Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It really was a seminal book this, because he was interested to the extent in which the work of artists, craftsmen and embroiderers in England relied on decorative ornamental prints from the Continent. He had this amazing visual memory, so he could match them together and even when, you know, a little corner of a print had been taken out and made into a bit of fireplace or something, he could spot it.
Now, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England by Anthony Wells-Cole.
It doesn’t sound very exciting but it really is. It really was a seminal book this, because he was interested in the extent to which the work of artists, craftsmen and embroiderers in England relied on decorative ornamental prints from the Continent. His extraordinary achievement was to build up an enormous library of photographs of all those actual prints, as well as photographs of the English ornament, a lot of which are reproduced in colour in this book. And he had this amazing visual memory, so he could match them together and even when, you know, a little corner of a print had been taken out and made into a bit of fireplace or something, he could spot it.
Was he the first to notice these similarities?
People sort of knew it: a few correlations had been spotted, but what he really found out was that pretty well any Elizabethan ornament, whether on a dress, on a fireplace or a piece of furniture, in an engraving, in a book, derives from Continental sources, because they were the only sources available really.
Was there no English tradition worth building on?
There wasn’t so very much in Britain. There was this terrific surge of engravings on the Continent, which came flooding into England mostly from Antwerp, but to some extent from Italy and France too. There was a big market for engravings around St Paul’s, but also a lot of foreign craftsmen were coming over from the Continent, usually because of religious wars and so on. What I found so interesting was that you might have thought that this meant that Elizabethan art was completely derivative, but it wasn’t: because they used these sources in a wonderfully creative way – they would take out one element and enlarge it, or alter it, or they would collage together lots of different things so the end result was something basically different from what they’d been copying.
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Mark Girouard is an architectural writer, a leading architectural historian, and biographer of James Stirling, as well as an authority on the country house. He was previously architectural editor of Country Life magazine, and was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1975 to 1976. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987. His book Elizabethan Architecture was published in 2009. Elizabethan theatre, he says, wasn’t at all a provincial thing but was tied into the classical world and Europe. There were ideas of geometry and proportion in the theatres, and there was this idea that the theatre was a miniature of the world. ‘Elizabethan theatre was a conscious re-creation of Roman theatres,’ he says.
