The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection Renaissance and Baroque

The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection Renaissance and BaroqueT H E A RT O F I TA LY
I N T H E ROYA L COL L E C T ION
R E NA I S SA NC E & BA ROQUE
royal collection publications
Lucy Whitaker Martin Clayton
w i t h c o n t r i b u t i o n s b y
Aislinn Loconte
ITALY
Published by Royal Collection Enterprises Ltd St James’s Palace, London sw1a 1jr
For a complete catalogue of current publications, please write to the address above, or visit our website at www.royalcollection.org.uk
© 2007 Royal Collection Enterprises Ltd Text by Lucy Whitaker, Martin Clayton and Aislinn Loconte and reproductions of all items in the Royal Collection © 2007 HM Queen Elizabeth II.
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isbn 978 1 902163 291
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This publication has been generously supported by Sir Harry Djanogly, CBE
‘Art becomes a piece of State’: Italian Paintings and Drawings and Royal Collectors
Catalogue of Paintings and Drawings
Florence and Rome, Sixteenth Century
The Courts of Northern Italy, Sixteenth Century
Venice and the Veneto, Sixteenth Century
The Seventeenth Century
404 405 407 426 427 432
At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 Charles I owned one of Europe’s most important collections of Italian art of the High Renaissance and early Baroque (from the period 1500–1640). Within ten years he had been beheaded and almost the entire collection sold (the major exceptions being Raphael’s tapestry cartoons and Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar). After the Restoration in 1660 Charles II set about reassembling his father’s picture collection where possible, and where it was not, acquiring comparable works. Subsequent monarchs, at least until the death of Prince Albert in 1861, continued this work, all to a greater or lesser extent inspired by the example of Charles I. While it is possible to reconstruct and appreciate the coherent character of the collection Charles I formed in a mere twenty years, it is in some ways more difficult to gain a sense of the collection his successors took two hundred years to accumulate. The present publication and the exhibition it accompanies provide for the first time an opportunity to do just this. The paintings included here are quite simply the best of their type in the Royal Collection.
The Italian drawings in the Royal Collection from the same period are among the finest in the world, but the history of the acquisition of the drawings collection is almost completely unrelated to the same history for the paintings. Nor can the
distribution of paintings be exactly matched (especially in areas such as the Veneto, where drawing was a less important activity than elsewhere in Italy). However, the selection process has provided an opportunity for less familiar areas of the collection to be explored and for well-known sheets to be seen in a new context.
The story of the acquisition (and in some cases reacquisition) of the collection of paintings and drawings is told in the Intro- duction. The Catalogue presents the paintings and drawings according to their place and date of creation, arranged under four broad headings, three for the sixteenth century – Florence and Rome, the Courts of Northern Italy, and Venice and the Veneto – and one for the seventeenth century. The prominence of the ‘Northern Courts’ reflects Charles I’s acquisition of most of the collection of the Dukes of Mantua in 1627–32; the preponderance of early seventeenth-century painting in the final section reminds us that Charles ceased collecting in 1642. But otherwise these groupings, or something very like them, could be seen in any comparably rich collection.
A project as ambitious as this could never have the catalogue it deserves without additional funding. We are therefore extremely grateful to Sir Harry Djanogly, who has supported this publication most generously.
7
Preface
INTRODUCTION
‘Art becomes a piece of State’ Italian Paintings and Drawings
and Royal Collectors
in 1624 henry wotton, former British Ambassador to Venice, wrote of the benefits in the ancient world of creating statues of deserving men; such art, he argued, was not ‘a bare and transitory entertainment of the Eye . . . But had also a secret and strong Influence, even into the advancement of the Monarchie, by continuall representation of vertuous examples; so as in that point, art became a piece of State’.1 There is no doubt in Wotton’s mind which nation in the modern world created art capable of this ‘secret and strong influence’. In his address to Charles I in 1633, he told the King that ‘the most splendid of all your entertainments, is your love of excellent Artificers, and works: wherewith either Art both of Picture and Sculpture you have so adorned your Palaces, that Italy (the greatest Mother of Elegant Arts) or at least (after the Grecians) the principall Nurse, may seem by your magnificence to be translated into England’.2 Art in this serious and improving sense meant Italian art.
No single acquisition within the history of the Royal Collec- tion exemplifies this high-minded attitude to art better than the series of seven full-scale drawings or cartoons for tapestries by Raphael, depicting subjects from the Acts of the Apostles, now displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum (fig. 1; see also no. 12, a preparatory drawing for the cartoons). These seminal works of the Italian Renaissance form part of the story of the taste of almost every reign discussed in these pages. In 1542 Henry VIII acquired a set of the tapestries made after Raphael’s designs for Pope Leo X. Charles I acquired the cartoons themselves while still Prince of Wales. They were one of the most important Royal possessions that Cromwell decided to reserve for the use of the State at the Commonwealth Sale, though Charles II reportedly considered selling them himself to the French after the Restora- tion. In 1699 William III commissioned Sir Christopher Wren and William Talman to remodel a long gallery at Hampton Court, specifically designed to display the cartoons (fig. 18). During the Georgian period they were taken as models for the emerging British school of painting, admired even by someone as sceptical about Italian art as William Hogarth. In 1763 George III transferred them to London to decorate Queen Charlotte’s Saloon in the recently acquired Buckingham House, and was attacked in the House of Commons by John Wilkes for removing
them from public view. In 1804 the King returned them to their purpose-built setting at Hampton Court. In 1865, soon after Prince Albert’s death and presumably as a tribute to his great love of Italian art, Queen Victoria offered the cartoons on long-term loan to the newly founded South Kensington Museum (later renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum), where they have remained ever since. By this date it was not only art but also artistic education for the general public which had become a ‘piece of State’.
the tudors
Exchanges of works of art have often played a role in political alliances. Early in 1504 Henry VII sent ambassadors to Italy to present Guidobaldo, the eldest son of Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, with the Order of the Garter. This was part of Henry’s plan to persuade Pope Julius II to allow the marriage of the Prince of Wales, the future Henry VIII, to his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon. In 1506 Baldassare Castiglione, later author of the highly influential Book of the Courtier (1528), set out for England to act as proxy for the Duke at his ceremony of installation as Knight of the Garter at Windsor. There is an old tradition (although not documented) that Castiglione brought with him, as a gift for the King, the small panel of St George and the Dragon by Raphael (National Gallery of Art, Washington dc) painted in c.1505–1506, in which St George wears the Garter around his left leg (fig. 2).3 If this story were true, this would have been the first major Italian Renaissance painting to enter the Royal Collection. However, a hundred years later the painting was owned by the 4th Earl of Pembroke, from whom Charles I acquired it in exchange for a book of Holbein drawings.4
Henry VIII used Italian sculptors, painters and craftsmen for his building projects (though most of their work has now disap- peared) and for his parents’ tomb, which survives in Westminster Abbey, created in 1512–18 by the sculptor Pietro Torrigiani (1472–1528). Girolamo da Treviso was invited to London by Henry VIII in 1538 to work as a military engineer and was killed by a cannon shot when the English besieged Boulogne. His Protestant Allegory (fig. 3), described in Henry VIII’s 1547 inven- tory as a ‘table [i.e. panel] of the busshop of Rome and the foure
12
13
Fig. 1 Raphael, The Sacrifice at Lystra; bodycolour on paper mounted on canvas, 350 560 cm (Royal Collection, rl 12949; on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
Fig. 2 Raphael, St George and the Dragon; oil on panel, 28.5 21.5 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington dc)
Euangelistes casting stones apon him’, is the only painting by an Italian artist to remain in the Collection from this period.5
At this date tapestries were more valued as wall decoration than paintings. The first exposure to the magnificence of the Italian High Renaissance in England came in 1542, when two sets of tapestries, later weavings from the sets commissioned by Pope Leo X, arrived at Henry VIII’s court: the Acts of the Apostles, designed by Raphael (see above), and the Triumph of the Gods (known as ‘The Antiques’), designed by two members of his studio, Giovanni Francesco Penni and Giovanni da Udine.6
Henry VIII’s 1547 inventory records more than 2,700 tapestries and they remained the most expensive furnishings for palaces. Even a century later, when the Royal Collection contained masterpieces of Italian painting, the tapestries were the highest valued items in the Commonwealth Sale.7
During Henry VIII’s reign the ‘privy’ [private] gallery developed in English palace design into a long connecting space for informal conversation and relaxation, where paintings were displayed.8 Throughout the sixteenth century such spaces were generally and principally used for the display of portraits, demonstrating the lineage and alliances of the monarch, with a shift away from religious subject matter following the Reforma- tion. While English patrons might have looked first to the Low Countries or Germany for their portrait painters, they also began to acknowledge the Italians’ distinctive contribution to the art form. Titian’s portrait of Philip II had been sent over by the Queen of Hungary to Mary I in 1553, unfortunately only on a temporary basis. Mary of Hungary wrote (in French): ‘it will serve to tell her what he is like, if she will put it in a proper light and look at it from a distance, as all Titian’s paintings have to be looked at.’9 This advice suggests that the English audience needed guidance in how to appreciate Italian painting. When the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard first drew Queen Elizabeth I in 1572, he recorded that ‘after showing me howe shee notied great difference of shadowing in the works, and diversity of Drawers of sundry nations, and that the Italians had the name to be cunningest, and to drawe best, shadowed not, Requiring of me the reason of it. . .’.10 In 1575 Federico Zuccaro (nos. 10, 26) paid a brief visit to the court of Elizabeth I, probably at the request of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and painted both of them.11 The full-length portraits are lost, but the drawing of the Queen (British Museum, London; fig. 4) is a rare ad vivum likeness; its allegorical ermine and snakes are similar to those appearing in Zuccaro’s Calumny (no. 10).12
15‘art becomes a piece of state’
Fig. 3 Girolamo da Treviso, A Protestant Allegory; oil on oak panel, 68.0 84.4 cm (rcin 405748)
Fig. 4 Federico Zuccaro, Queen Elizabeth I; black and red chalk, 30.7 22.2 cm (British Museum, London)
the stuarts
Lord Salisbury claimed that Anne of Denmark, the consort of James I, preferred ‘dead pictorres in a paltry Gallery’ to the company of living people.13 Both of Anne’s sons, Prince Henry and Charles I, clearly inherited their mother’s taste for art. After Henry VIII’s break with Rome and Elizabeth I’s excommunication in 1570, Venice was the only Italian state with which the English had a political understanding. The Anglo–Spanish peace treaty of 1604 forged stronger links between England and the Continent and made travel easier. It was at this time that a succession of astute English ambas- sadors served in Venice – Sir Henry Wotton in 1604–1609, 1616–19 and 1621–3; Sir Dudley Carleton from 1610 to 1615, and Sir Isaac Wake from 1624 to 1630. All were involved in negotiations for the export of works of art in addition to their other duties. When it came to the export of the Gonzaga collec- tion from Venice for Charles I, the Doge and Senate offered every assistance to Wake, adding: ‘not onley in that, but in any thing else, wch shall be required in his Maties name, or for his service, they will alwayes be ready to serve him wth alacrity.’14
In 1608 Wotton wrote to Lord Salisbury: ‘There is also a figure (I take it) of Prometheus devoured by the eagle, done by Giacobo Palma in concurrence with Titiano, which for the
emulation between two painters (both of no small name) I dare almost say to be worthy of a corner in one of your Lordship’s galleries.’15 Lord Salisbury acquired the painting, Palma Giovane’s Prometheus (fig. 5), and gave it to the young Henry, Prince of Wales, two years later; it is still in the Royal Collection.16 In the same letter Wotton discusses a portrait by Leonardo Donato in a way which suggests that Venetian painting made particular demands on English viewers: the portrait, he writes, is ‘done truly and naturally but roughly, alla Venetiana, and therefore to be set at some distance from the sight’. In another letter Wotton praises a Titian for ‘being so round, that I know not whether I shall call it a piece of sculpture, or picture, and so lively, that a man would be tempted to doubt whether nature or art had made it’.17 Henry, Prince of Wales, had clearly developed a taste for Italian art: shortly after acquiring the Prometheus he spent £408 17s 6d on a shipment of Venetian paintings direct from Italy, which probably included works by Tintoretto, Bassano and Palma Giovane.18 On 26 January 1610 Sir Walter Cope wrote to Carleton: ‘If you meete with any auncient Masterpeeces of paintinge at a reasonable hand, you cannot send a thinge more gracious to the Prince [Henry, Prince of Wales], or my Lord Treasurer [Lord Salisbury]’, although he adds that for him ‘their inventions are a little too light, not fitting for any place of gravitie’.19
16 the art of italy
Fig. 5 Palma Giovane, Prometheus; oil on canvas, 184.0 160.6 cm (rcin 406075)
Meanwhile, the Venetian ambassador in London, Marc Antonio Correr, reported that Prince Henry was ‘paying special attention to the adorning of a most beautiful gallery of very fine pictures, ancient and modern, the larger part brought out of Venice’.20 The Prince’s Surveyor, Inigo Jones, probably remodelled the gallery of St James’s Palace between 1609 and 1610; for the first time large-scale religious and mythological subjects – Bacchus, Ceres and Venus, Prometheus – were seen alongside the more usual portraits. In 1615 Carleton sent another large shipment of Venetian paintings gathered together by the Flemish merchant and dealer Daniel Nys, for Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. When Somerset was arrested later that year on suspicion of murder, the collection was bought by the Earl of Arundel and Lord Danvers. It is probable that the ‘Labyrinth’ by Tintoretto mentioned in this shipment is the Pleasure Garden with a Maze (no. 79), now attributed to Pozzoserrato. It has a Renaissance-style frame with gilt scrolling foliage on black; some examples of this type can be dated to the 1630s.21
When plans were laid to marry Prince Henry to Caterina de’ Medici, the daughter of Grand Duke Ferdinando I of Tuscany, the negotiations involved a gift of paintings, including one by Beccafumi, which Prince Henry ‘wanted to place in a particular room so that it could be seen to better effect’, and portraits of famous Italians, including Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli and Castruccio. Henry also asked for sculptures by Giambologna and in 1612 received a number of small bronze casts from his models by Pietro Tacca.22 When they were unpacked at Richmond Palace, Prince Henry excitedly seized a bronze and kissed it, and refused to allow his younger brother, Prince Charles (then aged 12), to have one as a plaything. Henry gained a reputation as a discriminating collector who wanted to build up a princely collection in emulation of that of Rudolf II in Prague or the Florentine court under the Medici grand dukes.23 When he died at the age of 18 in 1612 his collection, which included fine Italian and Netherlandish paintings, as well as coins, medals and books, was inherited by his younger brother, Charles, and helped to form his taste.
charles i: ‘the greatest amateur
of paintings among the princes of
the world’
During the protracted negotiations for the marriage of Prince Charles to the King of Spain’s sister, the Infanta María, the future King sought to break the deadlock by visiting Madrid in 1623 and wooing the Infanta in person. He was accompanied by some of the most knowledgeable and important art collectors
associated with the English court: George Villiers, the Marquis (later Duke) of Buckingham; his agent, Balthasar Gerbier; Endymion Porter; Francis Cottington; James Hamilton, Earl of Arran and 3rd Marquess, later 1st Duke, of Hamilton; and Tobie Matthew. King Philip IV’s collection was at this date the most extensive in Europe and his Venetian paintings in partic- ular must have dazzled his visitors. The young King presented Charles with some spectacularly generous gifts: Titian’s Jupiter and Antiope (which hung in the Pardo Palace in Madrid and was thus known as the ‘Venus del Pardo’; Louvre; fig. 6), Titian’s Emperor Charles V with a Hound (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and Correggio’s Holy Family with the Infant Baptist (probably that in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans; see fig. 60). There was even a suggestion that Philip was intending to give Charles three of Titian’s magnificent late poesie (presumably in the event of a successful outcome to the marriage negotiations): Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon (both in the Sutherland collection, National Gallery of Scotland) and the Rape of Europa (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston).24 Charles also found opportunities to buy works: Titian’s Nude Girl in a Fur Wrap (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)…