gracefully cupped in a way which suggests a reckoning or sizing up going on behind his thoughtful expression. Those three or four strokes of orange paint realise, with a bravura unforeseen in Castiglione’s own era, the motif of the ‘brushstroke made with ease’ which Count Lodovico had used as a culminating example of the sprezzata disinvoltura which should characterise the consummate courtier. At the time when he produced this picture Van Dyck, as Bellori tells us, was adopting the aristocratic social habits which his success had made possible, and a keen sense of the relation between his facility as a painter and his aspiration to an élite lifestyle would have sharpened his understanding of what sprezzatura might involve. His performance as a painter here both exemplifes and personifes the elusive quality; and the ambivalent treatment of the armorial bearings in the overall composition questions, as had Castiglione in the frst place, whether courtliness necessarily depends on noble birth, an ironical demur which the sitter’s composure seems effortlessly to accommodate with an assurance innate as well as cultivated. Gage is represented as the perfect combination of courtier and gentleman. In this context, the statue which paraphrases his fgure in aestheticised shorthand may recall the central motif of the Galateo, the classical regolo or canonical embodiment of perfect human conduct, which Della Casa’s speaker urges his readers to measure themselves against and strive towards. At the same time, the Vitruvian associations attached to that motif, which assume that the proportions of the well made human body inform the best architecture, appear with the three columns rising behind the three fgures. These had become conventional accessories in portraiture, and are used here in combination with varying degrees of chiaroscuro, simply to suggest the relative importance of the participants. More idiosyncratic is the way in which the principal column, associated with the fgure of Gage, well lit so that its ornamental futings and base mouldings can be rendered with an appealing morbidezza (to use his own term of approval), seems responsive to his posture, by appearing to lean slightly to the left (from the spectator’s point of view) just as he leans to the right, as does the statue. Poised between the statue and the ‘pillar’ (to recall the Elizabethan translator’s serendipitously suggestive misreading of Della Casa’s regolo) and rising above the image of appetitive animal instinct, Gage could be seen to embody, as well as Castiglione’s courtier, the equally famous ideal of conduct expounded in the Galateo. In the lower zone of the picture, as we have seen, a different kind of imagery gives a more ambivalent account of this paragon of courtliness. The heraldic symbolism identifes Gage as a member of the gentry, his position confrmed by ancient lineage. The

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ingenious incorporation of the armorial shield into the design, and the visual play with the ram’s head crest, refect in the frst place a typically English insistence on heraldry as a signifer of gentle and noble status. As Henry Peacham wrote, just around the time when this picture was painted: How should we give Nobilitie her true value, respect, and title, without notice of her Merit: and how may we guesse her merit, without these outward ensignes and badges of Vertue, which anciently have beene accounted sacred and precious; withall, discerne and know an intruding upstart, shot up with the last nights Mushrome, from an ancient descended and deserving Gentleman…?78 In this piece of special pleading the notion of the ‘ancient’ becomes blurred. Like many writers on the subject before him, Peacham is determined to derive medieval heraldic symbolism from classical antiquity. He notes, for example, that Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, ‘ordained a Colledge of Heralds’,79a move which suggests a venerable ancestry for the College of Arms in London, and, with unconscious irony, imitates its sometime practice of fabricating pedigrees for arrivistes. Here we may recall the debate in Ferne’s Blazon of Gentrie about whether coats of arms derive from ancient Roman ancestral images and their associated military panoplies.80 Ferne has his herald Paradinus disagree with Budé’s argument to this effect; but the discussion itself indicates that this was a live issue. Van Dyck’s treatment of Gage’s arms, rather than identifying with a position in this debate, plays with the possibilities raised by it to make his own quizzical representation of what Peacham calls ‘ancient’ descent. Coats of arms were often added, in miniature form, to English élite portraits of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, either when frst painted or at some later date. Occasionally they appear not as extras but as an integral part of the design. An anonymous portrait of Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester features his arms, in sizeable format, painted over an enigmatic image of twin pillars; and Hans Eworth’s portraits of the fourth Duke of Norfolk and his wife Margaret Audley display their respective arms apparently woven into an embroidered hanging behind each fgure.81 Rubens had gone one better in his grand portrait of Lady Arundel with her attendants by displaying her arms on a velvet cloth of estate, dramatically fapping in the breeze.82 Van Dyck, on a more modest scale, has incorporated Gage’s arms even more thoroughly into his composition by showing them carved on the stone altar, a pictorial conceit which assimilates the notion of ‘ancient’ lineage to that of ‘antiquity’ in its most historically prestigious guise. At the same time, by giving the conventional ram’s head on the altar an exaggerated salience – it is completely out of scale with the armorial shield, and much larger than a normal altar ornament – and considering the ram’s proverbial reputation for aggressive virility, the design suggests how gentle birth and lineage are biologically produced, bodily matters dependent on the animal basis of human nature. The suggestion counterpoints the fact that Gage had been ordained as a Catholic priest,83 committed to celibacy, and so was not going to help continue the family bloodline; the black servant is licensed to hint broadly at this fact by pointing towards the statue’s groin, decently screened by the dealer’s head. The Gage coat of arms, the ‘outward ensigne’ (in Peacham’s words) of heritable family honour, has been skewed into a visual conceit which plays with the idea of noble lineage as mere bodily reproduction. Of course behind this idea lies a tradition of critical argument, which in general terms holds that inherited nobility has no value in itself. When Possidonio in Il Nennio

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contends that true nobility can only be produced by nature, and that the only true representations of nobles are to be found in the children whom they engender, his position is frmly countered. The herald Paradinus in Ferne’s dialogue protests that the outward signs of lineage, such as ‘autentique coate-armours’ are on their own of no value to the commonwealth. Peacham, whose treatise appeared at the same time as Van Dyck was painting Gage, begins it with a preface demonstrating that to be ‘a Gentleman borne’ and no more is meaningless.84 The wider context of these arguments is the often repeated view that nobility, whether inherited or acquired, can only realise itself through active virtue. This is a view which Castiglione, while not writing about nobility as such, supports by analogy, as courtiership depends on a wide range of talents and capacities, strenuously albeit covertly developed, and overtly performed with an effortless conviction. Gage’s virtue, in the specifc guise portrayed here, is to be a virtuoso. The relationship between these two concepts, as observed in the previous chapter,85 had become well established in Italian culture, so that, for example, each of Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture could be appropriately introduced by the presiding fgure of ‘REGINA VIRTUS’ and, in the Rome familiar to Van Dyck and Gage, the new Palazzo Mattei di Giove be pertinently inscribed with the founder’s wish that its assemblage of antique sculpture would remain for his descendants an ‘incitement to ancient virtue’.86 When Lord Arundel, in an early will drawn up around the same time, after his return from Italy, expressed a similar hope that his art collection would inspire ‘the love of things vertuous and noble’ in his heirs, he stipulated that it remain accessible not only to artists but also to connoisseurs, ‘gentlemen of Vertue’,87 a phrase which sums up the characterisation of Gage in this picture. Peacham, as we have already noted,88 in the chapter ‘Of Antiquities’ which he added to the 1634 edition of The Compleat Gentleman, introduces the term virtuoso to his English readers as if he assumes it will be new to them (which it would not have been to Gage and Van Dyck in 1620s Rome). He explains that it refers to those who are ‘skilled’ in antiquities, that is, statues and all kinds of related artefacts, and describes this expertise not as a specialised technical pursuit but as a humanistic study of the widest scope: For next men and manners, there is nothing fairely more delightfull, nothing worthier observation, than these Copies, and memorials of men and matters of elder times; whose lively presence is able to perswade a man, that he now seeth two thousand yeeres agoe. Such as are skilled in them, are by the Italians tearmed Virtuosi, as if others that either neglect or despise them, were idiots or rakehels.89 He concedes with amusement that there is scarcely a perfect ft between the concept of the virtuoso and that of the virtuous person; at the same time, he characterises the virtuoso in sympathetic terms, as a student of past human societies and cultures. It is soon afterwards in this chapter that he refers to the bronze cast made for Charles I of ‘the Gladiator, molded from that in Cardinall Borgheses Villa, by the procurement and industry of ingenious Master Gage.’90 This tribute acknowledges Gage as a dedicated and, it would seem, infuential virtuoso. The epithet ‘ingenious’ recalls the Latin epigram addressed by Peacham on his dedication page to the ‘ingenious youth’ (ingeniose puer) William Howard, in which he plays on the terms ‘genus’ and ‘genius’

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to drive home the point that noble stock counts for nothing without moral and intellectual culture.91 It is clear that the pursuits of the virtuoso, a new breed in England exemplifed by Gage, fall into the category of what Peacham had represented on his title page as ‘Scientia’, the essential complement of ‘Nobilitas’, without which gentle birth remains a dead letter. His image of ‘Scientia’, while derived from woodcut images in Ripa’s Iconologia, is fgured as a neo-antique statue placed on a podium,92 so that even the frst edition of his treatise in 1622 implicitly recommends the study of classical remains, especially sculpture. His explicit account in 1634 of the virtues of studying antiquities postdates Van Dyck’s painting by a dozen years, but allowing for the cultural time-lag between Italy and England, it helps in understanding the depiction of Gage the gentleman virtuoso. The narration of Gage’s identity therefore takes place on two levels, both using the metaphor of ‘antiquity’. In the lower zone of the picture lineage is represented, with an element of sceptical humour, as a source of honour but also as a function of the body. In the upper zone virtue is fgured as a knowledge of ‘the men and manners of elder times’ and of the works of art which evoke them, a discipline of aesthetic taste and judgment which also involves insight into the values of classical civilisation. A striking precedent for this way of linking and contrasting two notions of the ‘antique’ in élite portraiture would have been familiar to both the sitter and the artist. This was the pair of portraits by Daniel Mytens of Lord and Lady Arundel (Figure 5.14 and 5.15), painted in London only four or fve years earlier.93 Each contains

Figure 5.14 Daniel Mytens, Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel, c.1618. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Figure 5.15 Mytens, Aletheia Talbot Countess of Arundel, c.1618. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.

an inset of a carefully depicted interior scene, the two symmetrically contrasted. Lord Arundel sits in front of the gallery of antique sculpture at Arundel House, and his wife in front of the picture gallery below. The poses of each fgure indicate that the Earl’s portrait would be placed on the heraldic right (that is, the viewer’s left), marking not only his status as husband but also the authority of antiquity. Neither gallery is presented in an exactly literal view;94 instead of a topographical record, these background scenes have a thesis to present. In the lower gallery, the pictures are mostly family portraits; two half-lengths at the far end of the vista are facing the spectator, but the main series of full-lengths are only seen side on, and the fgures are scarcely discernible, although the installation looks imposing. The corresponding life-size statues in the upper gallery are turned more towards the viewer and carefully delineated in grisaille so as to be recognisable: one can easily make out, for example, Cupid, Venus, Minerva, Homer, and Marius. The statues identify Arundel, who points towards them with his Earl Marshal’s baton,95 as a virtuoso, a nobleman of noble mind, conversant with the values of the ancient world. With their more vivid presence, they surpass the conventional chronicle of aristocratic ancestry set out in the lower gallery, while at the same time they complement and reinforce it, fnessing the idea of hereditary nobility into a more powerful concept. In a similar fashion, Van Dyck’s picturing of Gage the virtuoso subsumes the idea of time-honoured ancestry into a loftier notion of consanguinity with the classical past through a kinship of the mind.

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Van Dyck must have seen the Mytens pictures when commissioned to paint his own portrait of Arundel in London during the winter of 1620–21.96 The device of using antique sculpture to fnesse the concept of venerable ancestry has apt associations with the double plot structure frst used in The Continence of Scipio (produced during the same visit to England) and adapted for George Gage. The result is a telling contrast which, as already suggested, could be described in the terms used on the programmatic title-page of Peacham’s almost exactly contemporary treatise (Figure 5.1). The heraldic carvings low on the altar plinth correspond to his imagery of ‘Nobilitas’ and its accompanying functions designated ‘external’ (Extra), while the statue held up above on the plinth corresponds to the imagery of ‘Scientia’ and its pursuits designated ‘interior’ (Intus). These are the physical and intellectual domains in which ‘complete’ gentility operates. The metaphor of sculpture has further and broader associations. As has been noted, the image of the statue in relation to that of the ram, the idealised human form in contrast to the disgruntled beast, can be related to the Galateo’s injunction to rise above all forms of physical crassness and impulsive behaviour and shape oneself according to a canonical model of gracious conduct. The literature on nobility uses the same analogy of the perfectly or at least fnely fashioned human image, but approaches it from the opposite direction. Ferne in The Blazon of Gentrie and Cleland in The Institution of a Young Noble Man warn that ‘gentlenesse of high bloud’ which is not animated by the practice of virtue will be ‘no better then a faire and beautiful Image without life and motion’.97 The Apollo-like sculpture presented for Gage’s inspection, which seems to fgure as an alter ego, fxed in an elegantly mouvementé pose, is brought to life in his own person, which embodies at the same time a model of social grace and a sense of communion with the enduring values of the classical world. Van Dyck’s unusually animated portrait, because it shows its subject in what we are invited to see as a real-life situation, is able, by giving its narrative a metaphoric dimension, to canvass questions about the meaning of gentility. The metaphoric motifs charged with being the vehicles of this enquiry are fabricated objects. They raise the possibility that not only is Gage the cosmopolitan courtier a product of expert selfformation, in accordance with the kinds of disciplines frankly detailed by Castiglione and his followers, but that Gage the gentleman may be equally an artefact, a product of assiduous craft and skilful representation.

Notes 1 Complete Paintings, II.43, 186–8; Edward Chaney and Godfrey Worsdale, The Stuart Portrait. Status and Legacy, Southampton, 2001, 17–19. 2 Fiorenza Rangoni, ‘Anthony van Dyck and George Gage in Rome’, Burlington Magazine, 160 (2018), 4–9. 3 Anton van Dyck, Italienisches Skizzenbuch, ed. Gert Adriani, Vienna, 1940, 65, pl. 104 verso. Later, in the 1630s, Van Dyck used this pose for his full-length portrait of the diplomat Cesare Alessandro Scaglia; see Stijn Alsteens and Adam Eaker, Van Dyck. The Anatomy of Portraiture, New Haven and London, 2016, 114, fg. 72. 4 Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian II. The Portraits, London, 1971, 118, no. 64, pls. 29–32. The leaning pose is also seen in Titian’s portrait of Benedetto Varchi, 146, no. 108, pl. 83. The former picture ended up in London before the time of Van Dyck’s second arrival there in 1632, Charles I having purchased the Mantua collection. 5 Italienisches Skizzenbuch (as note 3), 44, pls. 31 verso–32 recto. Luitpold Dussler, Raphael. A Critical Catalogue, London and New York, 1971, 71–3.

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6 Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour, London, 2nd edn., 2000, 176, 198, note 36; and I am grateful to Edward Chaney for further details about Gage’s ordination. 7 W. Noel Sainsbury ed., Original Unpublished Papers Illustrative of the Life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens, London, 1859, 19–20, 24–5. For a detailed and searching account of the dealings between Gage and Carleton see Robert Hill and Susan Bracken, ‘The ambassador and the artist. Sir Dudley Carleton’s relationship with Peter Paul Rubens: connoisseurship and art collecting at the court of the early Stuarts’, Journal of the History of Collections, 26 (2014), 171–91. 8 Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, ed. and trans., Hessel Miedema, Vol. I, Doornspijk, 1994, 434–5. 9 Sainsbury (as note 7), 4. Hill and Bracken (as note 7), 173. 10 Vasari/Milanesi, II, 101: ‘morbidezza nel colorito….una morbidezza [nel]la sua maniera; III, 390: ‘una certa maniera secca e cruda e tagliente’. Cf. Giovan Battista Armenini, De’ Veri Precetti Della Pittura (frst edn., 1587), ed. Marina Gorreri, Turin, 1998, 107: ‘quelle morbidezze e quelli facilità e grazie, che usano dare a i loro dissegni i buon dissignatori’; 140: ‘le opere loro riuscivano crude, secche e tagliente’. Toby Mathew was equally familiar with this vocabulary, using in his correspondence with Carleton the concepts of disegno and colorito which were salient in Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della pittura (1557); see his letter to Carleton of 25 November 1620, quoted Hill and Bracken (as note 7), 179 and note 106. 11 Sainsbury (as note 7), 51. Hill and Bracken (as note 7), 178. 12 Sainsbury (as note 7), 18. 13 Ibid., 22, XIII. Toby Mathew to Sir D. Carleton; 27, XIX. Peter Paul Rubens to Sir Dudley Carleton; 24–5, XVI. G. Gage to Sir D. Carleton. 14 Ibid., 146–7, CXXVII. G. Gage to Endymion Porter. 15 See Oliver Millar, ‘Notes on Three Pictures by Van Dyck’, Burlington Magazine, 111 (1969), 414 and note 6; Susan Barnes, ‘Van Dyck and George Gage’ in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts. Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar, ed. David Howarth, Cambridge, 1993, 4 and note 16. 16 See back chapter 3, pp. 91–2. 17 Historia Naturalis XXXV.xxxvi.77 in Pliny, Natural History. Volume IX. Libri XXXIII– XXXV, ed. and trans. H. Rackham, London and Cambridge, MA, 1952, 316–19. 18 Philemon Holland trans., The Historie Of The World. Commonly called, The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus….The second Tome, London, 1601, 537 B. 19 Antoine Pinet trans., L’Histoire Du Monde De C. Pline Second, 2 vols., Paris, 1622, II, 490–1. 20 Lodovico Domenichi trans., Historia Naturale Di Gaio Plinio Secondo….Di nuovo ristampate, riviste, & ricorrette, Venice, 1603, 858. 21 For a list of these writers see Armenini (as note 10), 53 and note 5. 22 See back chapter 2, p. 43 and notes 19, 20. 23 Mary F. S. Hervey, The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, Cambridge, 1921, 302–4. 24 See back chapters 1, p. 27, 2, p. 43, and 3, pp. 91–2. 25 See back chapters 2, p. 43, and 3, pp. 91–2. 26 Felice Figliucci, De La Politica Overo Scienza Civile Secondo La Dottrina D’Aristotile, Venice, 1583, 249 verso, uses the expression ‘l’arte del designare, & di dipingere’ (the art of drawing and painting), while other translators refer only to painting e.g. Bernardo Segni, Trattato Dei Governi Di Aristotile, Florence, 1549, 395–8 (la Dipintura); Louis Le Roy, Les Politiques D’Aristote, Paris, 1600 (frst edn 1568), 436 (la peincture); Guillaume du Val, Aristotelis Operum Tomus Secundus, Paris, 1619, 450–2 (ars pingendi). 27 Giovanni Genesio Sepulveda, Aristotelis de Republica Libri VIII, Paris, 1548, 245 verso– 247 verso, adds examples of the household furniture and artifacts which the eye trained in the ‘ars pictoria’ can expertly appraise. The anonymous English translation of Louis Le Roy’s French version into Aristotle’s Politiques Or Discourses Of Government, London, 1598, 383–4, details additional areas where skill in what is designated ‘painting’ can be useful, such as architectural plans, topographical surveys, and illustration of herbs and plants needed for medicinal purposes.

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28 Figliucci (as note 26), 249 verso: ‘pitture, statue, disegni, & simili cose….’ 29 Niccolò Vito di Gozze, Dello Stato delle Republiche Secondo la mente Di Aristotele Con Essempi Moderni, Venice, 1591, 398: ‘vasi, statue, lavori di legnami, di marmo, case, possessioni, et simili….’ 30 Figliucci (as note 26), 249 verso, considers not just the appreciation but the buying and selling of works of art. 31 Gozze (as note 29), 398: ‘cavalli, & altri animali….’ 32 Ibid., 399: ‘fu mosso…Aristotele a volere, che la disciplina disegnativa fusse tra quelle, che ad huomo nobile si convengono….’; Figliucci (as note 26), 249 verso: ‘cercare in tutte le cose l’utile, e ‘l guadagno, è disdicevole a gl’huomini nobili & magnanimi & liberi….’ 33 Segni (as note 26), 398: ‘il ricercare…l’utilità in ogni cosa non si confà agli huomini generosi, nè ai liberi’; Le Roy (as note 26), 437: ‘chercher par tout prouft ne convient point aux genereux ny aux libres’; Aristotle’s Politiques (as note 27), 384: ‘hunting after profte and advantage in all places, is not ft for Gentlemen and Noblemen’ (dropping the concept of ‘free men’). Latin translations render Aristotle’s terms more faithfully, but would have had a less diffuse readership. 34 An assumption which Aristotle himself contradicts e.g. Rhetoric II.xv.3; see back chapter 1, p. 32 and note 143. 35 Bull, 99–101; Cian, 125–30, I.LI–LII. 36 Bull 100–1; Cian, 128, I.LII.21–2, 129, I.LII.33. 37 Bull, 101; Cian, 129–30, I.LII.40–44. 38 James Fairbairn, rev. Laurence Butters, Fairbairn’s Crests of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland, London, 1992, 195, plate 109.2. Van Dyck was to make a similar use of heraldry in Portrait of a Young Man of the Spinola Family (now identifed as Filippo Spinola Count of Tassarolo) where the Spinola arms appear in relief on the pedestal of the column behind the fgure: Complete Paintings, II.66, 207. 39 Complete Paintings, I.161, 139. 40 David Howarth, Lord Arundel and His Circle, New Haven and London, 1985, 47, 229–30 note 40; D. E. L. Haynes, The Arundel Marbles, Oxford, 1975, 3–4; Michael Vickers, The Arundel and Pomfret Marbles, Oxford, 2006, 18–19. 41 Haynes (as note 40), plate 23b. Two of the pseudo-antique fgures by Moretti, dressed as soldiers, have the same heraldic animals incorporated into their costume, shown as small heads in relief on the lappets of their cuirasses (i.e. the tabs on the lower fringe of their breastplates); see Fig. 5.2 and Vickers (as note 40), 18–19. 42 Paula Henderson, The Tudor House and Garden, New Haven and London, 2005, 196. 43 Howarth (as note 40), 98, fg. 60. Diane DeGrazia Bohlin, Prints and Related Drawings by the Carracci Family, Washington, DC, 1979, no. 144, Portrait of a Man, 248–9. 44 For an argument to this effect see John Peacock, ‘Inigo Jones and the Arundel Marbles’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 16 (1986), 81. For an image of a statuette on an altar plinth, in the sculpture garden of the Cesi family, see the drawing by Maarten van Heemskerck reproduced in Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists & Antique Sculpture, London and Oxford, 1986, 472. 45 Pier Nicola Pagliara, ‘(Giovanni) Battista da Sangallo’ in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, vol. 27, London, 1996, 748 and fg. 1. 46 David Freedberg, ‘Van Dyck and Virginio Cesarini’ in Van Dyck 350, eds. Susan J. Barnes and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Washington, DC, 1994, 153–74. 47 Memorie Istoriche Della Chiesa E Convento Di S. Maria in Araceli Di Roma. Raccolte Dal P. F. Casimiro Romano Dell’Ordine de’ Minori, Rome, 1736, 274–5 and 275 note 9. 48 Pagliara (as note 45), 748. 49 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. G. W. E. Russell, rev. edn., 2 vols., London and New York, 1952, I, 145. 50 Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, ed. and trans. Ralph Francis Kerr, Volume XXVI. Leo XI and Paul V (1605–1621), London, 1937, 430. The structure of the fountain (the ‘castello’) comprised an arcade of fve bays through which water poured, surmounted by an attic with a celebratory inscription and an aedicule with a monumental relief of the Pope’s arms. The two outer, smaller bays contained heraldic dragons gushing water, but more salient were pairs of dragons and eagles fanking

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51 52 53 54 55

56

57 58 59

60 61

62

63

64

65 66

Van Dyck’s Almost Complete Gentleman the attic at its lower and upper levels, just as they fgured on the coat of arms crowning the ensemble; see Le Fontane Di Roma Nelle Piazze E Luoghi Publici Della Città…Disegnate, Et Intagliate Di Gio. Battista Falda, Rome, n.d., plates 11–12. Von Pastor (as note 50), Volume XXI. Sixtus V, London, 1932, 216. Ibid. Ibid., Volume XXVI, 430. Andrea Palladio, I Quattro Libri Dell’Architettura, Venice, 1570, facsimile Milan, 1968, Book 4, 22. John Bold, John Webb. Architectural Theory and Practice in the Seventeenth Century, Oxford, rev. edn., 1990, 32–5. Webb designed a variety of composite capitals after the precedent of Palladio’s Temple of Mars Ultor, including one which paraphrases a Roman altar with ram’s heads marking its corners, and another associated with the King Charles Building at Greenwich which uses the lion and the unicorn from the royal arms; ibid., 33 fg. 19, 145 fg. 97. For the wyvern capitals at Wilton see John Bold, Wilton House and English Palladianism, London, 1988, 50 fg. 57, 49 fgs. 54–5, 54 fg. 64. Upon entering the chapel one can see an eagle in the frieze up to the right, and a winged dragon up to the left; at the farther end of the chapel, in the corners of the recess containing the altar, the frieze repeats these motifs in reverse, with an eagle on the left and a dragon on the right. For partial photographic documentation see Liliana Barroero, ‘La basilica dal Cinquecento al Ottocento’ in La basilica romana di Santa Maria Maggiore, ed. Carlo Pellegrini, Florence, 1987, 263 (section of frieze with putti, festoons and Borghese dragon), 252 (fresco with dragons in lower corners of the frame), 272 (lower fresco with segmental pediment above the frame, surmounted by an eagle). G. B. Falda and A. Specchi, Palazzi di Roma nel ‘600, intro. Renata Piccininni, eds. Marina Del Nunzio and Simonetta Sprega (Vedute d’Italia vol. 3), Rome, 1986, Falda pl. 6; John Barrington Bayley, Letarouilly on Renaissance Rome, Mineola, NY, 2012, 12, plate 2. James S. Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo, revised edn., Harmondsworth, 1970, 184, fg. 77. The branch of the family initiated by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, Pope Paul III, was obviously, at least in its origins, illegitimate. Giovanni Baglione, Le Vite de’ Pittori Scultori Et Architetti. Dal Pontifcato di Gregorio XIII. Fino à tutto quello d’Urbano Ottavo, 2nd edn., Rome, 1649, facsimile Bologna, 2008, 156, where Longhi is also described as a ‘virtuoso’ because he came to the practice of architecture through a regime of schooling and study. Piero Panizon, Il cardinale lanzichenecco, Turin, 2010, 203. Gerda Panofsky-Soergel, ‘Zur Geschichte des Palazzo Mattei di Giove’, Rӧmisches Jahrbuch fϋr Kunstgeschichte, 11 (1967–8), 152; Francesca Cappelletti and Laura Testa, Il trattenimento di virtuosi. Le collezioni secentesche di quadri nei palazzi Mattei di Roma, Rome, 1994, 56; Pietro Martire Felini, Trattato Nuovo Delle Cose Maravigliose Dell’Alma Citta Di Roma, Rome, 1610 (facsimile Berlin, 1969, ed. Stephen Waetzoldt), 219: ‘andarete à vedere quello [palazzo] de’ Mattei, non molto discosto del Campidoglio, perche si bene non sia fnito, vedrete un bell’ edifcio’. Cappelletti and Testa (as note 61), 61 note 17. See e.g. the Gonzaga arms which dominate the title-page of the most famous theatrical production staged at the court in Mantua, Monteverdi’s Orfeo: reprod. Raffaella Morselli ed., Gonzaga. La celeste galleria. Le raccolte, Milan, 2002, no. 184, 458. On these later additions see Paolo Sanvito, ‘Il ruolo dei cortili nelle collezioni di antiquitates come luogo di rappresentazione del patriziato. Il caso di Palazzo Lancillotti’ in Marcello Barbanera and Agneta Freccero eds., Collezione di antichità di Palazzo Lancillotti ai Coronari: archeologia, architettura, restauro, Rome, 2008, 41. Panofsky-Soergel (as note 61), 152: ASDRUBAL MATTHAEIUS MARCHIO JOVII VETERUM SIGNIS TANQUAM SPOLIIS EX ANTIQUITATE OMNIUM VICTRICE DETRACTIS DOMUM ORNAVIT AC PRISCAE VIRTUTIS INVITAMENTUM POSTERIS SUIS RELIQUIT ANNO DOMINI MDCXVI. One bears an urn instead of a statue, similar to the monumental urn displayed in the vestibule giving access to the principal staircase from the courtyard to the piano nobile; see Cappelletti and Testa (as note 61), plates VI and XVI. Lucia Guerrini ed., Palazzo Mattei di Giove. Le antichità, Rome, 1982, no. 42, 178.

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67 Ibid.; Clare Robertson, Rome 1600. The City and the Visual Arts under Clement VIII, New Haven and London, 2015, 151–2. 68 Cappelletti and Testa (as note 61), 59. 69 Louise Rice, ‘Jesuit Thesis Prints and the Festive Academic Defence at the Collegio Romano’ in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts 1540–1773, eds. John W. O’Malley, et al., Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1999, 151, 153 fg. 6.4. 70 Bober and Rubenstein (as note 44), 201, no. 170. 71 Rice (as note 69), 151, 154 fg. 6.5. 72 Ibid., 153–4. 73 Complete Paintings, I.157, 135–6. 74 John Peacock, ‘Looking at Van Dyck’s Scipio in its contexts’, Art History, 23 (2000), 280–3. 75 Idem, ‘Van Dyck’s Virgin and Child at Dulwich’, Apollo, 152 (August 2000), 34–8. 76 Giambattista Della Porta, De Humana Physiognomonia, Vico Equense, 1586. 77 For examples see Jean Jacques Boissard, III. Pars Antiquitatem Seu Inscriptionum & Epitaphiorum quae in saxi & marmoribus Romanis videntur cum suis signis & imaginibus exacta descriptis, Frankfurt, 1597, 86 (among the antiquities of Cardinal Cesi), 91 (in the church of Santissima Trinità formerly known as S. Benedetto in Clausura, used as a base for the baptismal font); as well, 108 has an illustration of the funerary altar of Sestius Eutropus in the church of the Aracoeli, for which see back note 47. 78 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, London, 1622, facsimile Amsterdam and New York, 1968, 138. 79 Ibid., 139. 80 See back, chapter 1, p. 19. 81 Karen Hearn ed., Dynasties. Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630, London, 1995, 96–7, no. 49 Robert Dudley 1st Earl of Leicester, 70–1, no. 27 Thomas Howard 4th Duke of Norfolk and fg. 31 Margaret Audley Duchess of Norfolk. 82 Hans Vlieghe, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard Part XIX/II. Rubens Portraits of Identifed Sitters Painted in Antwerp, London and New York, 1987, 48–52, no. 72 Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel and her Train. 83 Edward Chaney, ‘The Italianate Evolution of English Collecting’ in The Evolution of English Collecting, ed. idem, New Haven and London, 2003, 104, note 274; Michael C. Questier ed., Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics 1621–1625 (Camden Miscellany Fifth Series, vol. 34), Cambridge, 2009, 138, note 61; and see back note 2. 84 Peacham (as note 78), ‘To my Reader’, B 1 verso. 85 See back chapter 4, p. 119. 86 See back p. 146 and note 64. 87 John Newman, ‘A Draft Will of the Earl of Arundel’, Burlington Magazine, 122 (1980), 695. 88 See back chapter 1, pp. 29–30; chapter 4, p. 117 and note 19. 89 Peacham (as note 78), 105. 90 Ibid., 108. 91 See back chapter 3, p. 84 and note 32. 92 See back chapter 3, pp. 82–3. 93 Hearn (as note 81), 208–9, no. 140 Thomas Howard 14th Earl of Arundel, 210–12, no. 141 Aletheia Talbot Countess of Arundel; John Peacock, ‘The Politics of Portraiture’ in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, eds. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, Basingstoke, 1994, 221–3. 94 Howarth (as note 40), 58. These inset views suggest the hand of Hendrik van Steenwyck. 95 Holbein portrays his great-great-grandfather, Earl Marshal under Henry VIII, with a baton of the same type; see Susan Foister, Holbein in England, London, 2006, 150, no. 164 Thomas Howard 3rd Duke of Norfolk. 96 Complete Paintings, I.161, 139; and see back p. 138; see also Plate 12. 97 See back chapter 1, pp. 20–22 and notes 88, 92.

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Nobles and Nobilities English Double Portraits

Portrayal and Enlightenment The frst self-portrait which Van Dyck painted in his role as ‘Principal Painter to their Majesties’ Charles I and Henrietta Maria celebrates his attainment of noble status and courtly success, the king having knighted him soon after his arrival in London and, around the frst anniversary of his appointment, rewarded him with a gold chain. In this portrait the artist wears and displays the chain, while his fgure is paired with that of a sunfower,1 to which he points as, one is given to understand, a symbolic alter ego (Plate 8). The giant fower, proportionate to the human scale, which appeared to follow the path of the sun across the sky as if with a continual gaze, has been interpreted as an image of gratitude and devotion to the monarch. At the same time it suggests a reminiscence of Van Dyck’s sojourn in the Genoese Republic, across an interval of fve or so years when he had returned to live in his homeland, the Spanish Netherlands, working mostly in Antwerp but also in Brussels and over the border in The Hague. A prominent sitter of Van Dyck in Genoa had been Gian Vincenzo Imperiale, a member of one of the richest and most prestigious patrician families, whose father was elected Doge in 1617 and who was himself elected to the Senate in 1626. In the large-scale version of his portrait2 he is shown in the dress of a senator, with accessories which indicate his service to the Republic, especially its naval force, suggested by a view of galleys in the background. As a leading art collector he would have had a special interest for the painter, beyond his social position and political career, which are being recorded in the portrait. In his youth he had attained widespread fame as a writer, with the publication of a long poem entitled Lo stato rustico (The Rural Realm, or perhaps The Domain of Nature), which became one of the most celebrated works of its period among the generation of poets following on the death of Tasso. First appearing in 1607, it was reprinted with revisions in 1611, then again in 1613; the third edition contained a supplement more than two hundred pages long of complimentary verses by Italian letterati praising the author’s achievement.3 The action of the poem involves a wide-ranging journey under the guidance of a poetic mentor, narrated in extensive detail and concluding with an ascent to an encounter with a celestial fgure. This not unfamiliar structure is set in motion by a contrast between the ‘stato civile’ and the ‘stato rustico’, as the poet/author Clizio is led by the muse Euterpe away from the oppressiveness of city life to explore the alternative polity of the natural world in its various sectors: sylvan, pastoral, agricultural, and so on. Their tour becomes a quest, as at its climax they ascend Mount Helicon to a meeting with Apollo, the god of poetry. Clizio, his devotee, is presented to him as

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the male double of Clizia, that is, Clytie, the nymph who according to Ovid fell hopelessly in love with the sun god and, obsessively tracking his path across the heavens, was eventually transformed into a heliotrope.4 By the early seventeenth century, representations of Clytie’s metamorphosis had begun to substitute for that modest fower a new heliotropic plant, the spectacular sunfower, recently imported into Europe from South America.5 Gian Vincenzo adopts this modern parallel in a long description of a villa garden, referring to the sunfower as ‘the yellow fower of the loving Clytie’ (il giallo for de l’amorosa Clizia).6 In this revised context, Clizio, disciple and (in his case, welcome) devotee of Apollo, the solar divinity of poetry, fgures not only as the doppelgӓnger of Clytie but also, by implication, of the sunfower, her updated counterpart. It is unlikely that Van Dyck read through Gian Vincenzo’s lengthy and (to be frank) exhausting text. However, just as he did not need to peruse the whole of the Gerusalemme liberata to make accurate pictorial narratives of the episode of Rinaldo and Armida,7 he may have read part of Lo stato rustico or else, knowing the reputation of his sitter’s poem, simply picked up on its most striking motif, the fgure of Clizio, the votary and follower of the sun god, divine patron not only of poetry but of the fne arts in general. In this perspective we might entertain the idea that Van Dyck’s Self-portrait with a Sunfower represents the artist as another Clizio, and so allows for a coincidence of themes: like the sunfower which attends faithfully on the sun, the painter fgures his regard for the king but also, in more general terms, his constant watchfulness for imaginative illumination. In effect, the portrait presents, in appropriately pictorial terms, Van Dyck’s view of pictorial art as a way of looking and seeing, an exercise of representational skill which both relies on and enhances the faculty of vision in the interests of knowledge.8 Such a view, as we have observed, goes back to Aristotle, who recommends graphice as a discipline which develops alert and attentive apprehension of a whole range of visual phenomena and, above all, of ‘the beauty of the human form’. Castiglione, as we have also noted, articulates for an early modern readership the idea that depiction can be a cognitive process.9 Van Dyck, courtier and ‘gentleman painter’, with a talent and achievement far beyond any potential capacity of Castiglione’s civil conversationalists, intimates the same idea with genial assurance in his introductory self-image at the court of King Charles. Given the subtly programmatic nature of this self-image, we may be prompted to consider the artist’s portraits of the Caroline courtiers as attempts to scrutinise – to view but also to think through – their individual and, especially, their social identities. When Carlo Giuseppe Ratti in the eighteenth century wrote that Van Dyck’s portraits of the Genoese patriciate captured not only their likenesses but ‘the spirit of their nobility’10 he was glossing over the painter’s ability to make an implicitly searching demonstration of his subjects’ place in the world. That ability is especially discernible in a number of double portraits which he painted at the English court in the 1630s, portraits which, working through elements of difference and contrast, represent ‘the spirit of…nobility’ as a suggestively complex and unsettled notion.

Le Rouge et le Noir The traditional tendency to frame debates about nobility in binary terms, such as ‘arms’ and ‘letters’ or nature and art (to recall the contrast in Il Nennio between

166 Nobilities: English Double Portraits notions of ‘possession’ and ‘fabrication’), took a current turn in early Stuart England by way of Peacham’s distinction between ‘Nobilitas’ and ‘Scientia’, although his aim was to combine these qualities, which in past discussions might under other guises have been dramatised as antagonists, in his earnestly modernised idea of ‘complete’ gentility. Van Dyck’s double portraits of Caroline noblemen canvass not dissimilar possibilities of opposition and reconciliation. George, Lord Digby and William, Lord Russell11 (Plate 9) are represented as young nobles in an apparently close relationship but as dramatically contrasting fgures, and in fact their situations were parallel but disparate. Both were of high rank, being the eldest sons of earls. They were also brothers-in-law, as Digby had married Russell’s sister, Lady Anne, in 1632. Digby had the advantage of age, being four years older, and the younger Russell was still unmarried. On the other hand, his father’s peerage was the senior one: the Russell earldom of Bedford was a Tudor creation, whereas Digby’s father had only recently been raised to the peerage, as Lord Digby in 1618 and Earl of Bristol in 1622, by James I, who was notoriously prodigal with honours, although in this case they had been earned, through diplomatic missions to Madrid with the aim of fnding a Spanish bride for the king’s heirs, Prince Henry and, after his death, Prince Charles. In the end, Bristol fell from favour, having been picked on by Buckingham as a scapegoat for the tortuous failure of the Spanish match in 1623. As a result, young George Digby’s frst appearance in public life had been to present a petition on his father’s behalf to the House of Commons in 1624; although only twelve years old, he did this with grace and eloquence, and was noted as ‘a young man of great expectation’.12 By contrast, Russell’s public début had been in 1626, when he was made a Knight of the Bath on the coronation of Charles I, along with other young sons of noble families;13 Digby was passed over for this accolade, probably because of his father’s disgrace. However in the same year he was matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and he stayed on the college books for ten years, proceeding M.A. only in 1636. This is not to say that he was a slow learner or a fugitive from the world; he spent time away in France, pursuing his studies, and at his father’s country house, Sherborne Castle, where men of learning were welcomed and intellectual pursuits encouraged.14 The portrait seems then to suggest these differing early experiences and family situations, casting Digby in the role of the more mature, refective scholar and Russell in the chivalric role of the youthful knight. However, an interpretation which infers contrasting ‘characters’ from the life stories of the two men is not arrived at quite so easily. Russell had also spent time at Magdalen College, and not long before the portrait was probably painted (c.1635) he had travelled to Spain in order to study the language (which Digby had acquired at an early age while his father was ambassador to Madrid).15 Both were to become MPs in 1640, and both were to assume commands in the Civil War, Russell initially on the Parliamentary side.16 In this perspective, they appear less dissimilar: both expected to take on commitments to education, political activity, and military service which were normal for the eldest sons of the nobility, who would eventually sit as peers in the House of Lords and exercise considerable powers in their respective localities, also entertaining aspirations to offce in the royal government or the royal household. A simplistic biographical reading of the contrast between the two fgures may be less than adequate. The formal features of the painting supply the fundamental data. Digby’s black suit may suggest the dress of a scholar, but its expensive fabric and fashionable cut, the

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elaborate lace collar and cuffs, and the rosettes on his shoes give him at the same time the air of a courtier. He stands in front of two columns, leaning against the nearer one on his right elbow, so that, while his right foot is forward, his weight is displaced onto his left foot and his body tilts slightly backwards. This pose had already been used by Van Dyck for two rather different black-clad fgures: the so-called Prince Rupert, where it signifes a jejune version of courtly elegance, and the Abbé Scaglia,17 where it conveys a relaxed sophistication but may also be associated with his world-weary retirement from political life. In Digby’s case, both strands of suggestion seem present: a courtly nonchalance which accentuates a notion of backing away from the active life into contemplative studies. At his feet are an armillary sphere, two folio volumes, one of which is quite bulky, and a folio sheet of paper, partly folded and crumpled. The sphere resembles that in Van Dyck’s family portrait painted for his cousin, Sir Kenelm Digby, who was, like him, interested in astrology and cosmography.18 The books suggest George Digby’s other leading interest in theology. While they are mostly in shadow, the crumpled paper is strongly lit and rendered with painterly verve; this is a motif used by Van Dyck in earlier portraits, such as those of Cardinal Bentivoglio and Henry Percy Earl of Northumberland, to suggest a dedication to the life of the mind, with overtones respectively political and ethical.19 As our attention falls on Digby’s paper we notice that the books are disposed in a cleverly awkward fashion: the larger volume leans against the column, while the smaller one has the bottom of its spine propped up on the metal base of the sphere, so that it tilts back against the larger volume. The books lean and tilt in a way which mimics their owner’s relaxed posture, which they also counterpoint, as he is leaning to the left while they lean to the right. This subplot of objects is a device which Van Dyck had used before;20 here it helps to point up the idea, associated with Digby’s fgure, of intellectual animation and absorption. While Digby retires, Russell advances. His weight also falls on his left foot, but in this case it is his forward foot, which is brightly lit, constituting a pose which could turn into a striding away, out of the picture. He wears riding boots and spurs, carries a hat in his left hand and a cloak slung over his right arm, and his right hand is gloved and clutches his other glove. The readiness for departure is also a readiness for action: he wears a sword, and the military associations of his vivid red costume are confrmed by pieces of armour scattered at his feet. The red ribbon of the Bath is worn over his right shoulder and gathered next to his sword hilt, as if his identity is clinched by his youthful induction into knighthood. He stares fxedly out of the picture space into the distance, and the line of his gaze crosses that of the gaze which Digby directs at the spectator, as if to interrupt or restrain any contact or sympathy which his companion might be trying to solicit. As he looks out to the left, the direction of his forward foot, the gold brocade curtain which stretches diagonally behind him leads the viewer’s eye out of the picture to the right, as if to suggest a range of possible goals for his spirited readiness. His erect stance with its potential for instant, vigorous, forward movement seems to tug against the relaxed regression of his companion’s posture, creating a tension between the two fgures and the contrasting zones which they occupy. Each fgure, with its attitude and attributes, generates a competing conception of the picture space. Although in principle one might expect the space to be equally apportioned, there is, perhaps more interestingly, a dynamic imbalance. Digby, and the columns he rests against, appear to be pushed more to one side, into a relatively confned area. The objects at his feet cluster together, and the darkness of his costume

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concentrates the viewer’s attention. Russell occupies a more ample space. Not only is it wider and deeper, but it also encroaches on the space assigned to Digby. Russell’s jutting elbow and his spreading, trailing cloak mask part of Digby’s fgure and the space which should be setting it off, which is also invaded by the gold curtain above and the breastplate below, on the ground. These incursions are in the same direction as Russell’s determined, distant stare, as if they are the outcome of an aggressively superior spirit. The martial accoutrements at his feet, unlike Digby’s scholarly accessories, are spread out, and seem to point at different angles, the breastplate in the direction of his gaze, and the helmet in the other direction indicated by the pull of the curtain. Meanwhile the viewer’s attention is diffused over exciting episodes of colour, which offer beautiful contrasts even within a single monochromatic area, such as the red silk jacket. Digby inhabits a space which is concentrated and tightly composed and which, together with his gaze focussed squarely on the viewer, tends to draw our attention inward. Russell’s space seems to spread and push forward, defned by two lines travelling in diverse directions (one marked by his gaze, the other by his forward foot and the tug of the curtain) and expanding into a wider arc beyond the surface of the picture; this disperses our attention and causes it to fall back or retract outwards. The contrast between inwardness and outwardness, between mental composure and restless physicality, is obviously at the heart of this double portrait. Nonetheless it is a contrast based on a similarity, as the painter has taken care to demonstrate. For example, the convention of evoking the military life with pieces of armour scattered at the sitter’s feet is derived from Italian portraiture of the sixteenth century: we fnd it in the portrait of Leicester produced in London in 1575 by Federico Zuccaro.21 For portraits of scholars, who were usually shown seated, the appropriate attributes would on the contrary be arranged on tables, however casually or untidily. Van Dyck has not only matched the ‘scholarly’ Digby with the ‘soldierly’ Russell by showing him standing full-length, but also by scattering the paraphernalia of scholarship at his feet, with a comparable air of bold insouciance. He has also shown both in fashionable costume of similar design, stressing common features such as the slashed sleeves and elaborate lace collars. Both fgures sustain attitudes of easy self-possession, as if accustomed to being on display in the most prestigious of social environments, the court at Whitehall. In fact both had appeared in court masques, where a courtier was doubly on display, participating in a spectacle within the spectacle which was the court itself. Digby had appeared in Coelum Britannicum in 1634, as one of a group of ‘ancient British heroes’ attendant on King Charles, and Russell in the Queen’s masque of 1635, The Temple of Love, among a troop of ‘noble Persian youths’.22 These principal masquers’ roles were non-speaking parts, which required the participants to wear theatrical costume with conviction, comport themselves gracefully, and dance exceedingly well – an essential courtly accomplishment – in elaborate choreographed ensembles, not to mention the social dancing which occurred in the latter part of the performance. The contrastingly graceful carriage of the two young men in this picture may be owed to the artist’s skill, but can also be associated with their shared experience as courtiers. Masques were designed to glorify the royal government by offering ideal roles to the royal family and their courtiers, members of the nobility and gentry who formed the governing class which, even or especially in the absence of parliaments (the situation throughout the 1630s), was instrumental in carrying out the king’s will in the various regions of the realm. The kind of role-play which young Lord Digby and Lord

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Russell had undertaken in masques can also be observed in this picture, a spectacular portrayal of two contrasting but complementary noble identities. The dynamic tug of opposition between the two fgures marks their difference but also articulates an intervolved relationship. Van Dyck has imaged two classic but traditionally conficting concepts of nobility – the idea of ‘arms’ versus that of ‘letters’, of the chivalric warrior over against the learned and virtuous intellectual23 – and frankly represented their unsettled but inescapable interdependence. Rather than make specifc characterisations of two different individuals, the picture idealises two types of nobility while dramatizing the historical problem of their unresolved kinship.

Nobility by Halves The unresolved relationship between these two ideal desiderata of nobility, the inward and outward qualities which Peacham had spelt out symbolically on the titlepage of his treatise not long before Van Dyck was to picture them full-bloodedly in his portrait of Digby and Russell, forms the theme of similar double portraits which the painter produced around the same time. The portrait of Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart (Plate 4), younger brothers of the Duke of Lennox, follows that of Digby and Russell by about a year.24 It eschews the baroque pictorial rhetoric of the earlier work and concentrates on the fgures of the two young men, who are made to appear as distinguished as possible. Through the family of Stuart Earls of Lennox, of which Lord Darnley, consort of Mary Queen of Scots and paternal grandfather of Charles I, had been a member, they were third cousins of the king, with whom they also shared a descent from James II of Scotland,25 so that in the parlance of French genealogy they were princes of the royal blood, and to be treated with a certain reverential dignity. To set off their fgures, the background is very plain, and the composition adds only a simple architectural structure. This consists of a platform on which rises a classical pedestal, which could plausibly be the bearer of either a column or a statue. As the brothers were soon to depart on a lengthy period of continental travel, the kind of educational journeying which was to develop into the Grand Tour,26 this unoccupied podium may hint at their potential encounter with the world of classical antiquity. Meanwhile it serves for the elder brother, Lord John, to lean against, resting his right arm upon it. At the same time his stance is erect, and the resting arm contrives to display the gold lining of his dark reddish-brown velvet cloak, which falls off his shoulder and hangs over the corner of the pedestal, as does his elegant right hand. He seems to have taken up a pose, and then become quite unconscious of it, as he gazes calmly into the distance. Lord Bernard, the younger brother, stands appropriately lower, with his right foot on the foor and his left foot planted on the edge of the platform. His body is seen sideways on, with his left hand on his hip, so that his left elbow juts out at the viewer, towards whom, with a turn of the head, he looks directly. With his right hand he appears to have lifted his cloak and draped it over his left shoulder, so that its silver lining is displayed, along with his protruding elbow with its silver sleeve. Unlike his brother, he seems very conscious of the way in which he is standing. These differences in position and pose mark a clear contrast between the two fgures. This contrast is signifcant because at frst sight the two look basically similar. Apart from the family resemblance, they seem the same height and wear almost exactly the same fashionable garments. John wears a gold slashed jacket and reddish brown

170 Nobilities: English Double Portraits velvet breeches with gold buttons and gold lace, and a cloak of the same two colours, that is, reddish brown lined with gold. Bernard’s costume is of the same type, the colours being blue and silver, although there is a more prodigal use of silver lace on his breeches and cloak. Both wear lace collars and riding boots, Bernard’s being of a lighter brown. In terms of appearance alone they are very like each other. Van Dyck has chosen to emphasise certain features of their appearance in order to point up the contrast made by their differing poses. The darker colours of John’s costume, for example, accord more harmoniously with the setting, so that his fgure is drawn towards the background. The colours of Bernard’s costume are lighter and sharper, also more brightly illuminated, producing a strident dazzle on the silver lining of his cloak; this, in combination with the jutting elbow and the straight look outwards, brings his fgure closer to the plane of the picture surface. His face is also more strongly lit, emphasising the sharp lines of his nose and jaw, which gives his gaze an uncomfortably acute quality matching the spatial unease which the obtrusive elbow arouses in the viewer. John’s face is more softly lit, giving his skin a warmer tone, which, along with his abstracted gaze, endows him with a placid expression. Both have long, abundant pale red hair, which in John’s case falls with its own natural weight, while Bernard’s spreads in tight curls; whether this curling is natural or artifcial (following a French fashion of the period27), it adds to the air of tension which informs his face and fgure. Finally, the stance of Bernard’s fgure, seen sideways and on his left, means that his spurs and sword are visible; John’s pose, three-quarter and facing to his right, allows his sword to be unseen, and his one visible foot is pointed forward so that the spur on his boot is concealed. The contrasting impressions of placidity and aggressiveness have been created with a manifold attention to detail. It has been observed that Lord Bernard’s pugnacious stance is derived from Correggio’s Madonna of St George.28 In this sacra conversazione the saint stands in the right foreground with his left foot placed on the dead dragon and his left arm akimbo, while he looks out at the spectator. Whether Van Dyck is being allusive or simply imitative, the adaptation is obviously appropriate. At the same time it should be stressed that this representation of Lord Bernard does not correspond to his known character. Clarendon had occasion to write about both young men, as they died fghting for the king in the Civil War, and his characterisations are exactly the reverse of those apparently portrayed here by Van Dyck. Lord Bernard he praised as ‘of a spirit and courage invincible’ but also ‘of a most gentle, courteous, and affable nature….’ Lord John, on the contrary, he described as aggressive and militaristic: ‘being of a…choleric and rough nature…[he] was not delighted with the softness of the Court, but had dedicated himself to the profession of arms…’.29 It would seem that the artist was not concerned to fathom their individual personalities,, but rather to explore a more general idea, associated with their exalted rank. Van Dyck’s Lord John is a youth of eminently noble bearing, who appears calm, composed and refective. His gently abstracted expression suggests a mind dwelling upon its own movements and capacities of awareness, recalling that Giorgionesque motif of self-communion to be found in Venetian Renaissance painting, especially the earlier work of Titian, whose output Van Dyck had studied so devotedly. The sense of interiority conveyed by this way of conceiving his fgure stands beside the adverse conception of his brother’s, where a noble bearing becomes something powerfully and irresistibly demonstrative, with every impulse externalised and aimed towards physical action.

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The theme of contentious kinship between two traditional but distinct ideas of nobility, which Van Dyck had dramatized on an expansive scale in Lord Digby and Lord Russell, is restated here in a more economical format. The internal and external kinds of nobility, the ‘culture of the mind’ and the chivalric ideal, are embodied in a situation of fraternal contrariety. The absence of symbolic accessories enables the artist to focus on the essentials of fguration. As a result, what we may call the two nobilities are here represented not in terms of character, vocation or life choice, but as a dialectic of temperaments; this means that both can be romanticised, and their differences held in a kind of aesthetic suspense. The motif of the pedestal, bare of its column or statue – its potential regolo of impeccably superior social identity, to use Della Casa’s term – does intimate a position from which an integrated and perfected image of nobility might arise. However, its suggestive presence is diminished by relegation to the edge of the scene, where it seems, as the older brother leans against it, to be treated as a support in the most casual sense, so that the ‘compleat’ nobleman remains a marginal notion, an unresolved fantasy. This imaging of the complementary (or conficting) aspects of nobility as a romanticised brotherhood can be seen in two other double portraits. One is Prince Rupert and Prince Charles Louis (1637)30, contrastingly ‘characterised’ in the same manner, where psychological dissonance is suspended within aesthetic consonance. The other is the portrait of two unidentifed young men in the National Gallery (Plate 3), recently restored to Van Dyck’s oeuvre by Oliver Millar.31 Whether this was painted before or after Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart, it uses the same compositional scheme rearranged in a more condensed but less clearly defned format. The architectural pedestal is here oddly conjoined to a pilaster. Both young men stand on two adjacent sides of the pedestal, which is almost centrally positioned. There are much the same poses, with the same psychological reverberations, and the same colour schemes in the costumes, one darker and richer, the other more acidulous. The more forceful youth has his sword partly visible, and places his foot on the base of the pedestal, while looking over his left shoulder. The costumes are disposed in much the same way, except that, instead of being contemporary fashionable dress of the later 1630s, they appear to be simplifed and romanticised versions of that costume.32 A clue to this stylisation is perhaps to be seen in the boots of the young man on the left, which resemble those worn by Sir John Suckling and Lord George Stuart Seigneur d’Aubigny,33 who are both depicted in a kind of theatrical fancy dress. His clothing in turn resembles that of Lord Wharton,34 who is habited as a shepherd, and wears a similar velvet suit with a mantle draped over it. Both the cloaks of the young men in this picture are in fact mantles, and their garments altogether have a quasi-theatrical appearance. What this all means remains to be discovered; meanwhile the lack of information allows one to observe in general terms how closely this picture resembles the Stuart double portrait in fguring two versions of nobility as two types of temperament. One may also observe how the temperamental glamour of these young men’s appearance, nudged in a recognisably theatrical direction, makes the topic of nobility both more salient and more complex. The Caroline courtiers portrayed by Van Dyck had signal opportunities for theatrical display in the performances of the court masques. The fact that they were usually confned to non-acting roles, permitted by decorum only to appear in costume and to dance, emphasised their exalted status by combining extravagant splendour with dignifed reserve. Lord Digby, for example,

172 Nobilities: English Double Portraits as we have noted, appeared in a masque during the 1630s, while Lord Russell was to fgure in no less than four, taking such roles as a ‘noble Persian youth’ and an ‘ancient hero’, the latter alongside Lord Wharton, whose theatricalised portrait by Van Dyck looks like a reference to his masquing activities.35 Appearing in masques allowed courtiers to perform nobility a second time around and at a higher pitch; the everyday social enactment of noble status with all its signs of privileged display was intensifed by the power of festive spectacle. And on the occasions when Van Dyck was commissioned to distil this augmented nobility into portraiture, as with Lord Wharton or the anonymous youths of the National Gallery, his method of going half way only, shunning any literal record of role-playing in favour of the allusive method of ‘careless romance’, of a sprezzatura in depiction, laid open in a beguiling fashion the complex composition of noble identity.

Courtiers, Gentlemen and Friends: Sir Anthony and Mr Porter An inveterate Stuart courtier, Endymion Porter frst encountered Van Dyck during the latter’s initial visit to London in 1620; as a member of the household of the royal favourite Buckingham he had occasion to authorise a payment to the artist, possibly for The Continence of Scipio, a historical painting which alludes to Buckingham’s recent marriage.36 They met again in Antwerp in 1629, by which time Endymion was a groom of the bedchamber to King Charles I, and en route to Spain as a diplomatic agent. On this occasion he commissioned a painting for the king, Rinaldo and Armida; later, in December 1629, Van Dyck wrote to him announcing that it had been fnished, paid for and despatched.37 Although the letter is short and businesslike, he does ask Endymion to look after the canvas when it arrives, and see that it is properly handled and mounted, as if addressing someone who understands how to take care of paintings; and he expresses himself cordially, as to a friend. The letter is written in Spanish, a language which Endymion had acquired during his service as a waiting gentleman to the Count of Olivares, and Van Dyck presumably during his upbringing in the Spanish Netherlands. In the 1630s, the papal agent in London, George Con, accredited to Queen Henrietta Maria, went so far as to claim that Endymion, although a loyal member of the Church of England, had ‘a substantially Catholic cast of mind’ (in sostanza…d’intelletto cattolico),38 which would have been another link with the devoutly Catholic Van Dyck. Even if Con’s opinion was over-optimistic, it seems clear that shared cultural sympathies formed the basis of the friendship commemorated in the double portrait painted by the artist. Portrait of the Artist with Endymion Porter39 (Plate10) shows them coming from different worlds: while they amicably share the same space, the fgures have contrasting backgrounds. These are composed of elements which are entirely conventional in Van Dyck’s portraits: column, curtain, landscape, sky. But what particular connotations these features have in this instance remains to be seen. Besides the three portraits painted by Van Dyck, and a later one by William Dobson40 (Plate 11), the most well known representations of Endymion were made by poets who were his friends and clients. A gentleman and a courtier, he was also recognised as a ‘wit’, an articulate participant in the literary life of London which was partly centred on the court and partly on the wider society of the metropolis. He was an active patron of writers, and especially poets. Robert Herrick, who enjoyed

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his support and friendship, celebrated his generosity in a classicising epigram, ‘To the Patron of Poets, M. End: Porter’: Let there be Patrons; Patrons like to thee, Brave Porter! Poets ne’r will wanting be: Fabius, and Cotta, Lentulus, all live, In thee, thou Man of Men! Who here do’st give Not only subject-matter for our wit, But likewise Oyle of Maintenance to it….41 The tone of admiring enthusiasm is partly conventional, proper for this kind of poem, and partly explained as genial exaggeration, given that Herrick is praising Endymion’s generosity with money or other kinds of material help, such as hospitality or proftable contacts. The classical names refer to Roman patricians who augmented their public roles by being generous patrons of literature, cited in Juvenal’s Seventh Satire as fgures of the past with no counterparts in the degenerate modern age. Herrick reverses the satirist’s lament by declaring that they are reborn in the person of Endymion,42 characterised as the kind of patron who is not only ready with material assistance but can also dispense intellectual and cultural resources, supply ‘subject-matter for our wit’. In this respect he is made to resemble Peacham’s ‘Gentlemen, who are the onely men that imploy Poets, Painters, and Architects, if they be not all these themselves’.43 Herrick idealises Endymion in the role of the patron as poet, like Aristotle’s magnifcent man whose creative benefcence is tantamount to artistry.44 Endymion’s chief poetic protégé was William Davenant, whose career he promoted with signal success. Davenant got to write the texts of all the court masques in the second half of the 1630s. This was after a play written earlier in the decade was refused a licence by Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels. Endymion persuaded the king to read the play and, forming a more tolerant view of its supposedly offensive features, prevail upon Herbert to let it through. After successful performances, it was printed in 1636, with a grateful dedication ‘To The Chiefy Belov’d of all that are Ingenious, and Noble, Endymion Porter, of his Majesties Bedchamber’.45 The epistle which follows tactfully refrains from mentioning the king’s intervention, but represents the attempt to suppress the play as the work of ‘a cruel Faction’, some unspecifed cabal which Endymion had succeeded in defeating. This veiled reference to cultural infghting gives a polemical edge to the idea of Endymion as champion of ‘all that are Ingenious, and Noble’. He is characterised as an ideal type, the courtier of good family who is also highly educated and cultivated, the ‘compleat gentleman’. The play which carries this dedication is called The Wits, and even if the licencer found it too racy to be allowed performance, the title is generically apposite to the dedication. In a masque text published two years later Davenant was to refer to ‘the well-born wits’, courtiers of lively intellect with advanced cultural interests,46 and in this dedication he presented Endymion to the literary public avant la lettre as a ‘well-born wit’, the central fgure of a cultivated milieu where intellectual and courtly values combine, one that is, like him, ‘ingenious, and Noble’. His own sense of his situation can be gauged from two poems which he published, both appended to collections of work by recognised poets. The frst is one of a group of elegies included in the posthumous volume of John Donne’s verse which came out in 1633.47 This ‘Epitaph upon Dr Donne’ has some technical weaknesses, but it suggests

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a knowledgeable reading of Donne’s work, attempting to imitate the consciously extreme lamentations found in his famous Anniversaries, on the death of Elizabeth Drury, to which Endymion alludes towards the end of his own tribute.48 Adapting this ‘witty’ mode of grieving to Donne’s own death, he describes that as …a cause to make all joy to cease, And never let our sorrowes more take ease; For now it is impossible to fnde One fraught with vertues, to inrich a minde…. This is well phrased pastiche, offered as hommage. He goes on to apostrophise Death and demand its reason for striking Donne down: was it envy of his extraordinary gifts, …his rare Parts? Or didst thou throw thy dart With envious hand, at some Plebeyan heart; And he with pious virtue stept betweene To save that stroke, and so was kill’d unseen By thee?49 This attempt at ingenious fantasy seems factitious; however the assumption behind it is revealing. The conceit assumes that ‘rare Parts’, exceptional intellectual and moral qualities, raise one above the ‘Plebeyan’ multitude and confer or confrm an intrinsically patrician superiority. The point is made with jejune clumsiness by Endymion the amateur poet; nonetheless it casts an interesting light on his own self-image as courtier and patron, a ‘well-born wit.’ The second poem, in praise of a living writer, was published fve years later. In 1638, William Davenant brought out a collection called Madagascar; With Other Poems.50 The title poem celebrates a project to send an expedition to Madagascar and found a colony under the leadership of Prince Rupert, who had been keenly encouraged by Endymion among others. The book is dedicated jointly to Endymion and his fellow courtier Henry Jermyn, and it opens with a cluster of commendatory verses by several acknowledged ‘wits’, among whom Endymion is given pride of place: his piece ‘To My Worthy Friend Mr. William Davenant; upon his Poem of Madagascar’ opens the entire volume.51 It falls into two parts, the frst and longer of which humorously protests his incapacity as a poet; this is a prelude to the second part, where he attempts to rise to the occasion of praising Davenant’s poem on the Madagascar project and its protagonist, Prince Rupert. Endymion’s attempt at lofty panegyric is much less interesting than the rueful account of his inadequacies as a poet, for as he details his supposed incompetence in the literary sphere he gives the reader glimpses into other milieux where he feels more sense of belonging, and sketches a representation of himself on his home ground which can be grasped implicitly. He begins by doubting that he can produce ‘quaint conceits’, that is, the kind of ingenious and arresting metaphoric play that was characteristic of much poetry of the period, and was often seen as the acme of poetic ‘wit’. As he says later, of poets more capable than he is, …when I heare them read strong-lines, I cry Th’ are rare, but cannot tell you rightly why…. (lines 15–16)

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‘Strong lines’ was a term used to describe a forcefully ‘witty’ poetic style; Endymion confesses that he cannot even fathom how they work, let alone produce them in his own verse. To describe how remote he is from the practice of poetry he makes an analogy with a different world altogether: …my opinion…in Verse, or Prose, Hath just that credit, which we give to those That sagely whisper secrets of the Court, Having but Lees, for Essence, from Report. And that’s the knowledge which belongs to mee; For by what’s said, I guesse at Poetrie…. (lines 9–14) Like those who know what goes on at court only through attenuated gossip, his knowledge of poetry is merely hearsay. Of course Endymion’s readers would know that, as a groom of the bedchamber, he was at the heart of court activities; and the analogy which expresses how peripheral he is in one sphere intimates how central he is in the other. He contrives the same effect when describing how laborious it is for him to produce even one line of poetry; he grimaces as if having a tooth pulled, or looks pale like someone going into battle, or has to chase forever after a single word: With the whole Kennell of the Alphabet, I hunt sometimes an houre, one Rime to get…. (lines 25-6) As before, the metaphor which fgures him as an unpractised poet implicitly reveals his authentic self at the same time: hunting is the proper recreation of a man of rank. The less of a poet he confesses to being, the more he emerges in his true guise as a courtier and a gentleman. Of course these confessions of incompetence are a rhetorical ploy, generating the impetus and the structure which he claims his poetry is lacking. Endymion is not trying to write ‘strong lines’, but a more relaxed kind of verse appropriate to a courtier engaged in friendly social intercourse; the couplet about hunting for a rhyme strikes this note with ease. To achieve such an overall effect, it is essential to represent himself as an amateur. Early in the poem he regrets that he has no ‘choyce Mould, to cast good verses in’. The metaphor works in expediently opposite ways: it admits his lack of equipment, but at the same time signifes he is no poetic artisan. He goes on later to declare that only one consideration stops him from giving up: Had I not seene a childe with Sizors cut A folded Paper, unto which was put More chance than skill, yet when you open it, You’d thinke it had beene done by Art and Wit: So I (perhaps) may light upon some straine, Which may in this your good opinion gaine…. (lines 31–6) The typically self-deprecating analogy turns on the notion of an unstable balance between ‘skill’ and ‘chance’, and fgures his efforts as a kind of play. Even though it does cost him an effort, poetry cannot be his work or profession. By comparison with Davenant, he goes on, he can only produce ‘lay conceits’, which is itself an ingenious

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conceit using the idea that dedicated poets are priests of the Muses (an idea represented in one of Davenant’s recent court masques).52 All these fgurations of Endymion as an incapable poet – the amateur, the outsider, the frustrated hunter, the child at play, the layman – become vehicles of that poetic wit in which, with a courtly show of modesty, he claims to be defcient. Endymion’s poetic performance of sprezzatura cannot be judged a consistent success; for it to work all the way through he would, ironically, need to be a better poet. However, what is important is that he has set about this kind of self-representation and revealed the tensions involved, so that in the course of decrying his potential as a poet he affrms by implication his identity as an experienced courtier and a country gentleman. Van Dyck’s portrait attends to both aspects, which are not without their own reciprocal tensions; but in the frst place it makes a contrast between the fgures of the two friends. The artist shows himself standing sideways on and looking at the spectator over his left shoulder. This is a pose which bears residual signs of the instrumental devices used in self-portraiture, the mirror or mirrors to which the painter must constantly refer in order to study his own features. Some of Van Dyck’s individual self-portraits use this pose, while others – those painted in his early twenties – go deliberately beyond it and show him in full face, posed frontally.53 The latter type is associated with the early success which he achieved in his career, and give his fgure as much substance as possible. Here he uses the more modest type of pose, allowing his friend to be the man of substance, and casting himself in the minor role, the deft technician who has to adapt and accommodate in order to capture his own likeness. He adds to this impression by having his own fgure less generously lit: he wears a black jacket and cloak which absorb most of the light that falls on them, and, while his face is in three-quarter view, the right side is shadowed. In addition, his stance is unemphatic, even though it resembles that used later for the pugnacious Lord Bernard Stuart; his left elbow is cocked, for example, but not made to poke out in the viewer’s direction. He presents himself as the junior partner in this relationship. His reticence is partly a question of social tact. On the one hand Van Dyck had been knighted by the king and so took precedence over Endymion, a mere commoner. On the other hand he was a bourgeois by birth, and a foreigner, whereas Endymion had been born into a gentry family established on their lands in Gloucestershire since the ffteenth century.54 No doubt conscious of these asymmetries, Van Dyck cedes Endymion the place of honour on his right-hand side, together with a larger share of the picture space, so that questions of rank become graciously ambiguous. He also plays with mismatches of nationality. Endymion’s grandfather had lived in Spain and married a Spanish noblewoman; it was through the resulting contacts that the grandson had entered the household of Olivares and become fuent in Spanish. Van Dyck in his turn was a native of the Spanish Netherlands and a subject of the Archduchess Infanta Isabella. The only extant letter he wrote to Endymion is in Spanish, their common language. His native language was of course Dutch, and the homeland of his imaginative life was Italy. In this portrait Endymion’s physiognomy seems unmistakably English, and his costume is that of an English courtier; Van Dyck’s costume is simple in design, but its thoroughgoing blackness may be signifying it as ‘Spanish’.55 The contrast between the white-clad Englishman, former page to the Count-Duke of Olivares, and the black-clad ‘Spanish’ foreigner, Principal Painter to their Majesties of

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Great Britain, suggests a shared joke, a humorous allusion to Endymion’s cosmopolitan background, via a suave caricature of Van Dyck’s. The painter’s comparative self-effacement is at the same time a subtle form of selfdisplay. The shadow which obscures the right side of his face contrives to model the left side as a kind of over-extended profle: the broad forehead, the faintly rosy cheek, and the strong line of the nose give the face an air of distinction, projected straight at the viewer by the genial gaze of the left eye. The cloak which muffes the fgure is not impenetrably black but shines with a few sombre highlights, enough to emphasise its backward sweep which echoes the fall of the back-combed auburn hair; this movement lends animation to the fgure and seems to draw it to a kind of anchorage below the level of the picture space, at a notional point near the implied base of the column behind the artist. By seeming to limit his own presence in order to give way to his friend, Van Dyck contrives to enhance it: through being less substantial, it is more acutely sensed. An apparent economy of means produces an unexpected generosity of effect, and the painter exemplifes sprezzatura in a double sense, both in handling his paint and in presenting himself to be viewed: ‘brushstrokes made with ease’ (to recall a motif from The Courtier) such as those which model the bridge of the nose or mark the highlights on the cloak, or the dashingly exiguous indication of the white shirt just visible above the collar of his black jacket, endow his fgure with an unforced stylishness and grace. As so often in his portraits, the background is conventionally divided between an interior and an exterior zone; here, in the unusually broad oval format, this dual division also has a tripartite aspect, with the curtain forming a transition between the column and the landscape. Van Dyck shows himself against the column and the curtain, and his pose suggests that he has emerged from the milieu which they represent and will return to it. The more expansive fgure of Endymion is backed in part by the curtain but mostly by the landscape towards which his fgure is angled, and (as his right hand is on his hip) his right elbow seems to gesture in a down to earth fashion. The painter seems placed in an urban or courtly environment, and the gentleman associated with the countryside. Endymion had been brought up a courtier, passing from the household of Olivares to that of Sir Edward Villiers back in England, then to that of his brother George Villiers, future Duke of Buckingham, and fnally to that of Charles Prince of Wales and later king.56 While he was still young, the Porter family property in Gloucestershire had been alienated to pay off debts. In 1619, however, he was able to buy back the manor of Aston sub Edge, earlier sold by his uncle, and establish himself on an estate owned by his forbears.57 The many fnancial enterprises through which, as a favoured courtier, he was able to augment his income contributed to reinforce his position as a country gentleman. The poets whom he patronised helped to characterise him in this role. Davenant, in the Madagascar volume, has a jocular poem called ‘A Journey into Worcestershire’ in which Endymion fgures as one of the rural travellers.58 Robert Herrick, who from his rectory in Devon felt the pull of the metropolis which he could rarely visit, addressed poems to Endymion into which he projected his own conficting feelings about the country and the city. ‘The Country life, to the honoured M. End. Porter, Groome of the Bed-Chamber to His Maj;’59 is an imitation of Horace’s ‘Beatus ille’, where the celebration of country life turns out at the end to be provisionally framed in ironical quotation marks. ‘An Eclogue, or Pastorall between Endimion Porter and Lycidas Herrick’60 is a dialogue in which ‘Lycidas’ (a name taken from

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Virgil’s Eclogues) reproaches ‘Endimion’ because he has left the country for the court, and urges him to return. These poems refect Herrick’s concerns, one of which was to keep himself in the good graces of his patron and friend, but they also canvass tensions which would have informed Endymion’s life as a courtier periodically, if not constantly, attending on the king and not at liberty to enjoy an idyllic Horatian existence on his repurchased ancestral acres. In the later portrait of Endymion painted by William Dobson (Plate 11) in the early 1640s,61 his identity as a country gentleman is placed at the centre. This picture is crowded with motifs, and Endymion must have directed the programme, which shows him in hunting dress, holding a gun and accompanied by a dog, while a boy presents him with a hare he has just shot. The portrait was painted during the Civil War at the exiled court in Oxford, and it may have been in aversion to its confned atmosphere that Endymion had himself portrayed as a Gloucestershire squire. At the same time, however, his cultural interests are represented by a classicising bust of Apollo, god of poetry, mounted on a Corinthian capital, and a pseudo-antique bas relief with allegorical fgures of Painting and Sculpture engaged in portraying the goddess Athena. If by this stage he felt it necessary to insist on some fundamental self-image as a member of the gentry with his roots in the land (and his fgure is doubled by a large tree in the background62), during the earlier time of his friendship with Van Dyck in the 1630s he seems to have had an easier sense of the interchange between the different spheres of his existence. When Van Dyck produced the frst of his portraits of Endymion, showing him with his wife and three young sons, he made a preparatory drawing of him with the youngest boy.63 In this drawing Endymion’s left hand is wrapped around the hilt of the sword which, as a gentleman, he would have habitually worn; in the fnished canvas, which reproduces this pair of fgures fairly closely, the same hand gestures towards a statue of Athena behind and to one side of his wife’s head. The traditional, totemic sign of gentry status, routinely grasped as if for reassurance, gives way to a very different image and a very different gesture, the indication of the antique sculpture paradoxically signifying a more modern idea of gentility. The substitution may be incidental, as the programme of the picture was no doubt agreed in advance, and the drawing probably shows the sitter’s day to day appearance captured on a visit to the studio, but his readiness to think easily between the two images, from the sword to the (martial) goddess of wisdom, shows an openness to new ways of representing élite identity. The statue in the family portrait, like the bust of Apollo placed beside the sitter in Dobson’s later portrayal, may recall Della Casa’s crucial motif of the regolo, the canonical model of the male form which symbolises the perfect modelling of social conduct. A parallel notion of the plasticity of the self, its potential to be shaped according to different but complementary ideas of gentility, even to modify its shape from one to another, seems to arise from these overlapping views of Endymion as paterfamilias, country squire, cultural patron, seasoned courtier – English gentleman par excellence. The Dobson portrait, which covers much of this spectrum, stresses the notion of shaping and reshaping identity, given that it reworks Titian’s recreated image of Vespasian from the Twelve Caesars in the collection of King Charles, subjecting the staunch but unlovely person of the arriviste emperor to a handsome metamorphosis.64 In the double portrait Van Dyck presents Endymion standing at ease between two worlds. His broad and substantial fgure is set for the most part against a landscape which, because it is assigned (unusually) almost half the background in this

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exceptionally extended oval canvas, appears to be made correspondingly broad to accommodate him. Most of the terrain is overlaid by his fgure, as if we are to take it that he and the land are at one, and the various fesh tones of his ruddy complexion are paraphrased by the variegated sky. This close association with the landscape characterises him as a member of the landed gentry, in contrast to Van Dyck the habitué of urban and courtly interiors, signifed by the rich curtain and column adorned with futing. Nonetheless their fgures are contiguous – Van Dyck’s cloak and right hand overlaps our view of Endymion’s left arm – and Endymion is given certain subtle attachments to that zone of the background which seems at frst sight reserved for his companion. He is attired in the height of metropolitan fashion and his hair is lengthened on one side into a lovelock, which falls onto his lace collar in a way which is picked up by the twisting fall of the curtain behind. In a similar way the ‘panes’ (vertical slashes) of his doublet fnd a visual echo in the futing of the column. Van Dyck had used a similar device in the double portrait of his friends Lucas and Cornelis de Wael,65 where the decorative diagonal cuts in Lucas’s jacket, which incline alternately to left and right, refect the poses of the sitters, leaning in opposite directions. Patterns of visual analogy draw Endymion’s fgure not only towards the ‘country’ zone of the picture space but towards the ‘court’ zone as well, and help to intimate that he is at home in both worlds, secure in his identity as both gentleman and courtier. The corresponding question à propos Van Dyck is answered in more ambiguous terms. He succeeds in characterising himself as the courtier par excellence. At the same time he settles for a pose which relates back to this very process of self-characterisation, bearing as it does in its fgural obliquity traces of the expedients and manoeuvres required of the painter for the business of self-portrayal, when he must contrive through the medium of the mirror to inspect and depict his own person, turning to and from himself. As a result, the self-representation which Van Dyck offers here is both consummately achieved and quizzically tentative at the same time. Both men rest their left hands on a rock which, it has been suggested, ‘symbolically refers to the steadfastness of their friendship’.66 This explanation could perhaps be refned. In the Hieroglyphica of Piero Valeriano, one of the much reprinted manuals of symbolism taken up by early modern artists, the stone is expounded in general terms as a symbol of strength and permanence. Of its more specifc meanings, pertinent to this picture is that summed up as ‘Firmitas Foederum’, frmness of treaties, leagues, covenants or agreements.67 Valeriano gives a series of instances from classical texts, ranging from treaties between nations to binding agreements on the part of individuals, where a stone symbolises the strong and enduring nature of these compacts. The rock in Van Dyck’s composition seems to be this latter kind of symbol, in that it appears to signify not simply the condition of an enduring relationship, but also the differences between the two parties which constitute its special dynamic. These differences are summed up in the motif of physical bulk and stature. The rock is irregular, bulking larger and rising higher on Endymion’s side. This means that Van Dyck, not only slighter but shorter, can place his hand comfortably on the narrower, lower side of the rock, while the more imposing fgure of Endymion lays his hand on the bigger, higher side – or rather he seems to drape his hand in front of it, as if trying to mask the lumpy mass which mimics, in a kind of sly visual undertone, his imposing corpulence. The rock not only symbolises but also plays its part in representing, with subdued humour, the friendship between these physically and socially asymmetrical companions, fellow courtiers in the service of King Charles.

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Complementing the rock is an even more subdued motif, a minute symbolic accent of a type which Van Dyck included in a number of his pictures.68 On the collar of his black doublet two round gold buttons are seen in profle; there is a row of similar buttons at his wrist, but only the frst two of these are caught by the light. These pairs of buttons intimate a simpler image of the pair of friends, seen on an equal footing, as interchangeable selves. In this discreet fashion the artist wears his heart, his amicable affection, on his sleeve. The rock however is the more resonant symbol. It may remind us that a range of portraits by Van Dyck pose their subjects against backgrounds made up of rock faces which shift into landscapes.69 This scheme is repeated enough (and sometimes more than enough) to become a convention, but one with suggestive possibilities, as the setting offers a quasi-abstract paraphrase of the fgure in the foreground, the rock associated with bodily substance while the more variegated and elusive vista of countryside and sky relates to the nuances of physiognomy and the interior life which animates it. The archetypal narrative of geology translated to humanity is of course Ovid’s story in the Metamorphoses of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who, to repopulate the world after the food, obey a divine command to gather and cast stones which gradually turn into men and women – a myth retold by Karel van Mander, the Vasari of the Netherlands, in his book on ‘the noble, free art of painting’, and illustrated by Van Dyck’s master Rubens on the walls of Philip IV’s hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada.70 This locus classicus unfolds a spectrum of suggestions apposite to the rocky parapet which Endymion and Van Dyck mutually lay hands upon. Although it may seem an arbitrary symbol and a banal pictorial image, that is precisely the point: it sets out one of those small subplots, staffed by objects, which complicate the human narratives of several paintings by Van Dyck.71 By a subaltern imaging of the two men and their relationship in terms of raw material under the human hand, it hints at questions about the formation of the self which are extensively explored in the representation of the fgures and their setting. It reminds us how natural substance can be shaped into a work of art, how stone may be transformed into a classical column (the rock and the column are the same colour) or how the material of human nature might be shaped into a perfected social identity, as a courtier or a gentleman or a versatile being who compounds both roles. By underlining the plasticity of identity, and its capacity for metamorphosis, the painter perhaps inevitably stresses its dependence on the art of representation. As if modestly to minimise and camoufage his own presence, Van Dyck the painter, dressed in black, stands sideways on, in attendance upon his friend and his pictorial creation, the gentleman courtier Endymion Porter, and looks to observe the viewer’s reaction. His expression is unresolved, a mixture of assurance and enquiry.

Notes 1 Complete Paintings, IV.4, 431–2. 2 There is dispute about whether any of the surviving versions of the portrait are autograph. See Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Flemish Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art. Systematic Catalogue, New York and Oxford, 2005, 61–5, 1942.9.89 Giovanni Vincenzo Imperiale. The full-length version of the composition in the Museés Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels reprod. in Giacomo Montanari, ‘La parola e l’immagine. Cultura del libro e collezionismo artistico nella Genova del XVII secolo’, http://www.enbach.eu, fg. 1. 3 Lo Stato Rustico Del Sig. Gio. Vincenzo Imperiale. In questa terza impressione accresciuta delle Lodi A lui da’ megliori dedicate, Venice, 1613.

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4 Giovan Vincenzo Imperiale, Lo stato rustico, eds. Ottavio Besomi, Augusta LopezBernasocchi and Giovanni Sopranzi, 2 vols., Rome, 2015, II, 545, Parte Decimasesta, lines 243–4: ‘Quasi Clizia amorosa, ei Clizio amando/Del Sol de gli occhi suoi girare i giri’; Metamorphoses IV.204–70 in Frank Justus Miller ed. and trans., Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2 vols., London and Cambridge, MA, 1951, I, 192–7. 5 John Peacock, The Look of Van Dyck. The Self-portrait with a Sunfower and the Vision of the Painter, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2006, 135–75. 6 Imperiale (as note 4), II, 348, Parte Decima, line 1050. 7 Complete Paintings III.61, III.62, III.63, 294–8. 8 For a detailed argument to this effect see Peacock (as note 5), passim. 9 See back chapter 3, pp. 91–3 and notes 62–3, 72–5. 10 Vite De’ Pittori, Scultori, Et Architetti Genovesi Di Raffaello Soprani…rivedute…Da Carlo Giuseppe Ratti…Tomo Primo, Genoa, 1768 (facsimile Bologna, 1969), 447. 11 Complete Paintings IV.92, 501–3. 12 Richard Ollard ed., Clarendon’s Four Portraits, London, 1989, 50, quoted in Anne Sumner ed., Death, Passion and Politics. Van Dyck’s Portraits of Venetia Stanley and George Digby, London, 1995, 12–14. 13 Ibid., 91, fg. 10. 14 Ibid., 14; Ollard (as note 12), 52. 15 Complete Paintings, 501–3. 16 Ibid., 501. 17 Ibid., III.79, 310–11; III.126, 349–50. ‘Prince Rupert’ has now been identifed as one of the two young Italian aristocrats Filippo Francesco and Carlo Emanuele d’Este. For the origin of his pose in a portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, which Van Dyck took for a Titian, see Jeremy Wood, ‘Van Dyck’s “Cabinet de Titien”: The contents and dispersal of his collection’, Burlington Magazine, 132 (1990), 688, 691–2. 18 Complete Paintings, IV.94, 503–4. Sumner (as note 12), 34, fg. 2, 97–9. 19 Ibid., II.31, 175–6; IV.174, 564–5. John Peacock, ‘The “Wizard Earl” portrayed by Hilliard and Van Dyck’, Art History, 8 (1985), 153. 20 John Peacock, ‘Looking at Van Dyck’s Scipio in its contexts’, Art History, 23 (2000), 280– 83. Cf. the ‘Great Piece’ of Charles I and his family, where the image of the regalia shows the orb ‘leaning’ against the crown, as if in humorous mimicry of the Queen’s deferential regard for the King: Complete Paintings, IV.46, 460–62. 21 Karen Hearn ed., Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630, London, 1995, no. 99, 152–3. 22 Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols., London, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973, II, 567, 599. 23 See back chapter 3, pp. 99–100. 24 Complete Paintings, IV.221, 602–3. 25 Princess Mary Stuart, daughter of James II of Scotland, had a daughter, Elizabeth Hamilton, who married Matthew Stuart, second Earl of Lennox, from whom Lords John and Bernard were directly descended. 26 Complete Paintings, 603. Edward Chaney and Timothy Wilks, The Jacobean Grand Tour: Early Stuart Travellers in Europe, London, 2013. 27 His brothers, not only John, but also James and George, had straighter hair. For the fashion see e.g. Emilie E. S. Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress in SeventeenthCentury Portraiture, Turnhout, 2001, fgs. 13, 31. The king had tried it at one stage in the late 1620s: see Orgel and Strong (as note 22), 394–5. 28 Christopher Brown and Hans Vlieghe eds., Van Dyck 1599–1641, London and Antwerp, 1999, 320 and note 1. 29 Oliver Millar, Van Dyck in England, London, 1982, 89. A suggestive parallel to this apparent contradiction is provided by Castiglione, who has Federico Fregoso in Book Two instruct the courtier that his virtues should be manifested in an artistic dynamic of contrast: just as a painter dramatises his colours by means of chiaroscuro, and his fgures through contrasting attitudes, so the courtier should ensure that his military valour offsets and enhances his gentleness, and his boldness points up his modesty. 30 Complete Paintings, IV.69, 485–6.

182 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Nobilities: English Double Portraits Ibid., IV.244, 618. Gordenker (as note 27), 62 and fg. 105. Complete Paintings, IV.222, 603–4; IV.15, 439–40. Ibid., IV.237, 612–13. Orgel and Strong (as note 22), II, 453, 567, 599, 661, 705, 729. Wharton appeared in three masques between 1632 and 1638. The one in which he and Russell appeared together was Britannia Triumphans (1638). Gervas Huxley, Endymion Porter. The Life of a Courtier 1587–1649, London, 1959, 52. Jeremy Wood, ‘Van Dyck’s pictures for the Duke of Buckingham’, Apollo, 36, no. 365 (July 1992), 37–47. Complete Paintings, III.61, 294–5. William Hookham Carpenter, Pictorial Notices: Consisting of a Memoir of Sir Anthony Van Dyck, London, 1844, 24–6. Gordon Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, London, 1935, 210, note 2. Complete Paintings, IV.6, 432–3. The other two by Van Dyck are Complete Paintings, IV.190, 576–7 (a family portrait) and IV.191, 578. For the Dobson portrait see William Vaughan, Endymion Porter & William Dobson, London, 1970. Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly eds., The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, 2 vols., Oxford, 2013, I, 40. For the names see Juvenal, Satire VII.95 in Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. G. G. Ramsay, London and Cambridge, MA, 1961, 144–5. Henry Peacham, Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman 1634, intro. G. S. Gordon, Oxford, 1906, 111. Cf. ‘To the Honoured, Master Endimion Porter’ in Cain and Connolly (as note 41), I, 308. For the magnifcent man see back chapter 1, p. 21 and note 131. Vaughan (as note 40), 8. Orgel and Strong (as note 22), II, 706, Luminalia, line 28. Vaughan (as note 40), 8. John Donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate, Oxford, 1978, 100. ‘The First Anniversarie’, lines 20–38, ‘The Second Anniversarie’, lines 39–56, in ibid., 22–3, 42. Ibid., 100, lines 5–8, 13–17. Madagascar; With Other Poems. By W. Davenant, London, 1638; Sir William Davenant, The Shorter Poems and Songs from the Plays and Masques, ed. A. M. Gibbs, Oxford, 1972, 1–80. Ibid., 5–6. This poem is not lineated in Gibbs’s edition of Davenant, but I have supplied line numbers as a guide to the quotations which follow. Orgel and Strong (as note 22), II, 600, The Temple of Love, lines 29–31. For the oblique pose see Complete Paintings, IV.4, 431–2 (Portrait of the Artist with a Sunfower); IV.5, 432 (Portrait of the Artist); IV.A1, 628 and IV.A3, 629 (both whereabouts unknown). For the more frontal pose I.99, 92–3; I.159, 138; I.160, 138; II.26, 169–70. Huxley (as note 36), 17. Cf. Gordenker (as note 27), 61 on Van Dyck’s costume as ‘not to be seen in the light of social rank, but as an expression of intellectual…interests’; also 118, notes 135–7. Huxley (as note 36), 24–34. Ibid., 39. Gibbs (as note 50), 24–6. Cain and Connolly (as note 41), I, 217. Ibid., I, 73. Vaughan (as note 40), passim. Malcolm Rogers, William Dobson 1611–46, London, 1983, no. 8, 33–5. For Count Lodovico’s comparison in The Courtier of a nobleman to a tree, Bull, 54; Cian, 38–42, I.XIV. Complete Paintings, IV.190, 576–7; Karen Hearn ed., Van Dyck and Britain, London, 2009, no. 83, 163. Vaughan (as note 40), 30–1.

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65 Complete Paintings, II.71, 210–11. 66 Arthur K. Wheelock, Susan J. Barnes, et al., eds., Anthony Van Dyck, Washington, DC, 1990, no. 73, 281. 67 Ioannis Pierii Valeriani…Hieroglyphica, Lyon, 1602, facsimile New York and London, 1976, 524. 68 Complete Paintings, I.5, 23–4, Samson and Delilah (the ithyphallic fgure forming the handle of the gold wine pitcher); III.35, 272–3, The Resurrection of Christ (the gaping animal head on the falling soldier’s sword hilt); III.126, 349–50, Cesare Alessandro Scaglia (the talismanic amethyst ring on the little fnger of the sitter’s right hand). 69 The frst instances of this convention date from the later 1620s: Complete Paintings, III.92, 320–1, Nicholas Lanier, and III.202, 392, Portrait of a Woman. Notable examples among the London portraits of the 1630s are IV.9, 436, Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel with His Grandson, and IV.215, 598, Thomas Wentworth Earl of Strafford; numerous other examples from this period could be cited. 70 Metamorphoses I.348-415 in Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols., London and Cambridge, MA, 1951, I, 26–31. Karel van Mander, ‘Van Deucalion’, Wtlegghingh op den Metamorphosis Pub. Ovidii Nasonis, [fol. 7 recto], in Het SchilderBoeck waer in voor Eerst de Leerlustighe Ieught den Grondt der Edel Vry Schilderconst in Verscheyden Deelen Wort Voorghedraghen, Haarlem, 1604. Svetlana Alpers, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard Part IX The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, London and New York, 1971, no. 17, 209, fgs. 95–6. 71 See back p. 167 and note 20. For a subplot using plants rather than objects see Complete Paintings, IV.15, 339–40, Lord George Stuart Seigneur d’Aubigny, where the rosebush and the thistle allude to the Anglo-Scottish union between him and his bride, Lady Katherine Howard.

7

Conclusion Nobles and Courtiers

Depicting Noble Lineage Van Dyck’s frst encounter with a clientele of nobles and courtiers had been during his initial, brief visit to England in the winter of 1620–21. The portrait commissioned at that time by Lord Arundel1 (Plate 12) shows the artist dealing with imagery designed to affrm and expound the sitter’s identity as a nobleman, in fact as someone who was in a few months’ time to be recognised as head of the English nobility, when King James confrmed his appointment to the offce of Earl Marshal, which had been held by his ancestors and was now reinstated in his family, as doubtless he thought it should be. Dressed in black, with the kind of doctrinaire plainness which his contemporaries recognised as an understated sign of pride in his exalted lineage, Arundel displays with his left hand the Lesser George, the medal of the Order of the Garter worn around his neck, while his right hand grasps a paper, partly scrolled and partly folded, just bulky enough to seem a document of some substance. These associated symbols of chivalry and ‘the culture of the mind’, to use the phraseology of his son’s tutor, Henry Peacham, identify an image of the ‘Compleat…Noble Gentleman’ to be described in that same tutor’s treatise frst published a year or so later. Precisely this characterisation of Arundel is taken up by the Royalist clergyman David Lloyd in his post-Restoration Memoires of the Civil War. Described, in language reminiscent of Peacham, as an exemplary ‘compleat Gentleman’, the Earl is remembered through an anecdote which he often repeated, of an encounter between a Nobleman of Henry the eights time, and Mr. Pace one of his Secretaries; The Nobleman expressing himself in contempt of Learning, that it was enough for Noblemens Sons to Wind their Horn, and carry their Hawk fair, and to leave Study and Learning to the children of mean Men. Mr. Pace, replied, That then you and other Noblemen, must be content that your Children may Wind their Horns, and keep their Hawks, while the Children of mean Men do manage matter of State.2 The story is not so much applauding a wintry Tudor bureaucrat as arguing for an educated nobility of effective statesmen. It reminds us that to complement the classical sculpture which he imported from Rome in 1614, Arundel while there commissioned a group of pseudo-antique statues, two of military offcers and two of senators, representing the twin constituents of nobility later to be symbolised in Van Dyck’s portrait by the Garter medal and the document.3

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While these signifcant details were no doubt determined by the sitter, Van Dyck looks to have made his own contribution to the overall programme. The landscape in the background may be alluding to the Earl’s estates in southern England, possibly in Sussex, the locality from which his principal title derived; at the same time the composition of the picture makes this view more than a topographical appendix. The purple brocade curtain behind Arundel’s seated fgure, with its subdued gold accents streaked diagonally to the spectator’s left, appears to be drawn to one side so as to give a fuller view of the landscape, where the terrain is aligned with his upper body and the sky with his head, the two elements related by distant clouds from which, in one corner of the horizon, shafts of light and bands of rain fall on the green earth below. The variegated skyscape impinging on and fanning out from his brightly lit and sensitively depicted countenance, with its high, shiny forehead and liquid eyes, seems to suggest the complexion of an interior life, the atmosphere of the mind which informs the expressive features, judiciously brought to attention by the drawing aside of the curtain. The artist’s attribution of subjectivity to his sitter makes the theme of mental culture, cued by the image of the document held in the forward right hand, pervade the portrait with a discreet dynamism. This creative response to a portrait commission from the premier nobleman of England set Van Dyck on a course of expounding nobility in pictorial terms for which he had shown himself well prepared through his masterly portrayals of the citizens of Antwerp, a body of work crowned by the portraits of Rubens’s wife Isabella Brant,4 shown as the most sympathetic grande dame imaginable, and that of the animal painter Frans Snyders,5 pertinently represented – with his fnely moulded features, tapering hands and casually graceful stance – as an aristocrat of the natural order, a ‘rational animal’ par excellence, a thoroughbred of the most exquisite provenance. The question of breeding or lineage, here canvassed by a witty evocation of the doctrines of physiognomy linking animal and human nature, came to be treated by Van Dyck in different ways, one being the family coats of arms either alluded to or incorporated in his portrait compositions. Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, in the bravura portrait painted in Rome in 1623,6 sits on a chair upholstered in red velvet, its back decorated with two fnials of bronze or gilt eagles. These refer to the principal charge on the Cardinal’s armorial shield, an imperial spreadeagle which indicates the putative descent of his family from the Hohenstaufen emperors. Here the fat, schematic heraldic motif has been transformed into a three-dimensional, mouvementé image, with the eagles’ wings arched as if they have paused from fight. This conceit brings a dynamic immediacy to the notion of lineage, refecting the animated attitude of this modern representative of an ancient noble line. Van Dyck does the reverse, as we have observed, with the almost contemporaneous portrait of George Gage7 (Plate 7). Doubtless in consultation with the sitter, who will have discussed with him the various themes concerning gentility and courtliness treated in the picture, he shows the Gage armorial shield carved on a supposedly antique plinth. The implied claim to a strictly implausible antiquity of descent is ironically qualifed by the rearranged image of the ram’s head from the Gage crest, which plays feetingly with the same physiognomic conceit more sharply set out in the portrait of Frans Snyders, and suggests the witty complexity of the scene depicted. The later Genoese portrait of Filippo Spinola, Count of Tassarolo8, uses the same device of a heraldic shield carved on a plinth, which stands as the pedestal of a Solomonic column marking the corner of an imaginary balustraded terrace. The column is brightly

186 Conclusion lit so as to display its elaborate carving, which includes the customary imagery of putti among grape vines, often regarded in the post-Tridentine context as Eucharistic symbolism but in this case possibly also referring, in a businesslike Genoese way, to the wine-producing resources of the Count’s feudal estate. The young proprietor stands on a narrow chequered pavement which mimics on a larger scale the chequered band crossing the middle of the Spinola armorial shield.9 The assimilation of heraldic motifs into the programme of the portrait has here a modern rather than an antique character, but the effect is broadly the same: to monumentalise noble lineage by giving it an appearance of solid, enduring reality.

Sprezzatura and Nobility: Tensions and Transformations Unlike Filippo Spinola, George Gage was a courtier as well as a gentleman, and the complexities of his portrait comprise the two roles. In the century which elapsed between the publication of The Book of the Courtier in 1528 and Van Dyck’s eventual employment at the court of King Charles in the 1630s, the fgure of Castiglione’s perfect courtier had been subjected to the pressures of historical change. We recall that, near the beginning of the discussion in Book One, there is a disagreement about whether the courtier needs to be of noble birth or not. Count Lodovico argues that nobility is a prerequisite, whereas Gaspare Pallavicino maintains the opposite. The debate is left unresolved and the issue of noble birth seems to fade into the background, while the Count’s exposition of sprezzatura, which he propounds as defnitive of the courtier’s identity, takes centre stage and begins to acquire the compelling fascination which it was to hold for future readers. The new concept of sprezzatura is overlaid on the traditional idea, or ideas, of nobility, with no manifest sense of discontinuousness. What the relationship between the two might be remains a question. Is sprezzatura to be regarded as a supplement to, or an enhancement of, nobility? Is it a form of élite social conduct which might supersede or eclipse nobility as formerly understood, revising and updating a traditional complex of behaviours for a new age? Is it an alternative to nobility, allowing exceptionally capable individuals of low or mediocre birth, via the profession of courtier, to recruit themselves into the noble class? One might surmise that the overlay of the concept of sprezzatura on traditional notions of nobility is a misft waiting to turn into a misadventure, like the mutual tension between two tectonic plates, neither of them coherent in itself. In the one case, we have observed how debates about the idea of nobility often tended to be played out in terms of binary oppositions: lineage and virtue, nature and artifce, arms and letters. In the other, we have observed that sprezzatura, a concept of such transcendent ingenuity as to tempt fate to discompose it, experienced, across the century after Castiglione, a double and divided afterlife. The frst, more obvious strand of this afterlife unfolds in the work of writers of what have been viewed as successor texts to The Courtier, by Della Casa, Guazzo and Tasso. In this sequence, the Malpiglio of Tasso marks a turning point, with its argument that Castiglione’s portrayal of the court and the courtier is at once perennially valid and historically outdated, as ‘courts change with the times’ (le corti si mutano a’ tempi). Unlike Castiglione’s court of Urbino, with the gracious consort of the absent Duke holding the ring as courtiers contend in a civilised and sometimes playful manner, in Tasso’s equivalent establishment courtiers are all potential rivals under the watchful and potentially jealous eye of the ruler. Here, among classic moral principles the one to be chiefy exercised is prudence, manifest

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especially in the modern courtly virtue of feigning (l’infnger). This hard-headed revision of Castiglione leaves the way open for writers of the early seventeenth century, such as De Refuge and Faret, transferring attention from Castiglione’s Urbino and Tasso’s Ferrara to one of the greatest and most perilous courts in Europe, to subject the concept of sprezzatura to ever more ‘realistic’ mutations until, with Faret’s rewriting of Castiglione, it seems to have undergone a kind of reverse evolution, emerging attenuated and degenerate. At the same time, tracking the second strand of sprezzatura‘s afterlife, we see it adopted into the discourse of what we would call art theory, with writers such as Dolce and Comanini invoking it so as to require an appearance of unstudied virtuosity in the work of pictorial representation, and to reprimand any signs of industrious over-exertion. In the milieu of Van Dyck this strain of criticism is taken up and elaborated by Franciscus Junius, with his eloquently argued demand for a graceful ‘facility’ in the painter’s art, a line of argument which reconnects with the sources of Castiglione’s sprezzatura in the rhetorical theory of Roman antiquity. So while that version of sprezzatura which is transmitted through the literature of cortegianía is critiqued, revised and degraded by the pressures of historical change, the original classic version, which Tasso in Malpiglio pauses to eulogise before subjecting it to uncomfortable mutation, fnds a refuge in the Kunstliteratur of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where it undergoes a creative transition from a theory of social conduct to a doctrine of artistic practice. This transmigration into the sphere of pictorial art is a factor which, alongside the continued republishing of Castiglione’s text, in various languages, on into the seventeenth century, helps to keep the pristine concept of sprezzatura available and adaptable for the purposes of representation, most notably in portraiture, even while it undergoes rough handling in the generations of successor texts to The Courtier. A case in point stands out from Van Dyck’s work during the 1620s in Genoa, where he portrayed numerous members of the local nobility. This is the equestrian portrait of Anton Giulio Brignole Sale which celebrates the young man’s coming of age, his offcial enrolment in the ranks of the patriciate, and his marriage into one of the historic families of the Genoese Republic, recorded in the pendant portrait of his wife Paolina Adorno.10 The sitter’s double surname signalled both his paternal descent from a family of recent social distinction, through his father Giovan Francesco Brignole, and the inheritance from his mother’s father, Giulio Sale, of the marquessate of Groppoli, which Giulio had purchased from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, obtaining permission – in the absence of a son to succeed him – to have it descend via his daughter Geronima Sale Brignole to his grandson. Anton Giulio, christened with the combined forenames of both paternal and maternal grandfathers, was inaugurating a new composite dynasty, sanctioned by a freshly acquired feudal title. However neither the Brignole nor the Sale families belonged to the so-called ‘old’ Genoese noble clans with distant origins in the medieval past. Van Dyck does not represent Anton Giulio with formal stateliness as a scion of longstanding aristocratic stock, but resorts to a more modern fashion of signifying his nobility. This is done through the medium of sprezzatura: the youthful rider, in a dark ‘Spanish’ costume of unemphatic splendour, advances towards the viewer with an expression of composed geniality, his right hand simultaneously holding his mount’s bridle and doffng his hat with relaxed grace. While the fgure of the horse, rendered by the painter with virtuosic skill, offers a metaphor of high breeding, it is Anton Giulio’s perfectly understated self-assurance which suggests an intrinsic and

188 Conclusion natural superiority, and gives a buoyant stimulus to his role as the prospective initiator of a new lineage.

Nobility and Its Images, Old and New While the idea of sprezzatura, beleaguered by the challenges of political history, was on an alternative front, that of culture, preserving its conceptual practicability by crossing over into the feld of art, the relationship between the idea of nobility and that of pittura or pictorial representation was undergoing disturbance and change. For example, the Protestant British writers on nobility considered in the frst chapter of this book, Humphrey, Ferne and Cleland, tend to characterise inauthentic or inadequate nobility by reaching for metaphors of the ‘image’, by which they usually mean a painted portrait. Humphrey’s use of this vocabulary can be, as we have seen, ambiguous, so that when he uses a term such as ‘image’ pejoratively it carries an extra charge of uneasy energy, as does the analogously employed term ‘counterfeit’. Like Humphrey, Ferne and Cleland use the notion of the ‘image’ to fgure nobility which is insuffcient, in Ferne’s critique because it is derived from lineage without the complement of virtuous qualities, and in Cleland’s because the privilege of an education in virtue, by which he means the study of moral philosophy which an élite youth might undergo, does not result in virtuous practices. In both cases the failure of nobility to realise itself, to fulfl its true nature, is expressed by the analogy of a fne visual representation which is inevitably static or inert: Ferne writes of ‘stately image…without any motive quallitie’ and Cleland of ‘a faire and beautiful image without life and motion’. Here, what look like fxed and concordant notions of bare nobility as an ‘image’ are nonetheless liable to blur or shift out of focus, as the history of art moves onward. Given that Humphrey’s and Ferne’s use of the word ‘image’ in connexion with nobility attested merely by lineage makes some reference to the ancestral portrait busts of ancient Roman patrician families, when they and Cleland characterise an inadequate noble as an ‘image’ they implicitly invoke contemporary conventions of portraiture, the splendid but static Elizabethan portrait style which persists into the early Jacobean period when Cleland, the last of the three to publish his work (1607), is writing. But by the time of the frst edition, in the latter years of King James, of Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman (1622), English artistic culture is making considerable advances, so that the relevant connotations of the term ‘image’ are being expanded and transformed. Van Dyck’s ‘image’ of Lord Arundel, noted at the beginning of this chapter, painted about eighteen months before the appearance of Peacham’s treatise and little more than a dozen years after Cleland’s, could scarcely be described as ‘without life and motion’, considering the mobility of the sitter’s features, the liveliness of the setting, and the animation of the painter’s style. Given that this portrait is a tour de force by an inordinately talented foreigner staying, as it turned out on this initial visit, only briefy in London, it is nonetheless symptomatic of a progressive cultural climate involving both artists and connoisseurs in which using the metaphor or analogy of a portrait image to signify inertia becomes less and less plausible. In dedicating his book to William Howard, Arundel’s youngest son, whose tutor he had been for a time, Peacham recommends as models of mature virtue not only his ‘Noble Father’ but, from an earlier generation, his great-grandfather, the fourth Duke of Norfolk11. More generally he sums up this advice by saying ‘verily you need

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no other patterne to the absolute shaping of your selfe, then the Images of your forefathers’. By the word ‘Images’ he presumably means the characters and reputations of various Howard ancestors taken as exemplars, but the term acquires additional substance from the lineage of distinguished portraits of these same fgures displayed in the picture gallery of Arundel House, an idealised view of which is seen in Daniel Mytens’s portrait of young William Howard’s mother12 (Figure 5.17). These would have included Holbein’s portraits of Thomas Howard third Duke of Norfolk13 and his son Henry Howard Earl of Surrey14 – both displayed in a portrait group of Lord and Lady Arundel with their grandchildren by Philip Fruytiers15 (Figure 7.1) – together with those of Thomas Howard the fourth Duke by Hans Eworth16 and (now in the National Portrait Gallery) another unidentifed painter working in an Anglo-Netherlandish style,17 and, at the current end point of the sequence, Van Dyck’s portrait of Lord Arundel painted the year before. The high aesthetic quality of these pictures and their manifestly striking effect as records of individual personality mean that when Peacham, an ardent advocate of painting as an interest and a pursuit for the ‘compleat gentleman’, invokes ‘the Images of your fore-fathers’, he suggestively seems to confate exemplary models of nobility with choice pictorial representations. Equally suggestive is his phrase ‘the absolute shaping of your selfe’, which may recall Della Casa’s idea of a perfectly developed denizen of good society as a kind of living sculpture, akin to the canonical model of the male body formed by ‘Maestro Chiarissimo’ or Polycleitus. Peacham makes clear that his metaphor of ‘shaping’ refers

Figure 7.1 George Vertue after Philip Fruytiers, Earl and Countess of Arundel with grandchildren, etching and engraving, 1745 (after an original painting of 1645). Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.

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to the disciplines of education or ‘Learning’ (allegorised on his title-page as ‘Scientia’), which he shortlists as ‘Historie…the Mathematiques, Poetrie, Picture, Heraldrie, &c.’18 In the last two cases he characteristically pushes visual studies into the foreground, implicitly keeping in play the suggestion that the exemplary ‘Images’ of the ‘forefathers’ which are to serve as a ‘patterne’ for the moulding of the young nobleman’s character may be not only recorded in historical memory but even more immediately apprehended in lively portrayals by past masters such as Holbein or new ones such as Van Dyck. Certainly William Howard’s parents, Lord and Lady Arundel, in their employment of Mytens, Van Dyck and Rubens to produce programmatic ‘Images’ of them at various stages of their lives, evidently regarded portraiture as a signifcant record of family history in its ethical, not just its biographical, dimension.

The Noble Self as a Work of Art We do not know whether Peacham’s preparatory reading for his treatise included the fairly recently published Necessarie, Fit and Convenient Education of a Yong Gentlewoman, translated by William Philip from a small book in both Italian and French originally addressed to the Genoese nobleman Silvestro Cattaneo, whose wife had died in childbirth. If so he would have noted the author’s advice on choosing for the motherless daughter (from a prestigious family of the ‘old’ Genoese nobility) a gentlewoman to act as guardian and tutor, who is likened to a painter chosen to decorate the interior of the family palace, instructed to use for guidance ‘the designs of Raphael, or Michelangelo, or Albrecht Dürer, or Giulio Romano’.19 The idea of the young noble as an artistic project and the mentor as an artist would no doubt have seized Peacham’s interest. What he certainly must have read was the prototypical use of the analogy by Castiglione. As we have seen, in Book Two of The Courtier Federico Fregoso compares the courtier’s necessarily complex deployment of his virtues to the design of a painting, where attention must be paid both to nuances of colour and chiaroscuro and also to larger matters of fguration and composition. This parallel, passing by way of the Galateo’s exposition of the civilised body as a living sculpture, seems to inform Peacham’s notion of ‘shaping’ the ‘self’ through resort to exemplary ‘Images’. With hindsight, one might suggest that when Castiglione, leaving to one side gentle birth as a defnitive qualifcation, proposed, via his notion of the perfect courtier, that the formation of élite identity was an artistic project – a sophisticated discipline of self-invention embracing ethical, cultural and social dimensions – he unsettled familiar assumptions about nobility as a superlative category of social status. At the same time, in using pictorial representation as a metaphor of the formation and performance of élite identity, he heralded the power of a relatively new cultural format, the realistic painted portrait, through which nobles could manifest or even to an extent exercise their customary assumed predominance. The power of representation is emphatically endorsed in Tasso’s revision of Castiglione, the Malpiglio, when the young protagonist enthuses over the latter-day courtly virtue of feigning (l’infnger), which denotes both pretence, insofar as the courtier manages his identity by prudent subterfuges, but also fction, insofar as he constructs his image to the best and most attractive advantage, deploying his virtues with skilful artistry as recommended by Castiglione but according to compositional schemes revised in the light of a sterner contemporary reality. It is to this kind of development that Peacham gives a more optimistic character when he writes about the ‘shaping’ of the self, or elsewhere about the full substantiation

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or ‘completion’ of nobility which ‘Scientia’ or Learning bestows on the gentleman, ‘heigthing with skill his Image to the life’,20 making his honourable identity more salient, just as the subject of a portrait may be given the semblance of three dimensions by chiaroscuro. The legacy of discussion and debate about both nobility and cortegianía is rehearsed in Peacham’s treatise close to the time when Van Dyck in the early 1620s is carrying out his frst few commissions for the Stuart courtiers in London, where he was to return in the following decade to produce a much greater volume of work, much of it portraiture. In the intervening years of an extraordinarily prolifc career he had occasion to execute portraits in various Italian centres, the principal output being for the nobility of Genoa and later for a similar élite clientele in his native southern Netherlands. In addition, during the decade of his work at the British court he spent a year away in Antwerp and Brussels, portraying a number of sitters associated with the new government of the Cardinal Infante Ferdinand, including exiled notables from France and Lorraine. The range, variety and quality of his portraiture at its best make it a serious contribution to early modern debates about élite identity customarily conducted in textual form, debates given their most famous and infuential stimulus by Castiglione in The Courtier. The painter’s interest in the matter of identity is most directly attested by the series of self-portraits produced at different stages of his life, beginning with the very frst, painted it seems in his early teenage years, and evidence not just of extraordinary talent but of exceptional achievement. The much later double portrait with Endymion Porter, painted in his maturity and representing himself as a courtier of King Charles and a recruit to the English gentry, shows (as discussed in the previous chapter) an alert and sensitive approach to the asymmetries of rank and status informing the relationship of the two friends in the privileged milieu which they inhabit. The more nuanced features of that composition, residing partly in small details and partly in the painter’s portrayal of his own fgure, will have been worked out by Van Dyck himself; but in the general population of his portraits, or at least in those which involve some complexity of design, it must often remain a matter of speculation how far, in representing his patrons’ social identity, the artist is being inventive and how far responsive, either to a sitter’s requirements or to an available repertory of conventions. In the narrative portrait of George Gage there must have been collaborative planning between the sitter and the artist about the themes to be included in the composition, some more overt, such as the expression of pride in lineage and the role of Gage as artistic agent and virtuoso, and one at least left to be inferred, namely the incongruity between lineage and priestly celibacy. In realising what was to be a complicated programme Van Dyck’s creative contribution to the handling of the imagery must have been considerable. Simpler projects would have been the later full-length portraits of Philippe Le Roy lord of Ravels in the southern Netherlands21 and James Stuart Duke of Lennox,22 elder brother of Lords John and Bernard, where the motif of noble lineage is signalled by the attendance of highly bred hunting dogs; in the case of Le Roy, who was illegitimate, the theme is reinforced by an over-stressed glamourisation of the sitter’s physiognomy (as had been done earlier with Frans Snyders to signify his celebrity as an animal painter). These are both bravura portraits, but in their simply illustrative representation of noble descent they do not elicit from Van Dyck the creative ingenuity of his account of Gage the gentleman courtier or his exposition of the same dual

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role linking himself and his friend Endymion Porter, where in each case more detailed themes and questions are propounded in the artist’s native pictorial language. Van Dyck’s supreme study of élite identity is of course the Triple Portrait of Charles I,23 prepared as a model for the bust to be sculpted by Bernini. Epitomising his entire range of portraits of the king, it articulates that quality of inwardness which has been mistakenly viewed as a melancholy apprehension of the ‘coming’ political crisis and may be better understood as the rare condition of regal subjectivity, earlier explored by Shakespeare in his sequence of historical dramas from Richard II to Henry V. The Triple Portrait falls outside the scope of this book, but Van Dyck could not have painted it without his many essays in the representation of individuals next below the gradation of monarchy, in widely differing locales and political contexts. At their best, these essays were increasingly informed by a refexive self-consciousness, as exceptional talent and success enabled him to develop a style of living consonant with that of his noble patrons and a pictorial style characterised by the quality of grace24 declared by Castiglione’s Count Lodovico to be defnitive of the perfect courtier, its essence distilled into the enchanting stealth of sprezzatura. His following the path mapped out by Castiglione to what was in effect self-ennoblement must have played no small part in Van Dyck’s contribution to the related discourses of nobility and cortegianía – in which age-old arguments were undergoing refned modern mutations – through the pictorial language of his portraiture.

Notes 1 Complete Paintings, I.161, 139. 2 David Lloyd, Memoires Of The Lives, Actions, Sufferings & Deaths Of Those Noble, Reverend, And Excellent Personages That Suffered…In our late Intestine Wars…, London, 1668, 286. 3 Michael Vickers, The Arundel and Pomfret Marbles, Oxford, 2006, 18–19; see back chapter 5, pp. 138–9. The document in Arundel’s right hand may recall the scroll held in the same hand by one of his more imposing antique statues, the so-called Cicero; ibid., 14–15. 4 Complete Paintings, I.100, 93–4. 5 Ibid., I.106, 100. 6 Ibid., II.31, 175–6; Stijn Alsteens and Adam Eaker, Van Dyck. The Anatomy of Portraiture, New York, New Haven and London, 2016, no. 15, 89–92. 7 See back, chapter 5, passim. 8 Complete Paintings, II.66, 207. For the more recent identifcation of the sitter see Piera Giovanna Tordella, ‘Un ritratto genovese di Van Dyck e due disegni di Ottavio Leoni. Filippo Spinola, conte palatino di Tassarolo’, Storia dell’ arte, n.s. 32 (2012), 46–56. 9 Ibid., 49, fg. 3. 10 Complete Paintings, II.32, 177–8; the portrait of Paolina Adorno is II.33, 177. Anna Maria Bava and Maria Grazia Bernardini, Van Dyck pittore di corte, Turin, 2018, no. 18, 224. 11 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, London, 1622, facsimile Amsterdam and New York, 1968, A4 recto. 12 Karen Hearn ed., Dynasties. Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630, London, 1995, no. 141 Daniel Mytens, Alatheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel, 210–12. 13 Susan Foister, Holbein in England, London, 2006, no. 164, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, 150. 14 Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein, London, 1997, fg. 255, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. 15 Ibid., fg. 260, 202, for the Fruytiers original (which may be a record of a composition by Van Dyck). 16 Hearn (as note 12), no. 27 Hans Eworth, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, 70–71.

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17 Roy Strong, The English Icon. Elizabethan & Jacobean Portraiture, London and New York, 1969, no. 74, 125. 18 See back note 11. 19 The Necessarie, Fit, And Convenient Education of a yong Gentlewoman. Written Both In French and Italian, and translated into English by W. P., London, 1598, facsimile, Amsterdam and New York, 1969, C4 verso–C5 recto. The original, bilingual text is Giovanni Michele Bruto, La Institutione Di Una Fanciulla Nata Nobilmente. L’Institution D’Une Fille De Noble Maison, Traduite de langue Tuscane en François, Antwerp, 1555. 20 Peacham (as note 11), 18. 21 Complete Paintings, III.98, 325, 327. 22 Ibid., IV.200, 584–6. 23 Complete Paintings, IV.48, 464–6. 24 Jeffrey M. Muller, ‘The Quality of Grace in the Art of Anthony van Dyck’ in Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Susan J. Barnes, and Julius S. Held, eds., Anthony van Dyck, Washington, DC, 1990, 27–36.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate photos or illustrations. acceptable social behavior, Della Casa on 46–8 ‘Affabilitie’ 60 Alcibiades 67–8 Aletheia Talbot Countess of Arundel 157, 158 Alexander the Great 26, 44, 78, 94 ancestry/descent arguments 23 antique statues 30, 78–9, 178; in Peacham’s works 79, 87–8; in Rome 146 antiquity, perceived authority of 15–16, 30–1, 43, 76, 78, 86, 88, 102–4 Apelles 26, 43–4, 96, 105–6, 114–15 Apollonius of Tyana 123 Aretino, Pietro (character) 114–15 Aristotle 32, 44, 88–90, 94, 138; Ethics 22, 28, 30, 96, 117, 123; Poetics 1–2, 5–6, 33, 91–2; Politics 43, 92–3, 136–7; on portraits 92; Rhetoric 85 art: Aristotle on 92; and courtly accomplishments 42–3, 76–8, 90–1, 160n27; De Refuge on 59; instruction in 27, 88–9, 92, 104–5, 118, 136–8; social identity, as 75–6 The Art of Drawing (Peacham) 27, 88–9, 98 artful neglect 115 artists: role of 76; see also court artists Arundel, Lord see Howard, Thomas, Earl of Arundel Arundel Marbles 30–1, 94, 110n35, 138, 184 Barbaro, Daniele 8 Bartholus (character) 18–19 Basilicon Doron 25–6 beauty, Della Casa on 46–7 behavior, Della Casa on 9 Bellori, Giovan Pietro: Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects 119–22, 123; The Idea of the Painter, the Sculptor and the Architect 123 Bembo, Pietro (character) 45–6, 48–9, 62, 64, 93

Bentivoglio, Guido 185 The Blazon of Gentrie (Ferne) 18, 20–1, 155, 159; see also individual characters Bocchi, Achille, Symbolicae Quaestiones 124 bodily comportment, in Galateo 7 The Book of the Courtier (Castiglione) xiii, 44, 61, 95, 136–7, 186, 190; see also Castiglione, Baldassare; Il libro del cortegiano (Castiglione) Borghini, Raffaello 119 Brathwait, Richard, The English Gentleman 96 Breughel, Jan 135 Brignole Sale, Anton Giulio 187 Bucci, Antonio (character) 32 Budé, Guillaume 18–19, 155 buildings, recycled components 142 Caravaggio 122 carelesse Romance 126 Carleton, Dudley 134–5 Carracci, Agostino 139 Case, John 117–18 Castelvetro, Lodovico 33 Castelvetro, Ludovico 6 Castiglione, Baldassare xiii, 10–11, 118, 186– 7; on Aristotle 92–3; artistic ambitions of 1–2; courtier’s fne qualities 13; courtier’s goals 55; portrayals of 3; and Raphael 1; use of Classical authors 41–2; see also The Book of the Courtier (Castiglione) the Cavaliere Guglielmo (character) 5, 35n15, 51–3 Cesarini, Virginio 140 cette noble franchise 125 Charles I 100, 103–4 Charles, Prince 25, 59 Charles V, Emperor 29 Chiarezza (Ripa) 83, 84, 86 Cicero 16, 56, 65, 105–6; De Ofciis 3, 96; In Pisonem 16, 20; on oratory 42, 106

Index Civil conversazione (Guazzo) xv, 5, 51 Classical Greece 43–4, 92–3, 136; see also Aristotle; Plato; Socrates Classical Rome 15–16, 19, 23, 28, 76; see also Cicero; Juvenal; Martial; Pindar; Pliny the Younger; Seneca; Vitruvius Cleland, James 25–6, 86, 188; The Institution of a Young Noble Man 21–2, 24–5 Clerke, Bartholomew 74n115 Comanini, Gregorio 116 The Compleat Gentleman (Peacham) xv, 27– 9, 31, 33, 80, 81–5, 89, 91, 94–6, 188–91; heraldry 98–100, 110n26; moderation in 96–7; ‘Of Antiquities’ 79, 87–8, 94, 117, 156 concealment 105 constancy, Elyot on 13 The Continence of Scipio (Van Dyck) 151–2, 159 Correggio, Madonna of St George 170 cortegianía xiii–xvi, 106, 109, 114, 116, 187, 191–2 Costanza Gonzaga of Novellara 144, 146 court artists: role of xiv, 76; see also artists court of Louis XIII 11, 66 court of Urbino see Urbino court ‘courtesy books,’ precedents for 4 The Courtier (Castiglione) see The Book of the Courtier (Castiglione) courtiers: compared to painters 32; fne qualities of 13; Fregoso on 3; and painting 43–4, 118, 136–8; perfection 61; requirements of 43; self-creation of 6–7, 14, 34, 40; and war 53 courts, Faret on 63, 66 Dati, Carlo 121, 131n40 Davenant, William 173–4 de Gheyn, Jacques 135 De Humana Physiognomonia (Della Porta) 153 De Offciis (Cicero) 3 de Refuge, Eustache 66; infuence on Faret 67–8; on moderation 59–60; Traicté de la cour 10–11, 58–9, 187 decorum 47 Delaram, Francis 79, 80 Della Casa, Giovanni 5, 10, 116; on behavior 9; perfected selves 13, 189; sonnet 115; on sprezzatura 49, 51, 54, 70; see also Galateo (Casa) Della Casa on 46–8 Della Porta, Giambattista 153 dexterity 61–2 Digby, George 127, 166–8, 171–2 dilligence 105

205

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 124 disegno 33 dissimulation 61–2, 68, 105 Dobson, William 172, 178 Doctrina (Peacham) 82 Dolce, Lodovico 131n45; Dialogo della Pittura 56, 114, 116 Domenichi, Lodovico 136 Donne, John 173–4 Dottrina (Ripa) 83 du Pinet, Antoine 136 Dürer, Albert 88 education: in art 27, 88–9, 92, 104–5, 118, 136–8; liberal 88, 100 ekphrasis 77–8 Elizabethan England 15–17 Elyot, Sir Thomas 94; The Governour xv, 13, 76; on portraiture 76–7, 87, 89 The English Gentleman (Brathwait) 96 Evelyn, John 142 Eworth, Hans 28 excellence, in Aristotle 117 Exodus, quotations from 118 Fabricio (character) 23–4, 75 Fabrini, Giovan Francesco (character) 114–16 The Faerie Queene (Spenser) xv Faret, Nicolas 187; on grace 63–4; on himself 12; on sprezzatura 63–5, 67–9; see also L’Honneste-Homme Ou, L’Art de Plaire A La Court (Faret) Ferne, John 19, 76, 188; The Blazon of Gentrie 18, 20–1, 155, 159 Figino, Giovan Ambrogio (character) 115–16 fgurative imagery, in Renaissance art 6 Florentine portraits 10 Forni, Antonio (character) 32 Fregoso, Federico (character) 2–3, 55, 95, 181n29, 190 Gage, George xv, 133, 135–6, 138–40, 143, 151–2, 154–7, 185–6, 191 Galateo (Della Casa) xv, 35n22, 49, 57, 88, 127, 130n16, 154, 159, 190; and art theory 116; behavior in 9, 46–8; bodily comportment in 7; sprezzatura in 45 gentility 97; Ferne on 18–19; literature on 13 geometry 87 George, Lord Digby and William, Lord Russell (Van Dyck) 166–8, 171 Gheeraerts, Marcus the Younger 22 Giotto 57 Giovan Cristoforo Romano (character) 118 The Governour (Elyot) xv, 13, 76–7, 78

206

Index

grace 40–1, 114, 192; Faret on 63–4; Junius on 102, 105–7; and sprezzatura 44, 107; translated from Galateo 48 the Graces 50 Gracian 127 Graphice (Sanderson) 126 Gregory XV 149 Greuter, Matthaeus 150 Guazzo, Stefano 79; Civil conversazione xv, 5, 51 Hanmer, Thomas 127 Hay, James 25–6, 29 Haydocke, Richard 92, 116–18 heraldry 98–100, 110n26, 138–9, 142–4, 146, 147, 148–9, 150, 151, 155 Herbert, Henry 173 Herrick, Robert 172–3 ‘heureuse négligence’ 126–8 Hilliard, Nicholas 130n21; Treatise on the Art of Limning 33–4 Hoby, Thomas 106; The Courtyer Of Count Baldessar Castilio xiv, 8 Holland, Philemon 136 hope 59 Horace 41–2 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 38n119, 189 Howard, Thomas, Earl of Arundel 27, 29–31, 34, 81–2, 91, 101, 119, 136, 138, 157, 158, 184, 189 Howard, William 27–8, 81–2, 84, 91, 156–7 Humphrey, Laurence 25, 188; on images 16–18; The Nobles 13–16, 76 Iconologia (Ripa) 79, 81, 83–4, 87 Il libro del cortegiano (Castiglione) 1; see also The Book of the Courtier (Castiglione) images 188; and the Catholic Church 24; Humphrey on 16–8, 188; Peacham on 18, 31–2; as personal character 28 Imitatio Sapiens 122, 123 imitation 77–8; positive aspects of 17 Inigo Jones 140 The Institution of a Young Noble Man (Cleland) 21–2, 24–5 Iris modelling the Ludovisi arms on three distant rainbows 149, 150 Italian Sketchbook 133, 134 Jacobean England 25–6 James VI, King 25 Jones, Inigo 139, 140, 143 Junius, Franciscus xv, 101, 104, 187; compared to Castiglione 106–8; The Painting of the Ancients 101–3 Juvenal, Satires 16–17, 20

Lactantius 78, 91, 94 Landscap 89 language, and civil conversations 5 ‘leggiadria’ 49 Leicester, Earl of 9 L’Honneste-Homme Ou, L’Art de Plaire A La Court (Faret) xv, 11–12, 62–5; Castiglione’s infuence on 63; Eloge Des Honestes Gens 68; Maximes Generales de la Conversation 67; metaphors in 65–6; sprezzatura in. 63–5, 67–9 Life of Alexander 78 ‘l’infnger’ 56–8, 61, 190 Lives of the Ancient Painters (Dati) 120 Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Bellori) 119–22, 123 Lloyd, David 184 Lo stato rustico (The Rural Realm) 164–5 Lodovico, Count (character) xiii–xiv, 2–3, 40–5, 50–1, 53, 62, 76, 92–4, 107–8, 118, 136–8, 186, 192 Lodovico of Canossa xiii, 2 Lomazzo, Giovan Paolo 116–18 Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart (Van Dyck) 126–7, 169–70 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio 96–7, 121 love, Bembo on 45 Ludovisi family 149, 150 Magnifco Giuliano (character) 108 Malpiglio (Tasso) 4–5, 54–7, 70, 186, 190 Margani, Lodovico Grati 140, 141, 142 Martial 102–3 masques 168–9, 171–2 Mathew, Toby 135, 160n10 Mattei, Asdrubale 144, 146, 148 Mattei, Muzio 147 Maurits, Prince of Orange 29 Michelangelo 12 Miguel da Sylva 1 Millar, Oliver 126, 171 Misura (Ripa) 87 moderation 96–7; importance of 59–61 Moretti, Egidio 138, 139 Mytens, Daniel: Aletheia Talbot Countess of Arundel 158; Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel 157, 158 navigation metaphors 65–7 Necessarie, Fit and Convenient Education of a Yong Gentlewoman (trans. Philip) 190 ‘négligence’ 65, 114–16 negligentia diligens 115, 126 Nenna, Giovan Battista 24; Il Nennio 23–4, 26, 75, 155–6; see also Nennio Or A Treatise of Nobility (Nenna)

Index Nennio Or A Treatise of Nobility (Nenna) 23–4, 26, 75, 155–6 Newcastle, W. 122 nobility: as amateurs 97–9; and birth 75; Christian views of 14; counterfeit 17; debates over xiii–xiv, 155–6, 191; Elizabethan 15; literature on 13–14, 34; in Lord Digby and Lord Russell 171; painters depicting 24; Van Dyck’s 126 Nobiltà (Ripa) 81, 85–6, 159 The Nobles (Humphrey) 13–17, 76 Norfolk, 4th Duke of 27–9, 91 north Italian portraits 10 nudity 83 Numa Pompilius 155 Nuovi Disegni Dell’ Architetture 143 oil painting 98 orators, Cicero on 42 Ovid 108 painters: antiquity 93; compared to courtiers 2–3; as gentlemen 97 painting 44; Junius on 104–5; techniques 114, 128; see also art The Painting of the Ancients (Junius) 101–2; language of 103 paintings: metaphors of 13, 31–3, 55–6; representing the mind 37n106 painture, defned 20 Palazzo Mattei di Giove 144, 145, 146, 148 Palazzo Senatorio 143 Palladio, Andrea, Quattro Libri Dell’Architettura 119 Pallavicino, Gaspare (character) xiii–xiv, 40, 186 Pamphilus 136 Paradinus (character) 18–20 Parrhasius 121, 131n40 Peacham, Henry 33, 76, 94, 130n21, 155, 166, 173, 190; The Art of Drawing 27, 88–9, 98; The Compleat Gentleman xv, 27–9, 31, 33, 79, 80, 81–9, 94–7, 117, 156–7, 188–91; on maps 88–9; Minerva Britanna 82, 95, 99, 111n60 Peake, Robert 22 perfume 127 Peterson, Robert 9–10, 49–50 Pettie, George 53–4 Phidias 78 Philip, William 190 Piccolomini, Alessandro 6 pictoral art 98; and literary art 56; Peacham on 98 pictorial metaphors 4 Pindar 41, 50 Plato 106

207

plinths 147, 159; in art 139–40 Pliny the Elder 15–16, 19, 37n106, 43, 92, 105–6, 114, 131n40, 136–7 Plutarch 86–7 Poetics (Aristotle) 1–2, 5–6, 33 poetry, by Endymion Porter 174–6 Polycleitus 6–8, 10, 45 Portal of Vigna Altemps 144 Porter, Endymion xiv, 172–8 Portrait of the Artist with Endymion Porter (Van Dyck) 172, 176–80 portrait styles: baroque 10, 129; Elizabethan 21–2; Florentine 10; north Italian 10 portraits: Aristotle on 92; and coats of arms 155; Elyot on 76–7; occupation conventions 168; by Van Dyck 126 Possidonio (character) 23 Prince Rupert and Prince Charles Louis (Van Dyck) 171 Protestant humanism 19 Protogenes 105–6, 115 Pygmalion myth 108 Quintillian 104–5, 107 Quintus Curtius 78 Quintus Fabius 43, 92 Raphael 12, 99, 122; and Castiglione 1; reproductions 133, 134 Ratti, Carlo Giuseppe 165 the Reformation 24 ‘regolo’ (rule) 9, 87, 154; defning 8; misreadings of 10 Renaissance art, fgurative imagery in 6 representation, vs. spectacle 21 Reynolds, John 10–1, 59, 61–2 Rinaldo and Armida (Van Dyck) 172 Ripa, Cesare 82, 85, 100; Iconologia 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87 Roman military offcer statue 139 Rome (city of) 30, 119, 142, 143–5; Baroque statues in 138, 139 Rome see Classical Rome Romei, Annibale 5, 51–3, 76 Rubens, Peter Paul 119–20, 135–6 Rudolph II 97 Russell, Lord 166–8 Ruthven, Mary 125–6, 128 Sackville, Thomas 8 Sanderson, William, Graphice 126 Sapientia 124 Scientia 28, 31, 78–9, 82–6, 88, 91, 157 sculptors: nobles as 76; regulatory systems for 8 sculpture, Elyot on 76–7 sea marks 85

208

Index

Seigneur d’Aubigny, George Stuart 126, 171 Selden, John, Marmora Arundelliana 30 self-control 67–8 Self-portrait (Van Dyck) xiii, 128–9 Self-portrait with a Sunfower (Van Dyck) 165 Seneca 41, 123–4 Sidney, Philip, Earl of Essex 98, 102 Sidney, Sir Philip 22 Socrates 14, 47, 57, 124 Socratic argument 57 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene xv sprezzatura xiii, xv, 14, 47, 58, 61–2, 94–5, 106, 186–7, 192; Della Casa on 49, 51, 54, 70; Dolce using 115–16; downplaying 75, 96; Dutch translation of 114; examples of 1; Faret on 63–5, 67–9; Gage as example 154, 186; and grace 45; Guazzo on 51–2; Lodovico on 2, 40–1; and painters 43, 117; and poetry 174–6; in Van Dyck’s portraits 128–9 The State Of England, Anno Dom. 1600 (Wilson) xv Stoic doctrines 3 Stranger (character) 54–9 Suckling, John 126, 171 Tasso, Torquato 31–3, 66, 164; on Castiglione 58; Malpiglio 4–5, 54–7, 70, 186, 190 Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel (Mytens) 157, 158 Titian 32, 129, 133; Man with a Glove 127, 133 titles, unworthy creations of 25–6 Traicté de la cour (De Refuge) 10–11, 58 travel 94 Treatise of the Court (trans. Reynolds) 59; see also Traicté de la cour (De Refuge) Treatise on the Art of Limning (Hilliard) 33–4 Tudor England 20 Tuscan dialect 5 Urbino court 11, 56, 117 Valeriano, Piero 179 van den Bos, Lambert 114

Van Dyck, Anthony xiii–xiv, 22, 112n105, 119, 123, 132n69, 133, 164, 176–7, 184, 187; on antiquity 139–40; Bellori on 120–2; cette noble franchise 125; The Continence of Scipio 151–2, 159; French biography 124–5, 127; George Gage 134, 151, 154, 158, 185–6, 191; George, Lord Digby and William, Lord Russell 166, 168, 171; Italian Sketchbook 133, 134; Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart 126–7, 169–70; portrait of Lord Arundel 184–5; Portrait of the Artist with Endymion Porter 172, 176–80; Portrait of Two Young Men 126–7; Prince Rupert and Prince Charles Louis 171; Rinaldo and Armida 172; Self Portrait xiii, 128–9; Self-portrait with a Sunfower 165; self portraits 164–5; Sir Thomas Hanmer 127–8; Triple Portrait of Charles I 192 van Mander, Karel 96–7, 128–9, 131n40 Varchi, Benedetto Due lezzioni 118–19 Vasari, Giorgio 32, 96–7, 119, 121–2, 128–9, 130n16, 135 Vertue, George 189 Victory 149 Villamena, Francesco 139, 140, 149, 150 Vincenzo Imperiale, Gian 164–5 virtues 12, 156, 159; Aristotle on 28; Cleland on 22; courtly 57; Faret on 12–13; linking 3; Tasso on 4 virtuoso 156; defning 3; Peacham on 29–30, 117 Vitruvian infuences 10, 49 Vitruvius 8 Vorsterman, Lucas 136 war: and courtiers 53; and education 53 warfare, and learning art 76–7 Webb, John 143, 162n55 Wharton, Lord 126 Wilson, Thomas, The State Of England, Anno Dom. 1600 xv Wilton House 143 wisdom 117, 123–4 Xenophon 106 Zeuxis 120, 131n40