The Ghost of Galileo
Page 17
It was said that de’ Servi’s main job was to keep Henry in mind of things Florentine when thinking of marriage. He was something of a portraitist, for he had studied with Santi di Tito, whose sitters included Galileo; and among de’ Servi’s few accomplishments in England was a portrait of Prince Henry.98 De Caus was more engineer than courtier. He worked for Anna and Henry and then for Elizabeth, primarily as a designer of geometrical gardens; the beautiful example he made for Elizabeth at Heidelberg was one of the great losses she suffered when driven from the Electorate. While with Henry, de Caus completed a book on drawing and optics, La Perspective avec les raison des ombres et miroirs (1611), compiled from lessons he had given the prince, and designed all sorts of hydraulic machinery for Henry’s palace at Richmond.99
When Henry began to express an interest in art, he received gifts from many sides, notably Giambologna sculptures from the Grand Duke of Tuscany. These lively statuettes seem to have made a strong impression on Charles as well as on his brother. Henry soon was buying paintings through Wotton, Carleton, and others, in such numbers that Jones had to build a small gallery for them.100 Additional bespoke accommodation was needed for the many books Henry received as presents, by purchase, or through inheritance. The largest part of his library came from the childless Lord Lumley, whose collecting had privileged books on genealogy, history, antiquities, and natural science. Henry discarded law and theology and augmented the rest. The mathematician Wright was to have been Henry’s librarian. But the books passed, as did the artworks, to Charles, who moved the center of interest to paintings.101
The Caroline Couple’s Entertainments
Calculations
If he was indeed the good mathematician he was reputed to be, Charles would have been familiar with the military compass, a standard calculating instrument designed by Galileo and others for scaling up drawings or reckoning interest.102 He no doubt understood the method of logarithms invented by his father’s protégé John Napier as simplified by the same Edward Wright who had made Mercator manageable; for Charles in his turn patronized a logarithmic inventor, Richard Delamain, a mathematics teacher with a gift for self-promotion. Delamain had his invention made in silver as a New Year’s gift to Charles in 1630. The king accepted it and the dedication of Delamain’s book, Grammelogia (1631), which described its construction and use.103
The instrument had log scales for sine and tangent as well as for the natural numbers, and so was useful in astronomy; and, as it also had proportional scales for integers, it could do the simpler problems treatable by Galileo’s compass. The very first worked example in Grammelogia calculates interest at the 8 percent Charles typically paid. But the interest of the instrument for our story lies in the squabble it unleashed when William Oughtred, a mathematician in Arundel’s circle, claimed credit for its invention. Since Delamain had studied with Oughtred, he very probably took the idea from him; and he certainly pinched the design of a second instrument, a pocket “horizontal quadrant” or handy astronomical calculator, from his teacher. This he reduced to practice and rushed to market, taking care again to give Charles a sample in silver.104
Oughtred called foul. Delamain was not only a thief but an ignoramus (he had taught him!), who probably did not know how the instruments worked and certainly did not bother to explain them. There is no reason to criticize me, Delamain protested, for not bothering my clientele with the theory of the instrument; the nobility and gentry had no time for “theoretical…demonstrations.” They wanted to know how to survey their estates and to estimate the amounts of timber on their lands and wine in their casks; and for them Delamain’s instructions sufficed. For Oughtred they were “onely the superficiall scumme and froth of Instrumentall trickes and practises.” The exchange was not unprecedented. Competing for the then new (in 1619) Savilian chair in geometry in Oxford, the practical mathematician Edmund Gunter showed Savile his dexterity with instruments. “Said the grave Knight, ‘Doe you call that reading Geometrie? This is shewing of tricks, man!’”105
Gunter did not get the job. He could not find the answer Delamain would give to Oughtred: go-betweens were needed to reduce difficult concepts to art and deliver them to users without the “rigide Method and general Lawes [that] scarre men away.”106 Liking instrumental tricks and practices, Charles gave Delamain a patent on the circular slide rule, made him an engineer in the Office of Ordnance, and employed him as a tutor to the royal children. The king set great store by his engineer’s silver quadrant. He carried it about his person until just before his execution. He then directed that it be given to his younger son, the future James II, who would need every help to find his way.107
Charles took a strong interest in architecture and liked to review the plans of Surveyor General Jones. Their grandest project, a magnificent new palace of Whitehall, turned out to be well beyond the royal means. A lesser project that succeeded deserves mention for its subtle combination of art, politics, and religion. This was the church of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, said to be the first entirely new Protestant church built in England after the Reformation.108 It still stands as the dominant structure in the piazza that Jones designed against the royal policy that forbade increasing the housing stock of London lest country aristocracy and gentry reside there with nothing to do between parliaments but plot and carouse. Despite this policy, Charles allowed development of Covent Garden with a square surrounded on two sides by townhouses that unwelcome newcomers, already a subject of comedy, soon occupied.109
The developer was the entrepreneurial fourth Earl of Bedford, who bought, for a fine or fee of £2,000, a license to build adjacent to the church he had constructed on his London estate at Laud’s request. Charles insisted that the church have a portico. Being a frugal Calvinist, Bedford choked over the extra expense of the portico and asked Jones to build as cheaply as possible. Hence its chaste style, which did not suit Laud’s ideas of the Lord’s House. Nor did Jones’s placement of the church on the west side of the piazza so that its entrance faced east, where the altar belonged. The archbishop was not amused. He ordered the entrance sealed and the altar placed against it.110
Addictions
Being indifferent to paintings and perhaps ignorant of their value, James had allowed the collections of Henry and Anna to pass intact to Charles.111 The prince sharpened his appetite for art in competition with Buckingham, and both of them were energized by the acres of paintings in the galleries of Charles’s prospective brother-in-law Philip IV. As king, Charles augmented his holdings inexpensively with presents from other sovereigns, like the King of Savoy, and ambitious courtiers such as Carleton, Cottington, and Porter.112
A great opportunity for more soon presented itself. The needy Duke of Gonzaga decided to sell his important collection. Daniel Nijs succeeded in buying it, much to his surprise. “In this business I feel I’ve had divine assistance, otherwise it would have been impossible to pull it off.” He had managed to outmaneuver the Grand Duke of Tuscany, a rich Genoese consortium, and the citizens of Mantua. Divine assistance is not dependable, however. Many of the Gonzaga paintings degraded during shipment and Charles, declining to honor the agreed price, bankrupted Nijs. Charles delighted in his undamaged Gonzaga paintings, which, when added to what he had, made his collection one of the best in Europe, “the culminating point of Italian influence in England,” the translation of “Italy (the greatest mother of Elegant Arts)” to Albion. As he rose to respected connoisseur in the art world, Charles sank to sinful spendthrift in the Puritan universe.113
Charles shared his Italianate sin with a few connoisseurs like Arundel. The degree of their intimacy and addiction may be gauged by the king’s rushing to the earl’s house to see the pictures he had brought back from his failed mission to Vienna in 1636. Conn was present at one of their discussions. Charles: I have learned of a miracle: the earl (Arundel) has given a Holbein to the Grand Duke (of Tuscany). Conn, who knew that it was impossible to extract anything from Arundel: the earl could perform the sam
e miracle thirty times since he has thirty Holbeins. Arundel: I do not have the power. Conn: You have freedom of will. Arundel: “[I am] most willing to support that doctrine except in the matter of giving away pictures.” Conn diagnosed Arundel as too addicted to his collections to do much to help Catholics; all his conversation was about pictures, “while I am no good for these objects, unless to dust them.”114
With Conn’s help, Charles obtained several coveted pieces from Italy, most famously a bust of himself sculptured by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. This coup required the approval of Pope Urban; an art of the Vatican was the gift of Vatican art.115 Urban gave his permission for Bernini to proceed with Charles’s bust. That left the technical problem that the sculptor had never seen his subject. Van Dyck solved it by painting a triple portrait of Charles on the same canvas, two in profile and one face on. Bernini then worked his magic. The royal couple received the king’s bust with rapture, and, when Conn returned to Italy, gave him a commission and drawings for a similar representation of the queen. It did not materialize. Charles’s bust lasted longer than he did, but it also died violently, in the fire that destroyed Whitehall in 1698.116
The Barberini continued their seduction by art with works by Leonardo, Veronese, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, and Guido Reni. They were circumspect: Henrietta Maria complained of one of their shipments that it contained no religious paintings. Nonetheless, the chapel Inigo Jones made for her in Somerset House opened with great fanfare in 1635 under pictures supplied by the pope.117 He also sent her rosaries and a crucifix embossed with Barberini bees rendered in diamonds, “a priceless favor…my most precious possession.”118 The royal couple delighted to show their favorite paintings to Conn. Charles so forgot himself in exhibiting them that once he kept the glories of England, the Knights of the Garter, waiting while he dallied in his galleries with the pope’s agent.119 The king extended a similar familiarity to Conn’s successor, whose residence he visited to see portraits of Urban and the cardinal nephew. Charles then remarked that he regarded the pope with “the esteem and respect that should prevail among all princes” and effusively praised the cardinal, who had been kind to important English travelers.120
It took money and taste, but not much imagination, to assemble a good collection of finished paintings. With a push from Lanier, Charles and his emulators came also to value preparatory drawings. As Arundel’s librarian Franciscus Junius put it, drawings allowed the collector to follow “the very thoughts of the studious Artificer, and how he did bestirre his judgment before he could resolve what to like and what to dislike.” Perhaps Wotton had such drawings in mind when reaching the counterintuitive insight that it is almost harder to be a good critic than a good artist. The artist can change his mind as he proceeds; the critic, especially if a buyer, must conclude quickly and definitively; “the working part may be helped with Deliberation but the Judging must flow from an extemporall habite.”121
Charles was a major patron as well as collector of art. “The most splendid of your Attainments [so Wotton wrote his sovereign], is your love of excellent Artificers and works.” Most of these artificers were foreign. Francis Cleyn was the foremost if judged by expenditure on product, for his ongoing labors at Mortlake probably cost more than all the paintings and sculpture Charles commissioned from Van Dyck, Bernini, Daniel Mytens, Gerard Honthorst, Orazio Gentileschi, Orazio’s daughter Artemesia, and Arundel’s protégé Wenceslas Hollar. The only major Italian artist in Charles’s employ, Gentileschi, acquired by Buckingham from the Dowager Queen of France in 1626, did more than paint: he probably acted as an intermediary between Spain and England as Rubens did and certainly sent the Vatican information about the Caroline court. The scant representation of resident Italian artists records their disinclination to live with rain and heretics. No doubt also they disliked Charles’s bad habit of postponing payment and reducing prices. He cut a bill from Van Dyck for £1,295 for twenty-four pictures in half in 1638, although he then owed the painter £1,000 on the retainer he had not paid for five years.122
Foreign artists tended to live in ex-pat communities in districts of the city like Blackfriars that lay outside the jurisdiction of the Painters–Stainers Company.123 Charles kept these guild-free painters busy painting his guilt-free person. Van Dyck outdid them all by portraying Charles bursting through an archway effortlessly controlling a huge horse, his adoring groom by his side, a baton of command in his hand (Figure 22). This persuasive depiction hung so as to give the impression that Charles was riding into one of his galleries through its end wall. Other renditions by Van Dyck emphasize Charles’s domestic virtues. As Wotton, who knew something about the political value of portraits, observed, Charles was made to appear a model of chastity and temperance (which he was), of steadiness of resolve (which he was not), and of “heroicall ingenuity” (which his foreign policy exemplified).124 In these repetitive portraits Charles tried to achieve what ancient kings had done by multiplying their statues. As Wotton put it, “[the portraits] had 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.”125
Figure 22 Antony van Dyck, Charles I (1633), commander of horses and men.
Practicing his preaching, Wotton liked to hand out portraits of Sarpi copied from the one he had smuggled out of Italy. Known recipients were Nathaniel Brent, who, having accomplished the feat of publishing Sarpi’s Trent in English within a year of the appearance of De Dominis’s Italian edition, and having performed equally well in other projects of a political–religious character, had climbed to the wardenship of Merton College in Oxford. A late recipient of what Wotton called the “true picture of Padre Paolo the Servita, which was first taken by a painter whom I sent unto him from my house then neighbouring his monastery,” was the Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, Samuel Collins. His copy had a motto devised by Wotton: Concilii Tridentini Eviscerator, “The Eviscerator of the Council of Trent.”126 Just such a picture now hangs in the Upper Reading Room of Oxford’s Bodleian Library (see Figure 7).
Masquerades
Court plays and masques offered another route by which royalty could exaggerate its merits. Charles and Henrietta Maria sat through the same yearly average of these hieroglyphs as had James and Anna and may have enjoyed them more, since the Caroline variety was both spunkier and more sycophantic, “more exotic and prodigiously expensive,” than the Jacobean. Much of the difference was owing to Henrietta Maria. In her first English theatrical season, 1625–6, she not only danced but also spoke; those not scandalized by her forwardness admired her recital, from memory, of hundreds of lines of poetry. The teenage queen must have been in good shape; she could rehearse for twelve hours before a performance lasting seven or eight. After one of these athletic feats Prynne announced his famous equation, “woman actors, notorious whores.”127
To his iconic stature of chaste lover, model father, and alpha male, Charles added man of peace, to which he had a valid and compromising claim. Poverty and prudence advising against a war for international Protestantism, the court made the best of the situation and celebrated Charles as pacifier. The Banqueting House often served as auditorium, Inigo Jones as set designer, and Ben Jonson as skit writer. The final tableau usually referred to peace, which did not prevent Jones and Jonson from going to war; their collaboration ended with the masque given for Charles by William Cavendish in 1634, Love’s Welcome at Bolsover, which parodies the king’s Surveyor as Iniquio Vitruvio.128
The masques often conveyed their panegyric with the help of astronomical symbols and motifs. Representing the king as the sun was common coin, as we can read on one stamped to commemorate Charles’s entrance into London in 1633, after his crowning in Scotland. Sol rediens orbem, sic rex illuminat urbem, “like the dawning sun the King illuminates the city.”129 A double portrait by Honthorst, Apollo and Diana (1628), makes the obvious connections between the sitters and the luminaries. The translation of the entir
e court into the Heavens, however, was something unusual. It happened in Coelum britannicum, “the most spectacular, elaborate and hyperbolic of the Caroline masques,” written by Thomas Carew and staged by Inigo Jones in February 1633. Its premise: Olympian Jove looks down at the connubial faithfulness of the royal couple, feels ashamed, and resolves to clean up his act.130
Jove first purges the Heavens of every constellation representing his love affairs. The Bull and the Swan have to go, and the Bear, Dragon, Hydra, Centaur, and even the Virgin, compromised by lying between a Lion and a Scorpion. To accomplish the burdensome task, Jove appoints an “Inquisition” taxed with removing all celestial improprieties and “all lustfull influences upon terrestrial bodies.” Like Urban’s Inquisition, Jove’s is to “suppresse…all past, present, and future mention of those abjured heresies.” Having thus arranged for the conversion of the home of the Gods into a “cloyster of Carthusians,” Jove commands Mercury to make a “total eclipse of the eighth Sphere”—that is, to expel all the stars, an event, as Mercury rightly says, unforeseen by earth-bound prognosticators, “no, nor their great Master Ticho.”131