The Jacobean Grand Tour: Early Stuart Travellers in Europe
Although the eighteenth century is traditionally seen as the age of the Grand Tour, it was in fact the continental travel of Jacobean noblemen which really constituted the beginning of the Tour as an institutionalized phenomenon. James I's peace treaty with Spain in 1604 rendered travel to Catholic Europe both safer and more respectable than it had been under the Tudors and opened up the continent to a new generation of aristocratic explorers, enquirers and adventurers. This book examines the political and cultural significance of the encounters that resulted, focusing in particular on two of England's greatest, and newly united, families: the Cecils and the Howards. It also considers the ways in which Protestants and Catholics experienced the aesthetic and intellectual stimulus of European travel and how the cultural experiences of the travellers formed the essential ingredients in what became the Grand Tour.
News from the Mainland: Mapping Physical and Intellectual Spaces Before the Grand Tour
Despite the Royal Society’s interest in far-off, exotic lands in the years 1665–1700, the Fellows’ cultural relations were firmly rooted in the European “Republic of Letters”. The type of information that they exchanged particularly about France, Holland, Switzerland, and Greece was pivotal for the beginning of the Grand Tour in the Enlightenment. Textually based on vols. 1–22 of Philosophical Transactions, and complete with background information about the relations that England and the Society had with such important European countries, Chap. 2 may be considered as an introduction to the special contribution that the Fellows offered not only to the emergence of the Grand Tour as the socio-cultural phenomenon in the Enlightenment, but also to the special contents of the letters that Philosophical Transactions published from and about Italy in late Restoration years.
XVII. Observations upon some Sepulchral Monuments in Italy and France. By T. Kerrich, M.A. F.S.A. Principal Librarian to the University of Cambridge
Several writers have endeavoured to trace the arts in Italy as far back as possible, and they have given us voluminous histories of their artists; but travellers in general attended little to what was produced there, either in painting or sculpture, till the time of Raphael and Michael Angelo, and the succeeding ages, whilst they flourished in their greatest vigour. The ancient pictures were considered as barbarous rude things, whose only merit was their antiquity, and the sculptures were entirely overlooked.