In the Preface to this book by two noted experts in the field (see bibliography below) there is an illuminating reference to ‘passion, as the counterpoint to reason’, relating these opposites to the phenomenon of travel and the collecting of art, a connected activity in the seventeenth century and beyond. ‘Reason’ might represent the reaction against an emotional engagement with art, thereby identifying the puritanical mindset of post-Reformation England as ‘rational’. The authors prevent recourse to this caricature by noting that the ‘canvas-ripping, statue-decapitating’ extremism of the iconoclasts shows them in the grip of an overwhelming passion, contrasting remarkably with the refined cultural and intellectual response of those who engaged in travel and collecting at the period. This fascinating book, more of a case study than a survey, delineates the experiences of a young aristocrat sent by his father on a ‘grand tour’, highlighting the importance that travel had for England in the fields of diplomacy, education and artistic culture.
John Finet, the scholar and diplomat who, with Inigo Jones, is the true protagonist of the book, was the embodiment of the courtesy, loyalty and good taste necessary for the role of governor to Viscount Cranborne, son of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury during his travels on the Continent in 1609–11. He epitomised the man of virtue, high-minded and serious, and the travels undertaken by Cranborne in those years were of that character, unlike the common perception of the tours of the wealthy eighteenth-century visitors to Italy – often an excuse for unmarried men to indulge in lavish and sometimes indiscriminate spending, riotous carnivals and illicit sex.
The first chapters set the scene of the small world of royal, noble and educated Europeans and delineate the political and religious tensions between England and her allies and enemies on the Continent in the post-Elizabethan age. The lamentable exclusion of this country from meaningful cultural and artistic development as a result of the Protestant revolution, and the attempt to reconnect it to the source of culture despite this setback, forms the backdrop for travel in this period, whether undertaken by Catholics or Protestants such as Finet. He emerges from this book as enormously likeable and competent, an ideal travelling companion; his portrait, done in Venice in 1610 by Tintoretto’s son, Domenico (the second in a group of fine colour plates), suggests an inquiring mind and a lively intelligence.
Finet had been at Padua, Venice and Florence on earlier journeys. They had been political in character but the tour with Cranborne in a time of peace after the Treaty of London in 1604 had the wider scope of education – both of the young man himself but also of another of his companions, the artist and architect Inigo Jones, under the direction and patronage of Cranborne’s father. Jones had achieved great successes at the beginning of the reign of James i as a designer of celebratory public entertainments, court masques and temporary architecture, including some events sponsored by the earl. His credentials as a guide were excellent – he had acted as a courier for the earl with diplomatic correspondence before the Cranborne tour and was fluent in French (p 61).
The group that travelled into France in 1609 was a varied one; apart from Finet and Jones, the physician Matthew Lister, who had trained at Padua, accompanied Cranborne. In many ways these tours represented a true liberal arts education for the young nobleman, building on the reading from the classics he would have done in his earlier years. In France, the Roman remains in Provence were the focus of interest and attention for Jones whereas in Italy, whence Cranborne travelled without Jones but possibly with the musician and connoisseur Nicholas Lanier, Venice was the high point: for its art collections and, most probably, for the purchase of paintings, sent on later to England.
Although Cranborne’s illness and his wish to return meant he did not venture further south, each stage of the journey home is detailed and the account ends with a chapter on the Finet portrait and the history of its presence in England.
The book would have benefited from a more extensive introduction helping to support the archival material, and at times the two writers’ separate voices are not always in perfect harmony, but overall this book is an enormously satisfactory contribution to the growing body of scholarship on travel in early modern culture.
