Thomas
Dundas poses like a dancer in Pompeo
Batoni's
portrait,
an elegant leg resting casually on a masterpiece of classical sculpture. He
gestures towards the recumbent Vatican Ariadne, while in the courtyard behind him we can see
the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocovn and Antinous - when this was painted in about 1764, they
were the most famous works of art in the world. The scene is the Belvedere
courtyard of the Vatican,
and this painting of a
Briton abroad records a cultural obsession with Rome that has inspired some of the greatest
British works of art.
The Grand Tour is one of
the most famous chapters in our cultural history. In the 18th century, it
became an indispensable part of a gentleman's
education to make the journey across Europe and over the Alps to Italy, to admire the artistic treasures of Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome and Naples. English
aristocrats so abounded in Italy's cultural capitals that Johann Zoffany could paint a crowd of them draping themselves
among the Raphaels and Renis
in The Tribuna of the Uffizi; the picture had to keep
growing to show more and more men of influence in the red-walled, pearl-shell-ceilinged octagonal chamber of Florence's
picture gallery. When they got to Rome, these same individuals would like as
not commission portraits from Pompeo Batoni, whose prosperous career is about to be celebrated
by the National Gallery in London.
Batoni started out as a
decorator of churches in a late baroque manner, but he found a much more
dynamic market among the super-rich young Britons who flocked to Rome to be
seen looking at the Apollo Belvedere and to enjoy the fireworks, horse races
and courtesans.
Looking around
Batoni's
gallery of silked nonentities, it is tempting to
wonder why, after 200 years, anyone should care about the journey they made or
the art they commissioned. Here is the portrait of Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham,
6th baronet, beautifully done out in mustard and gesturing at what looks like a
cardboard stage-set of a classical vista; the painting must have made a fine
souvenir. Yet not every aristocrat was a powdered fop, even though Batoni made them all look as if they'd
had their brains removed by Frankenstein on their way down through Switzerland.
Many landowners went home, heads filled with antiquities, to landscape their
estates in the manner of Claude and to collect the treasures still being dug
out of ancient Italian soil; it is to the Grand Tourists that we owe half
the treasures in the British Museum, from the Portland Vase (acquired by the
Dowager Duchess of Portland in 1784) to the stupendous "Roman" vase
imaginatively assembled fr om
antique fragments by Giambattista Piranesi and sold
to Sir John Boyd in the 1770s. And with them they took artists, who brought
back more than souvenirs.
The Grand Tour
was so much more than a snobs'
excursion.
Before the aristocrats - and after them - came the artists. The real heroes of
the British obsession with Italy are not men like Alexander Gordon, 4th Duke of
Gordon, who is said to have sat blank-faced in his carriage while the renowned
neoclassical theorist JJ Winckelmann lectured him on the sights of Rome and who
was portrayed by Batoni hunting in the Campanian countryside, but these artists and writers,
mostly of humble or middle-class birth, who travelled
to be inspired. Their journeys to Rome
transformed British culture. This is their narrative - a people's history of the Grand Tour.
It begins in London's Covent Garden, a teeming, democratic piazza today as it was in
the time of Pepys and Hogarth. For four centuries, its street entertainers have
performed in front of the incongruous backdrop of Inigo
Jones's austere St Paul's Church, with its portico in the severe Tuscan
order - the oldest classical church in Britain and one of the first relics of
our national dream of Rome. When Jones consciously emulated Roman public
spaces such as Piazza Navona and Piazza del Popolo to plan Covent Garden piazza in the 1630s, he gave
London life a classical grace years before the Great Fire and Wren's rebuilding.
Italy sounded like a place of
wonders to the son of a London cloth-worker of
Welsh descent living in Shakespeare's
London, where
characters such as Julius Caesar and Prospero declaimed from classically
designed theatres.
Something of magic and the occult is inscribed in Jones's
architecture, which makes it more fascinating and compulsive the more you think
about it. No one knows how Jones got from his humble origins in Smithfield to being a professional artist and architect,
but by the turn of the 17th century he was in Italy, studying the classical
tradition. He wasn't impressed by
the architecture of Michelangelo
and his "mannerist" imitators, who insidiously
subverted the classical orders. Instead - especially after his second visit to Italy in
1613-14 - he admired the north Italian architect Palladio, who in the later
16th century systematically revived a purer classicism. Palladio's buildings in Vicenza
and Venice
invent an abstract, harmonious architecture for which he claimed the authority
of the ancient Roman writer Vitruvius. In the National Gallery is a portrait by
Veronese of Daniele Barbaro displaying his famous
translation of Vitruvius, with Palladio's
illustrations, that so inspired Jones.
Vitruvius
explains that Roman temples embody mystical mathematical ideas. Architecture is
like music, he says, and like a musical harmony it is all about proportion. All architectural
proportion is derived from the ideal shape of a human body. This is where it
gets spooky, if you're a fan of pulp
intellectual fiction, for the most famous attempt to illustrate Vitruvius's notion of "ideal" human proportions is
Leonardo da Vinci's
star-shaped man, gorily recreated in the Louvre in The Da Vinci Code. And this
really was, for imaginations such as those of da
Vinci and Inigo Jones, a secret code, the key to
everything: there is a mystical mathematics at the heart of the universe. So
some minds have felt since the time of Pythagoras. You hear it in music, you
sense it in architecture. I felt it the other day in a room in Greenwich.
Jones's groundbreaking journeys to Italy - he was
the first British visual artist to make what was then an arduous trek - got him
a job as court architect to Charles I. His masterpiece, I think, is the Queen's House at Greenwich.
Its Great Hall is a wonderful cool space with its black and white symmetrical
floor tiles and its square coffered ceiling - so you think when you first enter
from below. Climb the spiral staircase, though, and walk on the precarious
wood-railed gallery, and you realise it is something
much more bizarre than that.
It is not just a
square-shaped room, but appears to be a perfect cube. Right here in Greenwich time stops, the passing show dissolves before your eyes, and
you realise you are standing inside geometry, inside
a mathematically exact form. It is a Vitruvian
utopia. This is the most spectacular, stunning example of the same classicism
that creeps up on you more insidiously in Jones's
Banqueting House in Whitehall - notorious as the room from one of whose
windows Charles I stepped to be beheaded. Go to Greenwich and experience the arcanum that is the Queen's
House; it will blow away any lazy idea that classical means Georgian means
conservative. The vision of Inigo Jones pays eerie
homage to the mystery and sublimity of Rome.
Jones came from
common stock, but rose to a powerful position at the
doomed court of Charles I, where classical taste jostled with baroque opulence.
The paintings in the Banqueting House are by another northern European besotted
with Italy
- Rubens - and Jones's patron was
Lord Arundel, who amassed a formidable collection that included not just
ancient sculpture, but also Leonardo's
notebooks. (Did the designer of the Queen's
House study Leonardo's
"geometrical games" in the Codex Arundel, now owned by the British Library?)
So his story doesn't destroy the
myth of the Grand Tour so much as enrich it. But the point is that, while
aristocrats went to Italy
to collect, it was the artists they took along who saw the true magic of its
art and architecture.
What is influence?
If Inigo Jones was just a passive copier of Italy, he'd be of minor interest. What makes him one of
the greatest British architects is the unmistakable Britishness
of his style - the funny ways he twists the classical tradition. His
attempt to demonstrate in a posthumously published work that Stonehenge
is a Roman temple is typical of his genius: he responds to the rugged,
bleak stones in the British landscape. His own buildings have that same native
austerity.
In the 18th
century, the constant flow of aristocrats from England
to Italy provided artists
with an audience for Italian views: the painters Joseph Wright of Derby, Richard Wilson and Thomas Jones were
some of the most brilliant who made the trip. All these artists found a drama
and passion in the Italian landscape that wasn't
just to do with ruins and history. Italy came to symbolise a wilder, hotter, more passionate life than you
could experience at home; to compare the Welsh landscapes of the gentleman
artist Thomas Jones with his Italian oil sketches is to see a man brought to
life by travel. Wilson, his impecunious teacher, was as obsessive and
passionate as Inigo Jones in his cult of the
classical. And Wright of Derby's
views of Vesuvius erupting, red fire in the Neapolitan night,
are a reminder that Italy's landscape inspired science as well as art -
Charles Lyell's observation of the
clam-eaten ruins at Pozzuoli
inspired him to postulate laws of geol ogical change
in his Principles of Geology (1830-33).
By the 1760s,
tourism to Rome
was the most important fact in European culture. A style was forged -
neoclassicism - that was truly international in its belief in the moral example
and aesthetic excellence of antiquity. Batoni
gradually adopted this style, abandoning the baroque putti
and melting honeyed air of his early paintings for the crisp statuesque
proportions of his Grand Tour portraits. The same plain precision is what makes
British paintings such as Wilson's
view of Tivoli at Dulwich Picture Gallery or Wright's scintillating nocturne of fireworks over the
Vatican at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool such neoclassical monuments. And
yet, these "international" artists are almost too slavish to Rome. Only after the
traditional Grand Tour was cut short by Napoleon did a British painter make
true masterpieces from his love of Italy.
Even if the
Grand Tour had never stimulated any other artist, the cult of it would be
justified by JMW Turner alone. It wasn't
until the Napoleonic wars were over and he was already an established artist
that Turner visited Italy.
Shaped by his admiration for Wilson, he more than anyone else
brought a northern eye to the southern landscape. In the National
Gallery, you can compare Claude's
Italian sea ports with Turner's Dido Building
Carthage.
Turner's vision of the ancient
Mediterranean has that tough texture, that harsh London air even in its acute
heat and fire, that makes him unmistakably a traveller,
not a native, in the south. His aching, mind-stretching vistas of classical
architecture glinting white like jewelled bones in
the blinding light are some of the most astonishing miracles in all art.
When did the
Grand Tour end?
In Boston,
you can visit an Italian Renaissance palace. Meticulously recreated for the
collector Isabella Stewart Gardner from fragments of Italian buildings, it is
proof that Americans took up the collecting manners of British aristocrats.
American creative artists - Henry James and John Singer Sargent
- were still entranced by Italy
in the early 20th century. Even after the second world war,
trips to Italy
were formative experiences for the painters Mark Rothko and Cy Twombly. In fact, Twombly has
spent his creative life in the orbit of Rome
much like a modern Claude or Poussin.
Does Rome
still have anything to teach artists and architects, now that we can all go
for the price of an Easyjet trip to Ciampino airport? Walk around London,
past the dome of St Paul's with its homage to Michelangelo and Brunelleschi.
Look at Norman Foster's
"Gherkin". The architect of London's greatest contemporary building has evidently
stood in the Belvedere in the Vatican,
looking with pleasure and creative fire on the giant pine cone mounted on its
staircase. Pompeo Batoni,
1707-1787 is at the National Gallery, London WC2, from February 20 to May 18.
Book tickets on 0870 906 3891 or at www.nationalgallery.org.uk